A discussion of constraints on ellipsis after auxiliaries in English focuses on a particular analytic problem concerning nonfinite verb phrases using "be", which has a historical dimension. A solution involving the morphological claim about the copula and its incorporation of tense-distinctions is proposed and discussed in the context of…

Conversion, the deliberate transfer of a word from one part of speech to another without any change in its form, is a typically English phenomenon, conditioned but not caused by the extensive wearing-off of word endings and weakening of inflections. It has typically been treated as a syntactic matter, since no new words are produced, and its…

Transferred epithets, adjectives that appear to have been transferred from adverb to prenominal position (e.g., "I balanced a thoughtful lump of sugar..."), have been viewed as unanalyzable both grammatically and from the viewpoint of transformational derivation. However, another explanation is that these combinations show patterns…