Date: Sun, 29 Jun 1997 09:37:48 -0400 From: "Dennis R. Preston" Subject: Re: galore Larry, I'm not sure what level of variation you are looking for, but I have an odd distinction between having things 'up the wazoo' (with considerable phonetic variation, e.g., 'kazoo,' 'gazoo,' but only velars I note) when I am really fed up with whatever it is. Such things may be mass or even abstract. (I've had it with semantics; I've got semantics up the wazoo!) But 'out the wazoo' is a different matter; there I seem to have only an abundance (and it need not be annoying, but must be concrete and count). (The weather's been so nice this year that we've got flowers out the wazoo. *I like phonetics. I've got it out the wazoo.) The source of the negative sense of 'up' seems obvious, but I wonder if my contrast in both sense and the kind of NP which can be referred to is matched by others. DInIs >This is a response to a recent Linguist posting from Jules, which follows. (I >assume this is a fit topic for the list.) > > >>I just read, belatedly, Alan Harris's communication re >>punctuation. What struck me was not the inappropriate "'", but the >>word 'galore'. What the heck is that? Is it an obligatorily >>post-posed adjective? Is it unique in English? It can't be a matter >>of idiomatic phrases, since it seems to me it can be added to noun >>plural or mass noun: Come out to our ranch, we've got horses galore, >>cattle galore, sheep galore, etc. >Not to mention that notoriously yclept girlfriend/moll of James Bond a few >decades back... >I assume (and Webster's corroborates) that 'galore' is indeed a postposed >adjective, and it's not unique in this status. 'aplenty', though it can also >be an adverb, occurs in the same adjectival frames as 'galore', with the same >quantificational flavor (sheep/horses/cattle aplenty), and at least for me >prepositional phrases like 'up the wazoo' (there are others, I'm sure) are >in the same ballpark. Any other intuitions, dialect variants, etc. out there? > >--Larry Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Languages Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]pilot.msu.edu Office: (517)432-1235 Fax: (517)432-2736