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CGEL trees.
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"hung up on" idiom: verbal or adjectival? #87

Open nschneid opened 1 year ago

nschneid commented 1 year ago

The sentence: "I just get hung up on 'Christians', as they're the dominant form where I come from."

One can be hung up on something, and no by-phrase is permissible, suggesting to me that it's adjectival.

OTOH, the complementation with two PPs ("up" and "on...") is characteristic of verbs. We have a rule that only VPs allow ternary branching with multiple :Comps. Does this mean we need layered AdjPs?

BrettRey commented 1 year ago

Deverbal words are often going to have argument structures that look like those of verbs. Consider: a bet with Nathan for $5 that we can find other such cases. I'm not sure what to do with this. I trust John about it, but the motivation for only allowing it on VPs wasn't clear to me.