do, v.i.

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Mon Jan 17 21:05:54 UTC 2011


Risking a one-liner--that was my understanding. Thanks.

     VS-)

On 1/17/2011 3:47 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> 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?

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