[go: up one dir, main page]
Wiktionary

Wiktionary:Tea room: difference between revisions

Browse history interactively
← Go to previous editGo to next edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
→‎spoken for: redirect to spoken and define there.
Uncle G (talk | contribs)
6,175 edits
Some quotations.
Line 1,376:
:I think so, but I can't speak for <s>what</s> others. Has anyone used the sense of [[speak for]] that is the origin of [[spoken for]] [in the last centtury]? - ?"I '''spoke for''' my share of reward." The usage example seems at least archaic. If it is archaic, I would think we should join the several OneLook lemmings that have it as an adjective. There is also the quaint sense of ''spoken for'' meaning "engaged to be married, or nearly so" (or something.
:I question whether all (any?) the senses of [[speak for]] are, first, phrasal verbs and, second, meet CFI. Some lemmings have some of the senses, but, of course, not MWOnline. Tellingly, ''McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Idioms and Phrasal Verbs'', not bashful about claiming (*speaking for) verb-particle combinations as phrasal verbs only has the adjective sense. [[User: DCDuring |DCDuring]] <small >[[User talk: DCDuring|TALK]]</small > 20:36, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
:*Also, the translation target rationale is not very compelling for phrasal verbs as there are hardly any phrasal verb entries that have translations. [[User: DCDuring |DCDuring]] <small >[[User talk: DCDuring|TALK]]</small > 20:38, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
::**I'm certainly not feeling the current implicit claim that when a person is spoken for, it's an adjective, but when seats are spoken for, it's a past participle. Either they're both adjectives, or they're both past participles, or they're both both. —[[User:Angr|'''An''']][[User talk:Angr|''gr'']] 22:12, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
:::***I think the rationale for including the adjective (absent evidence of gradability) would be that the verb {{term|speak}} only has the meaning "claim" in archaic current usage. Is there such a concept in etymology as a ''stranding'' of a sense of an inflected form? [[User: DCDuring |DCDuring]] <small >[[User talk: DCDuring|TALK]]</small > 22:20, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
::::**** If we don't like ===Adjective===, we can instead say that this sense of {{term||speak for|lang=en}} is now restricted to the passive voice. {{user|Brett}} wrote [http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2011/08/most-passive-verbs-in-english.html here] about 23 verbs that occur more commonly in the passive voice than in the active, and similar sorts of restrictions are seen with various other verbs (for example, "I've never been to China" uses a sense of {{term|be|lang=en}} that's restricted to the perfect aspect), so it's not completely farfetched. —[[User: Ruakh |Ruakh]]<sub ><small ><i >[[User talk: Ruakh |TALK]]</i ></small ></sub > 03:42, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
:::::*****That's how MWOnline presents it. I wish we had the ability to redirect users who search for "spoken for" to a specific sense of a polysemic term like {{term|speak}}. As we lack that ability, why don't we direct users to ''spoken'' and place our definition there. I haven't found an instance at google books of "[speak] for a seat" and only one of a "seat [being] spoken for", so our usage example seems to be a stretch. [[User: DCDuring |DCDuring]] <small >[[User talk: DCDuring|TALK]]</small > 04:59, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
******&nbsp;
******* {{quote-book|title=International Rivalry in the Pacific Islands, 1800&ndash;1875|pages=76|author=Jean Ingram Brookes|publisher=University of California Press|year=1941|passage=&#91;&hellip;&#93; Australia and New Zealand, the only suitable places, were already '''spoken for''' by Great Britain.}}
******* "Most of the good colonial territories were already '''spoken for'''; &#91;&hellip;&#93;" &mdash; ISBN 9780847684694 p. 106
******* "The school was very partial to legacies and 30 of the places were already '''spoken for'''." &mdash; ISBN 9780470604540 p. 219
******* "We were informed that there were fifty-four seats onboard the aircraft for this mission, but approximately thirty of the seats were already '''spoken for'''." &mdash; ISBN 9781440125621 p. 515
****** [[User:Uncle G|Uncle G]] ([[User talk:Uncle G|talk]]) 14:55, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Add topic
Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Tea_room"