Hmm, I seem to have unwittingly ticked some folks off with my first question as a newcomer, although I don’t exactly know why or what I did. Please pardon me if I have inadvertently stepped into some invisible mine field.
This is not a homework question and it’s not a request for help with editing. It’s an academic question. Scholarly papers in linguistics (just to cite an example) often take a rather bizarre but perfectly grammatical and idiomatic sentence that would never occur in real life and analyze it to death because it exemplifies or challenges some principle or process. I’m no better than an amateur at linguistics, although I have read 2 or 3 textbooks from cover to cover, and I am not up on current grammatical theory, but as a worker with words I remain fascinated by instances of simple, plain English that do not readily lend themselves to analysis (and this is my idea of fun; I don’t judge other people’s). I constructed this sentence to illustrate a structure that was not transparent to me.
Does “took” have two direct objects, or what is the relationship of each of those elements to the main verb? If “me” is an indirect object, how so?
The infinitive is a verbal, but is it functioning adverbially or adjectivally? Same question for the past participle.
As I say, I am usually the one consulted professionally, and so I had to swallow my pride a bit even to ask. If you’re not interested, that’s fine—most people won’t be, as I know very well. If you know the answer but prefer not to share it, that is up to you, of course. I’m just not sure why you’d want to tease me with that.