My point was that "looked after" is a prepositional verb, not a phrasal verb as was suggested in the thread. I've been trying to understand the difference. It seems that many people are not aware that there is one. My error, I misunderstood.

the heavier the complement the more grammatical it seems I mean heavy NP-shifting as you show in this example: Who have we issued the new uniforms with the navy blue stripes so far this month? (OOF!) It's better to say "Who have we

Ok, here's what a friend of mine said... 1a. who did you give the book to? 1b. *who did you give the book? 1c. who was given the book? The derivational source of (1a) is as discussed previously: you give the book to who? -> who did you

"Looked after" isn't a transitive phrasal verb, correct? For one thing, I can stick an adverbial between the lexical verb and the prep: Looked silently after. But I can't split it with the object as I think you can with a transitive phrasal verb:

I'm not sure anyone has actually compiled a set of "rules" There are many good books (and not so good books) on modal logic. Works by David Lewis such as On the plurality of worlds and a general search on "modal logic" would yield decent

I don't beleive that it is proper to say that a modal has a past "tense." Modals can not be inflected for tense. Dear Cacarr, modals can be inflected for tense but only syntactic tense.

I got lost here. If it's not a word at this stage, but only a logical concept, how can everyone's interpretation of the word (which is not a word at this stage) be the same across all languages? Logic does not vary across languages. So the

This is however ungrammatical: -> *who did you give the book Oh, I meant to add that its ungrammatical by my grammaticality judgment. So I try to explain its ungrammaticality from that point of view. If it's ok for you then your grammar

Dear paco, "who was given the book?" as a wh-question obtained by changing the subject to 'who' in "he/she was given the book" Unlikely, what motivates the change of subject? The wh-word should already be in your derivation when you

I'll share my thoughts, albeit from a transformational standpoint, T represents traces. The child was given to whom -> -i was-j the child Tj given Ti who was given to whom -> -i was-j who Tj given Ti *To whom was whom given? I'd say