Annals of collocation
Any number of people have remarked on the tendency of representatives
of the U.S. government (GWB especially) and supporters of the
government's current policies to refer to timetables for leaving Iraq
as
artificial timetables or
arbitrary timetables, collocations
that are presumably to be understood as involving
appositive
rather than intersective modification. That is, those who use
these expressions are conveying that they believe that such timetables
can be characterized in general as "artificial" or "arbitrary", and
they are are reminding us, again and again, of this claim.
Elsewhere on the collocation front, I've been noticing how often
vibrant democracy occurs in
print. I got ca. 111,000 raw Google webhits on the expression
this morning, referring to countries that are claimed (depending on who
you read) to have, to not have, or to be working towards a form of
government that is not only a democracy, but a vibrant one. This
is intersective modification.
Just in the first 50 hits, I found 16 different countries referred to:
India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Japan,
Latvia, Mexico, Mongolia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sri
Lanka, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, U.S.
(plus Africa as a whole and the UAW).
Now, about the contribution of
vibrant.
It clearly means something beyond just the minimal trappings of
democracy (some voting): broad access to the vote, honest elections,
perhaps the promotion of social equality and the protection of
individual rights.
Vibrant
would not have been my choice of adjective to convey this, though it is
vivid. I'd guess it comes from a single source that's been quoted
again and again. But I don't have the resources to search through
media databases for the original, though I suspect that some helpful
colleague will turn it up soon.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 5, 2007 07:48 PM