killed to death

[Michael Covarrubias]

Laurence Horn wrote:
> Could be a translation from the Chinese, Korean, Hindi, etc. where
> lexical causative verbs (e.g. "kill") don't entail their result state
> (without an explicit resultative adverb or secondary verb, e.g. "to
> death").  I've always thought English was not such a language, but
> perhaps that's changing.  There are 39,800 purported hits for "killed
> to death" and another 47,000 for "killed dead".
>
> LH
>

And another 16,100 for the threat "I'll kill you dead".

mhc

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