Comments on: Must We Repeat Ourselves?

By: rbeard

rbeard — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 18:05:40 +0000

This was a consistency that Chomsky missed: words like “drinkable”, “playable”, “readable” have two senses determined by their context, i.e. the noun following it. If the noun following it is already drinkable, playable, readable by definition, then the semantic interpretation is that the speaker intended intensification. If not, then intensification does not apply.

This carried over to the negatives that you mention. Since wine is not by definiton undrinkable (only 90% in the worst case scenario), then the semantic interpretation will not include intensification.

By: bnjtokyo

bnjtokyo — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 05:31:00 +0000

I agree with you that “drinkable wine” is intended to indicate “wine — minimally — capable of being drunk.” That this is so should be obvious to anyone who has encountered “undrinkable wine.” Although some people are like Peter Lorre in the short film made from E. A. Poe’s “The Black Cat” and find it all eminently drinkable, there are other sensitive souls who claim that some 10% of all wine on the market is infected with trichloroanisole and therefore undrinkable.

By: rbeard

rbeard — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 17:27:51 +0000

Whitehead and Bertie Russell wrote Principia as the philosophical foundation of mathematics. If you are not a theoretical mathematician, you are not supposed to be able to understand it. There are far more interesting and entertaining books to read.

As for semantic intensitification, I didn’t mean to leave the impression that semantic intensification is langauge-specific. It does occur in all languages; I can vouch for that. I examined, as I recall, 98 languages in connection with my research and found evidence of it in most of them. I presume the reason I didn’t find evidence of it in all of them is that the grammars I read simply didn’t have examples. I first noticed in in my research on Russian and Serbian.

–RB

By: engineer27

engineer27 — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:32:21 +0000

First to Comment!

Actually, my comment starts here. What you saw before was merely pretext … that is, some text that is placed before the start of the main body of a work, analagous to a PostScript which is placed after the ostensible end of a work.

In reality, all of that was pretext, and what I really want to comment on is the apparent, but not actual, semantic drift present in the word ‘pretext’, since it appears to be composed of the common word ‘text’ prepended by the common prefix ‘pre’. Of course, this isn’t the case, as already expounded in the “What’s the Good Word?” from Oct 2.

On the topic of redundancy in language representing intensification, this is a phenomenon which is well established. Hebrew scripture is replete with examples of words being repeated for emphasis or intensification. However, I am not sure if the usage of an adjective with a noun in which the adjective is implicit is unique to English.

By: Mr Pipes

Mr Pipes — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:25:29 +0000

I once blundered into a book entitled _Principia Mathematica_:talk about a book that can’t be read! I venture to say 99% of all people couldn’t read more than 1% of it, including myself of course.