Re: Soaloa evolves, and a small challenge

I wrote initially:
<<
So the object of "play" is "game"
 >>

And J. 'Mach' Wust responded:
<<
No, it is intransitively used here.
 >>

No, it's plenty transitive.  Easy to prove by just taking out all
the other clauses.

"It's the kind of game that you just want to play right away."

If you'll agree that the following sentence is similar:

"It's the kind of dessert that you just want to devour right away."

Then it should be fairly obvious that the use of "play" is
transitive.  Play *can* be used intransitively, but it isn't in the
sentence I quoted.  "Devour", of course, is famous for being
robustly transitive.  Compare:

I want to play.
*I want to devour.

So, no, "play" is certainly not intransitively used in the example
I gave, and "game" is its object (the thing that corresponds to
the gap [or trace] directly after "play").

J. Wust wrote:
<<
You may replace it with with a prepositional phrase like "to your
place", a replacement which is impossible in objects ('I see you' but
not
*'I see to you').
 >>

Interesting theory.  In practice, it doesn't work:

I shot the bear.
I shot at the bear.

J. Wust responds to my saying the sentence should be ungrammatical:
<<
It is not. The sentence is complex because of the way it is joined by a
peculiar use of "that" which is not a relative pronoun in this case.
 >>

I said that it *should* be ungrammatical, which conversationally
implicates that it *is* grammatical.

Anyway, as others have pointed out, though, this sentence only
holds together when the clauses are directly relevant.  So going
home and sitting down are prerequisites to playing a game (if
you're somewhere else and the game usually involves sitting).
The sentence becomes a lot worse if you replace with similar
constructions that aren't relevant:

Original sentence:
"It's the kind of game that you just want to go home, sit down
and play."

Modified version:
"It's the kind of game you just want to go to church, sleep for
awhile and put away."

This sentence should come across as extremely bizarre.  If you
read it, though, and accept that it's an okay sentence, it seems
like what your brain tries to do is come up with a story to
explain the use of the construction.  So, say it's a game you don't
like, and you'll do anything to get out of playing it.  So when
someone suggests playing it, you say that you have to go to
church, even though there is no sermon in progress.  So you
simply go there and take a nap until the friend that suggested
playing it has left, then you go home and put it away.

A better example (now that I've opened up my notes from
my pragmatics class) that shows the first and last of three
verbs which take the topic as the object, and an intransitive
second verb, is as follows:

"What cake did John buy, come home and devour?"

With gaps...

"What cake(i) did John(ii) buy _(i), _(ii) come home and _(ii) devour
_(i)?"

Now here's something interesting.  If you take away the
middle verb, you still get a grammatical question:

"What cake did John buy and devour?"

But if you take away the last one...

*"What cake did John buy and come home?"

For me, that last sentence is robustly ungrammatical, but I
get the sense that opinions may vary.

Anyway, this kind of constructions reminds me of a talk I saw
on a particular construction in Japanese that involved a particular
verb marker.  I have no idea where the handout was (and I don't
know Japanese), but this marker made it so that you had to be
able to construct some sort of story that connected two parts of
the sentence, and if you couldn't, the sentence came out as
semantically anomalous.  Any Japanese speakers on the list know
what I'm talking about?

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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