Query Details

Query Subject:	Use of 'Substitute'
Author:	David Denison
Submitter Email:	click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):	Historical Linguistics Semantics

Query:	I'm just tidying up a paper (draft available on http://ling.man.ac.uk/Info/staff/dd/) on the reversal of _substitute_, which in British English is moving rapidly from the subcategorisation (1) substitute new for old towards (2) substitute old for new - a switch which raises some interesting questions. I've got one passive example from the American National Corpus whose interpretation isn't 100% clear to me. Could a native speaker of American football English give me the sports-language-for-dummies version, assuming complete ignorance of the setup and the jargon? (3) Non-specialists only can be substituted out of the lineup once per quarter, meaning two-way players can expect to be on the field upward of 45 to 50 minutes of a 60-minute game. (ANC, NYTimes) In particular, what does 'out of the lineup' mean? - that the coach can take non-specialist players off the bench and send them out onto the field, or that he can bring them off the field, or perhaps that he can bring them off the field and replace them by others waiting to come on? And whatever it means, does example (3) represent normal usage in context? Many thanks.
LL Issue:	15.3523
Date posted:	18-Dec-2004
Back

Sums main page

New from Cambridge University Press!