@porsche - oops, sorry! It was my mistake. I originally had 'you've got' for both, but there was a problem with apostrophes, and I changed one but forgot to change the other. I've tried it again with 've got'. The corrected version still shows that the popularity of the thing version is relatively recent, although stronger than I had it originally, and that the increase really started around 1982.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ve+got+another+think+coming%2Cve+got+another+thing+coming&year_start=1880&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

@Bubbha - OK, but it's a bit vague for me. Let me explain how I've always understood the think version - If that's what you think/thought, you've got another think coming

The speaker thinks that the other person is wrong, and that sooner or later they will realise they are wrong and have to rethink their position, in other words have another think about it - hence they've got another think coming. So for me, the second think isn't simply a play on words, it's the whole point. And I feel that this is completely lost in the thing version. For me it's not simply that some vague thing is on the way, it's that the person will have to change their thinking on this particular matter. Hence the strength of the idiom.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=got+another+think+coming%2Cyou+got+another+thing+coming&year_start=1880&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3 - Notice that the rise starts in 1982, the year of Judas Priest's song - 'Another thing coming'

Hi Jasper,

Tricky one, in one way, but not so much in another. Just in case anyone's not familiar with subject complements, they are what follows a linking verb like 'be' or 'become' where other verbs have a direct object, or an adjective where other verbs have an adverbial. For example:

She likes her doctor - her doctor - direct object
She is/is becoming a doctor - a doctor - subject complement
She plays very badly - very badly - adverbial
She is highly gifted - highly gifted - adjectival subject complement

In your example I would say that the whole nominal clause - who he's looking for - is functioning as the subject complement here, not just 'who'. But 'who' is also the object of looking for, which I think is why you want to say whom. So which takes more weight?

I don't know the theoretical answer. But in a section on nominal relative clauses in Longman's Grammar and Vocabulary for CAE and CPE (Advanced and Proficiency exams) one of their example sentences is - 'Bernadette? That's not who I thought you had invited'.

And looking at a blog post I wrote about nominal relative clauses, I notice that I used an example sentence - Here's a list of who I've invited so far - Two things possibly suggest this 'should be' whom - it's the object of a preposition, and the object of invited - but for me whom here simply wouldn't sound natural English. In TEFL we teach that you only need whom after a preposition, but as you can see in that example, even that may not be totally true. And again in this second example, it is not really who that is the object of the preposition, but the whole nominal relative clause - who I've invited so far

Actually I've just discovered that (unknowingly of course) I more or less ripped off that last sentence from another grammar book - Advanced Grammar in Use, which has the example sentence - Can you give me a list of who's been invited.

In a nominal relative clause, the relative pronoun is doing a double job, it is standing in for a noun as well as being a relative pronoun - so 'what' means the thing(s) that and 'who' really means the person/people that, and as far as I can see, whom is simply not used in nominal relatives, but I can't find any reference to back me up on that.

Actually whom isn't used that much in adjectival relatives either: in defining (restrictive) relatives we can leave out the object pronoun altogether. Anyway, if like me (and according to my TEFL books, a lot of other people), you try and avoid whom unless it's absolutely necessary, then the problem doesn't really arise. Why do we do that? Because for many of us it sounds stilted and rather old-fashioned. Who is usually more natural.

No, sorry Bubbha, it's the other way round. The earliest known occurrence in the US of the thing version was in 1919, and of the think version in 1898.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/thing.html
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxyouhav.html
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/04/the_think_thing/?page=full
http://grammartips.homestead.com/anotherthink.html

But in any case, you haven't answered my question - where is the possible logic of the thing version.

@Zine - Better late than never perhaps. In terms of tenses, the first one, but something seems to be missing. I presume there's a sentence before this one telling us something about the early reactions of newspapers to the Internet. The reason is that the creation of the online version came after not loving the Internet, not the other way round, so you want to use present perfect not past perfect, which would suggest an anterior or previous action. The use of Present perfect also shows that this event is relatively recent.

However, there are two other problems that I can see. The first one is the use of although. In written English, although is not used on its own with a comma like that; it is a conjunction and needs to lead directly into a clause - Although they were taken by surprise by the success of the Internet, most national newspapers have started to fight back. - If you want to start a sentence with a contrast word on its own followed by a comma, you need a conjunctive adverb such as however, nevertheless, on the other hand etc.

The second problem is that it sounds a bit as if the national papers have together created one joint national online version. I think it would be a bit clearer if you put it all into the plural, something like - At first national newspapers were not too enamoured of the Internet. However, most of those that did not previously use to particularly love the Internet have now created online e-versions of their papers. - Note - newspapers which or that, but not who.

