Re: Vocab lists

Quoting JS Bangs <jaspax@...>:

> Thomas R. Wier sikyal:
> > Isn't it supposed to be an example of secondary predication,
> > such as "They swept the floor clean" (= They swept the floor
> > such that the floor was clean)?  The two sentences clearly
> > behave differently:
> >
> >   "What did they name their child? Fafnir."
> >   *"What did they name their child strange? Something."
> >   "What did they name their child? Something strange."
>
> Well, that too. I'm not enough of a syntactitian to attempt to address
> this question, but I will note that the two are not exactly parallel,
> since "sweep" is not normally a transitive verb, while "name" is.
Really? For me, it is almost always transitive. I would
hesitate on calling an intransitive construction grammatical.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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