Postpositions?

[zompist]

And if you look harder, you will find exceptions within exceptions.

Of course!

Some verbs can't be both progressive, and given an interval: *I am considering/wanting/becoming/lasting from four to seven." Some don't seem to like the progressive at all: *I am having this property." (Note that this is non-auxiliary 'have', and "possess" doesn't improve it.)

But when discussing timetables, I'm having the hall from three to five.. The problem with the initial examples appears to be incongruity. It is perfectly possible to say, 'I will be considering applications from four to seven'.

The first one doesn't work for me. Could be British?

I do think (English) transitive verbs are divided into those which require an explicit object and those which merely allow one. "Consider" seems to be the former ("Let me think. / ?Let me consider."); "bake" is the latter. For me at least, adding complements doesn't fix all of these: "*I am wanting pizza from 4 to 7"; "*I am becoming deaf from 4 to 7"; "*I am lasting surprisingly long from 4 to 7."

What a verb requires— its elaborators, in David Allerton's terms— can be complex in English, beyond just transitive/intransitive. I purposely used "put on" in my examples, as it takes a PP as an elaborator. "Last" seems to require an adverbial (which can be a time NP).

I'm not sure you have the right generalisation here. You could also add:
*The baking cookies is a fine art.

Not really, because I was trying to show differences between verbs. These are nouns, or verbs acting as nouns, and nouns require "of" before an object.

It would be fair to complain that I was leaving out some required syntactic glue in the other examples— but so far as I know I was not. Most of them, which we could loosely call resultatives, just don't play well with the gerund. Certainly you can't throw in "of", and I don't know of any other fix.

*The turning of thirteen is a lovely time. [...]

Beats me! / *The beating of me is a fine art.

I think we have the grammatical sentence 'The beating of the drum is a fine art'.

Of course, but "Beats me" is syntactically different from "I beat drums". It's an idiom, and in general idioms are restricted in idiosyncratic ways. They are still evidence that not all verbs act the same way, and I don't accept that evidence from idioms can be thrown out when inconvenient.

[zompist]

I suspect the differences here are almost entirely due to transitivity, and in obvious ways too. ‘Want’ and ‘put’ are both transitive; compare I love to wish and I love to throw, which are intransitive.

Um, "bake" is transitive too. "Put on clothes" is not transitive. "Put the X on the Y" has two elaborators.

See my reply to Richard— English verbs have more complicated behavior than "transitive/intransitive". This is literally stuff that syntax has talked about for 60 years; this was in Aspects.

Yes, I know this. As you may be able to tell, I am pretty terrible at syntactic analysis: I make counterexamples that aren’t, and then miss ones that are really there, and get myself all confused in the process. At some point I need to properly sit down, with a wordlist and a blank page, and see if I can find any interesting behaviour.

I encourage this! FWIW, it gets easier as you do more of it, and have more of a mental library of things to try.

I think there is some miscommunication here. When I talk about something being ‘primitive’, I mean it in the programming sense: like one might say that ‘in JavaScript strings are a primitive type’, and so on. In this case, I mean that word classes should be defined such that later stages of analysis can just assume they exist; that is, such that they can be treated as primitives for syntactic analysis. I meant ‘inviolate’ in the same sense: the later stages don’t need to question whether ‘verbs’, say, form a coherent category. And ‘simple’ applies to each individual test: combining all the tests together can make the defining features for a single word class quite involved, in fact!

I agree with you that the end analysis may be a complex superposition of simple tests! And I've said many times that you can start with morphological tests.

But perhaps because I value syntax more, I don't think you can say ahead of time that syntax won't make you change or even throw out your initial categories. Your prototypical verbs and nouns may well escape unscathed. But to take just one example, deciding what thing or things -ing words are is going to be determined by syntax— morphology can't really answer this one at all.

Of course we can ask questions like ‘what does “impersonal” mean’; it means that the verb can only take ‘it’ as its subject. And how, exactly, does prototype theory give a ‘reason’ for all this‽

Kind of amusingly, you've precisely escaped looking at what the word means. Im-person-al = not a person. Why is "it" different from other subjects? It's not a person. Impersonal verbs are non-prototypical in that they don't have a person as a subject.

Again, it's fine and desirable to start your morphosyntactic analysis without reference to semantics. This is mostly to avoid preconceptions. But at some point it's OK, in fact it's essential, to open the semantics box. Why are stative verbs resistant to the progressive? Is it just unfathomable? I think it's relevant to the difference between prototypical states and prototypical events.

[Richard W]

Some verbs can't be both progressive, and given an interval: *I am considering/wanting/becoming/lasting from four to seven." Some don't seem to like the progressive at all: *I am having this property." (Note that this is non-auxiliary 'have', and "possess" doesn't improve it.)

