Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!we13!ihnp4!harpo!decvax!cca!ima!inmet!jc From: jc@inmet.UUCP Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Final prepositions turn me on. - (nf) Message-ID: <1349@inmet.UUCP> Date: Sat, 5-May-84 03:15:55 EDT Article-I.D.: inmet.1349 Posted: Sat May 5 03:15:55 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 29-Apr-84 07:33:53 EDT Lines: 41 #N:inmet:7300031:000:1785 inmet!jc Apr 26 10:39:00 1984 Hey, guys, if you want to really confuse the medieval grammarians about final prepositions, bring up a sentence like "She turned me on." The grammarians would have us rephrase this as "She turned on me." Now, I don't know about your dialect, but in mine this isn't nearly as pleasant a thought! For you non-native speakers of English out there, I should explain that in the first sentence, "to turn x on" means to get x interested or excited about something (usually sex or drugs). In the second sentence, "to turn on x" means to attack or betray x. There are several ways of analyzing these sentences. One of the simplest is to classify "turn on" in the first sentence as a complex verb consisting of "turn" + the adverbial partical "on". The fact that "on" looks like a common preposition is not very relevant. In the second sentence, "turn on" is a true idiom; it consists of the simple verb "turn" + an adverbial prepositional phrase, just like your high-school teacher explained it. This is a nice "monkey-wrench-in-the-works" example. The only way to salvage it is to dig into the syntax a bit further, and recognize that "turn x on" is not an ungrammatical rephrasing of "turn on x", but rather a new sort of linguistic beast altogether. Does anyone out there have any more examples in this class? What we want is more cases where, in classical terminology, "subject verb object preposition" is not equivalent to "subject verb preposition object". Perhaps you can bring in other transformations, such as "object 'was' participle(verb) preposition 'by' subject". There oughta be some more of these for us to fool around with. (Oops!) John M Chambers [inmet!jc] Intermetrics, Inc. 735 Concord Ave. Cambridge, MA 02138