adverb

[kohyoongliat]

You mean grammarians are not experts?

Some native and non-native speakers even question grammarians, saying they are only compiling what they hear spoken and written by native speakers. They compile what is spoken by the majority.

Some books are on pure grammar. Others are on usage of words, explaining the difference/s between words and how the words should be used. So I think English experts should be good at both. Even some native speakers are uncertain when asked about punctuation. So it is a bit hard to split hairs over the term "English experts'.

[Casiopea]

Question aside: Why isn't the /p/ included among the phonemes?

There are two /p/'s in pushed open, but for the sake of efficiency, not to mention phonological theory; i.e., English has just the one /p/ phoneme, not two), just the one is sufficient to note.

And I'd split the /o/-phoneme into the phones [o] and - is that the "great, lost" phone #8? I'm not an expert, really.

Yes and no. Again, it all depends on how deep you want to go. We're dealing with phonetics (the study of human sounds) at that level, not phonemes (the study of distinctive sounds that are represented by abstract units that you cannot pronounce.) The phrase spin pots, for example, has two [p]'s that are represented by the phoneme /p/. The [p] in spin is different from the [p] in pots. The latter has a great puff of air when it's released, whereas the former doesn't have as great a puff of air. You can test this yourself using a piece of paper. Hold it in front of your lips, say spin; the paper shouldn't move; then say pots. The paper should move. Now, those two sounds are different phonetically, but they aren't phonemically. They are not distinctive in English; they aren't part of English's phonemic alphabet; speakers can't tell them apart like [p] and [b], for example, which are contrastive and distinctive. The two p's we're talking about are, however, distinctive in other languages, like say Hindi, in which aspirated and unaspirted p's exist. In short, not all p's are the same across languages.

Just as all human languages (to my knowledge) have [p]'s--but then again there's that joke about languages spoken in Nunavut, which I won't go into here--all languages have verbs, but verbs aren't interpreted the same way in all languages. Headedness varies. In some languages, the verb's object comes before the verb (SOV, e.g., Japanese), and in other languages it comes after the verb (SVO; e.g., English). That's just the beginning, though. There are the adverbs to consider. Where do they go? Are they pre- or post-modifiers, or both? That's a question language learners deal with when learning a language whose headedness is different from their first language. Add to that the headedness of verb-verb compounds, which are found with some regularity in the world's languages, and some learners will indeed pause when it comes to English phrasal verbs like pushed open.

How is it structured? Does tense play a role? Is pushed a participle functioning as an adverb? Of course, it's not, but that's actually the whole point. We don't know what the learner is thinking, because we don't know the person's first language background, nor do we know that person's learning style, or how that person is interpreting the verb phrase; e.g., push to open; open by pushing, and so on. (I trust that addresses Andrew's concerns regarding my question whether open is a verb or an adverb. It's not a linguistic analysis, per se, Andrew. It's more along the lines of knowing what's behind a question, and not necessarily for the sake of the person who posted the question initially, but rather for the audience as a whole.)

I'm very interested in the idea that "open" in "pushed open" can be a verb. (It's especially interesting to hear about the mistake "pushed opens" etc.) Is there a term I can google?

Those are very good questions. What I can tell you is that pushed open is considered a phrasal verb in English. For a deeper analysis, you could goggle V-V compounds--Japanese and Chinese are just two. You may find, especially if you teach English as a second or other language, that language errors, like *pushed opens, betray a hidden code, which means our students aren't making what appear to be mistakes but rather are factoring language at a very complex level. It's that level of computation that excites me. ("Make errors!" I demand of my students. "Teach me your code"; i.e., show me how you are interpreting the language.)

(Ad hoc, I find it different from all other "verb+bare infinitive"-constructions, such as "He helped open the door.")

Very interesting, indeed. How so? (Show me your code. )

All the best.

[Ben_Adam]

If you get such big a deal out of this, I could be pleased to watch you dicsussing grammar in Serbian... :D :D

Lol...

[Casiopea]

... in all the verb-verb combinations I can think of they are active/stative combinations, such as "he died happy".

Just a quick and honest question. How is died happy a V-V compound?

[bianca]

I'm having so much fun in this thread! Really, I'm learning new things...

[Casiopea]

He pushed the door open.

My opinion is:

1. The syntactical pattern in the sentence is:

Subject (he) - Predicate (aux.verb: pushed) - Object (the door)- Predicate (adj: open).

I like your analysis and I have one question: Isn't pushed the main verb? Why 'aux'?

"Open" is never an adverb (openly is), and no way a prepostion! It can only be a verb or an adjective.

Open can be an adverb, just as wide in open wide is an adverb. The following is from The Particularity of Particles, bottom of page 6:

The claim that particles are intransitive prepositions [they don't take a object]also raises a problem for some particle-like elements that are not prepositional, such as open in push open the door, short in cut short the speech, and go in let go the rope, all of which can appear in the particle position.

