benson@dcdwest.UUCP (Peter Benson) (06/04/85)
My Swedish teacher takes great pains to point out the curiousities of English. His favorite example is the pair "slow up" and "slow down". He maintains these are synonyms while I think there is a subtle difference in usage. "Slow up", I think, is used when you are actively following someone whereas "slow down" is more generic and could be said to someone you merely SAW running too fast, for example. This came up in class again the othernight when the Swedish phrase "att leta upp" came up. This means to hunt up. I immediately thought about the difference between "hunt up" and "hunt down". I think "to hunt down" presupposes that the searched for item exists, whereas "to hunt up" merely hopes that it exists. There is another Swedish phrase "att leta fran" which seems parallel to the English but which my teacher says has the same meaning as "att leta upp". There is no great revelation here, but any comments would be welcome. -- _ Peter Benson | ITT Defense Communications Division (619)578-3080 | 10060 Carroll Canyon Road decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!benson | San Diego, CA 92131 ucbvax!sdcsvax!dcdwest!benson |
mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks) (06/09/85)
Some linguists, mostly in California and often working under the rubric of "Space Grammar", have been making interesting attempts to account for some of these peculiar prepositional usages. The attempt to explain them as complicated metaphors from very general meanings of the prepositions, rather than treating them as purely conventional and idiomatic. George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker are among the sources of this way of thinking. An interesting article representative of this sort of work is "How to be in the know about 'on the go' " by Claudia Brugman in CLS 19 (Papers from the 19th Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 1983).