Dick,

Dick Hudson wrote:
>
> Dear Joe (and Nik),
> I actually discuss OCCASIONAL (in this use) in English Word Grammar, though
> I focus on ODD, which has much the same properties. (If you want to check,
> see ODD in the index.)

Thanks. I just looked at it!


> (1)     He sometimes smokes the odd/occasional cigarette.
>
> I prefer THE  rather than A, to the extent that I claim that A is wrong -
> presumably wrongly for you.

I found this on the Internet this morning (at a singles announcement
site). The writer appears to be Canadian.

- I enjoy classic rock, cold beer, good friends. Social drinker,
  ex-smoker, but do share an occasional french cigarrette with friends
  on a Fri night ;-)


>         The main semantic effect that I discuss is the way that ODD overrides the
> definiteness of THE, but I also point out that ODD doesn't contribute to
> the noun's sense, because it can't be borrowed by identity-of-sense anaphora:
> (2)     She eats the odd orange from South Africa and he eats the one from Israel.
> ("the one" doesn't mean 'the odd orange').

Oddly (!) enough, AN OCCASIONAL X doesn't seem to work this way:

(2') ?* She smokes an occasional cigarrette from France, and he smokes
        one from Hong Kong.

I assume that this is because ONE refers to a single instance, whereas
AN OCCASIONAL X refers to iterated single instances.


>         In short it affects the referent rather than the sense, in much the same
> way as a quantifier/determiner such as EACH. What EACH does, according to
> my analysis, is to project the set-size of its complement up to its own
> parent; e.g. in (3) it projects the number of students up to the number of
> essay-writings:
> (3)     Each student wrote an essay.
> That seems to be about right for ODD and OCCASIONAL too.
>         So, as you say, not like "fast typist".

This has taken all morning and afternoon for it to sink into my rather
thick skull, but now I see it. OCCASIONAL and ODD are like EACH and
EVERY because they turn the category named by a singular count noun
into a set of more than one.

What OCASIONAL seems to do, then, is to distribute the instances of X
temporally. This is perhaps true even in:

(4) There was an occasional pedestrian painted across the top of the
    banner.

This makes sense because the visual scanning of objects has a temporal
aspect to it (note the use of ACROSS). Quite Langacker-like, actually.

Thanks,

Joe
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