🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul30.131645.648@athena.mit.edu> 
pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:

>In article <SCHILLER.92Jul29190137@tira.uchicago.edu>
>schiller@tira.uchicago.edu (Eric Schiller) writes:

ES:
>>Don't know what you mean. I checked the data with LOTS of native
>>speakers, and I believe that Fowler did too. Maybe you should
>>get together with Kartik and invent some normative Russian that
>>no one speaks. Really, people do use the construction. it is
>>not the invention of a linguist. As I noted in one of my
>>posts, not ALL speakers accept it, but then that is not
>>the point. 

Your ill-informed dissent has been noted.  I conjecture that your
informants' linguistic sensibilities are as stunted as your good
manners.  In my own poll, not a single speaker has accepted your
construction.

DP:
>Linguistics rule #1: Don't badger the native speaker. Especially not in public.
>
>On the other hand, I apologized a bit too soon.  The example with three
>datives was indeed my error, but the example with two is one that I also
>have encountered and had native speakers accept -- this is the "nam bylo
>pomoch' emu" (to-us was help to-you 'we had to help you') example.

Again, my experience differs.

DP:
>Perhaps the problem is the use of a modal dative embedding a verb that
>itself accepts dative -- some parsing problem?
>
>So let us construct an example without that feature.
>
>Mr. Zeleny, is "nam bylo poexat' tuda" `to-us was go there` also
>impossible for you?  Do you also need 'nado' in there?

Absolutely.  So does everyone I've asked so far.

ES:
>>A linguistic theory must at least account for
>>all attested data (the old descriptive adequacy). This
>>is data we syntacticians must wrestle with, as Fowler did
>>in his dissertation.

Well, in this case it appears that your data suffers from an internal
contradiction.  There goes "the old descriptive adequacy"...

DP:
>Do you mean this the way it sounds?  I certainly hope "attested" doesn't
>mean first and foremost "included in the examples section of a
>linguistics dissertation".  Can I just go and make stuff up and you
>promise to wrestle with it?  I am not at all implying that Fowler made
>anything up -- indeed, his data coincides with my own experience of what
>informants accept -- but a dissertation is not the ultimate authority on
>facts.

I like your point, but doubt that Mr Schiller will be convinced by
this argument.

DP:
>And shouldn't that be "us syntacticians"?

Perhaps it should be "you syntacticians", in contradistinction from
anyone who uses the language without official certification.

>-David Pesetsky
>

regards,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu