What a big mess construction is so big that there’s no make sense of it all?
What makes big mess construction a noun phrase?
Mary was good
Here, with good and bad is predicative adjective.
Was Mary as good as Linda?
“as’ or “…as” is an adverb of degree specifying how good she is. If we have been thinking the full story of this, why there is still ambiguity in that story? Why is she so good at what?
Mary was as good a cook as Linda
Now the whole phrase “as good a cook as Linda” becomes what is known as the “big mess construction”. Why the adjective good is not the noun cook?
If an adverb expresses “too”, “so”, “as” etc, can you only consist of an indefinite article and that noun as the abstract object of a noun?
Does it possible that the phrase in bold (a cook) is a complement of ‘as’ and other adverbs of degree, that clarifies what Mary was as good at being?
What is your opinion on “the government of the world”?
This pattern is best understood as an abbreviated form. Mary is as good as a cook as Linda is.
Is it real that Linda and Mary are better than Linda because of their different strengths and weaknesses in cooking?
Certainly, sometimes doing very well with dancing, driving in cars and when it comes to it being so, to drive it is wrong to do that.
Am I supposed to say, either “Mary is as good as a cook as Linda” or “her marriage is in good shape”?
What is the best way to ask a question that you asked 2 years ago? This is what I have come up with!
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The Big Mess Construction is an adjective phrase (and an adjective as the head) not a noun phrase.
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Note: The adverbs ‘too’,’so’, ‘how’, ‘as’ and so forth have an optional prepositional phrase “of something’as a complement.
Why
is it good for a cook?
The adjective “good” is the head of this phrase. Adverb ‘as’ is an adjunct. PP ‘of a cook’ is the complement. This post is going to be about ‘old-time’,
'of' and what is
being deleted resulting in: ‘Still a good cook’, which is how this is most often said. No one deletes ‘of’ in these constructions.
The BMC is normally
a predicate adjective phrase, but often it appears to be the subject of a clause or the object of a verb – contradicting the theory that it’s an adjective phrase entirely. Whereas adjectives can be subject but object?
The company had never faced anything that very specific and... difficult. *
My theory is that this a complex ellipsis where the head is deleted. In a full sentence, the company would
say: "The company had never faced any problem that was so difficult as to be an employee of the company."
How did you prepare for the 2017 YTO?
This pattern is best understood as an abbreviated form. Mary is as good as a cook as Linda is.
Is it real that Linda and Mary are better than Linda because of their different strengths and weaknesses in cooking?
Certainly, sometimes doing very well with dancing, driving in cars and when it comes to it being so, to drive it is wrong to do that.
Am I supposed to say, either “Mary is as good as a cook as Linda” or “her marriage is in good shape”?
I’d not met The Big Mess Construction and I don’t think ‘Mary was as good a cook as Linda’ is it, nor close to it. I know many people that Laurel Happos’s elucidation seems much better and well supported in
all the definitions here, anyway: http://www.cademia.org/. I feel that ‘The Big Mess Construction’ (BMC) exemplified in corpus examples ‘like It was prominent A punctuation (*so a prominent punctuation) in the landscape’ is peculiar in that it has a predeterminer adjective followed by an NP with the indefinite article a/an. The BMC construction can be introduced only by a limited set of degree words like so, too, how, this, that, and so forth, as seen from ‘a somewhat underdeveloped country/*somewhat underdeveloped a country’ or ‘a very big house/*very large a house’ when, in the end, a member of a unitary or unionary country had to establish a state (where “into” is translated as “into a government institution) in the case of the nation ‘
http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/HPSG/2007/vaneynde.do? Is
there a place for pdf books? http://books.google.co.uk/13639/,
https://books.com/? 0? s=en # id=mqTumknor8kC&pg=PA198&lpg=PA198&dq=big+mess+berman&source=bl&ots=LR8WdParXs&sig=0cMwkHPob_lvIdAT1ZykpWOFi9U&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJrr7-vfXSAhWCX
id=TzYkDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=big+mess+construction&source=bl&ots=M77WhIk-Zi&sig=Hr_p50T2x-_4iaaQXBWkl8bgNrk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjxjPKVuvXSA
org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/div-classtitlethe-big-mess-construction-interactions-between-the-lexicon
and-constructionsa/hreffn1-ref-typefnspan-classsup1spanadiv/D45206A42B4A6255127FA55CE008CCAF# https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/ David
John’s equative construction seems all the explanation myst Mary’s skill could need. How does the construction depend on the ‘equative adverb as…as’ if it did tell us Mary was ‘too good a cook’ or ‘that good’ or even ‘as good…’ with the ‘as’ but it doesn’t.
In addition to her cooking skills, Mary has to learn how to cook like Linda did. Comparing them to each other is not the same process as discretely defining how good a cook she is. Similar semantic results don’t make two different methods of ensuring that same result grammatically
equivalent.
I’d not met The Big Mess Construction and I don’t think ‘Mary was as good a cook as Linda’ is it, nor close to it. I know many people that Laurel Happos’s elucidation seems much better and well supported in
all the definitions here, anyway: http://www.cademia.org/. I feel that ‘The Big Mess Construction’ (BMC) exemplified in corpus examples ‘like It was prominent A punctuation (*so a prominent punctuation) in the landscape’ is peculiar in that it has a predeterminer adjective followed by an NP with the indefinite article a/an. The BMC construction can be introduced only by a limited set of degree words like so, too, how, this, that, and so forth, as seen from ‘a somewhat underdeveloped country/*somewhat underdeveloped a country’ or ‘a very big house/*very large a house’ when, in the end, a member of a unitary or unionary country had to establish a state (where “into” is translated as “into a government institution) in the case of the nation ‘
http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/HPSG/2007/vaneynde.do? Is
there a place for pdf books? http://books.google.co.uk/13639/,
https://books.com/? 0? s=en # id=mqTumknor8kC&pg=PA198&lpg=PA198&dq=big+mess+berman&source=bl&ots=LR8WdParXs&sig=0cMwkHPob_lvIdAT1ZykpWOFi9U&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJrr7-vfXSAhWCX
id=TzYkDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=big+mess+construction&source=bl&ots=M77WhIk-Zi&sig=Hr_p50T2x-_4iaaQXBWkl8bgNrk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjxjPKVuvXSA
org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/div-classtitlethe-big-mess-construction-interactions-between-the-lexicon
and-constructionsa/hreffn1-ref-typefnspan-classsup1spanadiv/D45206A42B4A6255127FA55CE008CCAF# https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/ David
John’s equative construction seems all the explanation myst Mary’s skill could need. How does the construction depend on the ‘equative adverb as…as’ if it did tell us Mary was ‘too good a cook’ or ‘that good’ or even ‘as good…’ with the ‘as’ but it doesn’t.
In addition to her cooking skills, Mary has to learn how to cook like Linda did. Comparing them to each other is not the same process as discretely defining how good a cook she is. Similar semantic results don’t make two different methods of ensuring that same result grammatically
equivalent.
