Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 12:39:26 EDT From: Larry Horn Subject: Re: Your mail Ron writes >Larry writes: >>Quang cites the contrasts > >Damn {God/*Himself} > >Goddamn {God/*Himself} >>to argue against the analysis in which >>God is the underlying subject of such >>verbs". > >I have never undestood this argument. It seems to me that "Damn!" is a >shortening of "Damn it!" which in turn has the "underlying" structure "May >God Damn it!" Who else would do the damning but God? How can anything other >than God be the LOGICAL subject of "damn" (or "bless")? The fact that "*God >damn himself!" is unacceptable to most people is irrelevant, since "May God >damn himself!" is acceptable--the constraint is on the "deletion" of "May" >before the reflexive. What Quang ends up positing (and this was in the days of VERY abstract deep structures, especially chez McCawley, Quang's alter-ego) is Epithet --> Quasi-verb NP --so that Damn you, Fuck you, etc. have no underlying subject. Seems right to me. The extension to Bless you is, admittedly, somewhat speculative and may differ according to the religious convictions of the blesser. (Notice, in- cidently, that I am using "blesser" here metalinguistically and do not intend transcendental reference.) >>If my intuitions are correct, God cannot >>be the subject of "bless" . . . >>It's clearly an empirical question. >Since this has never happened to me (or to anyone else who is signed up for >ads-l) I'm not sure that it is relevant. I'm even less sure how this thought >experiment is an "empirical" question... Sorry. I thought I could get away without the smiley on that one. > (The use of reflexives as a test for "subjecthood" is a bit murky, anyway, > e.g., one can say either, "I aimed the gun at myself" or "I aimed the gun at > me.") Actually, this one I'll go to the mat for. There's a difference between object reflexives, whose governance conditions seem to be almost purely grammatical, and non-object reflexives, which (especially when there IS a direct object) are determined by a complex set of conditions resulting in what may seem to be optionality (as in the aim case above) but on closer examination aren't really a matter of mere "free variation"; among those writing insightfully on these are Kuno (_Syntactic Theory_), discussing such pairs as "She pulled the coat around her/herself". The relevant example in our case is not "I aimed the gun at me/myself" but "I shot myself/*me", or "Don't shoot yourself/*you". Larry obADS: Then there are the indirect object non-argument cases we've touched on here--I'm gonna get {me/myself} a beer, He's gonna find him a wife,...