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More linguistic nit-picking
Tuesday, September 14th, 2004 10:36 pmI ask rhetorically, and in my most curmudgeonly voice: "Whatever happened to place structure?"
Those readers who have better things to do with their lives than study semantics may well ask (non-rhetorically) "WTF is a place structure?"
Well boys and girls, place structure is what happens when you use any verb (well any predicate, to be precise). If I say "Fred gave John a chihuahua", the place structure of "give" tells us that it was John, not Fred, who received the dog, and that the Fifi wasn't giving anyone anything. So what would we expect in the following sentence from the website of Anthony Robbins?
Wrong. Apparently Mr Robbins was not going around asking for the opinions of various dignitaries (plus the entire army and marine corps*). Rather, it was he who was giving them advice. It seems that "consult" is now a two-way verb, in that it can mean either "a sought the opnion of b" or "the opinion of a was sought by b." The only other verb that comes to mind that has this property is the Cheney word.
* I thought the U.S. Marines were part of the U.S. Army, but then my knowledge of this organisation comes mainly from G.I. Jane, so I could well be wrong.
Those readers who have better things to do with their lives than study semantics may well ask (non-rhetorically) "WTF is a place structure?"
Well boys and girls, place structure is what happens when you use any verb (well any predicate, to be precise). If I say "Fred gave John a chihuahua", the place structure of "give" tells us that it was John, not Fred, who received the dog, and that the Fifi wasn't giving anyone anything. So what would we expect in the following sentence from the website of Anthony Robbins?
He has consulted members of two royal families, U.S. Congressmen, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Marines and three Presidents of the United States.
Wrong. Apparently Mr Robbins was not going around asking for the opinions of various dignitaries (plus the entire army and marine corps*). Rather, it was he who was giving them advice. It seems that "consult" is now a two-way verb, in that it can mean either "a sought the opnion of b" or "the opinion of a was sought by b." The only other verb that comes to mind that has this property is the Cheney word.
* I thought the U.S. Marines were part of the U.S. Army, but then my knowledge of this organisation comes mainly from G.I. Jane, so I could well be wrong.
