I have an idea why
My apologies to those who happened upon the site today and were met with a database error message. The problem has miraculously resolved itself and will hopefully not come back (though I’m fairly sure what the cause is, and if it does come back it may be a few hours after I notice it before it is fixed).
Until next time, consider why preposition-deletion should be licenced in the same locations as NPIs are:
Do you have the faintest / any idea who that guy was? I have no idea who that guy was. *I’ve got an idea who that guy was. I’ve got an idea of who that guy was. ?I’ve got some idea who that guy was.
(Before anyone tries to give me counterexamples: don’t worry, I’ve already found about 30 of them in the BNC. This, however, dwarfs the 1000 or so that are under negation or in otherwise nonveridical contexts (or however you like to talk about NPI licensing.))
Hello, I happened across your blog and couldn’t help leaving a comment. Anyway, the starred example and question-marked example below are perfectly fine for me.
*I’ve got an idea who that guy was.
?I’ve got some idea who that guy was.
Also, regarding this line: “consider why preposition-deletion should be licenced in the same locations as NPIs are…”
I was wondering what you thought about preposition-deletion in conditionals, which also license NPIs, but don’t seem to care whether or not the preposition is deleted?
If he had any money, he’d be at the bar.
If he had an idea who that guy was, he wasn’t telling me about it.
If he had an idea of who that guy was, he wasn’t telling me about it.
The conditionals with and without prepositions are fine for me.
Oh, the prepositionless version under a conditional sounds very strange to me. In fact, if it has a sensible reading (maybe it does), then it has to be counterfactual.
If he had an idea who that guy was, he wouldn’t be sitting so close.
As for the conflicting judgements…well, what can I say? Maybe I was feeling over-sensitive that day. I still feel something is strange about my starred sentences, though it’s not necessarily “grammaticality” in the narrow sense.