toml@druxm.UUCP (LaidigTL) (04/29/84)
> #R:inmet:7300031:inmet:7300032:000:166 > inmet!andrew Apr 26 10:56:00 1984 > > OK, grammarians... rephrase "You get what you pay for" without a preposition > at the end! > > Andrew W. Rogers, Intermetrics ...{harpo|ihnp4|ima|esquire}!inmet!andrew Easy: "You get that for which you pay." Tom Laidig AT&T Information Systems Laboratories, Denver ...!ihnp4!druxm!toml
barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) (04/29/84)
The problem here is that "She turned on me" is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is resolved by using some commonsense ideas about what is possible. Another sentence with the same structure is "She turned on the lights", but the interpretation of "turned on" is different (in this case, "turn on" means to assume the "on" state). I can think of at least four possible interpretations for a sentence with the structure "She turned on X": She attacked X. She made X assume the "on" state. She aroused X. She was on X, and she rolled over (turned). I think that the third meaning is just a colloquialism derived from the second, i.e. arousing someone is analogous to turning on a light. I think that in this meaning of "turn on" the word "on" isn't really being used as a preposition; it is probably a reference to a switch which has two labels, "on" and "off", and "turn X on" is short for "turn X's switch to the 'on' position"; it could also be an adjective, describing the device, as in the sentence "The light is on". -- Barry Margolin ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar
gary@rochester.UUCP (Gary Cottrell) (04/29/84)
Sorry, this is not new. The fact that you can't say "She turned on me" and mean "She turned me on" is due to the restriction in English that you have to move a particle past a pronoun. You could say "She turned on Bill" and it would be ambiguous between the particle/adverbial PP readings. Similarly, you can't say "She called up me", but you can say "She called up Bill" or "She called Bill up." Also, there is a distance constraint on moving the particle: It sounds strange to say "She called the old man she saw yesterday after the dance up." In fact, one will tend to try to associate "up" with "dance". For an interesting pseudo-computational account (pseudo because the details have not been worked out) of this distance constraint, see "The Sausage Machine" by Lyn Frazier and Janet Fodor in Cognition, around 1980 or so. gary cottrell (allegra or seismo)!rochester!gary or gary@rochester (ARPA)
barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) (04/29/84)
--------------------
OK, grammarians... rephrase "You get what you pay for" without a preposition
at the end!
Andrew W. Rogers, Intermetrics ...{harpo|ihnp4|ima|esquire}!inmet!andrew
--------------------
You pay for what you get.
Don't complain if you think the connotation is different; we do lots of
things to the language in order to add connotations, not the least of
which is the addition of body language and intonation, neither of which
can currently be transmitted over the net.
--
Barry Margolin
ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmargarys@bunkerb.UUCP (Gary Samuelson) (04/30/84)
"rephrase 'you get what you pay for' without a preposition at the end" Easy: You get what you purchase.
jlg@lanl-a.UUCP (04/30/84)
"You get what you pay for" is not always true. "You pay for what you get" generally is. Now, as for using the later without leaving a preposition at the end, how about "Sooner or later, everything costs."
grw@fortune.UUCP (Glenn Wichman) (04/30/84)
[align a line so fine]
Actually, not to agree with the "absolutely no prepositions" people,
but the "grammatically correct" version would be "On she turned me", which
is pretty awful, I'll admit.
That which you pay for, you get.
-Glenngrw@fortune.UUCP (Glenn Wichman) (04/30/84)
[correction...]
