Like a lot of Mt Isa old-timers, he'll yarn to visitors, happily pulling their legs a little, becoming just a little impatient [with] complaints about modern living in the outback. (BofE: journalism)
Ms Thomson is already making plans for next year's eisteddfod: 'It has proved so popular we must limit the number of acts but all children will take part.' It's
a worthy cause but is Ms Thomson pulling our leg by saying the eisteddfod is part of the Excellence In Education In the Outback? (BofE: journalism)
While OHPC demonstrates some tendencies concerning inflectability, it is too small to be conclusive and a much larger corpus is needed. There seems to be genuine insecurity amongst speakers concerning pluralizations--the FEIs are comparatively infrequent, plural subjects are not that common, and the rules are not formalized.
A partial solution is suggested by the occasional use of an inserted plural marker. Collective is used as a grammatical device in metaphorical FEIs with plural subjects or referents and indeterminate rules for pluralization. Corporate is also used in this way, although in the examples cited below, this insertion is influenced by the management or business contexts. In all cases, the action denoted by the FEI is a mass experience or joint action, rather than affecting people individually:
But advertisers have since mostly seen that they have shot themselves and viewers in their collective feet . (OHPC: journalism)
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The Curtain falls. The audience rises to its collective feet with cries of 'Bravo'. The critics predict a huge sell-out monster. (OHPC:
journalism) Banks, building societies and other high street lenders look set to put a collective hand in their pockets to help people in debt. (OHPC: journalism)
Every time we get to the end, no one can say anything for a few minutes. There's a collective lump in the throat --even when you're rushing through a rehearsal, working desperately hard.
There's something that just hits you so hard. It just gets you right in the tripes. (OHPC: journalism) The Soviet embassy already has to grit its collective teeth and accept the burden of its formal address: Andrei Sakharov Plaza, Washington DC. (OHPC: journalism)
Well, chap, our buns could be in a collective sling, if you know what I mean. (OHPC: fiction) Tobacco was carrying health warnings in the West and it seemed prudent not to put all your corporate eggs into one basket . (OHPC: journalism)
The auction [of TV company franchises], when it comes next year, is sudden death for the losers; it is qualitatively different from the old review of the franchises where, provided the corporate nose had been kept reasonably clean, a renewal was virtually certain. (OHPC: journalism)
In fact, as pocket in the third example shows, the problem of pluralization is not entirely resolved.
5.4.1 A Note on Tense and Mood
I did not routinely record in the database the tenses in which FEIs occurred in OHPC: there was too little evidence, and genre influences choice. Similarly, I did not record mood choices of interrogative and imperative, except where they were fossilized and near-mandatory, nor the clause types in which FEIs occurred in OHPC (this could be significant since, although conventions such as speech formulae are typically fossilized in tense and person, they may inflect normally when reported). However, I monitored the distribution of proverbs in main and subordinate clauses in the separate study of proverbs which I undertook with Pierre Arnaud. I found that 20% of proverb tokens in OHPC occurred in subordinate clauses, typically report clauses. Most notably, 15 of the 18 tokens of enough is enough occurred in report clauses. In this way, the selection of the proverb represents a further level of distancing or interpretation on the part of the speaker/writer, reporting and sheltering behind received wisdom (see Chapter 9):
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Mr Brittain added: 'How long heads are prepared to keep going is debatable. There comes a point when we have to say enough is enough. (OHPC: journalism)
Dudgeon, who throughout his professional life stressed that prevention is better than cure, had the highly original idea that preliminary trials should be undertaken in closed religious communities. (OHPC: journalism)
You have to accept the notion that two heads are better than one. (OHPC: transcribed discussion)
Other choices such as passives and negatives are discussed in Section 5.6.
5.5 REGULAR SLOTS IN FEIs
In 48% of all database FEIs, there are slots to be filled according to context. Such slots include the subjects and direct or indirect objects of predicate FEIs; prepositional objects; possessives; reflexive pronouns; and locatives. More than half of FEIs with fillable slots have two or more slots:
X catches Y red-handed X faces the music
X feels the pinch X lines X's pockets X takes Y for a ride X takes a shine to Y X ties Xself in knots
X/SOMETHING gets up Y's nose at X's pleasure/at the pleasure of X in X's heart of hearts
SOMETHING flies in the face of SOMETHING SOMETHING sets X's teeth on edge
Nearly 10% of all database FEIs have 2 different human participants. Only 4 have 3, and in the first 2, Y and Z can be realized as them, their, or a plural nominal group:
X drives a wedge between Y and Z X knocks Y and Z's heads together X leaves Y to Z's tender mercies
X robs Y to pay Z (variation of X robs Peter to pay Paul)
While SOMETHING is used as a convenient proform in the database to denote abstracts and inanimates, there are frequently semantic constraints on its realization:
SOMETHING goes to seed (literal use; SOMETHING = plant) SOMETHING springs a leak (SOMETHING = boat or container)
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