On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Greg Lindahl wrote:
English has super-plurals:
http://d.a.nicolas.free.fr/research/Linnebo-Nicolas-Superplurals.pdf
rgb knows this, but he was pretending like he doesn't use "all-y'all"
all the time...
Y'all find some mighty odd things out there on the web, y'know Greg? I
hadn't ever heard of super-plurals -- very interesting. All y'all
should look at this, because the bit on the analysis of certain
super-plural constructs providing a lead to second and third (and
speculatively higher order) logics is mighty interesting.
Still, God knows that it is difficult enough to keep my verbs all tensed
up and correctly quantified without superplural constructs. Now
Whitehead and Russell, Whitehead and Hilbert, is a superplural construct
in a self-referential sentence that asks whether the verb "is" that
refers to Whitehead and Russell, Whitehead and Hilbert, should correctly
be singular super-super-plural or if I should have used "are" to
indicate ordinary super-plural (and while I'm at it, whether or not I
can use "used" as a self-referential past tense of a usage in a single
sentence with an implicit temporal order of expression right before
switching back to present tense). And only Kilpatrick Knows if I should
have put a question mark at the end...;-)
rgb
Anyway, the reason I suggested the OED is that they often have early
usage quotes, which may well include examples of 'codes'. I can only
access the free version, which shows that they do have the definition,
but doesn't include the examples.
I have VPN problems at home these days (too complicated to describe,
sigh) but when I get to Duke tomorrow I'll see if the University
subscribes to the OED so I can use it for free.
rgb
-- greg
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Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb
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