But when discussing timetables, I'm having the hall from three to five.. The problem with the initial examples appears to be incongruity. It is perfectly possible to say, 'I will be considering applications from four to seven'.

The first one doesn't work for me. Could be British?

Possibly, but I think the more likely cause is that one is doing something with the possession. It's similar to the progressive of the verb 'to be', as in to be good meaning 'to behave oneself'.

I do think (English) transitive verbs are divided into those which require an explicit object and those which merely allow one. "Consider" seems to be the former ("Let me think. / ?Let me consider."); "bake" is the latter. For me at least, adding complements doesn't fix all of these: "*I am wanting pizza from 4 to 7"; "*I am becoming deaf from 4 to 7"; "*I am lasting surprisingly long from 4 to 7."

The last two work if they refer to repeated actions or times. The one with last could refer to repeated brief endurance tests, e.g. holding one's breath under water, with performance oddly dependent on time of day. The second could refer to a repeated, temporary loss of hearing, or again, with a schedule.

What a verb requires— its elaborators, in David Allerton's terms— can be complex in English, beyond just transitive/intransitive. I purposely used "put on" in my examples, as it takes a PP as an elaborator. "Last" seems to require an adverbial (which can be a time NP).

That example feels muddled to me. "Put" may need a PP (though not when 'putting the shot'), but "put on" just takes an object.

Beats me! / *The beating of me is a fine art.

I think we have the grammatical sentence 'The beating of the drum is a fine art'.

Of course, but "Beats me" is syntactically different from "I beat drums". It's an idiom, and in general idioms are restricted in idiosyncratic ways. They are still evidence that not all verbs act the same way, and I don't accept that evidence from idioms can be thrown out when inconvenient.

Here's a century old quotation from the wild:

The sunshine seems to make everyone happy despite the signs & sounds of the all-important job on hand - the beating of the Hun - which in this "Forward Area" is ever "on tap".

It may be significant that when thinking of a likely grammatical object for use in the Google search, my thoughts turned to the Biggles stories. (This quotation isn't from them - it has an Australian source.)

[zompist]

I do think (English) transitive verbs are divided into those which require an explicit object and those which merely allow one. "Consider" seems to be the former ("Let me think. / ?Let me consider."); "bake" is the latter. For me at least, adding complements doesn't fix all of these: "*I am wanting pizza from 4 to 7"; "*I am becoming deaf from 4 to 7"; "*I am lasting surprisingly long from 4 to 7."

The last two work if they refer to repeated actions or times. The one with last could refer to repeated brief endurance tests, e.g. holding one's breath under water, with performance oddly dependent on time of day. The second could refer to a repeated, temporary loss of hearing, or again, with a schedule.

Not for me-- they'd have to be "I {want pizza, go deaf, last suprisingly long} from 4 to 7."

What a verb requires— its elaborators, in David Allerton's terms— can be complex in English, beyond just transitive/intransitive. I purposely used "put on" in my examples, as it takes a PP as an elaborator. "Last" seems to require an adverbial (which can be a time NP).

That example feels muddled to me. "Put" may need a PP (though not when 'putting the shot'), but "put on" just takes an object.

I did get this muddled, as I was in a rush. Normally "put" takes an NP and a PP: "put the lotion in the basket", "*I put the lotion", "*I put in the basket." "Put on" = "wear" is a verb + particle construction; the particle is required and can appear either before or after the object (which is not a PP; sorry for the confusion).

"I put on my pants" is a nice demonstration that Brad's hope that syntactic tests are all "simple" may not work. Namely, this matches the frame for a PP but isn't one. The test for a preposition would have to be carefully written to avoid this pitfall.

The sunshine seems to make everyone happy despite the signs & sounds of the all-important job on hand - the beating of the Hun - which in this "Forward Area" is ever "on tap".

I'm not sure what you're trying to show here. "Beat" in the sense "thump" and the metaphorical sense "defeat" is a normal transitive verb, and "the beating of the Hun" is normal. But just as with "put", the same lexical word can have senses that have different syntactic patterns. "Beats me" is a way of saying "I dunno" and in that sense resists a lot of transformations.

[Civil War Bugle]

I do think (English) transitive verbs are divided into those which require an explicit object and those which merely allow one. "Consider" seems to be the former ("Let me think. / ?Let me consider."); "bake" is the latter.

I can recall specific instances when I have said 'let me consider', although contextually anyone in the conversation knew what was being considered. Anecdotal data point, not intended to sway the larger argument in any direction.

[bradrn]

Some verbs can't be both progressive, and given an interval: *I am considering/wanting/becoming/lasting from four to seven." Some don't seem to like the progressive at all: *I am having this property." (Note that this is non-auxiliary 'have', and "possess" doesn't improve it.)

