snews 2009
Posted: April 20th, 2009 | Author: emma | Filed under: misc | 1 Comment »snews, or the southern new england workshop in semantics, is being hosted by umass amherst this saturday. i’ll be there with bells and whistles and also a talk about the work i’ve been doing for my major paper.
abstract for my talk here
handout coming soon.
Is the post-nominal intensifying “self” in (1) the same “self” as in (2)-(3)?
(1) The president himself must sign this bill.
(2) The president must himself sign this bill.
(3) The president must sign this bill himself.
(3) has an irrelevant “by himself, without help” reading, but also the “he has to be the one to do it” reading that’s the only reading of (1).
If (2)-(3) are the same, it’s interesting that your (7) sounds fine, I think even without context, with the “himself” moved:
(7′) Every department chair must
himself come up with the recipe used.
(And perhaps with “himself” at the end, though with “come up with” the “without any help” reading is too prominent for me to be sure.) Note the wide variety of Google hits for “every * must himself”:
* Not, of course, that every man must himself have travelled over every “Formation,” before he can understand Geology.
* I believe that every Jew must himself become the living embodiment of the faith he holds…
* Were this the case there could be no vicarious atonement, and every sinner must himself die.
(Asterisks indicate bullet points, not ungrammaticality.) Again, I find all of these fairly natural.