Looking through Keith's handout, I see that he has culled a lot of examples,
and points out that these examples are all attributive (cannot be
predicative). Here are some more:

his eyes widened and an *astonished* piece of toast fell from his hand
he was touched by the *fickle* finger of fate
Breake off betimes; And euery man hence, to his *idle* bed     [metaphor or
transferred epithet?}
He wandered through the *melancholy* fields

KB then goes on to discuss the argument structure of these adjectives,
identifying the attributive structure as involving "reverse unification" (A
depends on N, ref or N is argument of sense of A", comparing this structure
with the argument structure of related adverbs.

He embeds the discussion terms of what Nouns denote and what aspects of
their denotationss adjectives modify. Adjectives describe things like

(1) properties of instances of nouns: "a chemistry teacher"
(2) manner of event embedded in deverbal nouns: "a terrible teacher" (the
teaching is terrible)
(3) characteristics of category N instantiates: "a wonderful tree" (I can't
see what he's going on about -- the N needs to be interpreted generically,
no?)
(4) pragmatic inference is needed: "a useful/difficult/impossible tree"
(need to work out why -- some inferred function)

He then concludes that transferred epithets are a kind of mismatch
phenomena, with A syntactically dependent on the N, but not semantically
modifying it. Pragmatics is the answer, KB says.

Cheers,
Nik.



----- Original Message -----
From: Nik Gisborne <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 3:08 PM
Subject: Re: [WG] The occasional-lexical construction


> These things are called "transferred epithets" and Keith Brown is
interested
> in them. I've got a handout from a talk he gave on these things (I might
> remember Pustejovsky cropping up, but this was a bazillion years ago) and
> when I've found it, I'll see if there's anything worth passing on. Other
exx
> include
>
> "He smoked a sad cigarette"
>
> where it's obviously the smoking that is sad, not the ciggie.
>
> Nik.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Joseph Hilferty <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 2:53 PM
> Subject: [WG] The occasional-lexical construction
>
>
> > I've been thinking about the following use of "occasional":
> >
> > (1) She dated an occasional sailor.
> >
> > I interpret this to mean: 'She dated sailors from time to time.'
> > This seems to be different from, say:
> >
> > (2) Fast typist.
> >
> > "Typist" is a deverbal nominal, so it's not so strange that it
> > can be modified by an adjective such as "fast":
> >
> > fast typist = a person who types fast
> >
> > But this is not what's happening in (1), I think. That is, "She
> > dated an occasional sailor" does not seem to mean 'She dated a
> > person who sailed occasionally."
> >
> > Any ideas on how to handle this use of occasional?
> >
> > Joe
> > __________________________________________________________
> > Home page: http://lingua.fil.ub.es/~hilferty/homepage.html