pseudocoordinates

[John Dingley]

Hi,

(Apologies for the lack of Unicode!)

I have commented on John Dunn's "He went and broke his leg" as a
translation for  Russian "On slomal sebe nogu" indicating that the English
construction is mirrored in Swedish, i.e. "Han gick och bröt benet". These
constructions are known in the literature as "Pseudocoordinates" or
"Fake Coordinates" and besides the two languages mentioned, they
can be found in Danish, Norwegian, and Afrikaans, but not in Dutch  or
German. Other than English, the verb "take" can replace "go", e.g.
Swedish "Han tog och bröt benet".

Do such constructions occur in the Slavic languages? I believe they do in
Polish, e.g.

?Ona wzie,La och wLoz^yLa re,ke, do zimnej wody.
She went and put her hand in the cold water.

And I came across this possible Russian example on the mighty Google:

A server (win 2000 pro) vzjal i umer.
But the server went and died.

John Dingley

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