@dougincanada - the operative word in that Oxford dictionary definition was 'typically', which you yourself capitalised. And in Webster the idea of a complete thought. And then you yourself say - Put it a context: 'How are you feeling today?' 'Fine' is accepted as a sentence since it means 'I am fine' ('I am' is understood). But when would we ever use 'Fine.' when the context is not understood? And note that both Carolyn Burt and JJMB carefully capitalised their examples and ended them with full stops.

And by the way, you don't help your case much with the cheap references to 'Professor Ballantyne'

While taking on board and quickly checking out and accepting what Jacob has said,especially about word sentences, I would tend to agree with Rachel Madcow and call 'Fine' an elliptical sentence - eg: (That's) fine.- it's what is called 'answer ellipsis' in the Wikipedia entry on Ellipsis.

I do think there is a basic difference here between the linguistics approach, which looks at how language functions (major and minor sentences etc) and the traditional grammar approach which seems to to be more concerned with structure. For example, traditional grammar doesn't usually recognise structures such as 'Walking up the path' or 'Having finished his dinner as clauses because they don't have a finite verb. Linguists, however, do see these as clauses, because they function in just the same way as if they had finite verbs - 'As he walked up the path' or 'After he had finished his dinner'.

But ultimately I would have to agree with porsche: is it really that important whether we call these sentences or sentence fragments or anything else? The important thing is that they are valid utterances, something with which I think we can all agree.

I would say this one is more a matter of personal or house style, like whether to add commas to addresses etc in business letters. Personally I would capitalise and probably not use a full stop (period) - No 1. And I would use Nos 1-3 for plurals. But I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong way. Although not North American I also use the hash sign in informal notes, but I wouldn't use it in more formal work.

I write a language blog for learners, with exercises which obviously have numbers, and with questions that also have numbers, but I hardly ever have to use the abbreviation No - for the questions I just use 1,2,3 etc and if I need to refer back to them, I refer to them as Question 1, or Questions 1-3 etc. But I suppose you still have the same style decision to make there, too.

@Percy - In British English, I think we stress the first syllable more than the second for both noun and verb, I certainly do, and that's how they're shown in British dictionaries. But I accept that in American dictionaries, the second syllable is also given secondary stress.

I think the answer probably lies more in other comparable word pairs - participate / participation, deviate / deviation etc, where there is a shift in stress between verbs and nouns, although I don't know whether this happens with many -atory adjectives.

I did a check on words ending in -atory, (http://www.morewords.com/most-common-ends-with/atory/). They include celebratory, which seems to be stressed on the third syllable in BrE (and which is what I would do), but on the first syllable in AmE. And migratory, which three British dictionaries I checked say can be stressed on either the first or third syllables, although admittedly American dictionaries seem to stick firmly with the first syllable. So perhaps there's a bit of a BrE/AmE element to this.

@D.A.W - if singular they is so awful, what about singular you, or do say thee and thou? And now apparently, anybody one who doesn't agree with your quaint ideas about how language works is an 'argumentative weenie'.

As Goofy said, singular they is as old as the hills and originally had little to do with political correctness; it's just very useful after such impersonal pronouns as anybody, somebody etc and other occasions when you don't know the person's gender. - If anyone calls while I'm out, can you get them to call me back - natural, efficient, uncontrived (unlike, for example, alternating he and she) - you redundancy-haters should love it!.

Singular they was used by Jane Austen, amongst other literary greats, and was completely uncontroversial till a certain Anne Fisher (1719-78) decided that he should replace they as a universal pronoun. But times have moved on and as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary says:

'He used to be considered to cover both men and women: Everyone needs to feel he is loved. This is not now acceptable. Instead, after everybody, everyone, anybody, anyone, somebody, someone, etc. one of the plural pronouns they, them, and their is often used.'

And that includes by the British government in, for example, passport application documents. Of course we English, Scots and Irish don't want to get rid of singular and plural or articles; that's simply a daft idea. (And why the Welsh get off scot-free?). Singular they is perfectly normal, natural English, and now that even Associated Press, the final bastion of resistance, has finally relented and accepted singular they, surely it is time to put this shibboleth to rest.

My dictionary agrees with you that repetitious has a mainly negative connotation. But in some contexts so can repetitive. If you say your job or some music is repetitive, I think that's pretty negative too - it suggests a certain monotony. To me the difference seems to be mainly a matter of collocation - a long and repetitious speech but a repetitive job etc.

What does seem clear though, is that repetitive is used far more than repetitious, as this Ngram graph shows -
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=repetitive%2Crepetitious&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

And in Google Books, repetitive gets over five million hits, as oppose to less than a million for repetitious.