Why do these two sentences bother me so?

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Thu Apr 20, 2006 10:44 pm

You're right. I only get 276 hits for "since I heard it for the first time".

I wonder what I got 26,900 hits for then.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 11:05 am

I also point out that the highly prized "native speaker" intuition which has been the basis of so much linguistic theorizing is just about useless in considering these sorts of frequency issues.

What do you mean by 'these sorts'.

I am surprised here because it is not usual for my intuition to let me down so much. Certainly 'native-speaker' intuition is likely to be skewed towards frequencies in one's own dialect and idiolect, but it still works well for the overly formal, and for the dubiously grammatical.

abufletcher · Post by **abufletcher** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 1:49 pm

I guess what I mean is that "introspection" as a research tools seems to work reasonable well for judgements of grammaticality (most of the time) but it seems a lot less able to provide insights on complex collocational issues.

I asked the people in the MATESOL course I teach about their intuitions regarding "when first I saw it" vs. "when I saw it for the first time" and nearly everyone guessed that "when I saw it for the first time" would have been the more common.

BTW, another suggestion (a quite clever one I think) is that these two phrases may appear in "complementary distrubution" in differing sequential locations -- given that it's an Intro to Conversation Analysis course, I was naturally pleased with this suggestion.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 4:05 pm

It occurs to me that the keyboard makes (most of) us edit ourselves.

So I wonder if we don't hear and say the lengthy "since I heard it for the first time" with more frequency even though few go to the trouble of typing it out.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 10:29 am

JTT wrote:It occurs to me that the keyboard makes (most of) us edit ourselves.

So I wonder if we don't hear and say the lengthy "since I heard it for the first time" with more frequency even though few go to the trouble of typing it out.

It's not so much a matter of efficiency in reducing the number of syllables, or letters and thus keystrokes, but that the longer form is, what's the word, too explicit? 'First V-PAST it' had to have occured at some prior time, so 'for', 'the' and 'time' can all be omitted (I hesitate to say 'ellipted').