"like," intrans.

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:38 PM -0700 9/19/06, Dave Robertson wrote:
>Isn't "like", with this "ellipsis of object", what the linguists call an
>unergative?  That is, a distinct category of intransitives.

Well, actually, an unergative is essentially an agentive
intransitive:  "He's smoking", "She ran", etc., as opposed to
unaccusatives, intransitives in which the sole central argument is
essentially a patient:  "The boat sank", "The fire is smoldering".
In some analyses, the arguments in the former are taken to constitute
underlying subjects, those in the latter underlying objects.  Some
unergatives do correspond to transitives (that is, either
"underlying" transitives or intransitives corresponding to surface
transitives) lacking an overt object:  "He's eating", "They've killed
(before)".  These would more specifically be called (at least
traditionally) transitives used "absolutely", or in more recent (but
not current) syntactic lingo "unspecified object deletion" (similar
to "ellipsis of object" as noted above).

LH

>
>And the forms "me likey" etc. should probably be attributed to (mock-)
>Chinese Pidgin English (also known by other names)--which specialists
>consider a language distinct from English.  "The Common Foreign Language of
>the Red-Haired People" (1835) includes CPE entries for /laih geih/ "likee"
>and /nah laih geih/ "nah likee".  (Reproduced in Kingsley Bolton's 2003
>"Chinese Englishes: A Sociolinguistic History".)
>
>--Dave R.
>
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 11:37 AM
>Subject: Re: "like," intrans.
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail
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>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>here's
>>the OED:
>>
>>DRAFT ADDITIONS JUNE 2003
>>
>>     enjoy, v.
>>
>>  [In later use, prob. after dialectal Yiddish genist.] In imper.,
>>with ellipsis of object: take pleasure in the thing (freq. food or
>>drink) being presented.
>
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