But when discussing timetables, I'm having the hall from three to five.. The problem with the initial examples appears to be incongruity. It is perfectly possible to say, 'I will be considering applications from four to seven'.

The first one doesn't work for me. Could be British?

Not quite, since it works for me too, not that I’d regularly use the construction myself. But AuE and SAE are both heavily British-influenced.

I do think (English) transitive verbs are divided into those which require an explicit object and those which merely allow one.

Does this differ in any way from the usual division into ‘transitive’ and ‘ambitransitive’ verbs, respectively?

What a verb requires— its elaborators, in David Allerton's terms— can be complex in English, beyond just transitive/intransitive. I purposely used "put on" in my examples, as it takes a PP as an elaborator. "Last" seems to require an adverbial (which can be a time NP).

Question: how complex can the required elaborators of a verb get? Aside from your examples (PP, adverbial), I can think of: direct quote (with ‘say’), that- or to-complement (‘know’, ‘like’), that-complement alone (‘think’), to-complement alone (‘want’),. Curiously, all of those verbs also accept a simple NP as their elaborator.

Beats me! / *The beating of me is a fine art.

I think we have the grammatical sentence 'The beating of the drum is a fine art'.

Of course, but "Beats me" is syntactically different from "I beat drums". It's an idiom, and in general idioms are restricted in idiosyncratic ways. They are still evidence that not all verbs act the same way, and I don't accept that evidence from idioms can be thrown out when inconvenient.

I disagree strongly on the last point… if an idiom is unproductive, and seems to follow very different rules to normal grammar, then ‘evidence’ from that idiom should always be thrown out, even if it happens to be very convenient indeed (not that I can think of any examples where this might be the case). If something doesn’t obey normal syntax and is the only construction in an entire language which is organised in one particular way, then it’s only sensible to ignore it when analysing normal syntax.

I suspect the differences here are almost entirely due to transitivity, and in obvious ways too. ‘Want’ and ‘put’ are both transitive; compare I love to wish and I love to throw, which are intransitive.

Um, "bake" is transitive too.

No, it’s ambitransitive: I baked all day is fine with me.

"Put on clothes" is not transitive. "Put the X on the Y" has two elaborators.

OK, agreed, though it does still have two required arguments.

Interestingly, I note that you can vary the preposition for the latter but not the former:

I put the phone on/in/under the bag
I put on/*in/*under the clothes

I think there is some miscommunication here. When I talk about something being ‘primitive’, I mean it in the programming sense: like one might say that ‘in JavaScript strings are a primitive type’, and so on. In this case, I mean that word classes should be defined such that later stages of analysis can just assume they exist; that is, such that they can be treated as primitives for syntactic analysis. I meant ‘inviolate’ in the same sense: the later stages don’t need to question whether ‘verbs’, say, form a coherent category. And ‘simple’ applies to each individual test: combining all the tests together can make the defining features for a single word class quite involved, in fact!

I agree with you that the end analysis may be a complex superposition of simple tests! And I've said many times that you can start with morphological tests.

But perhaps because I value syntax more, I don't think you can say ahead of time that syntax won't make you change or even throw out your initial categories. Your prototypical verbs and nouns may well escape unscathed. But to take just one example, deciding what thing or things -ing words are is going to be determined by syntax— morphology can't really answer this one at all.

Sorry, but I really don’t understand what you mean by any of this. Could you elaborate please?

Of course we can ask questions like ‘what does “impersonal” mean’; it means that the verb can only take ‘it’ as its subject. And how, exactly, does prototype theory give a ‘reason’ for all this‽

Kind of amusingly, you've precisely escaped looking at what the word means. Im-person-al = not a person. Why is "it" different from other subjects? It's not a person. Impersonal verbs are non-prototypical in that they don't have a person as a subject.

Again, it's fine and desirable to start your morphosyntactic analysis without reference to semantics. This is mostly to avoid preconceptions. But at some point it's OK, in fact it's essential, to open the semantics box. Why are stative verbs resistant to the progressive? Is it just unfathomable? I think it's relevant to the difference between prototypical states and prototypical events.

I absolutely agree that semantics is vital for further analysis! (And if you doubt me on this, just read a bit of my alignment thread, or my more recent posts on aspect — they’re full of semantics being used to explicate syntactic patterns. The interaction between semantics and syntax is perhaps the area I’m most interested in.) But in this thread, I’ve been focussing all along on the preliminary stages of analysis, where utilising semantics should be mostly avoided to, as you say, avoid preconceptions.

I do think (English) transitive verbs are divided into those which require an explicit object and those which merely allow one. "Consider" seems to be the former ("Let me think. / ?Let me consider."); "bake" is the latter. For me at least, adding complements doesn't fix all of these: "*I am wanting pizza from 4 to 7"; "*I am becoming deaf from 4 to 7"; "*I am lasting surprisingly long from 4 to 7."

