LINGUIST List 11.1904

Sat Sep 9 2000

Qs: Written English/Ireland, Periphrastic Causative

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Geoffrey Sampson, Irish written English
2. YANAGI Tomohiro, periphrastic causatives

Can anyone who knows the Republic of Ireland please comment on a query 
about norms of written English there? It is well known that Britain
and the USA, respectively, have well-established orthographic norms covering
many details of usage, which are laid down in style guides, enforced by
editors, and are in some respects different between the two countries.
I have been working recently with a text corpus including some material
originating in the Irish Republic, which contains some orthographic
features that one would not expect to find in modern British (or American)
material -- for instance, use of commas in grammatical positions where
commas would be impossible in British standard English, or capitalization
of "important" common nouns in a way reminiscent for me of 18th-century
writing. These may well simply be individual writers' idiosyncratic
usages, but I find myself wondering whether the Irish school system may
have developed its own standards on such matters, independent of British
standards. Political independence happened long enough ago for there to
have been time for this; on the other hand, the respective political 
statuses in Eire of English and Gaelic have been such that I would not have
expected much effort to have been put into codifying English usage. I'd
be interested to hear from anyone with first-hand knowledge.


Prof. Geoffrey Sampson

School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB

e-mail geoffscogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
fax +44 1273 671320
Web site http://www.grs.u-net.com

Dear Linguists,

I'm YANAGI Tomohiro, graduate student at Nagoya University, Japan. I'm work
ing on periphrastic causatives in English, mainly _have_ and _make_.
I have a question regarding whether two distinct temporal adverbs can occur 
in _make_ causatives. Could any one of you check the following sentences (s
ome of which are cited from Rothstein's work by deleting asterisks)?

(1)
a. Yesterday John made Bill wash his car at three today.
b. Three days agao, John's doctor made him drink vodka tonight.
c. Yesterday, the witch made John know the answer last night and forget it t
his morning.
d. Yesterday, the witch made John be clever last night and be stupid this mo
rning.
e. Yesterday, the witch made John clever last night and be stupid this morni
ng.

(2)
a. Yesterday John had Bill wash his car at three today.
b. Three days ago John's doctor had him drink vodka tonight.

Any suggestions, references, contributions on the above sentences and the pe
riphrastic causative in English would help. Please feel free to e-mail me y
our suggestions 

Thank you in advance.