Tag Archives: English syntax

Incomplete sentences? Sure! Why not?

Posted on April 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

My latest article for TheWeek.com is up, and it’s on the oft-maligned “sentence fragments”:

It’s totally okay to write incomplete sentences

A few readers have pointed out, as I rather thought someone might, that Shakespeare isn’t really the best example. This is true, but I needed an example that I could be confident readers would be familiar with and would not dismiss as too modern, and I also had a length limit. So there it is. The compromises always get you in the end.

You can also see this article on Salon.com, and I don’t even know where else.

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One of the best poem

Posted on January 14, 2013 | 1 comment

Here’s another poem from Songs of Love and Grammar, which I present today to fix in mind a problem construction often encountered.

The one

I’m dating a girl who likes moderation
but sometimes praises without reservation.
She has a cute way to show you your place:
she starts off partway, then slips you the ace.

I cooked her some dinner on our first date.
“That’s one of the best meal I ever ate!”
She said that. One best! A class of one!
Such flattery! And we’d just begun.

We went to a movie – the choice was clear:
“It’s one of the best film of the year,”
she said. “On that, the critics agree.”
(They’d all gone for this one? That’s news to me!)

As we walked back, the weather was just sublime:
“It’s one of the nicest night in quite a time.”
It was clear in all that she had to say
that she wanted to take things all the way.

At evening’s end, she gave me my throne:
“one of the best lover I’ve ever known.”
“Lover,” not “lovers” – now, how do you do:
on the list of the best, there’s no number two!

It looks like the matter is when, not whether,
we’ll be vowing to share the future together.
Her level of commitment is plain to see:
“You’re one of the only guy for me.”

This one is similar to the false concord issue, and it’s a very common
thing to see. The analytically “correct” way to put something like this – and the way that seems more natural to at least some of us – is to say, for instance, one of the best lovers. That is, there’s a set of people who are the best lovers, and the person in question is one of them. And, indeed, even people who would say or write one of the best lover would, I think, write one of them rather than one of him for short. But because the subject of the sentence is singular, and we have one as well, there’s a certain magnetism of singularity, shall we say. The speaker stays focused on the one person and uses one of the best as though it were a one-of-the-best or a top-quality to modify lover. Frankly, I’d still rather use the plural there – it just makes more sense to me.

Not that many of us are necessarily all that used to hearing the phrase in the
first place.

Make sure to visit Lulu.com to buy Songs of Love and Grammar for the word nerds in your life!

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Don’t tell me no lies

Posted on September 21, 2012 | 4 comments

For the weekend – and maybe a day or two after – I’ll fill this space with another piece from Songs of Love and Grammar (still available on lulu.com or amazon.com for just $12), about double negatives and negative concord. A friend of mine says he’s thinking of setting this to music. I’ll let you know if he does.

Don’t tell me no lies

I met a little lady from way down south
and I thought she was kinda sweet.
She had a tasty tongue in a cowgirl mouth
that said things you’d wanna repeat.

“I don’t never go for that city stuff –
I like my drinks and men smooth and hard.”
And I said, “Won’t you leave me when you’ve had enough?”
And she said, handing back my credit card,

“I don’t want none of your money, sweet,
I don’t care for no one but you.
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout how to cheat –
that ain’t nothin’ I’d wanna do.”

We had a little drink and we had a little dance
and we painted lots of red on the town,
and pretty soon we had ourselves a fine romance
and I took her out shopping for a gown.

Oh, I bought her a ring, and I bought her a home,
and I got her set up nice and neat.
But sometimes I’d worry she would use me and roam,
and whenever I did, she’d repeat,

“I don’t want none of your money, sweet,
I don’t care for no one but you.
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout how to cheat –
that ain’t nothin’ I’d wanna do.”

So now why am I sittin’ with my head hangin’ low
with nothin’ left, not even pride,
wonderin’ where my sweetheart and my money did go
and how I got took for a ride?

My gal was a master of verbal predation,
a lawyer who took her reward –
she tripped up my ears with double negation
that I thought was negative concord:

“I don’t want none of your money, sweet,
I don’t care for no one but you.
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout how to cheat –
that ain’t nothin’ I’d wanna do.”

The double negative is one thing the prescriptivists won on. English had negative concord for a long time – if you negate one part of a phrase, you negate them all for consistency, just as in some languages you make the adjective feminine if the noun is, for instance. Romance languages still use negative concord. But by the 19th century it was pretty much vanquished in English by appeal to “logic” (rather than appeal to Latin, which actually uses negative concord). And yet in many “nonstandard” versions of English it’s still used – and understood. After all, language doesn’t actually work like math. But the “standard” rules – put in place by the legal class, in fact – are what prevail in law.

