Re: "par coeur" origin

TOF wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
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.


You're entitled to your view but it's hardly dicta.

Seldom is such intransigence found in one so ignorant.

You are going among linguists; you are pretending to discuss
linguistics; but you reject the fundamental assumption of linguistics --
that human language is an object of study, and not a collection of
_obiter dicta_ from some (nonexistent) "authority"?

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.


That's a standard troll. No thanks.

You have demonstrated even less awareness of linguistics than most naive
persons who have been brainwashed by their fourth-grade teachers and
never gone through recovery.

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


No, but people speak of it as if it is. We both do it and speak of what
is and is not done here and further, the rationales offered for the
choices made.

Linguists really don't care what "people" speak of it as. "People" have
no special knowledge -- any more than, say, George W. Bush is equipped
to speak of the inner workings of an iPod (as he tried to do yesterday
in Tuskeegee).

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.


That was the claim, and I declared that I'd not heard one particular
form of one.

No, that's not what you declared.

If you had indeed been referring to some specific, sizable corpus, your
claim could have been evaluated objectively. What you declared was your
opinion of what could or could not be said.

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.

Anything's *possible* including things you and I might consider to be
word salad. That "Jabberwocky" poem is damn near intelligible, but

There is not one ungrammatical feature in all of "Jabberwocky." Only the
vocabulary is unfamiliar.

Consider this other classic example:

(3) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

there are some contexts in which eccentric language use is undesirable
or fails to meet some key aim, and thus ought to be discouraged. In
this case, the eccentric construction was, in my opinion,.pure
contrivance to establish a point unworthy of being made.

At least you now recognize that it was an opinion. The opinion, however,
is not based in fact.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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