

Ordering of conjoined elements in English (1975) [pdf] - acangiano
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/worldorder.pdf

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evincarofautumn
There is a new phrasal verb “be a thing” which lets us conveniently talk about
such constructions. That is, “now and then” is a thing—an idiom, with a
specific meaning outside the wording—but “then and now” is not a thing.

You will note that all of the semantic constraints they propose place the item
with a “positive” aspect first—I wrote a blog post about this[1].

There is also a related notion of “stormy petrel”[2] which I wrote a poem
about[3] back when I had lots of hair.

[1]: [http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2014/08/adjective-
valenc...](http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2014/08/adjective-valence-and-
linguistic.html)

[2]:
[http://www.kith.org/logos/words/lower/petrels.html](http://www.kith.org/logos/words/lower/petrels.html)

[3]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRlpRFs2L30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRlpRFs2L30)

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baddox
As a side note, "then and now" is actually a common phrase used to describe
comparisons of old and recent depictions of the same subject, e.g. photographs
of celebrities.

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evincarofautumn
D’oh, you’re right. A better example is “cat and mouse” versus “mouse and cat”
from the paper.

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aparadja
Could someone more skilled than me in English explain the sudden "Whorfer"
ending to the paper on page 103? It makes no sense to me.

~~~
defen
"Whorfer" = adherent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which (very roughly) says
that language structure and vocabulary influences or determines what thoughts
can be thought. e.g. if your language does not have a word for "yellow", do
you classify colors the same way as someone who speaks a language that does?

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hurin
The HN title is quiet misleading - it's a paper about ordering of conjoined
elements in English.

~~~
dang
Ok, let's try that.

