Noncompositional

In certain circles, one of the more (in)famous bits of English syntax is the resultative construction, illustrated (again (in)famously) in:

Gazelles hammered the metal flat.

Where the adjective flat is added after the full sentence, indicating the resultant state of the direct object (the metal). Other possibilities are there: skin the cat bare, push the door shut, shoot the flamingo dead. This is a particular class of resultative: the type where you can remove the adjective and still have a well-formed transitive sentence. There are other varieties: run your shoes bare, where *run your shoes is bad; laugh yourself hoarse, with the characteristic “dummy” reflexive object.

The other day I found my way (ahem) to the EcoGeek blog on Yahoo!, and saw an article on a new type of washing machine that uses much less water and a lot more little plastic chips (that is, >0) to clean clothes without as much waste. The teaser line reads:

British company Xeros is testing a machine that uses plastic chips to agitate clothes clean.

I just smiled when I saw this sentence. Ah, grammar in action.

Incidentally, this is an exception to an observation in Adele Goldberg’s book Constructions that

[N]o speakers I checked with find instrument subjects acceptable

I guess this doesn’t contradict her claim that no one she checked with liked the sentences. But you know what I mean. Machine is an instrument subject (or rather, the that which is coindexed with it is an instrument subject). (And note that she only makes that claim with respect to cases where the verb is already a two-place predicate)

While we’re on the topic of linguistic constructions, consider these:

In fact, it’s downright unpatriotic to want to legislate Lowe’s from capitalizing on the Spanish-speaking market.

The goal of any smoking ban ordinance should be to protect these people, not to try and legislate people to quit smoking.

The first one was at an LA Times blog post on McCain and pushing one for English–actually, from one of the commenters. This is a nice example of using one word with the syntax of another: in this case, a “preventative” verb like keep, prevent, etc., take an NP and a PPing-from, but rather than using one of those, the commenter used legislate to indicate exactly how the preventing would be done. Same goes for the second sentence, but it uses the syntax of force (or something similar) instead. (some uses also seem to act like allow rather than force).

Just to do something minimal to prevent embarrassment, I checked the BYU Corpus of American English for legislate…to and legislate…from (with a window of 4). The former got two possible hit, one from 1998 in the ABA Journal (you can’t legislate people to obey the law), and one from CBS Morning in 2000 (get the government to — to legislate and force people to be moral), though that one might be right-node wrapping. There were no positive hits for legislate…from. Not surprisingly, nearly all of those involved benches. Might be a more thorough examination is needed.