Re: "par coeur" origin

TOF wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
TOF wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
TOF wrote:

Paul J Kriha wrote:

I doubt it. Where I come from (Australia) I've not heard someone split
"off" from "by" (although the "off" is occasionally omitted.)

Oh really?
"By now, you must be able to recite it off, you bloody drongo, by heart."

That's cheating. A parenthetical aside can go most anywhere, though I
stand by my claim. Why not put the "you bloody drongo" at the end or
after "By now,"?

Oh, puh-leez. Some of Jim McCawley's most notorious early work showed
that "parenthetical asides" are very, very strictly rule-governed. The
"printable" standard example is "abso-bloomin'-lutely."

No frickin' way they're as frick the rule bloody governed as you

from "they're" through "governed" is technically known as "word salad."


Indeed. It can be done, but it doesn't mean that it should be done.
It's what should be done that is on topic here.

No, it _cannot_ be done. There is no "should" in linguistics.

contend. In any event, the natural place to put the aside would have
been where I suggested, rather than inserted in someone's back door
hard enough to make Cartman squeal.

don't know what that means, either, but the very fact that you have an
intuition as to "the natural place" shows that it's rule-governed.

That's true in the sense that the rules are stylistic conventions
rather than the result of some ancient linguist's pronouncement, as the
phrase "very strictly rule-governed" would imply. You departed from
that stylistic convention in trying to separate the elements of the
phrase we were discussing.

I apologize for assuming you had the slightest idea of what you were
talking about. Please find out what linguistics is.

Basically, human language is not a batch of conventions that some
"ancient grammarian" "pronounced on" at some point.

Human language is a very rigorously controlled neurological phenomenon,
and its workings are all but impervious to introspection; all we can go
by is attested utterances, and attested utterances show (in this case)
that there are very specific spots where "parenthetical asides" can be
interpolated.

Your
rules are evidently far more restictive than Paul's, too.
--

How so?

Because you claimed that one of those "parenthetical asides" could only
go in a particular spot in a sentence, and that Paul's example is not
possible for you.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: "par coeur" origin
    ... Peter T. Daniels wrote: ... that "parenthetical asides" are very, ... linguistics; but you reject the fundamental assumption of linguistics -- ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: "par coeur" origin
    ... Peter T. Daniels wrote: ... "By now, you must be able to recite it off, you bloody drongo, by heart." ... that "parenthetical asides" are very, ...
    (sci.lang)