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Re: Noun tense

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 23, 2002, 6:00
Quoting Muke Tever <alrivera@...>:

> > On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 05:14, Thomas R. Wier wrote: > > > In general, I would disagree with the proposition that these > > > cliticized verb forms are evidence that English are likely > > > someday to mark tense on nouns. Evidence that they're still > > > clitics comes from grammatical constructions like the following: > > > > > > "The Man raving wildly's been rather active lately." > > This may be grammatical for you, but to me it looks like a "mistake" for > either
It's definitely grammatical for me, although I will grant that it may be somewhat awkward prose-style.
> I asked a friend offlist what was wrong with the sentence and he said: > > << you can't use 's to represent the word has, man > should not be capitalized, and it sure seems to > need a "who" or "that" and a "was" or "is" in there >> > > (I dont quite agree...)
Well, yes, <Man> should be <man>. That was a typo, but in general it's not a good idea to ask others "what's wrong with this", since they'll look for something wrong on the assumption that they are not experts and so can assume that something *is* in fact wrong. ===================================================================== Thomas Wier "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n / Dept. of Linguistics mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..." University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought / 1010 E. 59th Street and not complete one road that has no turn" Chicago, IL 60637 Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers