{"id":127,"date":"2008-07-16T04:31:48","date_gmt":"2008-07-15T20:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/16\/topic-fronting-with-i-know-from\/"},"modified":"2008-07-16T06:04:32","modified_gmt":"2008-07-15T22:04:32","slug":"topic-fronting-with-i-know-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/16\/topic-fronting-with-i-know-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Topic-fronting with &#8220;I know from&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reading Barbara&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tigersandstrawberries.com\/2008\/07\/14\/how-local-can-you-realistically-go\/\">lovely discussion<\/a> about &#8220;how local to go&#8221;, I was blindsided by this amazing sentence:<\/p>\n<p><i>Cornmeal, we know from, but millet &mdash; to most Appalachians, that stuff is birdseed.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;we know from&#8221; construction is fairly familiar to me from informal speech and writing. It&#8217;s a favorite of <a href=\"http:\/\/tomatonation.com\/\">Sars<\/a>. A few examples from her:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The man&#8217;s baseball childhood was basically the 12 Stations of Richie Ashburn; Philly fans know from having to wait.\n<li>I have spent time in New Jersey DMVs, so I know from annoying&#8230;\n<li>I don&#8217;t know from ESL grammar&#8230;\n<li>Moreover, Giuliani knows from art criticism like I know from sub-nuclear physics. [AG note: awesome]\n<li>Say what you want about the guy off the field, dude knows from pitching.\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been known to use it myself, although mostly self-consciously, to present a jokingly exaggerated portrait of my knowledge about some area. There are no uses of it in my blogging at all, so I can only suppose that I might say something like &#8220;I&#8217;m a linguist, so I know from dialects!&#8221; It&#8217;s a hard construction to search for on Google, because &#8220;know from X&#8221; is also the first part the standard structure &#8220;know from X that Y&#8221;, which is why I turned to Tomato Nation for examples.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t really want to get into discussing the &#8220;properness&#8221; of this structure (some people hate it) or its origin. What really struck me about Barbara&#8217;s sentence, though, was the effect of combination with topic-fronting: Instead of saying &#8220;We know from X&#8221; (X = cornmeal), she writes &#8220;X, we know from&#8221;. This is just standard <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Topic-comment\">topic-fronting<\/a>, which is a common discourse pattern.<\/p>\n<p>But the combination of the two yields a sentence unusual enough to catch my eye, unusual enough that several people I sent it to said it seemed confusing to them, especially on first reading. Quite an interesting result.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.squarefree.com\/\">Jesse<\/a> points out in the comments that a more  sophisticated Google search can find some examples, such as:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/gadgets\/portable-media\/ps-your-ipod-doesnt-know-from-romance-150067.php\">PS: Your iPod doesn&#8217;t know from romance<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.blog.newsweek.com\/blogs\/thegaggle\/archive\/2007\/07\/25\/barbecue-i-know-from-barbecue-my-dear-iowa-neighbors-heck-mitt-romney-probably-can-t-even-spell-barbecue.aspx\">Barbecue? I know from barbecue&#8230;<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.joeydevilla.com\/2002\/04\/26\/4601\/\">Since Five I Know From Funny<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reading Barbara&#8217;s lovely discussion about &#8220;how local to go&#8221;, I was blindsided by this amazing sentence: Cornmeal, we know from, but millet &mdash; to most Appalachians, that stuff is birdseed. The &#8220;we know from&#8221; construction is fairly familiar to me from informal speech and writing. It&#8217;s a favorite of Sars. A few examples from her: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}