A colleague had been discussing the difference between such as X and such X as with some friends, and asked for further insight from the rest of us. I gladly weighed in:
The first thing to note is that it’s actually a choice between X such as Y and such X as Y. But those two constructions are not the same thing, though they can mean similar things. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged English grammar, English syntax, grammar, such as, syntax
A colleague – Adrienne Montgomerie – was recently reading to her child from a story by Grey Owl when she came across this rather large sentence (From the second-last paragraph of “How the Queen and I spent the Winter” as published in the collection Great Canadian Animal Stories,
Whitaker, 1978):
This creature comported itself as a person, of a kind, and she busied herself at tasks that I could, without loss of dignity, have occupied myself at; she made camp, procured and carried in supplies, could lay plans and carry them out and stood robustly and resolutely on her own hind legs, metaphorically and actually, and had an independence of spirit that measured up well with my own, seeming to look on me as a contemporary, accepting me as an equal and no more.
We certainly don’t write like that so much anymore. I must say that I enjoyed reading that sentence, but some people may wonder whether all those commas are necessary and whether the whole thing is even grammatical.
So let’s have some fun and take it apart. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged commas, English grammar, English syntax, Grey Owl, syntax
One of the problems that I and other linguistically trained, open-minded writers run up against in building an audience is that people really seem to want someone to just tell them “Do this and don’t do that.” And they want nice, simple explanations. So they turn to people like Strunk and White, Lynne Truss, and Mignon Fogarty – the Grammar Girl* – who give them nice, reasonably simple answers and guidelines to live by.
Folks, if you want nice and simple, speak Esperanto. English is fun precisely because it’s, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy. English is not like one of those old ’70s video games with one level of play. English has more variations and levels of play, more nuances and negotiations, more little subtleties and twists and turns, than any computer game anyone’s ever devised. By orders of magnitude.
Yes, there is a version of English that is standard. (Actually, within that standard, there are quite a lot of variations.) Yes, that standard is generally susceptible to description – though, in fact, some of its structures are still subject to argument and further research even at the highest levels of linguistic enquiry. No, that standard does not involve nothing but simple, clear, consistent, one-way-for-all-times rules. Some rules are consistent. Some are not. There is no great merit in imposing rules that add complications without benefit or that restrict the expressive potential without adding some other virtue (other than defining an in-group of self-appointed cognoscenti).
I write this because I was just looking at Grammar Girl’s site because someone had sent me a link to an article of hers. Among her top 5 tips is one on ending a sentence with a preposition. To her credit, she starts off by saying that, contrary to popular belief, there is no firm rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. This is true: the supposed proscription on sentence-ending prepositions is nothing but a grammatical superstition, a mumpsimus, an invention that adds nothing to the expressive potential of the language.
She also says that you should not add a preposition on the end of a sentence when you could leave it off and it wouldn’t change the meaning. “Really,” she says, “I can’t believe anyone would make such a silly mistake!” Oh, indeed. Why use any more words than you absolutely have to? Other than for reasons of flow, sound, expression, emphasis, you know…
Then she notes that someone has called her out for saying “That’s where it’s at” on one of her episodes. She immediately goes into mea culpa mode. Does she say, “Oh, actually, there’s more to the expressive value of a sentence than just the denotative value of the words?” Nope. She completely disregards or forgets any motivation she might have had for saying it that way and declares, “But if I did say, ‘That’s where it’s at.’ I’m so sorry—the horror—because that is one of the instances where it’s not OK to end a sentence with a preposition! . . . The problem is that the sentence That’s where it’s at doesn’t need the preposition. If you open the contraction ‘it-apostrophe-s’ and say ‘That’s where it is,’ it means the same thing as That’s where it’s at. So the at is unnecessary.”
Nope. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged English grarmmar, English syntax, Grammar Girl, prepositions, syntax, where it's at
Yet again I’ve been discussing with colleagues the question of where to use whom (and, more particularly, whomever – see I must disagree with whoever wrote that). One thing the issue shows us (in case we hadn’t noticed) is that whom and whomever are no longer parts of current English. By which I mean they are not part of the language that most English speakers speak – they are, effectively, foreign words, or at best part of a second language that the user may not be altogether comfortable with. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged English grammar, English syntax, who, whoever, whom, whomever
A fellow editor was wondering aloud (OK, on email) about a sentence with a construction similar to the above (What would result in you sounding better?). She thought perhaps it should be your rather than you: What would result in your sounding better? So… what would? Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged English grammar, English syntax, gerunds, participles, possessive
A colleague just asked about a sentence similar to the following:
Provided that each member of the faculty club’s basic needs is met along with a comfortable free wine allotment, each professor will remain suitably compliant to expectations.
He question was whether it should be is met or are met; she was leaning towards is because it’s each member.
How do you sort out questions of conjugation? Find the head of the noun phrase that’s the subject of the sentence. What’s the head noun here? Is it member? Only if the faculty club’s basic needs is what it’s a member of. But I rather suspect that it’s actually talking about the basic needs of each member of the human family – in other words, the ‘s on club’s actually applies to the whole phrase each member of the faculty club… which makes that phrase a modifier of needs. And so “needs” is the head noun, the one that the verb conjugates to. (Anything that has a possessive, and anything that is the complement of a preposition – e.g., of the faculty club – is a modifier.)
The skeleton is in fact Provided that … needs … are met …, each … will remain … compliant. The rest is modifiers. And yes, it’s are: it’s the needs that are being met, not each member that is being met.
