LINGUIST List 3.652

Tue 25 Aug 1992

Disc: Reanalyses

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1. , got for
2. Henry Churchyard, Overheard reanalysis....

The recent discussion of "being have" reminds me of another
misanalysis our almost four year old daughter has come up with: "I
got for it", meaning "I forgot it." Whereas "being have" has an
obvious source for its misanalysis ("Behave!"), I can't figure out
why "forgot" -> "got for", other than the fact that there are many
V+P combinations in English. And yet "got for" seems familiar, as if
I've heard it from other children. Any thoughts?

Mike Maxwell maxwelljaars.sil.org

 I happened to randomly overhear today someone saying
"windowseal" (in the meaning of _windowsill_: "sitting on a w.").
I was fortunate enough to overhear it twice, pronounced with a
pitch accent both times, so that impressionistically it seemed
fairly clear that /Il/ and /i:l/ would have been pronounced
differently by the speaker (i.e. it seemed that there was not a
simple lack of a phonemic distinction, or a similarity only due to
details of phonological/phonetic implementation). So this seems to
be a fairly curious reanalysis or folk-etymology (I'm not really
sure what the semantic basis for it is...).
--
 --Henry Churchyard lify436utxvms.cc.utexas.edu