Re: USAGE: Verbs and verb compounds

Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> Sally Caves wrote:
> > What you can't do in
> > English is say something like:  "I went the house in."  "Went in" is a
> > verb phrase that has a preposition that's functioning sort of like an
> > adverb.
>
> Hunh?
Don't gape, Nik. ;-)

If anything, the ungrammaticalness of that sentence *proves* that
> "in" is a true preposition.  Adverbs can be moved to the end like that,
> "I ran to the house quickly", but prepositions MUST precede their
> object, unless that object is fronted, as in questions.
I don't disagree.

What I was trying to do was justify Charles' remark that prepositions
can have a shade of adverbial sense to them.  My original comment
was that there's a certain ambiguity as to whether the preposition
belongs to the verb it goes with or the object it goes with.  Which
is why it can be put at the end after the verb or at the beginning
with the fronted locative:  To which house did you run quickly?
Which house did you run quickly to? (run to comprising a kind of
verb along with "put up with")   My perhaps *unconventional*
assertion was that the adposition, when linked with the verb, has
adverbial force.  I would never have come to this conclusion had
I not created Teonaht.  Teonaht can take that preposition and turn
it into an adverb OR an adjective:  The in boy (meaning the boy
inside): adjective.  The boy writes in (inside):  adverb.  English
does this to some extent.  I'm no professional linguist, and that's
your field, but I suggest, tentatively, that shades of the adverbial
are operant in prepositions that make up VPs:  "The mother goes in."
How does she go?  In.  Where does she go?  In the house.  Because of
this
ghost of the adverbial, we can put prepositions at the end with the
verbs, like we do adverbs, when we front their objects, although
prescriptive grammarians have inveighed against this rule.  And lost.
Or: maybe it's this: maybe what is going on here is that the
prepositional
phrase itself is an adverbial phrase--"the boy writes inside (the
house)"--
even if the rest of the phrase is suppressed.  I wonder, though, if
the preposition in a verb phrase can have adverbial force.  I see the
preposition as a little more ambiguous than you do.  That's all.
Maybe I'm completely all wet.  But that was the context of my
remark.  I think verbal categories have a great deal of overlap,
and that was what I was challenging.


Sally--bold moves from a non-linguist.