September 21, 2006

Dan McGrew and topic marking


Phil Jensen, who recently discovered Language Log and is working his way through it systematically (in the past week, two people have reported to me that they're doing this!), writes that he followed a link from 2005 back to "the earlier long post on prosody" -- Mark Liberman's "An internet pilgrim's guide to accentual-syllabic verse" of 7/6/04 -- and then moved on to my 10/24/05 posting on topic-marking in terms of, so that he experienced the juxtaposition of fair chunks of "Dangerous Dan McGrew" with my example of topic-marking Left Dislocation:

Office hours, they're from two to four.

Ah, he thought, here we want something like

said the T.A. we all called Sue

to follow.

And now I have a wretched earworm.

zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 21, 2006 02:56 PM