tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post7753703262200538696..comments2024-02-28T05:25:12.859-05:00Comments on English, Jack: "Multiple coordination" with prepositions?Bretthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870575277556244419noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-70971801245964930392010-08-30T03:46:18.351-05:002010-08-30T03:46:18.351-05:00I tend to agree with Rob Van Dam; I am not sure wh...I tend to agree with Rob Van Dam; I am not sure whether 'multiple coordination' can be a decisive test for categories. <br /><br />Even verbs can be bidirectional, allowing multiple coordination, as in 'This band is really interesting; it's like Pink Floyd meets Linkin Park meets Afro Celts meets ...'. <br /><br />I am yet to come up with a bidirectional preposition, though.Q Higuchihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12065110305928472008noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-56674265097471372382010-08-28T17:10:27.934-05:002010-08-28T17:10:27.934-05:00I think it's a coordinator, because the semant...I think it's a coordinator, because the semantics don't match what you'd expect if either coordinand were the head. With <i>cum</i> and <i>slash</i> we weren't sure, because <em>either</em> coordinand would make sense as the head. (A sentence like "the X-cum-Y is […]" or "the X-slash-Y is […]" has roughly the same meaning if "X-cum-" or "X-slash-" or "-cum-Y" or "-slash-Y" is dropped, so we can suppose that any of those potential droppees is a modifier. Not so with "the X versus the Y".)Ranhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01369980917358096502noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-3057125758896060162010-08-28T16:51:27.310-05:002010-08-28T16:51:27.310-05:00I'd say this is more of an illustration of the...I'd say this is more of an illustration of the limits to the utility of grammatical categories. We already know that they are fuzzy in the sense that not all their members are as good examples of their properties as others. But they also become reified and labeling things with them becomes an end in itself. They can be very useful. If I say "book" is both a noun and a verb, I can make useful inferences as to its morphology, syntactic behavior and distribution. That's why it's useful to break up conjunctions into coordinators and subordinators. The label can provide useful information.<br /><br />But I wonder what useful information can be gained by labeling versus as either preposition or coordinator. It's a one off lexical item that sits somewhere between the categories and it's because of its uniqueness that we already know everything there's to know about it. Labeling it doesn't provide any additional useful information.Dominik Lukešhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03071876778771965740noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31830497.post-17043842890933553542010-08-28T11:41:44.171-05:002010-08-28T11:41:44.171-05:00I would argue that the reason 'versus' can...I would argue that the reason 'versus' can be used in (what at least appears to be) multiple coordination is because its meaning is bidirectional. Contrast that against Geoff's examples 'on' and 'of'.<br /><br />opioid versus alcohol versus tobacco<br />is equivalent to<br />alchohol versus opioid versus tobacco<br />=<br />tobacco versus alcohol versus opioid<br />etc<br />(except in sports where 'versus' vs 'at' implies which team is the home team)<br /><br />but <br /><br />kitten on a box<br />is not the same as<br />box on a kitten<br /><br />This would appear to lend itself to a 'Transitive Law of Bidirectional Prepositions' with an appropriate 'Commutative Law' corollary. So perhaps these examples with 'versus' actually are not examples of multiple coordination. Or else we need to relax the definition of mutiple coordination to only bidirectional coordinators AND prepositions. (I suspect that coordinators also require bidirectionality to multi-coordinate, for instance contrast 'There was a dog and a cat and a fish.' with '*There was (not) a dog but a cat but a fish').<br /><br />Of course, the only other bidirectional preposition I can think of at the moment is 'against' when used like versus ('The challenge pitted Rob against John against Fred' but not 'He bumped the board against the table against the wall') so perhaps this is unique to 'versus' after all.Rob Van Damhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11031153112516561489noreply@blogger.com