LINGUIST List 6.237

Fri 17 Feb 1995

Sum: Replies to comments about "risk"

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1. benji wald, Sum: Risk

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I was surprised to receive so many replies on my comments about "risk".
 So far they include:
Alison Huettner
Bart Mathias
John R. Lee
Scott Delancey
Deborah Milam Berkley
Tim Beasley
Eric Pederson
Claudia Brugman
Martha O'Kennon
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Sandi Michele de Oliveira (trying to get sick = about to get sick)
Debra R West
Balsa Stipcevic

I decided to post a summary for several reasons:
1) my comments made some respondents sufficiently insecure to wonder
 what other respondents thought.
2) I didn't want anyone to get the idea that my comments might represent an
 authoritative or majority opinion.
3) Although I usually try to respond individually to everyone, I get tired
 thinking of different ways to say the same thing.

Overwhelmingly, but not unanimously, the respondents disagreed with me. Alison
 Huettner represents the majority response:

"Funny, I have the opposite take on "risk" -- to me "He risked
losing the game" sounds fine and "He risked winning the game" takes a little
more processing."

Unusual was agreement, such as represented by Tim Beasley
"Both sound good to me. The first paraphrases "He ran/stood
the risk of losing the game", "He placed himself in risk of
losing the game." The second, "He placed in jeopardy .at risk.
his winning of the game."

As implied above, both sides of the Atlantic want to disown me,
 e.g., from Bart Mathias of California:
"No thoughts, but I thought I'd report that I expected to see a .uk or .au
or something in your address when I checked it after reading
your message. I for one (born and raised in California) find
"risk winning," at least at the moment , causes a double-take
reaction. To me it is equivalent to "be in/ put oneself in
danger of."

However, from John R. Lee at an Edinburgh address:
"This is interesting. I was very surprised to see "he risked
winning the game "! Perhaps as a British English speaker (?),
to risk losing the game seems a much more natural concept."

Larger context makes me think John considers himself, not me,
to be the British speaker. In any case, Andrew
Carstairs-McCarthy of New Zealand made a similar
comment.

Back on the American side, Scott Delancey agrees with the majority
and adds some interesting grammatical comments:
"This seems *really* strange to me. My reactions are exactly the
opposite of yours. A clausal complement of _risk_ is *always*
a negative and undesirable result. I can't even interpret _He
risked winning the game_,except in some strained context in
which winning wouldn't be a good thing. "_Risk_ can have a
positive NP complement-- _He risked his fortune_ is perfectly
OK--but not a clausal one, i.e. this could be expanded to
_He risked losing his fortune_, but ?? _He risked winning a
fortune_is impossible for me."

Eric Pederson and Claudia Brugman informed me that Chuck
Fillmore has written a paper on "risk". Claudia writes:
"[by] Sue Atkins and Charles Fillmore which I don't know
whether they've published (or indeed finished) yet, but they
talk about these two meanings of the word in terms of the
selection as complements of different aspects of the
 conceptual/semantic frame: one is where the desired outcome is
selected, the other is where the " collateral" is selected."

I haven't seen the paper yet, but it was comforting to the extent
that it seems to take cognizance of my impression. However, I
suspect that the "collateral" means a simple NP expressing the
desirable object, as Scott allows, and not a clausal complement.
Thus some replies suggested that "he risked his life" would have
to be expanded into "he risked *losing* his life". I have to admit
that that sounds better to me than "he risked *keeping* (?) his
life". Nevertheless , my theory is that in my rush to learn
English I made the following logical leap . "To risk your life"
is to risk something good, so you should risk "winning t he
game", not "losing the game". Risking fines, death, imprisonment
and cancer were later experiences for me. I'm quite sure
"risking life" was the first ex pression I heard. By the way,
I'm not at all sure that I differ from others on our favorite
Gallicism of "RUNNING the risk of/that [something bad
happening/ will happen.", so that's a different expression. I
kinda doubt that genuine dialect differences are respo nsible
for differences in "risk" -- only idiosyncratic differences in
generalisations, some of which survive contradictory data
learned later -- an interesting point that has been made before
in language acquisition theory.

Among the interesting comments I received which suggest to me that
 relatively discrete semantic splits may result from such
processes, and even become genuine dialect features is Sandi
Michele de Oliveira's observation that in South Texas the
expression "trying to get sick" can be used for "about to get sick".
I wonder if "trying to rain" could mean "threatening to rain" in
such dialects.

Of possibly different origin is the ambivalent Serbo-Croatian verb
"sumnjati" (="to doubt" OR "to suspect"). Balsa Stipcevic
indicated that:
"Sumnjam da je on to uradio." can have two meanings:
1) "I suspect that he did it."
2) "I doubt that he did it."
Here I suppose that the verb might have started off neutral to the
belief status of its sentential complement, but it remains
interesting that there is such a glaring pragmatic ambiguity in
what a speaker might be implying. Maybe English "wonder "
is similar. "I wonder if he did it". If he says he did, then
the sentence would seem to suggest that I doubt it, but if he
says he didn't, it would seem to mean that I doubt THAT. I'm not
gonna torture myself trying to figure out whether the same context-
ualisation differences work for "I wonder if he didN'T do it", but
maybe someone/body else wants to give it a shot. I wrote back to
Balsa that I hoped his comment on this verb is more generally
agreed upon by Serbo-Croatian speakers than my comment on
"risk". -- Benji