The last two work if they refer to repeated actions or times. The one with last could refer to repeated brief endurance tests, e.g. holding one's breath under water, with performance oddly dependent on time of day. The second could refer to a repeated, temporary loss of hearing, or again, with a schedule.

Not for me-- they'd have to be "I {want pizza, go deaf, last suprisingly long} from 4 to 7."

I have a slight preference for your versions, though both variants (progressive and simple) work for me. But the most preferred way of stating this would be: I have been lasting surprisingly long from 4 to 7, with the progressive perfect.

[cedh]

Um, no, this is all part of semantics. In some languages (notably active-stative ones), this stuff is reflected in the syntax, but English isn’t one of them, as far as I can see.

So part of the misunderstanding here seems to be due to different ideas of what counts as syntax and what doesn't.
(My own position would be that a verb telling us that the subject is an experiencer is semantics, but a verb telling us that its experiencer-like subject should be marked with a dative case, for instance, would be syntax. Transitivity is clearly part of syntax too.)

No, all of this is part of syntax. Not in an exclusive way; it's semantics, too. But it is still relevant to syntax. Let me explain.
In English, some ditransitive verbs' behavior depends on what sort of arguments they take. If I say "I asked Tom" and "I asked a question," a listener knows that the animate argument is the indirect object equivalent in the sentence "I asked Tom a question." But not all verbs work this way. If I shorten "I gave a cat milk" to "I gave a cat," the implication is that "cat" has switched roles.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. According to my understanding, the fact that both "ask" and "give" prototypically have two objects, an animate one in the role of experiencer/recipient (R) and an inanimate one in the role of theme (T), is semantics. The fact that they both prototypically appear in a [V IO DO] construction, with IO=R and DO=T, is syntax. And the fact that "ask" allows both [V IO] and [V DO] constructions while "give" allows only [V DO] is syntax too.
(And this type of syntactic detail is definitely useful for defining word classes. In my view, the result can be described equally well in terms of granularity and in terms of prototype theory, and I'm personally unsure which approach is easier/more efficient/more parsimonious)

[Moose-tache]

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. According to my understanding, the fact that both "ask" and "give" prototypically have two objects, an animate one in the role of experiencer/recipient (R) and an inanimate one in the role of theme (T), is semantics.

No, you don't understand; I'm disagreeing with you.
Let's say you're writing a book about syntax. You say that some words take certain kinds of agruments, but refuse to say any more about it because it's semantics. Your reader looks up some of the words you mentioned as being inscrutible semantic snowflakes, and find that the asterisks on their definitions are mostly the same. They discover that, in fact, there are patterns to how these words operate in various transformations and movements, how they interact with various NPs, how they can be diagramed, etc. How is this reader going to accept the notion that talking about these words was inappropriate in a book about syntax? The fact that, say, "ask" and "tell" share something in their usage that they do not share with "say" and "speak" is syntax. It tells us about the grammatical patterns that speakers use to understand how one word relates to other words in the same utterance.

To put it another way, the difference between a VP and an NP is syntax. But if we wanted to be cheeky assholes who make this face while we write our syntax book we could just call them all Ps, and relegate the rest to semantics.

Yes, a lot of how words relate will come down to semantics. But the moment there is a generelization, i.e. a pattern of word behavior that speakers can exploit, it becomes a matter of syntax as well. By all means, mirror this information in your dictionary if you have space. But also make room in your syntax section, because that's what it is. A good test of this is the fact that speakers will change how they use words to better match a pattern. "Anymore" is now used in positive sentences in a lot of dialects of American English. We would have no way to explain that if the behavior of words like "anymore" if we treated them as Balkanized territories defined only by their semantics. Clearly some American English speakers think that "anymore" feels like it belongs to some imaginary class of words that have a pattern of usage. In other words, they are doing syntax to it.

[bradrn]

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. According to my understanding, the fact that both "ask" and "give" prototypically have two objects, an animate one in the role of experiencer/recipient (R) and an inanimate one in the role of theme (T), is semantics.

No, you don't understand; I'm disagreeing with you.
Let's say you're writing a book about syntax. You say that some words take certain kinds of agruments, but refuse to say any more about it because it's semantics. Your reader looks up some of the words you mentioned as being inscrutible semantic snowflakes, and find that the asterisks on their definitions are mostly the same. They discover that, in fact, there are patterns to how these words operate in various transformations and movements, how they interact with various NPs, how they can be diagramed, etc. How is this reader going to accept the notion that talking about these words was inappropriate in a book about syntax? The fact that, say, "ask" and "tell" share something in their usage that they do not share with "say" and "speak" is syntax. It tells us about the grammatical patterns that speakers use to understand how one word relates to other words in the same utterance.