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged conjugation, English grammar, English syntax, syntax, verbs
A fellow editor and email columnist has been upbraided by a reader for using the form “smaller than me” rather than “smaller than I”. She reminded him that she was taught that both nouns must always be subjects, and it aggrieves her greatly whenever she sees it done “wrong,” as she so often does. He asked me for backup. Here’s what I sent him.
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged comparative, conjunctions, English grammar, English syntax, syntax, than he, than her, than him, than I, than me, than she, than them, than they, than us, than we
A colleague was puzzling over a “correct” example in Words into Type (page 358): “This kind of cats are native to Egypt, but they are common in America.”
Does that sound odd to you? It rubs my ear just a bit. But why?
One colleague averred that the problem was that this and cats don’t match. Ah, this question of matching parts.
Not “these question of matching parts”!
Anything after of modifies the word before of. What’s the word before it? Kind. What is kind? Singular. It’s the head of the noun phrase, and the specifier – which agrees with the head – is this. This kind. This box of cakes, this quintessence of dusts, this kind of cats.
So why does it sound odd? Well, to start with, if kind is singular, why is it “are native”? Shouldn’t it be “is native”?
In fact, there’s a very good argument to be made for sticking with the singular, and many people will do it without being wrong. But it also happens that kind is often used as a collective, an indefinite plural, like bunch and lot and percentage. As in “a very large percentage of people find this sentence odd,” or “a lot of people think it’s strange,” or “a bunch of people said it must be ungrammatical.” Wait – which bunch are saying it’s ungrammatical? Oh, this bunch are. This bunch right here are saying it’s ungrammatical. This…X…are.
But kind feels a bit off in that role, because it’s not a group per se as we usually see it, but rather a class identifier. Like style: “This style of coat is popular.” Who would say “This style of coat are popular”? Well, actually, in other times and places that would count as not only acceptable but in fact expected English. It’s a difference in construal of properties.
In fact, many of us wouldn’t say “This kind of cats is native”; we would more likely say “These kind of cats are native.” Oh, yes, you know you’ve heard it, and perhaps even used it: “These kind.” So we have evidence that in Canadian English “kind” has a quality of a plural.
Still, I find the sentence sounds odd too. And when something sounds odd, that’s because in the version of English you know so well, it’s just not done that way. So in Canadian English, while we may get away with treating kind as a plural (“these kind are”) and as a singular (“this kind is”), we can’t always get away with it as a collective without its sounding odd. Caveat editor.
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged English grammar, English syntax, syntax, these kind, this kind
A colleague has encountered a sentence of the type “This will happen in one-to-two months.” She’s wondering about those hyphens.
And well she should be. They have to go. It’s not optional. Otherwise it’s presenting a type of month with the quality of “one-to-two” in the same way as “two-by-four boards” are boards with the quality of being two inches by four inches. A “moderate-to-severe infection” is “an infection that is moderate to severe”; “one to two months” is not “months that are one to two”.
In cases like this, some people are confused by the use of hyphens in something like “a two-month decline”. But this is not that. In a case like that, the head noun is “decline”, and “two-month” is hyphenated because it is part of a compound modifier. In the case of “one to two months”, “months” is the head noun and the numbers are quantifying it – they are not adjectives, they are quantifiers. That’s another point of confusion some people get into: treating numbers as though they were adjectives. (It doesn’t help that CP Style, presumably for reasons of readability in newspaper columns, prescribes, for instance, “two-million” rather than the standard “two million”.)
“One to two months” is not a set of months with the quality “one to two”; it is “one month to two months” with the first “month” removed. (A similar deletion, but of the final “months”, is seen in “a month or two”, which we don’t write “a- month -or-two”.) We can use a dash to replace “to” in, for instance, “1–2”, but we don’t use dashes (or hyphens) and “to” with number ranges.
Posted in editing
Tagged compound modifiers, English grammar, English syntax, number ranges, numbers, syntax
I read the following in a New York Times article, “Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery“: “A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem.”
Does that sentence read a bit funny to you? It should. The fact that there are two things acting together does not automatically make them a compound subject – don’t mistake semantics for syntax. The phrase tag-teaming with is not a syntactic equivalent of and. It is not a conjunction; it is a non-finite verb phrase headed by a present participle. It has as a complement a prepositional phrase headed by with, and the complement of that prepositional phrase is the noun phrase a virus:
[NP A fungus {VP tag-teaming [PP with {NP a virus}]}]
The structure is the same as, for instance, An archbishop speaking to an actress or A dog barking at a car. Everything after the first noun is modifying the first noun, not coordinating with it. (Here’s a big tip: any time you see a preposition before a noun, you know that the noun and preposition modify what’s before them – meaning that they are not the main noun in town!)
Would you write An archbishop speaking to an actress have fallen down the stairs, or A dog barking at a car have run into a hydrant? Nope. So you don’t write A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have interacted. The fact that the fungus and the virus are working together doesn’t change the syntactic structure, which, at its core, is subject fungus and verb has interacted. I’ll say it again: never confuse semantics with syntax.
(And never look to newspapers for grammatical guidance. They make all sorts of silly mistakes. Sometimes it’s because they’re on tight timelines and sometimes it’s because they’re inappropriately applying rules they haven’t thought through well enough.)
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged conjunctions, coordination, English grammar, English syntax
Buy my books on Lulu.com:
You can also get them on Amazon.com. Please note that I make less than half as much per book if you buy them there, however.
Sesquiotica 