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polymathwannabe comments on Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition - Less Wrong Discussion
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The fact that people don't reflect about the sense in which they use a preposition doesn't mean that they can't learn to use a specific preposition for a specific purpose. In reality people can say "on Monday" while saying "in July" and "at night" without getting confused.
If you have the sentence "Galileo saw a man with a telescope" people do mentally distinguish two cases of with that could be meant. There nothing natural about all the meanings that "with" has in English being bundled together via the same word. Other languages bundle things together in different ways.
There's a very old and very silly debate in Spanish because some people refuse to acknowledge that "a glass of water" means what it intends to mean, instead of the ridiculously literal "a glass made of water", so they switch to the awkward "a glass with water", which in real life can mean a glass on a tray with a jar of water next to it.
So the result is that snobbish people insist on saying "a glass with water," and ordinary people plus meta-snobbish people keep saying "a glass of water", and both sides hate each other passionately.
So is it, basically, a status signal by now?
Yes, but in a complicated way. "A glass with water" is hypercorrection, which gives the speaker the opposite status from the one he believes he's displaying.
In that case it seems that a short preposition for "containing" is missing.
Language isn't easy. If you just know the rules, it's hard to know that a teacup might not contain tea while a cup of tea does. It get's even more confusing because the same object that's a teacup when it's intended to store tea liquids suddenly becomes a bowl when it's intended to contain soup.
Nope, it does not. Teacups have handles and bowls don't.
It might very well be true that there are English dialects where teacup means a cup with a handle but that's not general usage. Wikipedia start by it's description of teacups by saying: "A teacup is a cup, with or without a handle".
I'm in the process of reading Anna Wierzbicka's Imprisoned in English where she makes the claim that the intent of usage is what distinguishes a cup from a bowl.
So, during the Japanese tea ceremony do they drink the tea out of teacups? I don't think so.
As to Wikipedia, it's funny how they provide two images, one with a handle and one without. The one with a handle is called a "teacup". The one without a handle is called a "tea bowl" :-P
I am not sure why should I grant any authority to Anna Wierzbicka's opinion.
By the way, Wiktionary defines a teacup as "A small cup, with a handle, used for drinking tea".
The main point is that English is quite diverse. Not every language user uses it the same way. The British used to put a lot of value into drinking tea. The Americans generally don't but these days physicalism is quite prominent so it's reasonable when the meaning changes. What used to be about the purpose of the item became a word about whehter or it has a handle.
Are you providing examples for this paper? X-)
No, I reference a well-defined meaning. Physicalism does happen to be about not seeing the purpose of an object as part of its identity. It does happen to be a strong cultural force.
Or... do they?
I don't believe I ever heard the expression "handled bowl" before. It sounds... clumsy.
I drink tea. Sometimes I drink it out of teacups, sometimes I drink it out of tea bowls. The difference between them is quite clear in my mind. Even if I decide to become (more) silly and start putting soup in them, it will not change the teacups into bowls.
Strangely, the same people who object to "a glass of water" have no problem with "a bottle of soda," "a pot of potatoes" or "a truck of pigs".
But is a bottle of soda still a bottle of soda if it's empty?
(I think it would also be nice, if you add the spanish translation for those terms you are speaking about)
Bottle of soda = botella de gaseosa
An empty bottle of soda would still be called a bottle of soda, which makes me suspect that the actual meaning is closer to "bottle for soda."
Glass of water = vaso de agua
Pot of potatoes = olla de papas
Truck of pigs = camión de cerdos
Some defenders of the "glass of water" team argue that the peculiarity that makes the phrase valid is not the preposition, but the noun vaso (glass), which must be understood as a unit of measure, just like "spoonful of sugar." But I don't agree that that's the reason why "glass of water" is the right form. Nobody thinks a "truck" is a unit of measure (though some regional forms of Spanish do have a word for truckload, "camionado").