LINGUIST List 3.620

Sat 08 Aug 1992

Qs: Prepositionless Goals; Texts; Audiovisual

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Directory

1. , Prepositionless goals and "The Harder They Come"
2. , audiovisual materials for "language & society"
3. , out of print linguistics texts

In the reggae version of the 137th Psalm, as sung by the Melodians in
the 1970s college cult movie "The Harder They Come" starring Jimmy Cliff
occur the following lines (I have the album in front of me):

	Cause the wicked carried us away captivity
	Require from us a song

Is this to be parsed the way it sounds to a non-Jamaican ear, that is,
with a missing or null preposition marking the Goal "captivity" (sc.
'into captivity')? My real question, if the answer is yes, is whether
this is a general phenomenon and whether there is any literature on it
or any comment in some other work. I am interested in this because I am
interested in phonologically null prepositions.

I can think of another possible parse, since the King James version has:

	For there they that carried us away captive required of us a
	song.

It could be that "captivity" is just some sort of rendering of the
secondary predicate "captive" (and therefore of less immediate interest
to me). But since I know nothing about Jamaican English, perhaps
someone can clear this up for me.

-David Pesetsky

i am looking for materials (videos, films) to use in an introductory
linguistics course aimed at first year undergraduates. the title of
the course is "language & society" but the content is somewhat
broader than the title. the course is designed to cover the areas of
anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics (including language
acquisition, language & the brain, animal communication) and
sociolinguistics. if anyone has used any videos that might be useful
for this course, i'd appreciate hearing about them. i'd like to know
what they are, how to order them, and most importantly, what did you
think of them. please send replies to lingsupantnov1.aukuni.ac.nz

i would like to get hold of a copy of the following out of
print books:

giglioli - language & social contact
langacker - fundamentals of linguistic analysis
hymes - language in culture & society

if anyone has or know of a copy that would be available for sale,
please contact me at fewantnov1.aukuni.ac.nz

thanks,
fay (fewantnov1.aukuni.ac.nz)