"Something there is that doesn=?windows-1252?Q?=92t_?=love retroactivity."

[Laurence Horn]

FWIW, I demur on the analysis.  As I said earlier, I think it's just topicalization of an indefinite, rare but (as work by Prince, Ward, Birner, Gundel et al shows) not unprecedented, even outside poetic contexts.  No heavy NP shift since the relative clause in question ("that doesn't love a wall") stays put, while its head is extracted (or lopped off and tossed forward).  The source is "There is something that doesn't love a wall".  Note that your immediate source below is *really* awkward, much more so than Frost's line.  Let a hundred analyses bloom.

LH

On Jan 6, 2014, at 11:57 AM, Neal Whitman wrote:

> It's an allusion to the Robert Frost poem about walls, I assumed, and in
> the poem I figure Frost did it for metrical reasons. As for correctness,
> I take it to be a topicalization ("Something that doesn't love a wall,
> there is") combined with heavy NP shift. So technically correct, but
> awkward.
>
> Neal
>
> On 1/6/2014 10:45 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      =?windows-1252?Q?=22Something_there_is_that_doesn=92t_love_retroa
>>               ctivit?= =?windows-1252?Q?y=2E=22?=
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I saw this today in the NYTimes:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/opinion/greenhouse-crack-cocaine-limbo.html
>>
>> It feels wrong to me, but I can't put my finger on it. Is it technically
>> correct, but too Yoda-like? Help, please.
>>
>> DanG
>>
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