_bees_

[Enrique Figueroa E.]

Sorry, but I don't quite see why a stative verb would not tolerate an
imperative, as in "Be here!" (in the sense of "Stay here, don't move!",
not in the more usual sense implying movement, i.e., "Come (and therefore
be) here!". Same thing with "Be quiet!", which may imply, or not, that
previously the addressee was not being quiet: ="stay quiet" or "become
quiet" ("stop making noise or talking")... Max

On Thu, 17 Apr 1997, Geoffrey S. Nathan wrote:

> At 03:24 AM 4/15/97 -0500, you wrote:
> >     Re _bees, beed_: the following judgment holds for me:
> >
> >     You be good for Grandma, now, and if you do / ??*are I'll buy you an
> >     ice-cream cone.
> >
> >     "Are" sounds pedantic if not just plain wrong.
> >     Anybody concur?
> I concur with Dave's judgment.
>         Furthermore, I seem to remember a paper back in the glory days of
> generative semantics about DO as an abstract underlying verb encoding
> volition, or agenthood (of the subject) or some such.  I think it was
> written by Haj.  It seems to me that uses such as 'be good' are non-stative
> (which is why they can occur with the imperative and/or
> progressive--another Generative Semantics argument), and hence heading
> towards more prototypical verb-hood.  Prototypical verbs, of course, encode
> actions rather than states.
>         I think this ties in, somehow, with the regularization of the inflection
> (bee-s), and relates also to the issue that Kiparsky and others have
> written about on the relation between derived meanings and regular
> morphology (the Toronto Maple Leafs debate).
>
> Geoff
>
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
> Department of Linguistics
> Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,
> Carbondale, IL, 62901 USA
> Phone:  +618 453-3421 (Office)   FAX +618 453-6527
> +618 549-0106 (Home)
>