ZM In morphology, periphrasis is when you use a phrase rather than a single verb form. for example, in Latin the present indicative active and passive forms of a verb are a single verb form:
amo 'I love' and amor 'I am loved'. In the English glosses to those two forms, the second one, the passive, is a periphrastic construction.
Yes, I understood right away that here
periphrastic is used for a grammatical construction. You cannot get behind this when you look it up as an independant word in a dictionary.
FALD.
This is all in aid of my internal rantings against the Huddleston/Pullum categorization of bush as a preposition in the sentence 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.'
People like to make these constructions, whatever you call it grammatically, as a way of being creative with language. (often in advertizing) It can be irritating when those things become too fashionable.
I hope the chicks made it safely to the bush though God knows which chick devouring creatures were lurking there.
