[Lexicog] Slots and slot fillers (nee "Nouns")

[David Tuggy]

Sounds like a new sense of "a ferry" is being gradually conventionalized 
(at least for that speaker and those in his circle): "the cycle, and the 
associated period of time, from one ferry trip to the next."  And/or a 
new (transitive?) sense of "wait" = "wait for/out Obj".

Could this man say, with equal facility, "I waited an airplane"? or "I 
slept a bus"? If not, that's evidence that "ferry" is being given 
special treatment.

None of which contradicts, but rather fits in quite exactly, with your 
observation that by the right placement you can  "use any phrase that is 
susceptible to being interpreted as an adverbial of the relevant sort." 
It just adds that doing that a few times with the same lexical item 
starts a new sense on its way.

I would take some issue with your comment:

If "a ferry" were the direct 
object, then why can it be omitted and a PP or adverbial appear in its 
place?  You don't see that kind of substitutability with ordinary 
transitive verbs.

But you do, in fact, get time nouns there: wait an hour, sleep an hour. And by your data, "ferry" appears to be metamorphosing into that kind of noun (without of course losing its concrete object sense "boat for carrying cars etc. across a relatively narrow body of water"). Many transitive verbs do in fact impose strong semantic restrictions on the class of objects they allow, and objects grade into other kinds of complements, including prepositional-phrase complements, in many ways. If what you mean is that this is not a prototypical direct object, OK, but if you mean it can't be assimilated to the class of direct objects at all, I am much less sure. (Of course if your theory demands a +/- judment on direct objecthood, perhaps by setting up passivizability as the sole criterion, you might say this simply isn't a direct object. But that has problems, for sure.)

Btw, is a ferry a boat that ferries things, or is ferrying things doing the sort of thing a ferry does?

--David Tuggy



Mike Maxwell wrote:
> <snip>
> My favorite adverbial story is about the time we were late to a 
> barbecue, because we had gotten stranded on the other side of Puget 
> Sound waiting in a line of cars for another ferry.  When we finally 
> arrived, our host said, "Ah, you waited a ferry!"
>
> It was obvious what he meant.  Less obvious was how this would be 
> handled in a theory of syntax.
>
> The construction is not limited to 'wait', e.g. given the appropriate 
> circumstances, one might say "You slept a whole ferry", just as well as 
> you might say "You waited through an entire ferry" or "You slept through 
> an entire ferry" or "You slept too long".  If "a ferry" were the direct 
> object, then why can it be omitted and a PP or adverbial appear in its 
> place?  You don't see that kind of substitutability with ordinary 
> transitive verbs.
>
> Rather, what appears to me to be happening is that you can use any 
> phrase that is susceptible to being interpreted as an adverbial of the 
> relevant sort.  But that means treating the appearance of an NP in a 
> semantic way, not through syntax.  (And I don't think that a rule like
>    AdvP --> {NP, PP, Adv}
> or some such is an answer--it's more like a statement of the problem.)
>
> I could go on, but since this is a lexicography list, not a syntax list, 
> I'll refrain...
>
>     Mike Maxwell
>
>
>
>  
> Yahoo! Groups Links
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