Pray tell, what, exactly, are these patterns which are shared by ‘ask’ and ‘tell’ but not ‘say’ and ‘speak’? I know I haven’t found any, as I said in my previous post. From the perspective of syntax, they are identical; the fact that a single transitive argument can take on differing semantic roles is a matter of semantics.

To put it another way, the difference between a VP and an NP is syntax. But if we wanted to be cheeky assholes who make this face while we write our syntax book we could just call them all Ps, and relegate the rest to semantics.

Oh please. VPs and NPs are very different — even if you were to remove all the terminal nodes, their syntax trees alone look completely unlike, to say nothing about the fact that they undergo different transformations. Your two ‘different’ classes of verbs seem to have neither of these.

Yes, a lot of how words relate will come down to semantics. But the moment there is a generelization, i.e. a pattern of word behavior that speakers can exploit, it becomes a matter of syntax as well. By all means, mirror this information in your dictionary if you have space. But also make room in your syntax section, because that's what it is. A good test of this is the fact that speakers will change how they use words to better match a pattern. "Anymore" is now used in positive sentences in a lot of dialects of American English. We would have no way to explain that if the behavior of words like "anymore" if we treated them as Balkanized territories defined only by their semantics. Clearly some American English speakers think that "anymore" feels like it belongs to some imaginary class of words that have a pattern of usage. In other words, they are doing syntax to it.

Sure, ‘anymore’ being used in positive sentences in syntax. No-one ever said it isn’t.

[zompist]

Does this differ in any way from the usual division into ‘transitive’ and ‘ambitransitive’ verbs, respectively?

No, same thing I was referring to.

Question: how complex can the required elaborators of a verb get?

I don't know. Offhand it's hard to even think of a verb that has three elaborators, as opposed to three arguments.

I disagree strongly on the last point… if an idiom is unproductive, and seems to follow very different rules to normal grammar, then ‘evidence’ from that idiom should always be thrown out, even if it happens to be very convenient indeed (not that I can think of any examples where this might be the case). If something doesn’t obey normal syntax and is the only construction in an entire language which is organised in one particular way, then it’s only sensible to ignore it when analysing normal syntax.

Throwing out data is always questionable. It's OK to put some things aside for later. But idioms can reveal things that other constructions don't, and as I mentioned, there's no clear line between "idiom" and "construction".

Various linguists have criticized syntax, especially the Chomskyan type, for concentrating on a subset of English sentences; the syntacticians I respect most are avid for considering a very wide range of data. (John Ross would say "Neat fact!" when someone came up with an interesting observation, however minor.)

I understand the idea that you want to concentrate on the "most typical" stuff first. But... you don't know what is most typical until you've done some quantitative corpus studies. If you had a large corpus, what percentage would you be throwing out as "idiomatic"? I don't know and I don't think you do either. But in general, when people do look at corpuses (corpora?), they find a lot more weird stuff than might be expected.

But perhaps because I value syntax more, I don't think you can say ahead of time that syntax won't make you change or even throw out your initial categories. Your prototypical verbs and nouns may well escape unscathed. But to take just one example, deciding what thing or things -ing words are is going to be determined by syntax— morphology can't really answer this one at all.

Sorry, but I really don’t understand what you mean by any of this. Could you elaborate please?

This is a response to your using words like "primitive" and "inviolate", which suggests that you don't think extended syntactic study will change your initial assumptions much. That's not how science has ever worked. A deeper study may well upend your initial analysis. (This is a bit embarrassing for scholars who've already published their initial analyses...)

(In the case of English, it's probably going to be fine to keep referring to nouns and verbs, at least informally. But then, English is well-studied. I have a grammar of Mandarin which lists 23 word classes; I'm pretty sure this is not how the language was analyzed two centuries ago.)

From your reply to Moose:

Oh please. VPs and NPs are very different — even if you were to remove all the terminal nodes, their syntax trees alone look completely unlike, to say nothing about the fact that they undergo different transformations. Your two ‘different’ classes of verbs seem to have neither of these.

I do wish sometimes that you'd re-read my book... or better yet, read McCawley's book, or yet another intro. The thing is, the whole idea of X-bar theory is that VPs and NPs are similar. The syntactic trees are similar, the behavior of complements and adjuncts is similar. Much of what you'd want to say about VPs, you have apply to nominalizations ("the enemy quickly destroyed the city" > "the enemy's quick destruction of the city"). Reflexives work about the same in NPs as in VPs ("Bill's description of himself").

You don't have to agree with this-- I'm not sure I do. But it's not some outlandish idea.

[Kuchigakatai]

I just wanted to comment on this, from pages ago:

OK, take a look at Classical Chinese. There's no morphology[*[, so you're entirely reliant on syntax. And individual words are really resistant to neat labeling. It's not lawless, of course. But it would be a severe test of your claim that word classes can be easily defined and have no exceptions or prototype effects.

