Re: Soaloa evolves, and a small challenge

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 18:56:23 -0700, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

>"It's the kind of game that you just want to go home, sit down
>and play right away."
>
>So the object of "play" is "game".  The object of "go" is "home",
>though, and "sit down" doesn't have an object.  Yet these are
>all conjoined VP's.  By all accounts, this sentence *should* be
>ungrammatical, but people say things like this all the time in
>English.  This type of sentence, I figure, would be problematic
>for any language.
I think it works because it is a compaction of two seperate sentences.

1. "It's the kind of game that you just want to go home", and
2. "It's the kind of game that you just want to sit down and play right away".

Which happens to fuse into the above phrase because of the shared
same-functioning phrase. It would not work if the secondary clauses where of
two incompatible types. Example, "You go to hell" and "You go and walk"
would not reduce well to "You go to hell, and (and) walk" or "You go and
walk, and to hell" or whatever. It would come out "You go and walk, and go
to hell". What do you think?

Peter Kolb.