[net.nlang] Ups and Downs

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.
-- 
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Peter Benson                    | ITT Defense Communications Division
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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).