English as a Satellite-Framed Language - Looking for Examples

Factual Questions
1

In this thread, Whack-a-Mole wrote the following sentence :

It made me smile smile because it reminded me of a topic I had considered working on when I wanted to pursue a PhD, namely verb-framing and satellite-framing.

Romance languages are verb-framed because the path of the movement is encoded in the verb (entrar, entrer, entrare) and the manner is either expressed in a complement, or not expressed at all.

Germanic languages are, broadly speaking, satellite-framed because the path of the movement is encoded in a particle and the manner in the verb (to walk in).

There’s this classic example :

La botella entró a la cueva (flotando).
The bottle floated into the cave.
(Talmy, 1985)

This may seem like a detail, but it actually has some important consequences, one being that satellite-framed languages can extend this process to verbs that are not, or not primarily verbs of movement. Such constructions are usually incredibly difficult to translate into a verb-framed language.

Over the years, I’ve come across many other examples of creative satellite-framed constructions. Here are a few (the last two would require a very long and clunky translation in French or Italian):

  1. I waltzed her across the floor.
  2. A couple of months ago we would have laughed him out of town.
  3. She screamed him away from the altar.
  4. Women who married up the social ladder, how is it going?
  5. He bear-hugged me off my feet.
  6. My husband fat-shamed me into surgery.

Can you think of other examples, preferably funny, surprising or creative ones ? I read a post here a few months ago about a Doper who ate Quebec out of something. I remember thinking that was a great example, but I cannot find it anymore.

PS, I’m too old for homeworks, and I’ll never have a PhD.

2

Teenagers famously eat their parents out of house and home.

3

He painted himself into a corner.

4
5

That was some mighty f***ing fine f***ing writing. F*** yeah!

6

Great examples, thanks. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.

In the meantime, I’ve found the post I was thinking of in this thread (bolding mine). Another perfect fit.

7

Damn, I love this board.

8

Maybe not quite what you’re looking for but this thread brings to mind “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put,” which is frequently misattributed to Winston Churchill.

9

From Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too:

Narrator: Well, Tigger, your bouncing really got you into trouble this time.

Tigger: Say, who’re you?

Narrator: I’m the narrator.

Tigger: Oh well, please, for goodness sakes, narrate me down from here!

10

In another thread I mentioned a series on Netflix called The Imperfects about people with genetically enhanced abilities. One of them can produce a high pitched shriek that will shatter glass and knock people out. Another produces pheromones that induce people to anything she tells them to please her. The former might say something like “If he gets loose I’ll banshee him” and the result is implied. The latter will be more specifically referenced with phrases like “You can pheromone him into talking”.

11

Now we’re getting into all-nouns-can-be-verbed territory.

12

Could you explain why the zoo sign would be impossible in French?

13

I thought I knew a lot about linguistics, but this is a new distinction for me. My wife is quite fluent in French, so I asked her how would you say, “They laughed him off the stage.” She thought about for a minute and finally admitted she didn’t know. I mean you could explain it in a couple sentences. Something like “Il est sortie du scène a cause du rire de l’auditoire.” But that doesn’t have the bite of the original. And pardon my French; I’m just guessing here.

14

I have always found that the prepositions in French and English are the most difficult idiomatic parts of the two languages. In English, the choice of prepositions can change the meaning of the verb, in a way that doesn’t seem to happen as much in French.

“they laughed him off the stage” is a great example, because “laughed” has a completely different meaning there than than “they laughed” and it’s the preposition that does the change.

15

I think it is just that these kinds of particle verbs and separable verbs are common in English and German but not in Romance languages, not that the sets of available prepositions in each language are completely alien.

16

Not completely different, It has an extra meaning.

  1. they laughed.
  2. this this caused him, apparently at least, to enact 3…
  3. he left to leave the stage,
17

After translation: The boat entered the cave, floating.
The boat floated into the cave.

Well, perhaps we need to look at the history of rules in languages.
What inspired Latin to have so many rules ?
They took the language without rules, and tried to make it so that it had to be used with rigid rules.
Did it succeed ? It worked under authoritarian rule… it worked in courts of law and in exchanges between politicians, and religions… As the empire grew, it became unworkable, as dialects were using different rules.

We don’t have the dialect problem any longer, we can keep English as the one lingo franca language all over the world without having breakdown in usefulness (ie needing rules, which means idiom deleted.) ?

But with the modern ability to research the meaning of such idioms, do we allow more and more idioms to be accepted ?

“The shoe factory was sabotaged.” could be hard for a dutch speaker to understand.

Australia owns its own continent. All other countries are incontinent.

18

Oh in Australia, the media is saying things like , a made up example, “The government has ditched the submarines plan because it has bad optics.”… Maybe they could just order German or Japanese optics for the Americans submarines ? But they mean, it ins’t politically accepted. The population has a different “view”…“It doesn’t pass the pub test” is another way to say the same thing.

19

No, some of them are in islands.

20

Adding these to my collection, thanks !

It could be done, there are French equivalents for all of these verbs, I think.

But it wouldn’t be done. No one would actually write such a sign. It’d be more confusingly verbose than funny. Plus syntactically, there would probably be a problem with where you’d put the negation.

I’d say Les rires de l’auditoire l’ont forcé à quitter la scène or Il a dû quitter la scène à cause des rires de l’auditoire but as you say it doesn’t have the biting conciseness of the original, and it doesn’t even sound really idiomatic in French.

Hmmmm… I’m not sure what you mean here. All languages have rules. Even when they’re not written down in a Grammar, all languages have a grammar.