Positive or negative?

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wjserson
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Post by wjserson » Thu Mar 18, 2004 4:05 pm

Shun, I don't quite understand what it is you want to know, but your self-quote is not entirely right : your ExD is correct (grammatically) but not equal to ExC. You are correct in saying that the idea that they're equal is illogical. They do not represent the same idea. At the beginning of this thread, you asked what the difference is between these two structures and I attempted to answer. Let s take another look at your most recent examples:

ExC: "I hadn't thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."
ExD: "I had thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."

In your analysis of these sentences, you state "Both sentences say that now you brought it up, I thought about it.' I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this.

To clarify, I'd tell you that C says 'you brought it up' before 'I had though of your interpretation'. However D says 'you brought it up', but also that 'I had thought of it up until that point that you brought it up'.

The first includes no thought 'before you brought it up', the other includes considerable thought 'before you brought it up'. It's not a complicated distinction, it's a fairly simple to explain, and I don't see why anyone would disagree... unless somebody else can explain what I'm doing wrong here, or what I'm missing? (Larry? SJ?)

shuntang
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Post by shuntang » Thu Mar 18, 2004 5:03 pm

Last week my teacher asked me a question: “Is he a female, yes or no?”
I answered it was easy and then spent more than half an hour to explain the difference between male and female.
My teacher finally stopped me and said, the answer is ‘no’.
And I told him, “That is what I want to tell you.”


Bye. See you all next time.
:wink:

wjserson
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Post by wjserson » Thu Mar 18, 2004 5:30 pm

:shock:

Duncan Powrie
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Post by Duncan Powrie » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:35 pm

ExC: "I hadn't thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."
ExD: "I had thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."

Am I the only one who finds it almost certainly a total waste of time to even bother analysing the second example above?

I'm not saying that negative evidence isn't valuable, or that attested examples are the only ones we should study, but the mental effort involved in tackling such strange and dubious examples doesn't really do anyone (even smarter students) much good; there is hardly a giddying sense of discovery to be had, only confusion (and possibly mounting irritation).

Robert Burchfield (an editor of the OED) wrote something in his "The English Language" along the lines that a generation of good linguists had exhausted themselves struggling along in the Chomskyan paradigm (he didn't quite mention Chomsky specifically, though), and I can't help feeling we are risking doing the same here. The "phenomena" we are attempting to explain in many of the examples here is NOT REAL...so people may be excused for not really taking any notice of what we say about such phenomena and the sentences they are derived from (but obviously, retreating too far into e.g. Corpus Linguistics is not the answer either).

I'm actually quite glad that Wjserson appealed only to SJ and LL for help, and not to me (I hope I don't sound like I'm becoming too "personal" or critical there - they are obviously intelligent guys who perhaps ENJOY the challenges involved in answering this type of question more than me, and their views are always very interesting and usually very helpful!). :wink:
Last edited by Duncan Powrie on Fri Mar 19, 2004 1:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Lorikeet
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Post by Lorikeet » Thu Mar 18, 2004 11:58 pm

Duncan Powrie wrote:ExC: "I hadn't thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."
ExD: "I had thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."

Am I the only one who finds it almost certainly a total waste of time to even bother analysing the second example above?
I don't think it's worth trying to analyze a sentence like ExD, which I can't imagine anyone ever actually using. However, I think it would be possible to use the following:

"I had thought well of that interpretation until YOU brought it up."

;)

Duncan Powrie
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Post by Duncan Powrie » Fri Mar 19, 2004 12:07 am

Hi again Lovely L!

Of course, you can add to a wierd sentence to make it better - AND THEN ONLY CONTINUE TO DEAL WITH THE BETTER SENTENCE.

Negative evidence does get us thinking and improving, no doubt...but here's a thought: if you fed enough "food" (ooh metaphor!) into your "data-cruncher" it would probably come up with your "think well of sthg" anyway...so we could simply present that for perusal (IF WE THOUGHT THERE WAS A GOOD REASON FOR PRESENTING IT) and not actually need to entertain the "possibility" of the crappy sentence at all. 8)

Like I said, if you LIKE thinking about this kind of stuff, good luck to you, but don't blame me if you don't have enough energy left at the end of the day (week? year?!) to do feel like doing much with your "insights"! :wink:

Duncan Powrie
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Post by Duncan Powrie » Fri Mar 19, 2004 12:52 am

wjserson wrote:Let s take another look at your most recent examples:

ExC: "I hadn't thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."
ExD: "I had thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."

