Jonathan Bobaljik: "light" verbs in English (reply to Heidi Harley)

[Martha McGinnis]

HH wrote:

>I agree that in a late-insertion approach "be"-support makes pretty
>good sense, at least when "be" is tensed. Distinguishing between
>"be"-support on the one hand and "have" and "do" support on the other
>is pretty easy, I think, as Carson suggests:
>-T is realized as "be" when the complement to TP is a small clause,
>-you get "do" when the complement to TP (or NegP) is a vP (and hence
>eventive),
>- you get "have" when the complement to TP is a saturated PP headed
>by P(have).

A quibble re: "do" being associated with "eventive" predicates, this
seems to be plausible for VP-focus and pseudo-cleft constructions of
the type discussed by Jackendoff (if I'm not mistaken, J. claims the
factor is transitivity, which I think is inaccurate):

(1)	What John did was
	[chase Fido / fail the exam / ?die suddenly / arrive late].
vs.

(2)	What John did was [*know French / *love Beethoven etc...]

However, exactly for the classical instances of do-"support", there
is no such eventive restriction:

(3)	John doesn't know French / like Beethoven / ...
(4)	John doesn't seem/happen to be from New York ...

Best to all,

-Jonathan


_______________________
Jonathan David Bobaljik
Department of Linguistics
McGill University
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http://www.mcgill.ca/linguistics/faculty/bobaljik