do, v.i.

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:42 PM -0500 1/17/11, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
>Then there is the more confusing [or is it _less_ confusing?]
>
>"What is it that you do do?"
>
>The first one is just an auxiliary, but is the second transitive?
>
The second one here is fully transitive, with the object "extracted";
it's no more intransitive than "What do you do", which on some
syntactic accounts is treated as "What do you do t", where "t" is the
trace of the "moved" wh-word "what", alternately appearing in situ in
echo questions like "You do what?"  True intransitives don't permit
this configuration:  *What is it that you sleep?

LH

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