Fucking shut the fuck up

[Russ McClay]

I've read PhD dissertations on the f-word, so
this is not a particularly remarkable article,
but the comments which follow it were certainly
interesting to me.

"The main syntactic problem is to determine whether
"the fuck" is being used as an pleonastic (semantically empty)
direct object of shut or as a pre-head modifier of the
preposition phrase (PP) headed by up. (Yes, the up of
shut up is a one-word PP. It is not an adverb X all the
traditional grammars are flat wrong on that. The
arguments are given in chapter 7 of The Cambridge Grammar
of the English Language, or more tersely in A Student's
Introduction to English Grammar.) And I think we can do this."

July 28 2009

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1608

Russ

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