Re: "par coeur" origin

Phillip Mackin wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Phillip Mackin wrote:

In order not to have to just past it off as an idiomatic expression, I
tried to think of some other examples, but the only one I could think of
off the top of my head was "I got it off of the internet", which isn't
really mainstream usage.

Why do you think "off of" isn't common as dirt? (What it isn't is
parallel to "off by.")

Well it is common as dirt, but that doesn't mean there isn't grammar
behind it all. I thought it was a parallel to "off by" in the sense that
it was two prepositions, one of them able to be deleted without changing
the meaning, but they can't be split by inserting something between
them. Had I thought of "up till Friday" at the time I would have used
that one instead.

Just because two constructions have the surface appearance of being a
sequence of two prepositions doesn't mean they bear the same structural
relationship.

To use one of the earliest examples in mldern linguistics, do you see
how these two sentences are quite different?

(1) John is easy to please.
(2) John is eager to please.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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