"Look less-powerful weapons"

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jun 3, 2012, at 11:45 PM, Randy Alexander wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Sorry I didn't understand that clearly.
>
> If I now understand you correctly, you're saying that "[look] to be +
> {predicative that's not an AdjP}" is mostly BrE.  But while "[look]" is
> restricted in AmE to be followed only by predicative complements in the
> form of AdjPs, "[look] to be" has no such restriction in AmE, because the
> predicative complements are following [be], and not [look], so we can have
> NPs, PPs, AdjPs, and a few different kinds of complement clauses.

yes.

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