To give some illustration of what Zompist is saying, words in Old/Classical Chinese, much like English, had a lot of lexically determined notes about how they could be used and what connotations they acquired when used this way or that way. If you treated this as membership in a series of word classes, you'd need a lot of classes.

For example, 利 (profit) and 王 (king) were both nouns. As in English, they could be enverbled with impunity. But 利 as a verb meant "to consider something profitable," while 王 as a verb means "to be crowned." So do we have two word classes, one Yidong and one Shidong, to use the emic terminology? Or do we just have nouns with asterisks all over them?

Note that the Mandarin terminology involves "uses" (用法 yòngfǎ) of words as verbs rather than distinct word classes here. That is, 利 is taken to be primarily a noun, 'profit', which has been transformed into a verb with the sense "consider [something] as X" (this is the 意動 yìdòng use of a noun as a verb), and 王 to be primarily a noun, turned into a verb with the sense "make [something] X" (causative, the 使動 shǐdòng use).

I imagine you got this from the poorly-written section on Wikipedia's article on CC grammar. If you can read Mandarin I'd suggest reading the relevant articles on the Chinese online encyclopedias...

EDIT, unrelated: I try to bring this up whenever I can, since it tends to get forgotten very easily, but English "possessive s" is not a direct descendant of the genitive case on nouns. It is in fact a remnant of the genitive case on pronouns! That's why it's written with an apostrophe; it's a contraction of "[noun] his." This also explains why it behaves like a clitic and not a case suffix; it would have originally intervened as the new head of the noun phrase. So like you said, history helps us understand why English syntax is the way it is.

I believe that account of the ultimate origin of -’s is currently considered discredited. While there is evidence of it being analyzed in some time periods as “his” (by being spelled that way, often only when it is already syllabic due to being after a sibilant) and that might be the reason why the apostrophe ended up being used, I think the evidence as a whole is taken to show survival of the Old English inflectional affix up to the point where it turned into the modern morpheme.

Yeah, it's pretty discredited. "X his Y" was a conflation of the genitive ending -es with (h)is, most common in the 16th-17th centuries though arising from earlier phonetic similarity. Let me quote Lass (2000:145-6):

One further development, belonging somewhere between noun inflection and noun-phrase syntax, can appropriately be treated here: the curious ‘his-genitive’ (Jesus Christ his sake, the Kinge his fool, etc.). This is widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but arises much earlier. According to Wyld (1936: 315–16) the source is /h/-deletion in weak syllables (common enough), which leads to weak forms of his becoming homophonous to the ME genitive singular -es/-is. Thus in casual speech the kyngys son and the kyng hys son would be indistinguishable. Indeed, there are forms as early as the twelfth century bearing this out: e.g. the hyphenated genitives like adam-is sune in the manuscript of Genesis and Exodus (c. 1270). This is, notably, a manuscript in which /h/-dropping is particularly common (Milroy 1983). Given a masculine possessor (as in all the early examples), the semantics are reasonable as well.

While Middle-English instances are sporadic, the construction increases from the sixteenth century, and eventually extends to feminines as well: first with his (Margaret ys doghter, Cely Papers: Wyld 316), later more semantically congruent, as in Juno hir bed (Lyly); there are also plurals, e.g. Chillingworth and Canterbury their books (Verney Memoirs, 1645: both cited from Wyld). This led to the common belief that the normal {-s} genitive was in fact a reduction of his; though Dr Johnson in the grammar prefaced to his Dictionary (1755) points out that ‘this cannot be the true original, because ’s is put to female nouns’, where ‘his cannot be understood’. He was of course right in principle, though unaware of the Margaret ys doghter type. The his-genitive is obsolescent in the late seventeenth century, and pretty much dead by the eighteenth; any later survivals are essentially imitations of earlier uses in familiar texts like The Book of Common Prayer.

EDIT, on topic this time: regarding the argument about "baking," it might be useful to point out that these are homonyms. English conflated two separate endings a thousand years ago, hence the identical pronunciation of the gerund and participle. But we could, if we really wanted to, treat them as two coincidentally identical forms. We've all made peace with the fact that English subjunctive verbs are usually identical to nominal derivations of those verbs ("We ask that he leave" vs "He is on leave"), without scratching our heads about how we reconcile these disparate uses. If we even insist on deciding whether "baking" and "baking" are one word or two in the first place, that is. Personally I'm not sure that question will help given the number of assumptions we'd hjave to agree on before we could get there.

I understood that the progressive tenses actually use the gerund, whence the occasional variant we were a-baking, where a is a doublet of the preposition on.

