"Look less-powerful weapons"

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jun 3, 2012, at 5:36 PM, Randy Alexander wrote:

>
> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 5:31 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 3, 2012, at 1:08 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>>> Opening sentence in a WSJ article:
>>>
>>> "Take the nuclear option off the table, and some patents look
>> less-powerful
>>> weapons."
>>>
>>> I have never noticed this construction [N-look-N without a preposition or
>>> some form of to be] before in an edited publication.
>>
>> _look_ 'look to be' takes a predicative AdjP in English dialects
>> generally.  OED2 lists it as taking predicatives in general -- including NP
>> ("he looks a fool") and PP ("he looked to be in great anxiety") -- though
>> in fact these last two possibilities are usually associated with BrE rather
>> than AmE.
>>
>> perhaps the construction with NP and PP is spreading to AmE, or perhaps
>> the WSJ writer has some BrE influence in their speech.
>>
>
> I think that's a possibility, and I agree with everything above except
> "look to be" being BrE.
>
> COCA 1159/425,000,000
> BNC 207/100,000,000
>
> These numbers are pretty close, so "[look] to be" ([look] being the lemma)
> would have to be said just to be "pond agnostic".

no, that wasn't what i was saying. i was saying that "look" 'look to be be' + predicative other than AdjP was mostly BrE, not that "look to be" was.

arnold

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