LINGUIST List 12.181

Wed Jan 24 2001

Qs: French/Eng List, "become of"/"all of a sudden"

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

Directory

1. Daniel Poirier, Need help locating a linguistic reference
2. HMooney, become of and all of a sudden

I am looking for a list of words that are identical or very similar in
both French and English. These would obviously be pronunced differently
in the two languages, but would be spelled either exactly the same way
or very close. For example, the word "contact" is the same in both
French and English. Another example is "chameleon" and "cam�l�on" which
are very close, and actually pronounced pretty much the same way.

I stumbled on the Linguist list, and saw that the way to communicate
with the folks there is to write to this address (although I hope
replies will come to my email address, because I haven't really found
how to read the list, if there is such a list.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Web-based resources would be best
(they support searches).

Many thanks...

Daniel.

(poiriernortelnetworks.com)

Does anyone know of published analyses of either of these expressions:

become of (as in "What became of Old Jenkins?" or "What will become of Aunt
Sally now that Uncle Bob is gone?")

all of a sudden (as in "All of a sudden, Sally doesn't like Bob any more." or
"All of a sudden the lights went out.")

Both are idioms, i.e., expressions whose meanings cannot be deciphered from
their constituent parts. Both involve idiosyncratic structures. One would expect
"become" to take a NP object ("become a surgeon") or and AP complement ("become
confused"), not PP; "sudden" is usually an adjective, yet here it is used as
part of a NP with an indefinite article, as though it were a noun.

Hank Mooney
hmooneycmp.com