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July 27, 2019

One at a time but on/in its subject?

"An honor must be earned," commonsense says, but in the world of academe, it is not always pretended to be about the quality of the print products. The commonsense also says that the higher the technicality of a subject goes, the lesser  the quantity of its readers becomes. Yet language and linguistics subject is  still the passion for many; no need to mention that it is just for linguists. 

Whenever I have my read times, I try to do some literature reviews, primarily on English language and linguistics but in a small scale. I do enjoy writing posts for a language blog as this eventually gives me some good keepup exercise as well.     

So is to my reviews, without anything of my own, so to speak,  the last few weeks of worlds of mainstream media on the langling has been very  smooth; nothing serious, noting wrong, nothing much to debate.  But those who read blogs, journals, etc might have perhaps noticed that the ‘verbal illusion’ is something difficult to be understood and that agreed with. There is number of good reasons why the authors were/are mere on the idiomatic and pragmatic aspects of the issue and not on the semantical or grammatical aspect of it. Something like in these, for example:
No head injury is too trivial to be ignored
No sinner is too wicked to be condemned

Here the confusions are just like some of our verbal conventions like I am home or I am at home that give the similar reading. I prefer the adverbial with the preposition like at home rather than home. The Google NgramViewer, however, supports  the  home version rather than at home version as an emerging new trend among English speakers around the world. And of course which sounds better these days.       
But on the grammatical aspect of the verbal patterns, there seems no verbal illusion since it is strait forward and cannot be read as  ‘No sinner is too wicked' or 'No sinner is to be condemned’.   Since to be condemned here in this sentence is just the complement of the participle adjective wicked (via functional potential for transformation),  I like to argue that our grammatical verbal pattern does not allow any other  way of reading this sentence. However I agree that this, as authors indicated, may be a bit problem for L1ers and L2ers since our verbal patterns are sometimes catenatives. 

Some of the other things from last few weeks of language blogs and journals that i like to pinpoint are our common errors or likes that we face against our intuitions day-to-day,  something like by which circumstances we have the choice of using the preposition in or on for the same meaning  is in particular. And the other thing with this context that I like to add is our choices or styles of adjectives. For example,  why we like to refer something like 'I like to speak in English' rather than 'I like to speak on English' or vice versa appears to be the matter of our own referent to the preposition in question. The same analogy seems to be concealed with our adjective choices as well,  like for example, why we like to refer something as 'linguistics subject' rather than 'linguistic subject' but 'linguistic explanation' rather than 'linguistics explanation' or  something 'in political explanation'  versus 'explanation in politics'. Certainly we can argue that each of these forms as having its own non-identical referent not an exact synonym to its counterpart.      


This post posted a few years ago, and together with some comments, is in this link:

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