Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!uunet!world!jcf
From: jcf@world.std.com (Joseph C Fineman)
Subject: Re: Can a nonlinguistic entity be part of a sentence?
Message-ID: <D5I29L.MJ4@world.std.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
References: <D53E9u.CuL@world.std.com> <3jqp30$mv7@newsbf02.news.aol.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 1995 20:58:33 GMT
Lines: 19

paulabell@aol.com (PaulaBell) writes:

>Pls define pregnant.

Sorry for the delay; I missed this query until Joe Keane seconded it.

The OED (s.v. pregnant 4.b) says:  _Pregnant construction_, in _Gram._
or _Rhet._, a construction in which more is implied than the words
express.  W.3 doesn't have it, but I've seen it more than once, and
probably heard it in class in the '50s.  The standard example is
saying that so-and-so "drinks", where the omission of an object is not
meant to convey complete generality, but a specificity to be supplied
by the listener.  Evidently, it may be hard to draw the line between a
pregnant construction and a special sense of the word, but that is a
general difficulty plaguing the notion of metaphor.
-- 
        Joe Fineman             jcf@world.std.com
        239 Clinton Road        (617) 731-9190
        Brookline, MA 02146