...

To clarify, I'd tell you that C says 'you brought it up' before 'I had though of your interpretation'. However D says 'you brought it up', but also that 'I had thought of it up until that point that you brought it up'.

The first includes no thought 'before you brought it up', the other includes considerable thought 'before you brought it up'. ...
We could just rephrase D as "I ('d/'ve?) thought of that ALREADY/before (=?until you brought it up)." :P

Apologies for the crazy notation, but I'd prefer to use crazy notation than try to verbalize the extra thoughts that it is meant to convey.

Stephen Jones
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Post by Stephen Jones » Fri Mar 19, 2004 11:23 am

Your problem, shuntang, is that you produce a load of nonsense examples and then get your knickers in a twist trying to analyze them.

Few sentences, of course, are such nonsense that a meaining cannot be found for them if one is prepared to twist things far enough so I will tell you that the statement:
I had thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."
can only be interpreted to mean that I was giving serious thought about the problem until you butted in and complicated things so much that my eyes glazed over and my mind went blank.

Which, actually, is not as convoluted or improbable as it may appear :)

The phrase until these days that you use in your five examples is not correct English, and would normally be replaced by up till now, though there are other grammar mistakes in many of the examples. The reason you don't have any negative happening after the until is that there is no time after the until for the negative to take effect in.

shuntang
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Post by shuntang » Fri Mar 19, 2004 12:49 pm

Stephen Jones wrote:Your problem, shuntang, is that you produce a load of nonsense examples and then get your knickers in a twist trying to analyze them.

Few sentences, of course, are such nonsense that a meaining cannot be found for them if one is prepared to twist things far enough so I will tell you that the statement:
I had thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."
can only be interpreted to mean that I was giving serious thought about the problem until you butted in and complicated things so much that my eyes glazed over and my mind went blank.

Which, actually, is not as convoluted or improbable as it may appear :)

The phrase until these days that you use in your five examples is not correct English, and would normally be replaced by up till now, though there are other grammar mistakes in many of the examples. The reason you don't have any negative happening after the until is that there is no time after the until for the negative to take effect in.
Yes, you are correct. I made up those examples and posted in various websites and then searched them collectively for supporting myself. Somehow I feared some wise guys would find out. I didn’t know that using “up till now” may convince you and “until these days” doesn’t. How foolish I was.

Duncan Powrie
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Post by Duncan Powrie » Fri Mar 19, 2004 7:44 pm

Stephen Jones wrote:I had thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."
can only be interpreted to mean that I was giving serious thought about the problem until you butted in and complicated things so much that my eyes glazed over and my mind went blank.
How can "you" bringing up "it" complicate "it" beyond understanding when "it" is co-referential with "your interpretation" (which "I" had no problem in thinking about before - am "I" a mind reader?!)?! :lol:

Just can't let it lie eh...we'll maybe miss Shuntang!! :cry:

shuntang
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Post by shuntang » Sat Mar 20, 2004 6:19 am

The bad thing is, till/until-clause hasn't always struck me as implying a negative of the main clause:
Ex: From about 1885 until the present day, there was another family of Bobbitts living in Nuttall in Fayette County. This was the family of George and Abbie Bobbitt.
Ex: Sigma Chi Alpha Zeta Chapter -- was established in 1882 and has continued until the present day.
Ex: From prehistoric times until the present day, history is all around you in Dudley.
Ex: The service organization of the denomination, the Divine Science Federation International Association, was created at the Denver church in 1957 and was based in Denver until 1997. Up until recent years the offices of the DSFA were housed in the church at 1400 Williams Street.
Ex: at the site of the present building, there was a structure that was smaller than the present building and set back from the present street profile, the vaulted cellar of which has most likely been preserved until the present day.
Ex: His theory of the origin of the medieval epic, developed in Les Legendes epiques (4 vol., 1908–13), was widely accepted until recent years.
Ex: Until recent years type 2 diabetes was known as adult onset diabetes.
Ex: Until recent years, such resources were largely in the form of a regular lifetime income for retirees to live on.
Ex: This very important task remained unchanged up until these days and it still is most emphasized among our members.
Ex: Both Surface water and groundwater will be studied with focusing on the main problems found before the first week of last April and until these days. All the information is collected from employees in the Ministry of water resources and the governance in the main cities of IRAQ.
Ex: More than 60 years later the worldwide debate aroused on March 23, 1989 as the chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann published similar experiments with the same materials in use. This debate has not come to an end until these days.
Ex: The name Kouvola the village probably got after a settler called Kouvo. The beautiful countryside has almost completely remained until these days, and it is only a few kilometres away from the town of Kouvola.
Ex: However the truth is, that even until these days, I can still feel the stab of intermittent pain as if some pebbles were lodge within the corner of my heart.
Therefore, the judgment in our present thread that until-clause implies a negative of the main clause is tremendously interesting to me:
Ex: "I hadn't thought of your interpretation until you brought it up."
== The negative here has been further negated by the until-clause: "Now I thought of your interpretation". We understand this by the whole situation we saw in the thread, rather than by reasoning.

