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[Critical Thinking Practice; Basic]

Make sure you read the discussion of blow up in section 3.2 of chapter 1 before attempting this question. Consider the phrase blow off. In colloquial American English, this sequence has two² usages with quite different meanings.

1 The leaves blew off the sidewalk.

2 I blew off doing my homework.

In (a) blow means “(to move) in a burst of air”. The off is actually a preposition that is tied to the noun phrase the sidewalk. The other meaning, in (b), is the colloquial expression blow off meaning “didn’t do”, “ignored responsibilities”, or “didn’t show up” in some circumstances. Phrases like blow off or blow up often allow two orders of the object and the particle (off or up): I blew up the building and I blew the building up.

Now consider the following sentences:

c) Sean blew me off.

d) Sean blew off me.

Question 1: What meaning(s) does sentence (c) have? Are they different from sentence (d)? Is sentence (d) even grammatical in your dialect?

Question 2: Now you get to use Google to investigate the frequency of phrases like (c–d) to see if their relative frequencies correspond to the availability of meanings. We’re going to use a tool called ngrams produced by Google. Ngrams represent the frequency of strings in Google’s collection of published books. The numbers are going to be very small, but we can get a picture of the distribution of these constructions.

1 Go to http://books.google.com/ngrams

2 In the search box type the following terms, one by one.blow me offblow off me

3 Note down the percentage of hits for each of these in the year 2000.

Question 3: Is there a correspondence between the numbers you got above and your judgments of grammaticality and meaning?

Question 4: Now just do a regular search for “blow off me” (be sure to include the quotation marks“ “to insure that google searches for the words in exactly that order.) Do any of the results have the “didn’t bother to show up” meaning? What does this tell you about the structure of sentence (d)?