Thinking more about it, I really have problems because 'bear' is the
actor in the sentence. I can see a bare NP with something like "Bear are
found in the area", but not with "Bear will rummage through your
trashcan if you're not careful."
So what I'd really like to see are corpus examples of the latter sort of
sentence. (Since as we all know, individual intuitions of what is well
formed or not can be off.)
And I'd also like your explanation of how the recursion is supposed to
work. (Something you didn't respond to.) it seems ungrammatical as a
relative clause embedding. Compare "John had a child had a child had a
child" That does not mean "John had a child who had a child who had a
child." At best it's repetition of the same predicate, as in a song lyric.
Phil Bralich wrote:
> Sorry, dead wrong again. I actually took a course with Greenbaum when he was still teaching in Milwaukee, where I first learned this sentence and the point about game animals. Greenbaum was actually my advisor at the time. He did however point out that the game animal interpretation is easier for Brits. I and many others have never had a problem with it. The CGEL will have to be amended. This and the buffalo sentence have been around for years because they are good. The fact that some might object is not particularly telling in this case.
>
> Phil Bralich
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Karl Hagen <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: May 5, 2006 1:17 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: A humorous note on "bear"
>>
>> My copy of Quirk et al. is at home, but I do have the CGEL here at the
>> office, and it reinforces my conviction that I'm right.
>>
>> You're taking my meat comment too literally. In constructions like "I'm
>> hunting bear", we're thinking about the animal as food, even if only in
>> potentiality. That usage is not collective (i.e., a group of bears),
>> although it is non-count. But you have the animal as the actor in the
>> sentence, and the food interpretation doesn't make sense in that case.
>>
>> A sentence like
>>
>> *Bear live in the woods
>>
>> seems ill-formed to me. But even if we accept that a collective use of
>> 'bear' with no determiner is possible for some varieties of English,
>> nouns in non-count usage are virtually always singular, so it would need
>> to be
>>
>> *Bear lives in the woods
>>
>> which is, if anything, worse.
>>
>> You can, of course, use 'bear' in a collective sense *if* you use 'the'
>> ("The bear lives in the woods"), but here again, the verb is singular.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Phil Bralich wrote:
>>> Simply not true. Game animals regularly admit of a collective sense like this both before and after being turned into meat. See Quirk and Greenbaum.
>>>
>>> Phil Bralich
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>
>>>> From: Karl Hagen <[log in to unmask]>
>>>> Sent: May 4, 2006 3:55 PM
>>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>>> Subject: Re: A humorous note on "bear"
>>>>
>>>> With apologies for dissecting the frog...
>>>>
>>>> Since we're talking of individual bears rather than meat, and since
>>>> 'bear' doesn't admits a null plural (like sheep), you have a
>>>> subject-verb agreement problem. Also, the recursion seems a little
>>>> problematic because when the null relative pronoun is in subject
>>>> position, you can't omit 'that'.
>>>>
>>>> Bare bear(s) bear bare bear(s) [that] bear bear(s)...
>>>>
>>>> However that reminds me of the sentence in Stephen Pinker's The Language
>>>> Instinct (which IIRC he attributes to a grad student):
>>>>
>>>> Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
>>>>
>>>> (= The bison from Buffalo that (other) bison from Buffalo intimidate
>>>> (themselves) intimidate bison from Buffalo)
>>>>
>>>> Karl
>>>>
>>>> Phil Bralich wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I am sure many of you are aware that the pronunciation [ba:r] is capable of
>>>>> making a fully recursive sentence where all the words are phonetically
>>>>> idenitical meaning, "naked bears give birth to naked bears who in turn give
>>>>> birth to naked bears who then in turn give birth to naked bears" and so on.
>>>>>
>>>>> to whit:
>>>>>
>>>>> Bare bear bear bare bear
>>>>>
>>>>> Bare bear bear bare bear bare bear bear
>>>>>
>>>>> Bare bear bear bare bear bare bear bear bare bear bear ...
>>>>>
>>>>> and so on ad infinitimus recursibus ursimus.
>>>>>
>>>>> Phil
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Linda DiDesidero
>>>>> Sent: May 4, 2006 2:33 PM
>>>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>>>> Subject: Re: BEAR and time "I was born poor."
>>>>>
>>>>> That's an interesting way of characterizing it, Craig (acting/behaving). No
>>>>> matter how we characterize the verbs, though, we can see that there seems to
>>>>> be some consistency between what the verbs mean and how they behave
>>>>> grammatically. And that is really difficult to teach second language students!
>>>>>
>>>>> Linda
>>>>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
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>>>>>
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>>>>>
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>>>>>
>>>>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>>>
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>>>>
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>>>
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>
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