That should have been,
"That for which you pay, you get"
-Glennjcz@ncsu.UUCP (John Carl Zeigler) (04/30/84)
You pay what it's worth. --jcz
burton@inuxg.UUCP (Thomas Burton) (04/30/84)
Challenge - to rearrange "You get what you pay for" to not have a preposition at the end; Answer - You get that for which you pay. Doug Burton ATT-CP Indianapolis inuxg!burton
brennan@iuvax.UUCP (05/01/84)
Sorry Barry, but I have to complain. You have changed more than just the connotation; you have totally changed the meaning. You get what you pay for. ==> If you buy something that seems to be a bargain you will eventually realize that it was worth only what you paid for it, and no more. (i.e there is no such thing as a `bargain') You pay for what you get. ==> If you get something you must eventually pay for it. (i.e. nothing is free) The notion of `bargain' has nothing to do with it. JD Brennan ...!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!brennan (USENET) Brennan@Indiana (CSNET) Brennan.Indiana@CSnet-Relay (ARPA)
dinitz@uicsl.UUCP (05/03/84)
#R:inmet:7300031:uicsl:8600047:000:205 uicsl!dinitz May 3 11:37:00 1984 The bulldozer rolled me over. The bulldozer rolled over me. This may not be a genuine example of the phenomenon you described, since it turns on (no pun intended) the transitive/intransitive distinction.
dinitz@uicsl.UUCP (05/03/84)
#R:mit-eddi:-170200:uicsl:8600048:000:209 uicsl!dinitz May 3 11:42:00 1984 What you get is that for which you pay. or the more natural sounding (to me) You get that for which you pay. These don't have the same ring to them as You get what you pay for. But life's rough sometimes.
jc@inmet.UUCP (05/05/84)
#N:inmet:7300031:000:1785 inmet!jc Apr 26 10:39:00 1984 <Put cute saying here> Hey, guys, if you want to really confuse the medieval grammarians about final prepositions, bring up a sentence like "She turned me on." The grammarians would have us rephrase this as "She turned on me." Now, I don't know about your dialect, but in mine this isn't nearly as pleasant a thought! For you non-native speakers of English out there, I should explain that in the first sentence, "to turn x on" means to get x interested or excited about something (usually sex or drugs). In the second sentence, "to turn on x" means to attack or betray x. There are several ways of analyzing these sentences. One of the simplest is to classify "turn on" in the first sentence as a complex verb consisting of "turn" + the adverbial partical "on". The fact that "on" looks like a common preposition is not very relevant. In the second sentence, "turn on" is a true idiom; it consists of the simple verb "turn" + an adverbial prepositional phrase, just like your high-school teacher explained it. This is a nice "monkey-wrench-in-the-works" example. The only way to salvage it is to dig into the syntax a bit further, and recognize that "turn x on" is not an ungrammatical rephrasing of "turn on x", but rather a new sort of linguistic beast altogether. Does anyone out there have any more examples in this class? What we want is more cases where, in classical terminology, "subject verb object preposition" is not equivalent to "subject verb preposition object". Perhaps you can bring in other transformations, such as "object 'was' participle(verb) preposition 'by' subject". There oughta be some more of these for us to fool around with. (Oops!) John M Chambers [inmet!jc] Intermetrics, Inc. 735 Concord Ave. Cambridge, MA 02138
andrew@inmet.UUCP (05/05/84)
#R:inmet:7300031:inmet:7300032:000:166
inmet!andrew Apr 26 10:56:00 1984
OK, grammarians... rephrase "You get what you pay for" without a preposition
at the end!
Andrew W. Rogers, Intermetrics ...{harpo|ihnp4|ima|esquire}!inmet!andrewrpw3@fortune.UUCP (05/05/84)
#R:mit-eddi:-170200:fortune:8100011:000:406 fortune!rpw3 May 4 22:34:00 1984 +-------------------- | That which you pay for, you get. | | -Glenn +-------------------- Oh, yeah? Always? Send me $10,000 and I'll send you a... (Ah, I must resist taking advantage of the naive... ;-} ) Never mind. Rob Warnock UUCP: {ihnp4,ucbvax!amd70,hpda,harpo,sri-unix,allegra}!fortune!rpw3 DDD: (415)595-8444 USPS: Fortune Systems Corp, 101 Twin Dolphin Drive, Redwood City, CA 94065