best year ever
I'm the 11,405th vote in the BBC poll: Is the Health Service having its best year ever? Eighty eight percent of respondents have voted no, which is hardly surprising: obviously nobody's taking Patricia Hewitt seriously.
You've got to wonder what's the point of extravagant claims like these. If the government were just arguing that things aren't as bad as we think, that would be more convincing than announcements like "the best year ever" which are blatantly counterfactual.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to convince you that I do do work sometimes, I'm trying to decide what to make of this thing that an interviewer said on the radio yesterday evening. Speaking to her interviewee about the Health Secretary she said, "(Health service workers) don't feel as optimistic as you sound and as she does." I feel there's something unexpected in that use of "does" right at the end - even though, being but a humble phonologist, I can't quite put my finger on the syntactic reason why. It could be because the first comparison is between "don't feel as optimistic as you [do] sound," and both the verbs are lexical verbs, then the second is between "don't feel as optimistic as she does [feel]," where the first verb is lexical and the other is an auxiliary (or dummy?) verb. Never mind - it makes perfect sense, and in my linguistic world, meaning gets priority over syntax, so, please, don't let it worry you too much.
You've got to wonder what's the point of extravagant claims like these. If the government were just arguing that things aren't as bad as we think, that would be more convincing than announcements like "the best year ever" which are blatantly counterfactual.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to convince you that I do do work sometimes, I'm trying to decide what to make of this thing that an interviewer said on the radio yesterday evening. Speaking to her interviewee about the Health Secretary she said, "(Health service workers) don't feel as optimistic as you sound and as she does." I feel there's something unexpected in that use of "does" right at the end - even though, being but a humble phonologist, I can't quite put my finger on the syntactic reason why. It could be because the first comparison is between "don't feel as optimistic as you [do] sound," and both the verbs are lexical verbs, then the second is between "don't feel as optimistic as she does [feel]," where the first verb is lexical and the other is an auxiliary (or dummy?) verb. Never mind - it makes perfect sense, and in my linguistic world, meaning gets priority over syntax, so, please, don't let it worry you too much.
posted by cath at
11:04 am
3 Comments:
Catherine, how did you manage to make something perfectly simple sound so confusing?! Mmm?? :) I didn't see anything complicated about that sentence until you started explaining it.
By
Anonymous, at 8:00 pm
such a comment is undeserving of a response.
Soooo, how's the accountability situation coming along these days?
By
cath, at 10:36 am
Hah! Erm, well, I've not done too too badly this morning. But things could be much better. There's an obvious solution Catherine... ;)
By
Anonymous, at 1:21 pm
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