Araucaria - Him

Ciao!

Got to go to bed. Up early doing breakfast for the sprogs tomorrow

@alphabet Yes, but it's not elegant

Actually scratch that, these kinds of do's all involve eliipsis because they're auxiliaries or preforms.

@alphabet Yes. It seems to me, without thinking too hard, that all the examples we've come up with are constructions which allow gapping - i.e. comparatives or coordinations.

But all the different DOs are very weird, and no less so in BrE!

Which is the main reason you can't say "The problem was become by the mistakes".

@alphabet Well, they're normally considered PCs

@alphabet No, but there's a few complicating factors there. Firstly, become doesn't take a DO

Although it.s potentially ambiguous

@alphabet It can, but it appears it doesn't have to. "He's been feeding that cat's fish, as I've been doing the sharks" is fine for us Brits.

@alphabet Erm, don't know why (haven't analysed it), but that's crook in BrE!

@alphabet It appears you can (and you can have non-finite forms of auxiliary do too. Both pro-verb and auxiliary DO ae different in UK/US English.)

@alphabet Er, I just stated above that that example's fine in standard GB! ;-)

@tchrist Hmmm. This might be a pond thing. Your example without the pronoun's good for me, but the to-one's wonky! Need to come back and look at it in the hard light of day, but I think that's how we'd mostly see it over here.

@tchrist I can't quite process that NP at the moment, but it's a vey good question in general. When I get through my current overload of stuff and things, I'll come back and try and give have another go at analysing it ...

I'd feel exactly the same

@MetaEd Sorry. I'm very short. Easy for stuff to go over my head.

@tchrist You have become one with us ;)

@MetaEd That was in response to M.A.R's comment "it's funny watching these past loser presidents act all wisened up." But perchance I misunderstood something.

@M.A.R. But there's only one loser president there! None of the others presidents there apart from Trump have ever lost an election!

@Xanne I think ChatGPT etc can only hallucinate! It's just that sometimes the hallucination's very convincing ;-)

@tchrist Here's another user I hope hasn't died: linguistics.stackexchange.com/users/6726/user6726

@Mitch Thanks, Mitch. I already wrote one!

Xanne says in a comment underneath that it's from Rain by Robert Frost. But I can't find the couplet anywhere on the web, and nor can I find any reference to Frost having written a poem called "Rain"!

It's from this question here:

Anyone got any idea where the following lines come from?:

@tchrist Yes, you've nailed the problem there.

@Cerberus You can't run. a red light here driving or on a bike! But you can cross the road while the pedestrian light's flashing red. And you can cross not on a crossing right nearby. Of course, if you get run over that will be your own fault!

@Cerberus Nope!

@Mitch Over here? Nothing, because it's not illegal to cross a road even if there's a crossing a couple of metres away. Of course, you can't do dangerous stuff on a road, whatever your mode of transport.

@Mitch I can't. believe that in the 'land of the free' crossing the road is a crime with its own name.Sheesh.

@alphabet Yes, that's perfectly fine and normal in BrE. Sounds like a pond issue.

@tchrist What an odd claim to make. Consider "The dog was there" and "The dogs were there" where the verb agrees with the head noun in the NP, as it always must.

@tchrist No, quite. No disagreement there!

@tchrist But is's not the Subject, it's the head pronoun in the NP serving as the object of the preposition to!

@tchrist And the evidence seems to back this analysis up (even Lawler ran with it). Note that in your last example "To whoever wants this, I wish you the best of luck!" (which does involve a fused relative NP, not an interrogative clause), you could have had whomever too!

@tchrist The Head of an NP gets its case from the grammatical relations (aka 'syntactic function') of that NP in relation to the larger clause/phrase it appears in. However, in contrast, a Prenucleus gets its case from the syntactic function of the gap in the following relative clause.

@tchrist Well that's reasonable, but double duty is exactly what all of the "fused" constructions in CGEL involve. The case (not actually) in point here, is that of "fused relative clauses" or "free relatives". Here, the wh-word is a Prenucleus within the NP and also its Head. Note that this does not, surprisingly perhaps, involve it being part of two different constituents. It does however, mean that its case may be thought of as deriving from two different sources.

@alphabet Yes, they're right about that. And it explains the data just as well, I think. "Whom" is vanishingly rare in interrogatives unless they have a pied-piped preposition. When did you last hear someone ask "Whom is she?", for example. (So you could still write an answer there!)

@handan_toddler Yep

@alphabet I'm getting there slowly: prenucleus co-indexed with the gap functioning as the object of about [And that's another reason why you should write the answer]

The two functions are head of the NP functioning as PC of BE and then clause internally the object of about.

@alphabet Aargh, that's what happens if you multi-task (or rather if I do).

@alphabet I thought you might like to answer with in a proper professional kind of way? I am marking essays and exams and stuff so no can do ... But someone needs to give the OP and wider audience a proper answer. One of yours would be great!

@alphabet The word who there aguably has two functions: It's the Head of the NP functioning as Object of about, but it's also the Pronucleus for the free relative and thus as a prenucleus would normally be able to reflect the case of the gap that follows.

I don't think anyone's picked up on the issue, which is that the string concerned is neither a relative clause nor an interrogative, but a 'fused relative construction' aka 'a free relative'.