The far reaches of GoToGo

From Laura Staum Casasanto this morning:

Here is a sentence taken straight from an email about encouraging students to fill out course evaluations at Stony Brook:

[(1)] Did you know? Students can complete their evaluations on their mobile devices, and some instructors have found success with taking the first 10 minutes of class and ask their students to do the evaluations.

Wow, she said, and I concur. This is formally like classic GoToGo, but deviating from central examples in two respects. And it’s the second such example Laura has found.

QSV

The topic of the go get (or go + V) construction in English (Let’s go see what’s happening) has now come up (in comments) in connection with V + V compounds (sleep walk, stir-fry). I’ve spent years probing this construction, mostly in collaboration with Geoff Pullum, so I thought this would be a good time to reproduce a summary I wrote in 2000 for the Usenet group sci.lang (with editorial amendments and additions over the years).

Note: This is going to be long and pretty technical. And you should first read (at least) my 2007 Language Log posting “Go, go, go!”, which will put things in context and set aside a collection of issues off the main topic.

I feel like sushi

A recent Rhymes With Orange:

Among the many uses of the verb feel is is the one OED2 glosses as:

to feel like (doing something): to have an inclination for

with the usage note “(? orig. U.S.; now common)” and the usage label “colloq. or vulgar” (I wouldn’t say that vulgar is appropriate now, even if it was in 1989, but colloquial is about right). In the cartoon, this sense competes with a sense in which the subject of the verb is the source of a touch perception (with the experiencer of this perception optionally expressed by a PP in to).

seem as if that

Heard this morning in an interview on NPR, an instance of seem as if + that-clause, where an unmarked complement clause would be standard. Many examples can be found on the net, with seem and with other perception verbs (look, sound, feel), so as if joins complementizer like in allowing that-clause complements as a (non-standard) option (discussion of like here).

feel like that

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.

Dual VPE

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.

Unable to help

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.

Data points: WH-that 12/4/10

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.