All the best.

[Dawnstorm]

I wish I knew how to do that! Many years ago, before Windows 95 even, I had a little programme from Post-It that did just that.

Wish I could help. I had a hardware solution in mind: paper post-its. (Of course, if I remember to put up the post-it... )

[interesting things about phones/phonemes]

Just saying thanks and not going any deeper, because it's really off-topic. (About the phoneme-list: I didn't go that deep, really. The misunderstanding was quite simple. You listed the phonemes in order of appearance and I read it as a representation of the word in phonemes [a misunderstanding that would not have occurred if no phoneme had been repeated, hehe]).

Those are very good questions. What I can tell you is that pushed open is considered a phrasal verb in English. For a deeper analysis, you could goggle V-V compounds--Japanese and Chinese are just two. You may find, especially if you teach English as a second or other language, that language errors, like *pushed opens, betray a hidden code, which means our students aren't making what appear to be mistakes but rather are factoring language at a very complex level. It's that level of computation that excites me. ("Make errors!" I demand of my students. "Teach me your code"; i.e., show me how you are interpreting the language.)

That's where we meet. Explaining English structure is easier if you know the others native tongue (and you keep learning).

What I found especially intriguing are the two words "even children" (which I thought referred to 1st language acquisition). Fascinating.

Very interesting, indeed. How so? (Show me your code. )

Well my example was:

He helped open the door.

a) He helped the door.
b) He opened the door.

a) makes no sense (In this sentence, "help" is intransitive, but the sentence could have been "He helped me open the door.") but b) does.

Practical example (remember for later): "He didn't open the door; he helped open the door."

Compare:

He pushed open the door.

a) He pushed the door.
b) He opened the door.

Both make sense. And you can't really say: "He didn't push the door; he opened the door."

All verb + verb constructions I can think of have some sort of progression: auxilary + main; modal + main; I'm unsure how to label the "helped open" example, but "help" definitely acts on "open". The same seems to be true for "made believe that" or "made do with".

If I were told to use the verbs "push" and "open" in a sentence following each other, I'd come up with:

He pushed, opened the door. (A rather literary technique that usually places emphasis on sequence. "He walked, skipped, ran down the road.")

I can't think of any other verb(inflected)+verb(bare infinitive) constructions where the verbs are complementary in the same way that they are in "pushed open (the door)".

I suspect that this is an error in connecting the sentence elements, and the train of thought is "He pushed the door. He opens the door."

That's an interesting idea. (Assuming this: why the tense shift? Is "present tense" some kind of default, before the infinitive takes over? Is it a slip of mind?)

[bianca]

I like your analysis and I have one question: Isn't pushed the main verb? Why 'aux'?







Open can be an adverb, just as wide in open wide is an adverb. The following is from The Particularity of Particles, bottom of page 6:

The claim that particles are intransitive prepositions [they don't take a object]also raises a problem for some particle-like elements that are not prepositional, such as open in push open the door, short in cut short the speech, and go in let go the rope, all of which can appear in the particle position.

All the best.

you're right about "push" being a main verb, I don't know what I was thinking. Thanks for correcting me. But open is either an adjective or a verb. An adverb modifies a verb, but open modifies the noun "door", not the verb "push". Plus, in correct language the suffix -ly is needed to make an adverb.

"Open wide" -is completely wrong. what do you mean?(the door is wide open, open the door widely)
Open is both an adjective and a verb, respectively. (no adverb)

In the above text I've found two grammar mistakes: "a object" and "push open the door". How can you NOT see it's incorrect language, and trust the text's explanation of grammar?

[Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim]

That's a very good question! Is open an adverb or a verb? (Psst. It's definitely not an adjective in I pushed open the door.)

Note that, push open, meaning to open something by pushing, is a verb-verb compound semantically, with open as the head of the phrase and pushed as its modifier. However, pushed carries tense, which makes it the main verb and the head of the phrase syntactically. Thus: if pushed open is interpreted as a phrasl verb, open becomes a modifier. Why?

[1] I pushed open the door.
[2] I pushed the door open.



All the best.

Some more ideas:
1. Open can be seen as an adjective: the verb push is a stative verb. "pushed the door open" has the same meaning as "got the door open" I made it open. So "open" is an adjective. There are many verbs in English which behave in this way: become, be, get, make, grow, go: the food went bad, turn, remain
2. Open can be seen as a verb as in: I stayed put

[kohyoongliat]

My apologies. I accidentally submitted this here.

I have managed 20 internal and external projects.

Does it mean I have managed 2O projects altogether? Or 20 internal and 20 external projects?

I would interpret as 20 projects.

Am I correct?

Thanks in advance.