Noncompositional

…or, “some hint at why Russell could possibly have named this blog noncompositional.”

There are several (oh, call them) verbal constructions in English that incorporate a head verb with it. This it may or may not be referential, but it has certain other properties. It is destressed and cannot be fronted for passivization, nor questioned (i.e., there is no wh-…V for the V-it). Some examples:

All I have to say is, that dude better watch it with dumb comments like that. Hold it right there, man, just cool it for a sec. The article shows pictures of young, tattooed gang members kickin’ it – frolicking, laughing, roughhousing and just having a swell time. So I just kind of winged it and talked about how special the cat was. So live it up this week and treat yourself to the pleasures of low-fat foods. Pat, do you want to take it from here? Yeah – yeah, no, look it, here’s what happened, here’s what happened.

For none of these is it clear that there is any antecedent that the it is referring to, but certainly some of them seem referential. In particular, live it (up) and take it have to do with processes or activities, the agents of which are often the subjects of these verbs. Wing it, although a very high-frequency collocation, may not strictly belong in this category, since it can take a more specific complement, like the speech. (Interestingly, this is originally theater slang, where the person who “winged” it learned the part in the wings, on the spot).

Then there are those like watch it, cool it, and kick it. These almost certainly came from semantically compositional phrases, and with the its being so common with these phrases, reanalysis kicked in and made these guys into a unit. Or so one explanation might go. Take, for instance, watch it. The first attested example in the OED goes:

‘Don’t yer go lendin’ money to any other blokes wot ain’t fit to be trusted.’ ‘I’ll watch it.’

This definitely seems like the type of sentence that invites the hearer to reanalyze the phrase, overlooking the possibility that it refers to, say, the money. Cool it may have similar origins, particularly if it started a jazz jargon, as the adjective cool did.

Then we’ve got look it, which is the result of another reanalysis, from look at to look it (and onward to lookie). Actually, the whole story with look is much more complicated, and there are various discourse uses for the variants. Lookit (and lookit here, look here, et al) is often used as a preface to some step in argumentation, especially when leading to some conclusion that the addressee is unwilling to accept based on the facts (lookit, you’re too young, so don’t even try to play with the big boys). On the other hand, looky here functions to draw attention to coming discourse (for ridicule, often), but does not have an argumentation function.

These guys have some more discourse quirks: for instance, look it is used purely in the imperative (if it can be called such), and can’t take modals (*you oughtta/better look it). Watch it also likes to be imperative, though it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. However, I don’t think it can be used with a 3rd person: *He never watches it (with…), *I told her to be careful with the watergun, so I think she watched it.

Finally, there’s the issue of the semantics of the verb part of these constructions. In the “compositional” cases, like take it (from here, certainly I’m willing to say that the it is referential, but what about the take part? It seems that some sort of mechanism is needed to express the “unit” aspect as well as the compositional aspect, and of course the connection with other senses of take.