Re: What is this construction
| From: | caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, September 19, 2005, 16:23 |
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On Sep 19, 2005, at 7:16 AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>English occasionally uses a sentence structure of the form Pronoun
>Verb Object, Aux Subject where Aux is a form of "to do" or "to be"
>(or possibly another modal). For example, He liked languages, did
>Tolkien. It may be a particularly Northern English form. Does anyone
>know what such a construction is called?
I do not know whether this construction has an official name or not.
I think it should be called an emphatic ellipsis. The latter part
("did Tolkien") consists of "to do" used as a periphrastic emphatic
plus and ellipsis: "He liked languages, Tolkien did like languages."
BTW, I couldn't form this kind of sentence using "to be" as the AUX.
I always wind up with a question!
Charlie
http://wiki.frath.net/user:caeruleancentaur
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