I may argue that in the following cases, is there a negative implied in the sentence?
Ex: He refused to go until he had seen all the papers.
== Did or didn't he refuse to go after the inspection of all the papers? Could it mean he still refused to go even after the inspection?
Ex: He slept until his clothes had been soaked with the mist.
== Did or didn't he still sleep after the soaking? It could mean that the tired runaway was still sleeping even after his clothes had been soaked wet. Why not? We didn't use the negative, did we? Here, positive or negative?

I must say that if there were no personal descriptions, it should be a good subject. Bye again.

Duncan Powrie
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Post by Duncan Powrie » Sat Mar 20, 2004 8:02 am

Shun, I will give you a very clear (potentially "mind-blowing" in its simplicity) "percentages" run-down of all the meanings/uses of "until" that appear in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary within the next few days. Until then, try not to post too much crazy stuff or upset anyone here! :wink:

As for these ("good") examples of yours:

Ex: He refused to go until he had seen all the papers.
== Did or didn't he refuse to go after the inspection of all the papers? Could it mean he still refused to go even after the inspection?
Ex: He slept until his clothes had been soaked with the mist.
== Did or didn't he still sleep after the soaking? It could mean that the tired runaway was still sleeping even after his clothes had been soaked wet. Why not? We didn't use the negative, did we? Here, positive or negative?

We won't really know unless more context is supplied, will we!

For example, it would be a lot easier to understand if we were told that some pain-in-the-ass guy came (to wherever whoever works or lives etc), demanded to see some papers, refused to go until he'd seen them, and then finally, thankfully LEFT, wouldn't it? But if you deal in isolated sentences, you can and will have all sorts of "fun" of the kind you seem to enjoy. To not be a total party-pooper, however, I should say that it can be interesting and fun (I don't know if it is totally "harmless", though!) to look at meanings from your perspective; and that to me, looking at the isolated sentence, it is implicit/eminently imaginable that he did indeed leave after HE HAD SEEN the papers :wink: If he decided not to leave even after having seen them, that would need to be "said" - "...and he DIDN'T leave EVEN AFTER we'd showed him them all!!" -for us to be totally sure of the "meaning" of the (now, not so isolated) sentence.

I guess the sleeping hobo could still be sleeping even in his cold, wet, soaking clothes, because no WAKING UP has yet been mentioned; but hopefully, he will notice how cold he is and wake up before he gets hypothermia and dies.

Really, these kind of things are not problems for readers who want to proceed onto the next sentence, rather than linger on and dissect the "meaning(s)" of the one they "just" read. And even if we do have genuine problems with one sentence, reading on will often resolve whatever problems we began to entertain and imagined would continue to be a problem. :wink:

You are exercising "predictive power", certainly, which is good (some students don't seem to have any, and therefore can't understand anything!), but if you don't keep in under control, you (will) come up with multiple possibilties of meaning...and then, settling on one (the most likely, according to common-sense expectations, if you have any :lol: ) will obviously be more of a problem! :o

If you try to use the more "holistic" approach to understanding that I have alluded to, I am sure a great deal of your questions (I hesitate to say confusion) will evaporate like dew from a dozy hobo's clothes in the morning sun! :P

Duncan Powrie
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Post by Duncan Powrie » Sat Mar 20, 2004 9:04 am

Duncan Powrie wrote:If you try to use the more "holistic" approach to understanding that I have alluded to, I am sure A GREAT DEAL OF YOUR QUESTIONS (I hesitate to say confusion) will evaporate like dew from a dozy hobo's clothes in the morning sun! :P
Anyone notice (or care to comment) on this (which I noticed, but decided in the final analysis not to "correct"). Stephen "Super Joker" Jones, perhaps? :D

shuntang
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Post by shuntang » Sat Mar 20, 2004 9:29 am

Duncan,

You wrote:
> We won't really know unless more
> context is supplied, will we?
>
My reply: That is the point. We don't know whether positive or negative. That is why we discuss here. If as you say we really don't know it on one-sentence basis, that is still a conclusion, from our discussion, and most of all, from the examples I have quoted. So, I suggest we treat my quoted examples fairly.

