"come and" (V) as quasi-auxiliary

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Sat Nov 29 01:22:57 UTC 2008


Gerald's analysis of this as a syntactic blend seems to be confirmed.
On hearing the exact quote, the speaker commented, "Is that what I
said? I meant something like 'The infusion nurse will come and I'll be
taken off the pump.'"

Mark Mandel



On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at mst.edu> wrote:
>     If there are no other examples of this sort of usage, we may deal =
> with a syntactic blend in this particular case:=20
> =20
> "In about an hour I'm going to be taken off the pump" + "In about an =
> hour a nurse is going to come and take me off the pump."
> =20
> Gerald Cohen
>
> ________________________________
>
> Original message from Mark Mandel,  Fri 11/28/2008 10:44 AM:
>
> Just heard in phone conversation: "in about an hour I'm going to come =
> and be
> taken off the pump". What's going to happen at that time is that a nurse =
> is
> going to come to the speaker's house and disconnect the speaker from a
> medical infusion pump. So this seems to be an agentless passivization of =
> "X
> will come and take me off the pump", with "come and" treated as a kind =
> of
> auxiliary.
>
> Mark Mandel

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