Ordering of conjoined elements in English (1975) [pdf]

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28 points·acangiano··7 comments

There is a new phrasal verb “be a thing” which lets us conveniently talk about such constructions. That is, “now and then” is a thing—an idiom, with a specific meaning outside the wording—but “then and now” is not a thing.

You will note that all of the semantic constraints they propose place the item with a “positive” aspect first—I wrote a blog post about this[1].

There is also a related notion of “stormy petrel”[2] which I wrote a poem about[3] back when I had lots of hair.

[1]: http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2014/08/adjective-valenc...

[2]: http://www.kith.org/logos/words/lower/petrels.html

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRlpRFs2L30

As a side note, "then and now" is actually a common phrase used to describe comparisons of old and recent depictions of the same subject, e.g. photographs of celebrities.

D’oh, you’re right. A better example is “cat and mouse” versus “mouse and cat” from the paper.

Could someone more skilled than me in English explain the sudden "Whorfer" ending to the paper on page 103? It makes no sense to me.

"Whorfer" = adherent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which (very roughly) says that language structure and vocabulary influences or determines what thoughts can be thought. e.g. if your language does not have a word for "yellow", do you classify colors the same way as someone who speaks a language that does?

The HN title is quiet misleading - it's a paper about ordering of conjoined elements in English.

Ok, let's try that.

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