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From: need@bloomfield.uchicago.edu (Barbara Need)
Subject: Re: PBS is at it again---so are the Linguists
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Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 19:44:13 GMT
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In article <3ilqrv$sfs@newsbf02.news.aol.com> perotean@aol.com (Perotean)  
writes:

various comments deleted
 
> A few years ago, there was an affably
> "beard-stroking" article in _The Atlantic
> Monthly_ in which some sophomoric jackass
> made similar confusions between (among
> other words and parts of speech) the
> preposition "to" and the infinitive form "to." 
> There is absolutely no valid linguistic
> (ideational; semantic) relationship between a
> preposition and a verb, even an auxilliary one,
> except, of course, the obvious homonymous
> one.

If you meant ot say that there is no relationship between the _to_ in _to  
the store_ and _to_ in _want to go_, I need to diabuse you of the notion:  
they are, historically, the same word. They no longer have the same  
FUNCTION (in Modern English), but in Old English _to_ is a preposition  
which occurs before nouns and the infinitive (formally) a noun and showed  
up after the preposition in the dative case (_geliefan_ (inf. "to  
believe"), _to geliefanne_ (inf. in the dative, "to believe") 

more stuff deleted

> and legitimate
> language---which really did *evolve* way
> back before civilization---does not use verbs
> as nouns or vice versa; adjectives as adverbs
> or vice versa; or prepositions as auxilliary
> units or vice versa.

Well, I do not know what you mean by "legitimate language" which evolved  
back before civilization (are we talking about Proto-Indo-European, which  
may have had neither preopositions nor adverbs?); however, in Old English,  
adverbs were formally oblique (usually dative) forms of adjectives. That  
is, _gelic_ "similar, alike", _gelice_ "similarly". And all of the PIE  
languages had ways of making nouns from verbs and vice versa. Modern  
English just happens to do that with zero derivation (by using a noun in  
the syntactic frame of a verb, or a verb in the syntactic frame of a  
noun).

still more deleted

Barbara Need
University of Chicago--Linguistics
