Grammar nitpicks, descriptive linguistics, etc

Sorry, I should have been more clear. When I said that complements should be objective in most cases, I meant that “her” is correct in examples 3 through 6 because they are complements to other words that are subjects. I should have said, “If the verb were 'play,” then ‘her’ would be an object and therefore more obviously correct."

In the “It was I” or “This is she” examples, I am saying that the “It” or “This” are dummy subjects, and that the “I” and “she” are the de facto subjects of those sentences.

In other words, I think that the prescriptive approach actually does support what you are saying: that pronouns following a copula should be treated as complements (i.e. the same as objects) except in the cases where a dummy subject is used.

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Ah, I misread your previous statement. Sorry. I agree with you. Yeah, cross-linguistically copula constructions are really weird with regard to case marking. A lot of languages don’t even have an explicit “be” verb in these things at all. It isn’t surprising that the grammar is so unstable in English.

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English has a lot of rules that, I’m sure, make perfect sense; it’s just that these rules have never really been definitively defined or explained. In both writing and speaking, though, form must never take precedence over substance, and poking around with the rules is very much the work of authors and poets.

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Interestingly there is a current case where an attachment ambiguity had an impact on current events. An attachment ambiguity occurs in a sentence like “I saw the boy with the binoculars”, which could either mean “I used binoculars to see the boy.” or “I saw a boy who had binoculars.” The ambiguity is whether the prepositional phrase “with binoculars” is supposed to “attach” to the “the boy” or to “saw”.

Evidently when SurveyUSA was polling for the recent recall election in California they asked a question to determine if a survey participant was a likely voter. The question they asked was “Do you plan on voting in the recall election to remove Gavin Newsom from office?” This has two possible interpretations,

  1. “There is an election to remove Gavin Newsom from office. Do you plan on voting in it?”,

which is what SurveyUSA evidently intended and

  1. “Do you plan to remove Gavin Newsom from office in the upcoming recall election?”

So what happened is that they asked this question and democrats who did not want Newsom removed would say “No” because they interpreted the question as meaning 2. rather than 1. And thus Survey USA said that they were not a likely voter and comparatively few of their likely voters supported keeping Newsom in office.

This made it look like the election was going to be much closer than it was. I’m guessing that this probably actually helped Newsom with turnout.

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I had a little bit of trouble parsing this headline.

The sentence is actually ambiguous between situations like:

  1. John mowed my lawn. I paid John to mow my lawn.

and

  1. I watched a movie. I paid the movie theater to watch the movie.

For whatever reason, I kept trying to parse the headline as though it were like 1. rather than 2, which was a confusing and even more horrible interpretation. I suspect that constructions like 1 are more frequent than those like 2.

I’ve wondered this too. Bugs me a good bit.

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I think the cognitive linguists (i.e. Langacker, Talmy etc.) would say that the change is actually conceptual rather than just grammatical. For me, “base on”, means that you have a prototype and you more or less modify it in place to get the final output, whereas, “based off (of)” has this idea that you first form a copy that you move into a different place. But those function words are always slippery so it is hard to tell.

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Maybe “based on” is for situations where the secondary creative endeavor explicitly states it was derived from the first, involves very specific aspects of the first, and (hopefully) the original creator was paid. Leaving “based off” for situations where the secondary creative effort is coincidentally very like the first or is more a riff off some ideas in the first, not a explcit re-do?

Or not. Merriam-webster says it is a language change. 'Based On' or 'Based Off': Which is Right? | Merriam-Webster

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Yeah, not. I agree with MW that it’s a language change. Like, literally. :wink:

I just think it’s a dumb one. Why add an extra word? Grrrrrrr

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I should really know better than to try and find logic in languages, particularly english!

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Totally!

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Same. Based “based on” fan.

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While we’re on the topic, how does everyone feel about “based around.” as in, “His entire philosophy is based around a book he read in high school.” It seems to suggest a kind of outward expansion from the book, but some people have said that it defies logic to say that something is based “around” something.

As for “based off,” I have always had the impression that it signifies a major departure from the original (i.e. basis), kind of like saying “loosely based on” or “used as a starting point.”

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“Based around” to me means that a bunch of different aspects feature something as a central feature. “We based the WonderBot 5000 around the i263 AI chipset.” means that they started with the i263 AI chipset and all of the other design decisions were a result of that starting point so that they are somehow all directly or indirectly related to that decision. The “around” part seems very natural in that you could put a whole bunch of other verbs in there to replace it.

“We designed the car around a solor-powered engine.”
“He lives his life around a stoic philosophy.”

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Every time I see someone using “Gilead” like this, I feel bad for Marilynne Robinson.

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Are you sure it shouldn’t be “Vehicle width-restrictor”? It is a compound of three nouns and the headed-ness sure seems ambiguous to me. In other words, should it be

( (VehicleNN widthNN)AdjP restrictorNN)NP
or
( VehicleNN (widthNN restictorNN)NN)NP

Both types of compounds common and semantically it is something like “A restrictor on Vehicle width” vs “A width-restrictor for vehicles”.

Yes, I’m sure. Thanks for asking.

Are you also sure that you should call a noun-noun compound an adjective?

I know that this is a personal, stylistic choice on my part (and possibly not fully “correct”), but I really, really do not like using hyphens and will avoid using them to the extent possible without sacrificing meaning.

For example, when my company developed what they call “性能持続技術,” I insisted on translating it as “Performance Sustaining Technology” in all of the press materials even though I knew that there should be a hyphen between “Performance” and “Sustaining.” Hyphens just seriously mess with the flow of a sentence…

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