Oh, and all those -in’ endings? That’s another thing prescriptivists won on. By the 18th century, the –ing suffix had come to be pronounced as “-in” by everyone (because the tongue is drawn forward by the vowel); rhymes by English poets of the time don’t work with the “ing” version. But the spelling hadn’t changed, and so it was insisted by those who taught the stuff that the ending should be pronounced as written. Nonetheless, while the formal standard has changed, the old way hasn’t been eradicated. By the way, saying “-in” isn’t actually dropping the g; there is no g to drop (ng is just how we write the sound – do you heard a “g” in there? only in words like finger). It’s just fronting the consonant – from the velum (at the back of the mouth) to the alveolar ridge (near the front).

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preposition, position

Posted on July 3, 2012 | 6 comments

I’ll start this word tasting note with a poem from Songs of Love and Grammar (71 poems with this sensibility, nicely laid out and illustrated, just $12 on lulu.com, or $3.99 for the ebook). It’s about something just about everyone has a position on.

Indecent prepositions

by James Harbeck

I met a buxom grammatician
and said I’d like her out to take;
back she came with proposition:
in let’s stay and out let’s make.

I proceeded with elation
her proposal up to take,
and so prepared my habitation –
out put cat, up bed did make.

In she came and, around stalking,
switfly over she did take
and declared, with eyebrow cocking,
that me over she would make.

Up she tied me then and there
and smoothly off my clothes did take
and while I lay with syntax bare
she with my wallet off did make.

The upshot of my disquisition?
It is how down not to be shaken:
accept indecent preposition
and you might well in be taken.

The poem’s actually a bit of cheat, in that many of the ostensible prepositions are actually parts of phrasal verbs: take out, make out, take up, make up, take over, make over, tie up, take off, make off, shake down, take in. And some of the remainder are really adverbial uses. But I’m not of the disposition to reposition my composition in the face of opposition; the central proposition remains, that such transpositions are unnecessary impositions.

What is a preposition, anyway? It’s not something that pre-positions something as you would, say, a cushion near someone prone to passing out. It just comes before (pre) a noun phrase and says something about the position, physical or conceptual, of the things on either side of the preposition. (Sometimes the following noun phrase is moved and/or deleted. The preposition doesn’t have to move. You may not like it, but you have to put up with it. It’s just something you have to put up with. There is no rule against it, just a common superstition with no basis in actual authoritative usage.)

Oh, for the record, since there are actually many people who think this (some of them giving “answers” at online “answer” forums): is is not a preposition. It’s a verb.

There are also postpositions. The difference between a preposition and a postposition is the position, of course – a postposition comes at the end of a word (or noun phrase), whereas a preposition comes at the beginning. One might say that a postposition is the positron to a preposition’s electron. We don’t have postpositions in English; if we did, we might say things like your head above or this table on rather than above your head or on this table.

But, on the other hand, what postposition and preposition have in common is, of course, position. This word, originating in the Latin positio “act of placing”, which comes from the past participial stem of ponere “put” (which is also the fons et origo of all those words with pose in them, plus some pon words such as exponent), occupies a central position in English – actually a final position in the at least 40 words formed on it, but the point is that, in spite of its obvious morphology (pos+ition), it is effectively a basic word in modern English.

Did I say at least 40 words have the form [x]position? Yep. Here’s a list I’ve made with help from the Oxford English Dictionary:

adposition
anteposition
apposition
circumposition
composition
contraposition
counterposition
decomposition
deposition
disposition
electrodeposition
exposition
extraposition
imposition
indisposition
interposition
juxtaposition
malposition
opposition
out-position
oviposition
photocomposition
postposition
predisposition
preposition
pre-position
presupposition
proposition
recomposition
redeposition
redisposition
reimposition
reposition
retroposition
subterposition
superimposition
superposition
supposition
supraposition
transposition

And then there are all the common collocations of position, among which are these:

starting position
scoring position
geographical position
defensive position
take up position
jostle for position
in position
into position
out of position
sleeping position
fetal position
strong position
favourable position
precarious position
bargaining position
trading position
put you in an awkward position
in a position to help
philosophical position
official position
first position, second position, third position, fourth position, fifth position
privileged position
social position
full-time position, part-time position, salaried position, senior position, junior position
sex position
apply for the position, the position has been filled
in a unique position

Possession may be nine points of the law, but position is a pretty good fraction of the language. In Visual Thesaurus, it’s connected to no fewer than 16 nodes – that’s 16 different valences of meaning, though they’re all connected to the same basic sense of being somewhere. No other word can fill in for it in every position: not place (you may adjust your position in a chair, but not your place), not posture (you can’t ascend to a high posture in an organization), not point or situation or role.

