Language Log

What do the following concepts have in common lexically? (1) understanding; (2) judging; (3) experiencing; (4) finding out; (5) dating; (6) consulting; (7) visiting; (8) ensuring; (9) escorting; and (10) sending away?

What do loads, accumulations, obligations, and (idiomatic) kicks have in common with management, custody, people in care, sets of instructions, expenditures, liabilities, prices, loan records, and allegations?

What do support poles, staff positions, battery terminals, army encampments, blog articles, earring stems, trading stations, and snail mail have in common with billboard advertising, accounts recording, making bail, and assigning diplomats?

This is a follow-up to my syntax quiz from Sunday. Kai von Fintel was the first to correctly note that it was a trick question: swallow hard is probably intransitive in the relevant McCain quote, and so this is (probably) neither an instance of a parasitic gap nor of "across-the-board movement, coupled with right node raising out of a coordinate structure". There were various good attempts by others to show that it is actually an example of one or the other, though, of course under the assumption that swallow hard is, or at least could be, transitive (one reader even urged me not to concede defeat — even though I hadn't, I had only admitted to planting a trick question). Thanks to those commenters who accepted that the 'intransitive camp' had a point but that they'd like to give the quiz a go on the terms that I laid out.

In today's lead story in the New York Times ("Breakthrough Reached in Negotiations on Bailout"), John McCain is quoted as saying on ABC's "This Week":

This is something that all of us will swallow hard and go forward with.