FW: to be or not to be...

[Steven Pinker]

-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Pinker [mailto:pinker at imap.media.mit.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2000 1:37 AM
To: Antonella
Subject: RE: to be or not to be...

Dear Antonella,

The simplest explanation is that your Part Two answers your Part One: the
English imperative is based on the infinitive, not the second-person
present. For virtually every verb those two theories are indistinguishable,
but "be," which is irregular in the second-person present, shows that the
first theory is preferable. (We know that "are" is the irregular
odd-man-out, not "be," because most of the other forms of "be" based on the
infinitive - "being," subjunctive "let it be," untensed "all that you can
be," and so on, are just like all the other verbs in English).

Note that it is not necessary that the imperative literally be "derived
from" any other inflectional category - one could more simply say that there
are four forms of the English verb (-s, -ed, -ing, zero) which are linked in
one-to-many fashion to inflectional paradigm slots (preterite, 3rd person
singular, participle, infinitive, imperative, subjunctive, etc.) following
certain tendencies and constraints of paradigm construction (discussed in
Carstairs-McCarthy and in my 1984/1996 book). That is, "imperative" is
simply linked to "zero."  Arguments for separate levels of representation
for the phonological content of affixes and their inflectional categories
can be found in Mark Aronoff's "Morphology by Itself" and in my "Words and
Rules" (pp. 29-33).

The simplest explanation of "Thanks" is that it is a noun (some kind of
pluralia tantum derived from the verb), as we see in "Many thanks" and "No
thanks to you," and in pragmatically similar utterances like "Cheers,"
"Regards," and "Hugs and kisses." The commonly heard "This is the thanks I
get" (a noun, but not a plural) complicates the story but perhaps is an
example of how certain plurals can become reanalyzed as mass nouns (e.g.,
"data.').

--Steve Pinker