Re: USAGE: Survey

Okay, I know I'm not supposed to do this, but need some
data.  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".  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).

(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...)

Also, does anyone happen to know of any language where an
idiom has significantly different syntax from the rest of
the language?  Specifically, it would be nice to know, say,
if there are languages with idioms where the article follows
the noun rather than preceding it as normal.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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