And what position does position take in your mouth? Mostly a frontal one. It starts on the lips, and the other three consonants are on or near the tip of the tongue; of the three vowels, one (the stressed one in the middle) is high front, one is reduced mid central, and the other – the first one – may be a back vowel when given full value, but, like the final vowel, it’s almost always reduced to a neutral mid front-central one or sometimes deleted entirely (“pzishn”). The consonants alternate between voiceless and voiced; the middle two are fricatives, but in slightly different places, one buzzing and one shushing; it ends in the nasal, which also nasalizes the preceding vowel and sometimes pretty much merges with it. (Try this: say “sh” and hold it, and while holding it open your nose and add voice so it’s basically a “n” with the tongue not quite touching the tip – you see how you can shift the sound without really shifting position, if you’re lazy enough.)

And the shape of the word? Eight letters; one descender, one ascender, two dots; almost-mirroring o i io letters. It’s not an especially fast word to write, what with the dots and cross. And yet this borrowing from Latin has become a staple of English – on wordcount.org, which counts frequencies in the British National Corpus, it’s the 395th most common word in the language, just after woman and real and just before centre and south. Pretty decent, eh?

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Singular or plural?

Posted on February 23, 2012 | 4 comments

The question that comes up every so often among editors has come up again: what do you do in a case such as Fish breed for one stage of their life cycles – or is it Fish breed for one stage of their life cycle?

If that one leaves you feeling uncertain, you’re in great company. Everyone who works with the English language has wondered about that one for ages. Even the style guides are mushy on it. So don’t feel as though somehow there’s a clue space that you’re not in on this one. It’s one of those things that the English language is not suitably designed to handle (another one is Either you or I [are/am] going).

Generally, I think, the leaning is towards using the singular where reasonable. In case like Fish breed for one stage of their life cycle, there is additional justification for this because one could assert that all the fish have the same life cycle in the abstract.

But what do you do with something like They each held a cake in their hands? After all, each person might have the cake in both hands. They each held a cake in their hand is clearer but might sound ugly. Each one held a cake in his hand is a problem if there are males and females, and Each one held a cake in his/her hand is ugly. Best to do something like Each of them held a cake in one hand if you can, or, better, There was a cake in the hand of each of them.

But isn’t it annoying that we should feel the need to shift flow and emphasis just to deal with a syntactic inadequacy of our language!

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Going forward, it’s an adverb

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 8 comments

A colleague recently asked what part of speech going forward is when used in the annoyingly common way such as Going forward, we’ll do it this way. Here’s what I said:

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Presenting the future

Posted on January 9, 2012 | 3 comments

In an article in Slate that makes rather much of a little interesting observation in television news topic introduction syntax, Michael Kinsley tosses in this remark: “Long part of vernacular English: referring to the future as the present.”

I think it’s fair to guess that Michael Kinsley has never actually studied the topic, nor really spent all that much time thinking about it. The truth is that English, not just vernacular but all sorts, use present-tense inflectional forms to refer to pretty much everything that’s not the past – even our “future tense” (which we use only sometimes) is really a present auxiliary plus an infinitive. (I discuss this in a bit more depth in “How to explain grammar.”)

But that doesn’t mean we’re referring to the future as the present any more than saying “two fish” refers to the plural as a singular. It just means we have a semantic distinction that is not matched by a strict formal distinction. As with many things, we use our linguistic bits more loosely – English is a real ductape and WD-40 kind of language. Look, Chinese doesn’t have tense inflections at all, but that doesn’t mean that Chinese speakers are talking about everything as though it’s happening right now. Context!

Here’s a little poem, from my forthcoming Songs of Love and Grammar, illustrating our common use of present-tense forms to talk about the future and about timeless and durable states.

Christmas present

Now, Christmas has twelve days, of which the first one is tomorrow,
and I’m giving to my true love all that I can beg or borrow.
She knows that I’m a poet, so I’m giving her my words;
I know that she’s allergic, so I’m giving her no birds –
no swans, nor geese, nor turtledoves, nor even partridge one;
I know she’s introverted – lords and ladies are no fun.
Loud noises give her headaches. Drummers? Pipers? Please, not now!
And I’ll give her maids a-milking when she wants to have a cow.
But every year I give her something more than just a rhyme,
and I hope that she says yes to what I’m giving her this time:
on Christmas she is getting all the joy that I can bring,
for tomorrow I am giving her not five, but one gold ring.
She knows I don’t have money, but she knows she has my love;
with her I know I’m gifted by an angel from above.
So tomorrow I am proving what tonight I’m here to tell:
there’s nothing like the present to begin the future well.

