Bees again

[Debra Ziegeler]

The use of 'do' in
You be good for Grandma now and if you do I'll buy you an icecream

does sound a bit strange to me (a native speaker of Australian English).

It looks from all this discussion as though 'be' should be given a polysemy
analysis, in which it can sometimes be interpreted as 'become' or 'behave'.

But this is highly speculative. It would be more interesting to examine
a translation of this sentence in other languages, to see if verbs meaning
'be' are used in this context, especially those unrelated to English. What do
others think?

Debra Ziegeler