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Below is a guest post by Jason Merchant.

There is an interesting grammatical point in an article in today's New York Times exploring some of the strands of support for Donald Trump, who has repeatedly been endorsed by racists, neo-Nazis, and their fellow travelers. In prior campaigns, such endorsements were typically followed by immediate and explicit disavowals by the Republican candidates, who would often take pains to express inclusionist ideas (compare the 1980 primary debate between Bush and Reagan here for the very different tone the Republican primaries had in the past, for example).

Trump has charted a different course. He has contented himself with what the Times calls 'a vague refrain': when pressed about these endorsements, as for example after onetime KKK member David Duke spoke in Trump's favor, Trump's response was merely "David Duke endorsed me? O.K. All right. I disavow, O.K.?"

These words–"I disavow"–appear to be Trump's mantra when asked about such endorsements. Trump apparently believes that they are sufficient to satisfy the media's and the public's desire that he disassociate himself from racist, neo-Nazi, and other extreme rightwing groups; perhaps he believes the two words to be some kind of panacea.

But the "white racialists" who support him, such as one Richard Spencer, quoted in the article, are not fooled, and neither should anyone else be. Mr. Spencer made the linguistically accurate observation: "There's no direct object there," Mr. Spencer said. "It's kind of interesting, isn't it?"

Yes, very interesting, in fact. Though it's long been known that almost any transitive verb in English can occur without an object in a generic context ("They just destroy, destroy, destroy: they never build anything"), "I disavow" isn't being used in a generic context: it's being used as a simple eventive present, like "I apologize", or "I confess". But "disavow" is an obligatorily transitive verb (like "devour", "ingest", "note", "pride", "perjure", "comb", "despise", and unlike the optionally transitive "bake", "eat", "notice", "divorce", "shave"). So for most speakers of English, "I disavow" sounds like a an incomplete sentence. Which is no doubt the point.

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