defend = 'defend against'

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Dec 13, 2012, at 7:39 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> It may have something to do with people wanting to avoid prepositions
> whenever they can. But why? To conserve planetary oxygen? Just a tentative
> SWAG.

i've posted a number of times on "transitivizing P-deletion", a syntactic development that potentially serves two purposes: (a) brevity; (b) indicating, iconically, a tighter sematic/pragmatic bond between verb and object than the P-marked variant does.

arnold

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