Back on August 26th, I caught “I feel like that if …” in an interview on NPR. Saturday morning it was “I just feel like that we …”. That’s the perception-verb feel plus the subordinator like ‘as if’ and the complementizer that (and then a finite complement clause) — where feel like plus the complement clause would be standard.
The usage is far from rare, and extends to the related verbs sound, look, and seem.
Posted in Complementation, Syntax, Variation | 1 Comment »
Caught on a Law & Order re-run recently, this exchange:
A: Didn’t you accuse him of harassing you?
B: I did ___, and he was ___.
B’s answer is a coordination, with a Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) in each conjunct (the position of the ellipted material is indicated by underscores): a “dual VPE”, in the terms of my 2007 posting on the phenomenon. The ellipted material matches its antecedent in verb form in each case — VPE allows mismatch, though matching forms are most common — but the antecedents are different: accuse him of harassing you for the first (with BSE matching BSE), harassing you (with PRP matching PRP, though the antecedent has a gerund use of PRP, the ellipsis a progressive use of PRP). To make things more complicated still, the second antecedent is contained within the first.
That’s enough complexity in this example that some people find that it takes a little extra processing work to understand.
Posted in Complementation, Ellipsis, Syntax | 2 Comments »
From yesterday’s “Metropolitan Diary” column in the NYT, a letter from Bernard Brown (relevant bit in boldface):
I had just been prepped for a routine test at one of New York’s prestigious hospitals, and had been left alone for a few minutes. I could not help overhear an exchange between two young female doctors at the other end of the anteroom …
This is could not help + BSE, yet another version of an idiom that already comes in a number of versions, some of which have been the target of usage advice.
Posted in Complementation, Idioms, Syntax, Usage advice | 3 Comments »
Sen. John McCain on the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” survey of the military, in a Morning Edition Saturday story this morning on NPR:
… it’s a little bit like studying the Bible: you can draw most any conclusion from what part of it that you examine ___.
The WH complement clause (serving as the object of the P from) is boldfaced. It has an initial (“fronted”) WH phrase what part of it that functions, within the complement clause, as the object of the verb examine; the fronted phrase is underlined above, and the the position of the “extraction gap” is indicated by underscores.
Ordinarily we’d expect the fronting of the object in the complement clause to yield
what part of it you examine ___
but the complement clause in the McCain quote has a that in it. That is, the complement is doubly marked, with a WH word and a that, in what I call the “WH-that” construction.
Posted in Complementation, Syntax | 2 Comments »
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