Crazy grammar

Lazar   Sun Apr 01, 2007 7:27 pm GMT
Recently I've been thinking about some really interesting phenomena that can be found in English (especially vernacular English).

One of these is the "dative passive":

"My sister was given the car."
"They were given permission."
"I was told that..."
"He was told to wait."

~~~

Another cool one is the "prepositional passive":

"They were laughed at."
"You're not simply lectured at by professors."

And I don't think those would even be considered phrasal verbs.

~~~

And one of my very favorites, what I like to call the "empty infinitive".

"I haven't seen it yet, but I'd like to".
"Do you want to?"

This is basically the opposite of the bare infinitive ("Let's eat!") - here, the body of the infinitive has been removed, and the infinitive marker "to" is left as an empty shell.

~~~

And one that doesn't occur in my dialect, but which I know Uriel has, is the use of "anymore" in non-negative contexts.

"Gas is so expensive anymore!"

~~~

So if you know of any interesting grammatical phenomenon, especially if it's specific to your dialect, then bring it up here.
Travis   Sun Apr 01, 2007 8:14 pm GMT
>>This is basically the opposite of the bare infinitive ("Let's eat!") - here, the body of the infinitive has been removed, and the infinitive marker "to" is left as an empty shell.<<

This seems akin to how "to" for an infinitive clause following another verb seems to have become more tightly bound to the verb it follows than to the infinitive it marks (which already can become separated from it by intervening adverbs and like). In cases like "have to", "need to", "be supposed to", "want to", "have got to", "used to", and so on it seems to almost have become a fixed part of the quasimodal construction rather than part of some following infinitive clause.
Josh Lalonde   Sun Apr 01, 2007 10:05 pm GMT
These aren't specific to my dialect, but they're interesting nonetheless:

1. Impersonal 'they'
"Someone hit my car, and they just drove off."

2. The 'intentional infinitive' (?)
"What am I to do?"
Travis   Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:00 am GMT
Here is one construction for making a counterfactual conditional clauses (which underlying are probably subjunctive) which I always thought of as interesting, if quite standard, that just came to mind:

"Were he to drive his car, the muffler would fall off."
"I would first look on Bugtraq for vulnerabilities, were I to consider compromising this system".
Josh Lalonde   Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:20 pm GMT
One that came up on another thread: the middle voice. This must be awful for ESL students, especially since it isn't really taught in school (maybe there's a conspiracy?). "The roast is cooking in the oven." Cooking what? I wouldn't want to have to explain this one after having taught the difference between active and passive.
Geoff_One   Tue Apr 03, 2007 12:59 am GMT
The split infinitive as used in "Star Trek":

To boldly go where no man has gone before.
Travis   Tue Apr 03, 2007 1:57 am GMT
Here is a sort of adverbial clause-ish construction that I find interesting:

"He ran as fast as he could, him wanting to escape the incoming rocket porcupines."
"The dog barked loudly, it trying to defend its freshly claimed territory."
Lazar   Sat Apr 07, 2007 7:06 pm GMT
One really interesting expression is "among the rest" (which is discussed here: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=334709 for example). You would expect it to mean "among those that I didn't just specify", but in fact it has the totally counterintuitive meaning of "among those that I *did* just specify".

I first encountered this expression in "A Christmas Carol" by Dickens, in which Scrooge's newphew says: "There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest." My initial reaction when I saw this was, 'whaa?' ;-) But I've come to really like this expression - it's extremely concise, in fact - and I've started throwing it into my speech occasionally for fun.
Lazar   Sat Apr 07, 2007 7:08 pm GMT
<newphew> should be <nephew>.