{"id":1967,"date":"2024-04-24T11:46:40","date_gmt":"2024-04-24T15:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1967"},"modified":"2024-05-29T08:20:01","modified_gmt":"2024-05-29T12:20:01","slug":"minor-syntactic-innovation-english-be-crazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/minor-syntactic-innovation-english-be-crazy\/","title":{"rendered":"A minor syntactic innovation in English: “BE crazy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently became aware of an English syntactic construction I hadn’t noticed before. It involves the predicate BE crazy<\/em>, which itself is nothing new, but here the subject of that predicate is, essentially, quoted speech from a second party. I myself am apparently a user of this variant. For example, a friend told me of someone who describes themselves (on an online dating platform) as someone who …likes travel and darts<\/em>, and I responded, simply, L<\/em>ikes darts is crazy<\/em>. That is to say, I am making some kind of assertion that the description “likes darts”, or perhaps the speech act of describing oneself as such, is itself a bit odd. Now in this case, the subject is simply the quotation (with the travel and<\/em> part elided), and while this forms a constituent, a tensed VP, we don’t normally accept them as the subject of predicates. And I suspect constituenthood is not even required. So this is distinct from the ordinary use of BE crazy <\/em>with a nominal subject.<\/p>\n

I suspect, though I do not have the means to prove, this is a relatively recent innovation; I hear it from my peers (i.e., those of similar age, not my colleagues at work, who may be older) and students, but not often elsewhere. I also initially thought it might be associated with the Mid-Atlantic but I am no longer so sure.<\/p>\n

Your thoughts are welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently became aware of an English syntactic construction I hadn’t noticed before. It involves the predicate BE crazy, which itself is nothing new, but here the subject of that predicate is, essentially, quoted speech from a second party. I myself am apparently a user of this variant. For example, a friend told me of … Continue reading “A minor syntactic innovation in English: “BE crazy””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self","category-sociolinguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1967"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1976,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967\/revisions\/1976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}