"some many"?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Jun 12 02:44:49 UTC 2009

At 10:23 PM -0400 6/11/09, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 6/11/2009 09:09 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>I'm not sure it's all that unlikely on syntactic grounds.  "Some
>>three", "Some five or six", etc. occur, so why not "some many"?
>>"Some several" also occurs widely, although I'd never say it, and
>>there's no likely reanalysis in that case.
>"Some several" would have occurred in the 18th century, meaning "some
>individual, distinguishable" items.

That's essentially what I had in mind in the remainder of my message
not quoted above, viz.

'perhaps here (as with "some three", "some several"), the "some"
functions as a specificity marker for the relevant
speakers--"Three/Several/Many X that I have in mind..."'

[some single quotes for James Harbeck, but actually because I used
double ones in the original]

The speaker can distinguish and identify the items in question even
if she doesn't assume the hearer can.  I'm still not sure that's what
going on with "some many", though.


The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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