In a message dated 3/4/99, 12:36:59 AM, [log in to unmask] writes:
<<here is a kind of affirmative preposing.

3) Inside the Coors truck was beer for the student's consumption.
Consume they did.

Notice that 'consume' can be preposed, but you can't prepose a
"morphologically distinct near-synonym for consume."

4) ?Drink they did.

Try this out and you will find very strong intuition about what kind of
preposing is possible.

Bob

How about these sentences?

Inside the Coors truck was beer for the students to drink.  And drink they
did.

It seems to me that the only reason your example seems wrong is that you
didn't put the proper antecendent in the first sentence.


It also seems to me that in my example, " for the students to drink " is an
infinitive clause functioning as a subject complement.  Although it is an
infinitive, it is functioning in a location which is usually filled by a noun
phrase, so it would probably be fair to say that it is nominalized.  "drink"
then denominalizes it.  I think this is a rhetorical device for carrying
meaning across sentence boundaries and helping the listener/reader understand.

Janet Castilleja