adam did write:
[...]
Post by adamBut,
It gave me an idea.
Any mirror sentences with more than 4 words?
Actually more than 5, cos 5 is easy.
It would be, wouldn't it?
Cos you just need to stick a single word in the middle of the ones we
already have.
Getting more than five words is incredibly tricky because the basic way
all the examples so far have worked is by playing on the fact that they
have reverse polarity tags stuck on the end. RPol tags are used as
"neutral" question tags to provoke confirmation of the idea being expressed.
(Notice how a constant polarity tag [where the second 'part' is not the
negative of the first] seeks to challenge the idea being expressed -- see
Alex Warren's first reply in this thread for an example of a CPol tag in
action... or in Acton!)
To get a RPol tag in English, usually four steps are necessary:
1. Turn the sentence into a question that can be answered with "Yes" or
"No".
Example:
Declarative: Fred has just eaten a pizza. ==>
Yes-no question: Has Fred just eaten a pizza?
2. Switch the polarity.
Example:
Has Fred just eaten a pizza? ==>
Hasn't Fred just eaten a pizza?
3. Delete everything except the subject and the auxiliary.
Example:
Hasn't Fred?
4. If necessary, replace the subject noun-phrase with its proform.
Example:
Hasn't he?
Add this tag to the original sentence, and...
"Fred has just eaten a pizza, hasn't he?"
Step 1 is okay for your Mirror Sentence condition, since the act of
making an interrogative from a declarative involves (in effect) reversing
the positions of subject and verb ("I would" ==> "Would I?").
Step 2 is also okay for your Mirror Sentence condition because it reverses
the polarity, thus creating your "except that it is the opposite" feature
("I would, would I?" ==> "I would, wouldn't I?")
However step 3 just messes everything up if you go beyond the simple
Subject+AuxiliaryVerb format, because you have to delete everything else
to make the tag but still keep all that stuff for the 'declarative' part
at the beginning.
It works for "I would" and "I can" and "You are" etc because these already
have anything past the Subject and Auxiliary Verb deleted, so when it
comes to step 3 there's no change to see.
And it works for "It would be, wouldn't it?" because "wouldn't it?" is the
result of the four steps described above applied to "It would be". Equally,
any three word sentence in which the first word is a pronoun and the
second word is an auxiliary will work, because the third word (the lexical
word, the 'description' of the action you're talking about) stays in the
middle and doesn't require a copy of itself anywhere else to make the whole
thing palindromic.
But that's not to say that thinking up a 6+ word example is 100%
impossible... there are enough idiomatic phrases in English to push the
boundaries of every 'rule' and generalization.
--
BdeV