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Well, after that series of possibly annoyingly trenchant or incendiary posts lets perhaps give everyone a chance to laugh at Woodcutter with his mickey-mouse MA.

If you took the sentence

"The lesson was about to start when the student walked in"

would you say that "about to" was an adverb describing a verb within an adjectival clause? That's what Woodcutter said to this person that asked, but I suppose an adjectival clause ought to have an adjective in it, for one thing. Should be an adverbial clause?

If it said "on the point of starting" instead I don't think I'd have mentioned a clause at all.

Oh, and merry xmas, since I'll not reply until after I've opened all my presents.

Grammarians who don't avoid this phrase often classify it as a semi-modal. (I kind of like the term pseudo-modal) Other examples of this class are "ought to, have to, have got to, is going to, is supposed to, and used to". (Note that there are two types of "used to" phrases. The other is often classified as a complex preposition.)

Hats off to the few grammarians who are willing to take a stand on these unmodal modals.
http://www.eslgold.com/grammar/modals_chart.html
http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues ... ching.html

I can't remember if I first read it in a book on Chinese grammar, or if Lewis' writings made me formulate the English (as well as the Chinese) in this term, but Lewis for one mentions "imminent aspect" (and doubtless views it as a semi-modal too). (Edit: Actually I've just had a very brief look in The English Verb, and Lewis mentions 'be going to' as an aspect at the start, then "prospective" forms later, so the "imminent aspect" must've been in some book about Chinese). I think that's easier to process than your analysis, woodcutter (and like you say, 'was (...) starting' is another way of visualizing or indeed productively forming a neater verb phrase within the main clause).

Well, I feel a bit better about my cack-handed analysis since I don't think I have come across the term semi-modal too much, and it all seems a bit of a mess philosophically speaking anyway.

By the way, does anyone else wonder about situations where students continually ask about parts of speech and teachers come back with iron-clad "right" answers? For one thing, I often wonder why students wish to know, is it just because someone asked them? Is there any great unity out there in the way we parse sentences? There certainly isn't any in the way people draw a sentence diagram. Most people who do such things for a living would use a binary X bar diagram following Chomsky as far as his "principles and parameters" model, as far as I understand, and a few would follow him into the latest "move alpha - move something" kind of analysis. Non-Chomskyites do all kinds of things. Ordinary people draw diagrams in various old school ways.
This may not have that much influence on what we call a word at the end of it all, but for example, isn't it the modern practice to treat tense, and not verb, as the central component of the sentence?
This would perhaps affect how we view modals?

I thought semi-modal was a pretty well-established category for the less core modals (i.e. those that CAN be followed by '...to V'). As for 'X-bar diagrams' if you mean X-bar theory, that would just seem to be a preference for that particular design/layout in diagramming than having anything vital to say about the nature of language.

BTW, Sampson (surprise surprise) has some interesting things to say about uniformity in parsing (or rather, the lack of it), and about diagramming speech (i.e. incomplete sentences - echoes Brazil somewhat), in his Empirical Linguistics (a collection of papers dating from as far back as the seventies, but concentrated mainly in the nineties; more technical and unsurprisingly less sustained or enjoyable than his "Language Instinct" book).

I have a one book linguistics library (Rodney.H natch) and no other access to English books right now - otherwise I'd be off to peruse Sampson like a shot. (Pay money and order you say? How dare you suggest it!) Apart from semi-modals, which areas tend to have a lot of variety in the parsing?

Here "about" is an adjective meaning "around" or "on hand" or "ready" followed by the core meaning of "to" (purpose)

I can't see it as a semi-modal unless every "be +adjective+infinitive of purpose" (I'm happy to see you)" is a semi-modal.

I was simply copying ouyang. Whilst eating mince pies (we start the Xmas stuffing of cakeholes early in my family). Perhaps not in the class of 'semi-modals', then (how about that "pseudomodal"?) but it's certainly got the old thingummy aspecty flappers.

So you do see another clause there then Juan?

Doesn't it make a difference that we can't just say "I am about" (unless we are a hostile thug) or "the lesson was about"?

It's precisely that we can say "There are a lot of people about" which makes this structure fairly unremarkable and identical to "You're ready to leave" "You're free to go" "You're always around to help" and so on. That's "about" being an adjective.

"The class is about" is not ok because that "about" is a preposition. That and PVs like "go about" are a distraction.

I don't see the issue. Unless there's an alternative parsing that makes "I'm here to help" the same as "I'm about to help". That'd be an adverb, I suppose.

Parsing throws the word "adverb" at everything that doesn't have a neat definition. Or "particle".

I treat 'be about to do sthg' around the same time as 'be going to' i.e. as being implicitly similar semantically; if like me you treat the latter as a phrasal construction, then why not the former? But for those students who like to get their parts of speech "straight", I'd be willing to at least say that in the 'The lesson was about to start', 'about to start' is certainly adjectival (as a glance in any learner dictionary will confirm, versus the prepositional and adverbial uses of 'about' alone (i.e. without any 'to' following it)).

Anyway, 'be going to' sure crops up in relation to modals/modality, so why not 'be about to' also?

There's something about 'be X to' here:
http://neptune.spaceports.com/~words/futures.html
(Hmm, I should post that (and a link back to here) on the 'The Future exists!' thread too).

I'll dig out the Sampson in a bit - got it brand new off Amazon for under four quid (plus P&P)!

So the relevant thrust of this article is that the function of about here is to bugger about with time, and thus it is part of a modal construction? (and that modals are not a pure and simple future tense, if such a thing is possible).

If so, that's sort of what I was thinking anyway - in X-bar syntax I think I might hang "about" on the T bar rather than the V bar. And since it would then be friends with "was" I'd have to call it an adverb.

I suppose I don't really know how make a philosophical distinction between an adverb and a modal. Aren't they both things which ascribe a certain quality to the totality of a proposition? However, a modal takes on the tense fuction.

(Not that we are allowed to give simple notional explanations for word classes of course. I wonder though - did every single structural linguist ever first learn that a noun is a person, place or thing and such like and then make up another definition afterwards only intelligible based on what they already knew?)

If you want to share the pain that UNE inflicted on Woodcutter then

www.epistemic-forms.com/ps-xbar.html

says something about X-Bar theory. They call the Tense bar the Inflectional bar in this case, and beyond that this article has a C bar where modals seem to go (I never studied that. I usually had to study made up languages in fact, which maybe didn't have any....). Horrible as it all is, it does seem to make some kind of philosophical sense, maybe.

By the way, Fluffy was once upset that no one here ever heard of Jackendoff, so he'll be pleased to find him here instigating a "do drop" in my article. I think there is possibly only one linguist discussed on this forum that I have never bumped into in academia by the way, a certain Michael Lewis, who, unlike the full back for Scunthorpe, has never yet even inspired anyone to write a wikipedia article about him......

Hang on. Modality crops up all over the place. "The race is about to start" clearly has modality oozing out all over the place.

But modals are those nine thingies that don't do what full verbs do and semi-modals are thingies that don't quite make the grade either as modals ("ought to" because of that "to") or full verbs ("let me think" because of that bare infinitive).

So what's a modal construction? "If he gets the job, I go" shows modality. "It's raining" does as well. "Visitors leave at 20.00" too.

Are these "modal constructions"? Because if they are it's so loose a term as to be useless. "Mungo eat" is a modal construction?

Sorry if this sounds a bit brusque. I'd be more diplomatic if I had time. Perhaps (modal construction?)