I am trying to imagine a redneck poltergeist . <| sep |> She had to check if the juices were running clear . <| sep |> Like the right did when Obama was elected ? <| sep |> Is this a reference to Black Mirror ? Just started watching that show this week and some of the episodes are so fucking good . <| sep |> Careful , monk . There ' s a storm coming . <| sep |> Thanks , that was my goal ! <| sep |> All amazing questions , and unfortunately I don ' t have answers to haha . These are valid research questions . I really don ' t know wtf ' be ' is . I also haven ' t necessarily ruled it out as verb , and it does still work with modals , eg ' He might be mad ', ' She could be angry . ' At the same time , be X could be an adjective construct , and the ' be ' could be a head that can be influenced by tense , but only tense ? In case of do . I ' m also not really sure that my argument of ' be ' lacking transitivity or agency is true . I can imagine a philosophical argument about whether existence carries valency or agency in the mind . Maybe both are flexible depending on the culture and philosophic underpinnings especially for abstractions like existence lol ? Dear lord . For some people this is for the birds , but there are examples of tense and temporal aspects of a language being affected by a culture ' s interpretation of the world Hopi language comes to mindBut then you brought up adjective constructions , and I actually left my high level syntax classes pretty damn baffled by perspectives on adjectives . They seem like verby nouns that have extremely flexible feature sets , and can laugh maniacally at your understanding of them for any given language you ' re examining . Phrases like ' tough nuts to crack ' were a huge topic of interest . and argument . I can ' t remember if I ever came across what dummy stuff might actually be , formally , but I guess I always figured it was more of a semantic phenomena that can ' bleed ' into a language ' s syntax depending on ' constraints ' if you will I ' m not really a believer of optimality theory but it does help to describe things . My knowledge of this stuff is getting spotty , I haven ' t practiced formal linguistics for a few years , and since the theoretical linguistic landscape is changing ever so quickly , who knows what ideas are lurking around out there about these concepts . I don ' t think I added much more to this , but it is fun stuff to chew on !