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Why? Because it’s a complete sentence.

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 9 comments

A colleague was wondering whether, in something such as the title of this post, the b in because should be lower-cased, since Because it’s a complete sentence isn’t a complete sentence.

Of course, lower-casing the b wouldn’t result in the formation of a more complete sentence, and it would make a difference in how it could be read – a lower-cased follow-on after a question tends to imply that what follows is an explanation or addendum to the question, whereas a capital tends to indicate a response. But the important point I want to make today is that Because it’s a complete sentence actually is a complete sentence.

A complete sentence has a subject (sometimes implied) and a predicate. In this sentence, it is the subject and is a complete sentence is the predicate. Nor is there in reality a rule that a sentence can’t begin with a conjunction; that’s actually just a superstition invented a couple of centuries ago by people who didn’t understand what they were talking about (notably one Robert Lowth, who vandalized English teaching quite badly in 1762 with a book of inane invented superstitions that caught on). It was no problem for Shakespeare or the translators of the King James Bible, among other true standard-setters.

But the sense of the sentence is incomplete, one may protest! It requires something to have come before! Um, so? We have no issue with beginning sentences with other discourse markers that relate them to previous sentences (However, it’s a complete sentence – no one calls that incomplete, but you couldn’t start an essay with it; it requires a preceding sentence), and we have no issue with such things as pronouns that refer to entities in other sentences (most of the times we use he, she, or it we are referring to an entity established in a different sentence, so the sentence is not self-sufficient). The fact that a sentence in isolation is semantically incomplete does not make it syntactically invalid.

(It occurs to me that a church can be quite a good place to let opening conjunctions pass unremarked, even at the very start of a passage. A famous hymn begins “And can it be that I should gain an interest in my saviour’s blood?” A common Christmas reading from the Bible starts “And in that country there were shepherds.”)

Meanwhile, no one seems to have qualms about Why? even though it is clearly less complete than the sentence that followed.

It’s true that certain registers (tones, contexts, levels of use) tend to exclude the use of conjunctions at the start of sentences; this is because someone made up that “rule” and the people who established those registers tended to adhere to it. But registers also shift over time in what they allow, and even formal writing is gradually coming back to match ordinary English – and the English of Shakespeare and other greats – in this respect.

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It is not I, it’s me

Posted on August 18, 2011 | 10 comments

There’s an old joke: St. Peter hears a knock at the Pearly Gates. He says, “Who goes there?” A voice replies, “It is I.” St. Peter says, “Go away! We don’t need any more English teachers.”

For who other than a hard-core grammatical prescriptivist would say “It is I?” And would even the driest English teacher (not that that many are that dry anymore), arriving with others (I was about to type “friends,” but it’s hard to think that such a person could have any left), say “It is we”? Or, on the other side, answering the door, say “It is they”? I have seen “It is he,” it’s true, but…

But no one in normal English speaks that way. Not even the well-respected, highly educated people. So we’re all wrong, then? What’s with this, anyway?

This “rule” is obviously not organic to English, since it seems so awkward to pretty much every native English speaker (except the ones who have had “It is I” drummed into them and so accept it – a linguistic perversion that can be accomplished with any irregular usage if you can get people to think it’s more formal, polite, and correct, since English is capricious that way; see An historic(al) usage trend: a historical usage trend (part 1)). The idea behind it is that the is there is a copula: it equates two things. A=B. Identity means identity, so both must be the subjects: “I am he.” (If you recognize that as the first three words of “I Am the Walrus,” remember that the next four are “as you are me.” It’s not a grammar lesson from The Beatles.)

There are some problems with this reasoning. First of all, when you draw up the rules for a language, it helps if they actually describe what the language actually does, as opposed to enforcing practices that are quite different from what established usage is. If you get an idea about language and make a theory and it turns out not to be an accurate description, you shouldn’t bend the subject, you should change the theory. Otherwise you have linguistic phlogiston, a mumpsimus. And something unfortunately all too common.

Second, language is not math. Or, more precisely (since one may construct a mathematical language), English is not math. Why this isn’t incredibly obvious I don’t even know. Try performing a mathematical operation on a sentence. Give me the square root of “To be or not to be.” Language is waaaaay less tidy than math, but it’s a lot of fun. You don’t get to derive new equations and results, but linguists are discovering a lot of really fascinating weirdness. Grammatical prescriptivists, on the other hand, if they applied their thinking to the realm of math, would insist on only using certain equations in certain ways and would argue that some solutions are unacceptable because they involved, for instance, irrational numbers. They would be like the lawmakers who legislated the value of pi to be exactly 3.

