Comments on: Introducing new entities

By: Introducing new entities, again « NT Discourse

Introducing new entities, again « NT Discourse — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:48:06 +0000

[...] mentioned in a previous post that there are certain kinds of devices that work better in certain contexts than in others. In [...]

By: Steve Runge

Steve Runge — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:21:18 +0000

I am glad that you put the comma after “well.” It would indeed have different connotations. Glad to see you have not lost your sense of humor during the dog days.

By: Carl Conrad

Carl Conrad — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:20:45 +0000

Well, “hung nominative” perhaps has different connotations (everything hangs on the connotations, you must realize); “Nominativus pendens” I’ve seen but despise it (it’s a hanging offense, I think). We used to speak of “run-on sentences” (they don’t end, like some periods of mourning and gubernatorial resignations); of course, there’s an old-fashioned grammatical term, “expletive” — but were I to use it, some might think me either to be cursing or being quaint and archaic, as if I were to write, “It is I,” or “There is a place where … ” But it appears that “expletive” has gotten a bad rap in popular usage; another word that occurs to me is “placeholder” — guess what I found in the dictionary for that:

“placeholder 2 Linguistics an element of a sentence that is required by syntactic constraints but carries little or no semantic information, for example the word it as a subject in it is a pity that she left, where the true subject is that she left.”

Sometimes it seems easier to speak/write Greek than to write Linguistics.

By: Steve Runge

Steve Runge — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:48:10 +0000

Would you rather I call it a “hanging nominative”? That makes the nominative case sound really mean, like it is a kind of capital punishment. I would settle for pendens, if it really means that much to you.

By: Carl Conrad

Carl Conrad — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:53:44 +0000

I can’t help nit-picking here: every time I see it, I have a gut reaction to the phrase “left dislocation”: it hints all too uncomfortably at something short of a fracture that right-handed persons may be able to live with, however awkwardly and painfully; wouldn’t “sinister displacement” better serve the twin functions of alerting a sleepy reader and providing appropriate Linguistic obfuscation?

By: Introducing new entities-Gen 2:19 « NT Discourse

Introducing new entities-Gen 2:19 « NT Discourse — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:32:26 +0000

[...] a previous post, I presented an example from the synoptic gospels of how left-dislocations and conditional clauses [...]