"come and" (V) as quasi-auxiliary

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Fri Nov 28 16:44:33 UTC 2008


Just heard in phone conversation: "in about an hour I'm going to come and be
taken off the pump". What's going to happen at that time is that a nurse is
going to come to the speaker's house and disconnect the speaker from a
medical infusion pump. So this seems to be an agentless passivization of "X
will come and take me off the pump", with "come and" treated as a kind of
auxiliary.

Mark Mandel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list