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Thu 14 Feb, 2013 03:16 am
Hi,
I feel I am generally good at grammar but recently I encountered something I felt was right and couldn't explain. Google didn't seem to have any ideas either. Someone said "I'm not sick; I just seem it." Someone else claimed that the correct sentence would be "I just seem like it." Obviously the second would be correct and probably more clear. However, is the word 'like' absolutely necessary in this case, or can it be implied? I think people use this type of implied 'like' often enough for this to be legitimate, but I can't think of a grammatical reason why it's valid.
Thanks.
@goos,
Like apparently is implied in that sentence. It's conversational speech and thusly casual. It's most likely laziness that had the speaker drop the "like" from the sentence. For informal speech, both sentences work fine.
@goos,
No, it's not necessary. "I'm not sick, I just seem sick". 'it' replaces 'sick'.
@Mame,
The OP is asking about the word "like" rather then the inclusion of the pronoun "it" in the sample sentence.
@tsarstepan,
I know and I said it wasn't necessary because if you replace 'it' with 'sick', he'll see that.
I would say that "I'm not sick; I just seem it" is more formal than "I 'm not sick; I just seem like it", in fact if I were forced to use "like" which is just a filler word, I would prefer "I'm not sick; I just seem like I am."
@tsarstepan,
Quote:It's most likely laziness that had the speaker drop the "like"
Tsar I disagree; somehow it's better without
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