And incidentally, even in math, if you establish that in this instance of an equation a=3 and b=3, you don’t necessarily change all b to a. But anyway, syntax is sequence and form; identity is semantics. Two different areas of grammar.

Third, English is not Latin. Many of prescriptivists’ ideas, such as this one, are derived from and/or supported by appeals to Latin grammar. You might as well use a barbecue to bake a cake, or dress patterns to make shoes. Each language has its own set of rules, its own parameters, its own ways of handling this and that. French is descended from Latin but you could never say “C’est je” in French, so why would we insist that English use “It is I” just because Latin, which English is not based on, does similarly?

The real ace in all of this is that “It is I” is supposedly equating “It” and “I”. OK, what’s the “It” here? If I say “I am he,” then there’s a “he” we were talking about who turns out to be me. But where’s this “it”? There’s no object I’m claiming is me. The it is actually empty. The only reason it’s there is because in English we require every finite verb to have something in the subject position. Not every language does. In Chinese you can say you shu, “have book”, to mean “There’s a book”; you can say shi wo, “is I/me”, to mean “It’s me” (or “It is I” if you’re one of those people). But we have to put in these empty its and theres in English for it to be a complete sentence. (We may say, casually, Got it, but even casually we don’t say Is me instead of It’s me.)

So it’s is really an existential predicate. But it’s bootless to argue that since there’s only one real thing there (me), it must be the subject. The point is precisely that it’s not the subject because that’s not how English syntax works. A thing can’t be both subject and predicate. We can’t say I am to mean It’s me, because it means something else, so we have an existential verb and an empty subject, and make me the predicate.

Which leads us to another fact of English syntax: the case filter. Put simply, English nouns and pronouns are by default in the objective (accusative). For each finite (conjugated) verb, there has to be one subject, which means one noun phrase in the subject (nominative) case, and that noun phrase is the one that is specifying the verb – it’s in the “subject” position. We don’t do this with non-finite verbs: I want him to go, I want to see him going. Those hims are the subjects of an infinitive and a participle, but they’re still objective. But if the verb is finite, one noun phrase and one only is treated as its subject: I desire that he go. The one you want is him. (Note that there can be inversions: What fools are we! Sam I am!)

And that is a real rule of English. One that we all use all the time without having someone tell us, one that guides our comprehension and usage. Not phlogiston. There is no cake batter dripping from the grill. So if someone at your door says “It is I,” you’re fully enfranchised to say “Go to hell!” (You probably don’t want them at your party anyway.)

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Grammar Matters book review

Posted on June 23, 2011 | 1 comment

Grammar Matters: The social significance of how we use language
Jila Ghomeshi
Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010

A more incendiary writer – or a more sensationalist publisher – might have titled this book Grammar Gurus Are Bigots. But Jila Ghomeshi is not an attack dog; she is a moderate-toned professor of linguistics.

Nonetheless, her main theme is clear: abhorrence of non-standard grammar is a form of prejudice with no basis in reason, experience, or fact – no more intelligent than racial bigotry, but somehow presented as a sign of superior intelligence rather than as the expression of tribalism, intolerance, privilege, and hierarchy that it is.

Ghomeshi lays out some straightforward facts about what things in language matter to people, why they matter, and how they really work. Then she gets into the really good part. There are three fallacies, she explains, that prescriptivists use in touting the superiority of “proper” English: logic, precision, and authority. With clear examples and reasoning, she shows that “proper” English is not more logical than various “non-standard” varieties – in fact, it’s not especially logical or consistent at all; that English can be stunningly imprecise and even contradictory in its variations, idioms, and economies; and that we managed to get along quite well with language for about 100 times as long as we have had prescriptive grammars, which anyway were written by self-appointed “authorities” who were really inexpert dilettantes serving social climbers.

So is Ghomeshi waging war against standards? Does she think everything is relative, and we can just chuck standards out the window? Of course not. She has her brain fully in gear. She recognizes the value of having a standard version of a language: it maintains a common reference version of the language to facilitate communication. The point, as she says, is that “it is good to have a standard, but the standard is not ‘good’” – that is, it is not inherently superior. “Non-standard” varieties have their value, and “recognizing and celebrating a non-standard dialect is of no threat to the existence of a standard if speakers know and use both appropriately.”

For Ghomeshi, then, standards don’t go out the window, bigotry about them does – so that we can enjoy “a far greater range of expression than the narrow channel we think of as ‘correct.’” And of course I agree.

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