In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Pig once again fails to recognize idiomaticity, but this time he does it in steps:
Pig first treats expect as taking an infinitival complement, as in They’re expecting to leave soon. But then Goat provides an NP direct object (as in They’re expecting a baby, still with an idiomatic use of expect), so Pig shifts to treating expect as taking a direct object plus an infinitival complement, as in They’re expecting the kid to leave soon. Pig asks for the infinitival complement — for him, the sentence is still incomplete — and Goat abandons the whole thing in exasperation.
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