I got the following IM today:
“I traded the permanent parking spot for the bigger bedroom”
My first thought was “why would you get rid of the bigger bedroom?”
Apparently the natural reading of this sentence is that the speaker originally had the parking spot and then got the bigger bedroom, but I can read it either way. In fact, I can get either reading for several verbs like this: “trade”, “switch”, “swap”.
Anyone else, or am I alone in this?
Update: Danny informs me that Igor (a native Russian speaker, L2 English speaker) produces and judges these guys the same way that I do.
Update 2: JonW reminds me that he noted this pattern with the verb “replace” in what’s he’s termed ABrE on his wiki back in July ‘05.
Posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 11:00 pm. Categories: Linguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “Mixing up arguments”
JonW Says:
July 4th, 2007 at 8:15 am
In what *I* termed ABrE? I think there’s evidence that it was you… :-þ
July ‘05… That was two years ago‽ Wtf.
JonW Says:
July 4th, 2007 at 8:16 am
ABrE. It’s like AmericanBritishEnglish.
Except there’s an Am/Au dichotomy. Whatever.
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