To add to that, I find it interesting that according to Alexiadou (2013), an intermediate, fairly nominal construction "I am (a-)doing of [NP]" is historically attested, quoting the likes of Lord Berners' Froissart's Chronicles (ca. 1500) and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (17th c.), and even a work as recent as Margery Allingham's More Work for the Undertaker (1949):

You're dirt and can't 'ardly understand what I am a-sayin' of, but I'appens to like you

(bolding mine)

References:

• Alexiadou, Artemis. 2013. "Nominal vs. Verbal -ing Constructions and the Development of the English Progressive". In: English Linguistics Research 2:2. Pages 126-140. DOI: 10.5430/elr.v2n2p126.
• Lass, Roger. 2000. "Phonology and Morphology". In: The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III: 1476-1776. Pages 56-186.

[hwhatting]

"Put on clothes" is not transitive. "Put the X on the Y" has two elaborators.

Can you explain that to me? In my understanding, "put on" is a transitive verb, which functions differently from "put X on Y".

[Travis B.]

"Put on clothes" is not transitive. "Put the X on the Y" has two elaborators.

Can you explain that to me? In my understanding, "put on" is a transitive verb, which functions differently from "put X on Y".

I understand things as hwhatting does too here.

[zompist]

"Put on clothes" is not transitive. "Put the X on the Y" has two elaborators.

Can you explain that to me? In my understanding, "put on" is a transitive verb, which functions differently from "put X on Y".

I put that badly too. "Put on clothes" is transitive, but "up" is itself an elaborator [*], so this is a different verb class from "bake". In context, I was trying to say that transitivity alone didn't explain all the variation I was pointing out.

[*] in this construction, I mean. A single English verbs can have several different argument patterns.

[hwhatting]

@zompist: Thanks. I had started to doubt my knowledge of English or of syntactic concepts or both

[Moose-tache]

You would be forgiven if you did. The whole situation is complicated by the contradictions between formal English grammar and actual English grammar. And both are the foundation of much of academic syntax.

I see John. I look at John.

third grade teacher: "The first is transitive. The second is intransitive, because that's a prepositional phrase not a direct object."
logical person: "John is clearly an object in both. If anything "look at" is more transitive, as it has an agent and a patient instead of an experiencer and stimulus."
Chomskyist: "Clearly every sentence spoken by a human starts with a, often unspoken, "John." Therefore, when we diagram sentences in Yoruba, we should begin our sentence tree with a JP node."

[bradrn]

I disagree strongly on the last point… if an idiom is unproductive, and seems to follow very different rules to normal grammar, then ‘evidence’ from that idiom should always be thrown out, even if it happens to be very convenient indeed (not that I can think of any examples where this might be the case). If something doesn’t obey normal syntax and is the only construction in an entire language which is organised in one particular way, then it’s only sensible to ignore it when analysing normal syntax.

Throwing out data is always questionable. It's OK to put some things aside for later. But idioms can reveal things that other constructions don't, and as I mentioned, there's no clear line between "idiom" and "construction".

…

I understand the idea that you want to concentrate on the "most typical" stuff first. But... you don't know what is most typical until you've done some quantitative corpus studies. If you had a large corpus, what percentage would you be throwing out as "idiomatic"? I don't know and I don't think you do either. But in general, when people do look at corpuses (corpora?), they find a lot more weird stuff than might be expected.

This is why I specifically mentioned unproductive idioms. If an idiom is unproductive, then it’s a fixed, memorised expression — it doesn’t have to obey normal rules of grammar, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get any useful data out of it.

But perhaps because I value syntax more, I don't think you can say ahead of time that syntax won't make you change or even throw out your initial categories. Your prototypical verbs and nouns may well escape unscathed. But to take just one example, deciding what thing or things -ing words are is going to be determined by syntax— morphology can't really answer this one at all.

Sorry, but I really don’t understand what you mean by any of this. Could you elaborate please?

This is a response to your using words like "primitive" and "inviolate", which suggests that you don't think extended syntactic study will change your initial assumptions much. That's not how science has ever worked. A deeper study may well upend your initial analysis. (This is a bit embarrassing for scholars who've already published their initial analyses...)

I suppose this is a fair point. Still, my ‘primitive’ categories are defined with reference to the structure of the language itself: though they may be split into finer categories, I find it hard to imagine them turning out to be completely wrong.

(In the case of English, it's probably going to be fine to keep referring to nouns and verbs, at least informally. But then, English is well-studied. I have a grammar of Mandarin which lists 23 word classes; I'm pretty sure this is not how the language was analyzed two centuries ago.)

Well, yes. That’s because linguistics was still in the ‘everything is Latin’ stage two centuries ago. Times have changed since then!

(Also, which Mandarin grammar is that? I’m sure I remember you saying you use Li & Thompson’s Functional Reference Grammar, but I can’t find a mention of 23 word classes there.)

