www.alphadictionary.com

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll try other sites to see whether I can gather more information sufficient for a 15-page paper.

Ray...my deepest sympathies. Would a highly astute 8-pager not suffice? Would a 20-page piece of rubbish get you an A+?

I sometimes despair of schools.

Might I suggest focusing on parataxis, discussing its common use in English in the peculiar form of a tag question (It's a pretty cool topic, isn't it?), why this formation might be more common in certain English dialects than in others, and how similar semantic structures are handled quite differently in other closely related Germanic languages*? You could also discuss the oft-ignored semicolon as it relates to parallel structures. If you're short a page or two, you could finish up with an aside on the popularity of the sentence fragment and whether or not it qualifies as a parataxis. Or not.

That should do it for 15 pages, as long as you double-space.

-- PW


* I'm thinking of Swedish 'eller hur?' or the German 'nicht wahr?' but there are surely lots of other comparisons.

.... If you're short a page or two, you could finish up with ....<snip>.

--or you could call Mark Foley

Of coarse, the question-tag question came up on a previous thread here. There also would seem to be some localised British practice (which locality? comment invited) in which such tags are very common, especially something like "isn't it?". When we formed our New Orléans jugband years ago the bandmembers, for reasons known to none of us, commenced to speak in British accents amongst ourselves, overdoing it to the point of ending nearly every sentence with a tag. Why? I don't know, do I?

--or you could call Mark Foley

I can't even laugh much about that nonce yet. Slinking off to dipso-rehab quarantine, too. Shame.

Of course, that's all more to do with fags than tags, innit?

-- PW, not feeling very PC

Just wish to find a topic for a paper, that’s all.
I thought I could rely on the concept of hypotaxis and of parataxis to explain the usage of (3), in lieu of the concept of “inoperative redundancy” (to use Sluggo's terminology). Judging from your reply, I got the impression that this is not a good topic. Do I read you right?
Ray

I must apologise, we are not All short on scholarship but our attention span is.

mark ing-time Bailey

Tag questions do not seem to be examples of hypotaxis, as far as I understand it. Do check out the thread that Sluggo pointed out. Tag questions have to do with confirmation.

Here is a quick and easy contrast of parataxis and hypotaxis.

Parataxis is a rhetorical and syntactic arrangement in which clauses are strung together in series, without subordination: We ran, we sang, and we told jokes. Hypotaxis is the syntactic subordination of one clause to another: As we ran, we sang and told jokes.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press

Tag questions do not seem to be examples of hypotaxis, as far as I understand it. Do check out the thread that Sluggo pointed out. Tag questions have to do with confirmation.

You're right, Perry. Tags are examples of parataxis.

-- PW

Ooo. I should have read your further above posting more closely, shouldn't I?

Ooo. I should have read your further above posting more closely, shouldn't I?

Not to pile on, but that might should have been "shouldn't I have?", mightn't it shouldn't have been?