> Until then, try not to post too much
> crazy stuff or upset anyone here!
>
My reply: That is what I say personal descriptions: Shun upsets anyone here just by quoting real examples, or "crazy stuff". That is to say, Shun had better stop quoting real example so that everyone is happy and sane, for we want to keep the conclusion that until-clause negates the main clause. But please, even this conclusion was first suggested by me, not by another person!!! Now with my quoted examples, you have reached a totally new conclusion, as if it wouldn't upset anyone here. Do you believe this.

By the way, the example "He slept until his clothes had been soaked with the mist" is at the end of a paragraph. I really didn't know if the runaway did still sleep or not at this situation, not even if the whole book is quoted here.

Shun Tang

Duncan Powrie
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Post by Duncan Powrie » Sat Mar 20, 2004 10:10 am

shuntang wrote:Duncan,

You wrote:
> Until then, try not to post too much
> crazy stuff or upset anyone here!
>
My reply: That is what I say personal descriptions: Shun upsets anyone here just by quoting real examples, or "crazy stuff". That is to say, Shun had better stop quoting real example so that everyone is happy and sane, for we want to keep the conclusion that until-clause negates the main clause. But please, even this conclusion was first suggested by me, not by another person!!! Now with my quoted examples, you have reached a totally new conclusion, as if it wouldn't upset anyone here. Do you believe this.
Shun, there is a world of difference between being directly rude to somebody (and therefore getting personal), and making indirect fun of/poking fun at/teasing them. Please don't imagine that my intention is ever to really upset you. If you take extreme exception to what people say in jest (that is, cannot take jokes regarding your inimitable written style, and your quoting many UNREAL, CRAZY, grammatically *WRONG examples - NOT "real" examples at all, to my mind - that are hard to understand in themslves, let alone as a function of your argumentation!), then either don't post on this forum, or give serious consideration to how seriously you are expecting to be taken (after all, any bad feelings we all might have about responses to our individual postings are tied up with how much we imagine those postings to be representative of us, important to our "self-image". Call me intellectually a flyweight and without integrity, but I would never hesitate to say "That's not really me", or "I need to learn more and/or express myself a lot better" if I ever I got a kicking here (and I suppose, in a way, I have at times, but whaddya know, I feel the better for it. Call me masochistical as well, then!)).

I find it interesting that you wrote "so that everyone is happy and sane". :wink: By the way, that was a joke - you don't need to go to the mental hospital until you have been definitely certified as needing to. (That was another joke there, too). Maybe you don't like jokes? (Ooh, ANOTHER!!). Lighten up, man!

I only made the above-quoted joke because I imagined you would take it well (and as we both know, some guys on here can be a lot meaner than I ever get, so I could even be referring to other people's views of you being crazy, rather than saying myself that you actually are crazy, couldn't I! :P ), and were looking forward to my analysis from the OALDCE.
By the way, the example "He slept until his clothes had been soaked with the mist" is at the end of a paragraph. I really didn't know if the runaway did still sleep or not at this situation, not even if the whole book is quoted here.
Now this is interesting...did you know that it is a function of past perfect to end (as well as begin) written stories/parts of stories* (although these uses are less frequent - and certainly less useful in speech - than the "flashback" function (which is kind of related to the "beginning" function). Of course, here it works in tandem with "until", but I think you have overlooked the past perfect function.

Believe me, most of the people on this website are serious people who really, genuinely want to give serious consideration to all and everything that is posted, but there are limits to what you can expect people to understand when your style, rhetoric and use of examples are leaving something to be desired. That is why Larry said "Try again - we'll be waiting" at the end(?) of the "Highly Selected(=selective) Examples" thread.

Fair enough? Aren't we enjoying ourselves?! :wink:

* Which correspond to the end of a book vs. "the end of a paragraph". I'd need to check the relative frequencies of past perfect in each position, but I'm assuming it could occur in both.
Last edited by Duncan Powrie on Mon Mar 22, 2004 4:22 am, edited 2 times in total.

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