Re: USAGE: Survey

On Wed, 6 Jul 2005 12:26:16 -0500, Thomas Wier <trwier@...> wrote:

>Okay, I know I'm not supposed to do this, but need some
>data.
No worries -- getting data isn't always easy. I mean, you can't go up to
random people and say "Is this sentence grammatical?"

Actually, I should try that.

>I was attending Richie Kayne's class today at the LSA
>institute on comparative syntax.  A question arose as to
>whether in English there are any present participles that
>are irregular.  I mentioned the verb "to lightning", which
>in my dialect can only have the participle "lightning",
>not "lightninging".
Dare I say haplogy?

In my 'lect, haplology only takes place historically, not continuously. So
if a word is a noun, becomes a verb, and takes verbal morphology, you can't
haplologize from that; you have to keep the verbalized noun entirely
regular. So it'd be "lightninging" -- and a bit childish, because there's
an alternate construction using the noun-affiliation expletive "there".

>So which is better:
>
>  (1)  It was lightning out last night.  OR
>  (2)  It was lightninging out last night.
>
>In my dialect, I can only get (1).
But in your dialect, "lightning" is an ordinary, irregular verb. In mine,
it's an explicitly verbalized nominal.

>(Kayne has this rather controversial theory that there are in
>fact only a very limited number of verbs in English, such as
>"do", "make", etc. which are all light verbs.  Anything else
>that looks like a verb is actually a noun which has been
>incorporated with a null light verb. I think this is nonsense,
>but nonsense is how you get tenure...)
Well, that could be true, in light of recent minimalist theory...but ugly.
For my 'lect, you'd just say that no haplology has taken place. I'd like to
see his argument.

- Christopher Wright