From your reply to Moose:

Oh please. VPs and NPs are very different — even if you were to remove all the terminal nodes, their syntax trees alone look completely unlike, to say nothing about the fact that they undergo different transformations. Your two ‘different’ classes of verbs seem to have neither of these.

I do wish sometimes that you'd re-read my book... or better yet, read McCawley's book, or yet another intro. The thing is, the whole idea of X-bar theory is that VPs and NPs are similar. The syntactic trees are similar, the behavior of complements and adjuncts is similar. Much of what you'd want to say about VPs, you have apply to nominalizations ("the enemy quickly destroyed the city" > "the enemy's quick destruction of the city"). Reflexives work about the same in NPs as in VPs ("Bill's description of himself").

You don't have to agree with this-- I'm not sure I do. But it's not some outlandish idea.

Yeah, I definitely need to re-read the SCK. I forgot all about X-bar theory when I made that comment. (I did try finding McCawley’s too, but the university library doesn’t seem to have it.)

Note that the Mandarin terminology involves "uses" (用法 yòngfǎ) of words as verbs rather than distinct word classes here. That is, 利 is taken to be primarily a noun, 'profit', which has been transformed into a verb with the sense "consider [something] as X" (this is the 意動 yìdòng use of a noun as a verb), and 王 to be primarily a noun, turned into a verb with the sense "make [something] X" (causative, the 使動 shǐdòng use).

This is a much better way of saying what I was trying to communicate using Dixon’s figures. Nouns may be verbed and verbs may be nouned, but the language in question still has nouns and verbs as distinct categories.

You would be forgiven if you did. The whole situation is complicated by the contradictions between formal English grammar and actual English grammar. And both are the foundation of much of academic syntax.

I see John. I look at John.

third grade teacher: "The first is transitive. The second is intransitive, because that's a prepositional phrase not a direct object."
logical person: "John is clearly an object in both. If anything "look at" is more transitive, as it has an agent and a patient instead of an experiencer and stimulus."
Chomskyist: "Clearly every sentence spoken by a human starts with a, often unspoken, "John." Therefore, when we diagram sentences in Yoruba, we should begin our sentence tree with a JP node."

Please stop straw-manning. We all know that Chomskyist syntax, while… shall we say, suspect, isn’t half that bad.

As for your other examples: the first is just the syntactic viewpoint, while the second is the semantic viewpoint. They are both valid ways of looking at things, and assigning one to a ‘third grade teacher’ and another to a ‘logical person’ is really quite unnecessary — both are useful, depending on what you want to investigate. The most detailed notions of transitivity, such as Hopper & Thompson’s famous 1980 paper (which I still have yet to read…), combine both viewpoints, and are all the better for it.

[zompist]

(Also, which Mandarin grammar is that? I’m sure I remember you saying you use Li & Thompson’s Functional Reference Grammar, but I can’t find a mention of 23 word classes there.)

It's T'ung & Pollard's Colloquial Chinese. But it largely matches the word classes in Norman's Chinese, which are due to Yuen-ren Chao.

[keenir]

I understand the idea that you want to concentrate on the "most typical" stuff first. But... you don't know what is most typical until you've done some quantitative corpus studies. If you had a large corpus, what percentage would you be throwing out as "idiomatic"? I don't know and I don't think you do either. But in general, when people do look at corpuses (corpora?), they find a lot more weird stuff than might be expected.

This is why I specifically mentioned unproductive idioms. If an idiom is unproductive, then it’s a fixed, memorised expression — it doesn’t have to obey normal rules of grammar, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get any useful data out of it.

I thought the whole point of an idiom (and why conlangers & other translators are advised not to translate idioms literally) was because they were fixed.

[zompist]

I thought the whole point of an idiom (and why conlangers & other translators are advised not to translate idioms literally) was because they were fixed.

Some are, some aren't. You have to look.

Let's look at some idioms. Here's the first list I could find via Google. Some basic observations:

* Almost all of them are perfectly normal syntax.[*]
* What makes most of them idioms is simply that they're repeated, and use a vivid metaphor.
* Quite a few are easily understandable with the ordinary word meanings.

Now let's look at productivity. Often you can't vary the words at all: "bite the bullet" can't be turned into "bite the arrow" or "bite the ammo" or "chomp the cartridge." The vast majority of the idioms on that list are hard to alter.

They are often resistant to even basic transformations. As just one example, "I'm not as fit as a fiddle" or "Are you as fit as a fiddle?" sound odd to me-- they are grammatical, they just arguably lose the idiom. "It's a fiddle that he's as fit as" is worse.

On the other hand, the "way" construction is extremely productive: He found his way home. He made his way to Albuquerque. He slept his way to the top. He's lying his way to prison. The verb and the destination are infinitely variable, only "way" has to be there.

[*] Not that this is actual frequency information. As I said, this is from a quick Google search and seems to be meant for language learners.