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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
In this context, "take" roughly means "understand".The sentence overall means, "I understand it to mean that", which implies "I'm not sure that's correct, but that's what I think right now."I've fleshed out your example to make it easier to describe as I parse it:A: In a real estate listing, does "cozy" mean "small"?B: [That] is [what I take it to mean].The sentence you're asking about has a [subject] to the left of "is", and a [subject complement] to the right. "That" refers to "small". "It" is the direct object of "take", and refers to "cozy". "What" is a pronoun acting as the head of the noun clause, "what I take it to mean".The deep structure of "what I take it to mean" is: "I take it to mean what", where "what" is the direct object of "mean". This comes from the structure, [ "take" + object + "to mean" + something ]. Some other examples of this structure are:I take your silence to mean you're not interested.When you picked up your keys, I took that to mean you were going out.So other ways of wording the entire sentence are:I take "cozy" to mean "small".What I take "cozy" to mean is "small".Here's some other examples of the larger structure of the sentence:Breakfast in bed! That's what I like on my birthday.I failed art. But that's what I was expecting.You cannot remove "I take it". You'd be left with "That's what to mean", which is nonsense.
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