Subject: sum : risk

content - length : 15606 i was surprised to receive so many replies on my comments about " risk " . so far they include : alison huettner bart mathias john r . lee scott delancey deborah milam berkley tim beasley eric pederson claudia brugman martha o'kennon andrew carstairs - mccarthy sandi michele de oliveira ( trying to get sick = about to get sick ) debra r west balsa stipcevic i decided to post a summary for several reasons : 1 ) my comments made some respondents sufficiently insecure to wonder what other respondents thought . 2 ) i did n't want anyone to get the idea that my comments might represent an authoritative or majority opinion . 3 ) although i usually try to respond individually to everyone , i get tired thinking of different ways to say the same thing . overwhelmingly , but not unanimously , the respondents disagreed with me . alison huettner represents the majority response : " funny , i have the opposite take on " risk " - - to me " he risked losing the game " sounds fine and " he risked winning the game " takes a little more processing . " unusual was agreement , such as represented by tim beasley " both sound good to me . the first paraphrases " he ran / stood the risk of losing the game " , " he placed himself in risk of losing the game . " the second , " he placed in jeopardy . at risk . his winning of the game . " as implied above , both sides of the atlantic want to disown me , e . g . , from bart mathias of california : " no thoughts , but i thought i 'd report that i expected to see a . uk or . au or something in your address when i checked it after reading your message . i for one ( born and raised in california ) find " risk winning , " at least at the moment , causes a double-take reaction . to me it is equivalent to " be in / put oneself in danger of . " however , from john r . lee at an edinburgh address : " this is interesting . i was very surprised to see " he risked winning the game " ! perhaps as a british english speaker ( ? ) , to risk losing the game seems a much more natural concept . " larger context makes me think john considers himself , not me , to be the british speaker . in any case , andrew carstairs - mccarthy of new zealand made a similar comment . back on the american side , scott delancey agrees with the majority and adds some interesting grammatical comments : " this seems * really * strange to me . my reactions are exactly the opposite of yours . a clausal complement of _ risk _ is * always * a negative and undesirable result . i can't even interpret _ he risked winning the game _ , except in some strained context in which winning would n't be a good thing . " _ risk _ can have a positive np complement - - _ he risked his fortune _ is perfectly ok - - but not a clausal one , i . e . this could be expanded to _ he risked losing his fortune _ , but ? ? _ he risked winning a fortune _ is impossible for me . " eric pederson and claudia brugman informed me that chuck fillmore has written a paper on " risk " . claudia writes : " [ by ] sue atkins and charles fillmore which i do n't know whether they ' ve published ( or indeed finished ) yet , but they talk about these two meanings of the word in terms of the selection as complements of different aspects of the conceptual / semantic frame : one is where the desired outcome is selected , the other is where the " collateral " is selected . " i have n't seen the paper yet , but it was comforting to the extent that it seems to take cognizance of my impression . however , i suspect that the " collateral " means a simple np expressing the desirable object , as scott allows , and not a clausal complement . thus some replies suggested that " he risked his life " would have to be expanded into " he risked * losing * his life " . i have to admit that that sounds better to me than " he risked * keeping * ( ? ) his life " . nevertheless , my theory is that in my rush to learn english i made the following logical leap . " to risk your life " is to risk something good , so you should risk " winning t he game " , not " losing the game " . risking fines , death , imprisonment and cancer were later experiences for me . i ' m quite sure " risking life " was the first ex pression i heard . by the way , i ' m not at all sure that i differ from others on our favorite gallicism of " running the risk of / that [ something bad happening / will happen . " , so that 's a different expression . i kinda doubt that genuine dialect differences are respo nsible for differences in " risk " - - only idiosyncratic differences in generalisations , some of which survive contradictory data learned later - - an interesting point that has been made before in language acquisition theory . among the interesting comments i received which suggest to me that relatively discrete semantic splits may result from such processes , and even become genuine dialect features is sandi michele de oliveira 's observation that in south texas the expression " trying to get sick " can be used for " about to get sick " . i wonder if " trying to rain " could mean " threatening to rain " in such dialects . of possibly different origin is the ambivalent serbo - croatian verb " sumnjati " ( = " to doubt " or " to suspect " ) . balsa stipcevic indicated that : " sumnjam da je on to uradio . " can have two meanings : 1 ) " i suspect that he did it . " 2 ) " i doubt that he did it . " here i suppose that the verb might have started off neutral to the belief status of its sentential complement , but it remains interesting that there is such a glaring pragmatic ambiguity in what a speaker might be implying . maybe english " wonder " is similar . " i wonder if he did it " . if he says he did , then the sentence would seem to suggest that i doubt it , but if he says he did n't , it would seem to mean that i doubt that . i ' m not gonna torture myself trying to figure out whether the same context - ualisation differences work for " i wonder if he didn ' t do it " , but maybe someone / body else wants to give it a shot . i wrote back to balsa that i hoped his comment on this verb is more generally agreed upon by serbo - croatian speakers than my comment on " risk " . - - benji
