LINGUIST List 3.528

Tue 23 Jun 1992

Disc: That good of

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Directory

1. Kathleen Hubbard, 3.493 "that good of"
2. Narciso Jaramillo, That good of
3. BORKOVSA, that good of--3.479

I always assumed this construction started from "he's not that much of a jerk",
which then extended to something like "that big of a jerk", and so on. I've
rarely heard it without the article ('that good of advertising'), but that
seems like the next step.

Kathleen Hubbard
U.C. Berkeley

A possibly related expression is one that I've heard a lot in the
SF Bay Area: "hell of" or "hella", as in

	He's hella rich.
	I'm hell of tired.

This presumably comes from the more standard use of "hell of a", as in
"She's one hell of a ballplayer." However, the original use requires
a noun, while the newer use takes an adjective; and the original use
requires some sort of quantifier, I think ("*She's hell of a
ballplayer").

nj

Bruce E. Nevin writes:
> Barbara Abbott wondered about expressions like "they don't have
> that good of advertising." This looks to me like a generalization of
> a kind of partitive genitive that has been around in English
> dialects for a long time.
Compare with Russian (and other Slavic languages) use of genetive
for direct object in negative constructs:
 U nix jest' reklama
 loc-they-gen is advertizing-nom
 (they have advertising)
 vs.
 U nix net [takoj xoroshej / nikakoj] reklamy
 (they don't have [that good / any] advertizing-gen)
 Also:
 Ja videl reklamu
 I-nom see-past add-acc
 (I saw the add)
 vs.
 Ja ne videl reklamy
 I-nom negation see-past add-gen
 (I did not see A add)
 but
 Ja ne videl reklamu
 I-nom negation see-past add-acc
 (I did not see the add)

In the English example, the difference
"that good of advertizing" vs. "that good advertizing" must be
similar to the second one.

Arkady Borkovsky
Dialog Inforamtion Services