User:Ricardiana/noun

The Great Participle / Gerund Debate
A discussion took place here.

Bottom line:


 * 1) There's no authoritative consensus against this usage.
 * 2) The fact that there is no consensus on the issue is a result of loopholes in traditional grammar.
 * 3) It has been used by many authors, including Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll.
 * 4) It only "sounds wrong" to people whose reading is limited to 20th-century texts.
 * 5) I'm not going to stop using it.


 * Jesperson v Fowler The Careful Writer By Theodore Menline Bernstein p 200 ff. ~ overview of debate, problems with Fowler, examples of historical writing
 * Jesperson & McCawley, Philosophy of Grammar
 * Walter Nash, An uncommon tongue note 16 p. 205
 * Frederic Theodor, An historical syntax of the English language p 1186
 * Aarts, The Handbook of English Linguistics - J v F

[above - Jesperson Fowler genitive p. 1 only] [below - ditto ditto fused p. 1 only]


 * Tony Bex, Standard English p. 103 ff. Cites Partridge, Usage and Abusage.

OK, well, first of all, as you requested, here is the bit from the Chicago Manual, the new 15th edition, page 193 (I believe I gave this information on the peer review page also, by the way): "With" used loosely as a conjunction. The word with is sometimes used as a quasi-conjunction meaning and. This construction is slovenly because the with-clause appears to be tacked on as an afterthought. For example, the sentence everyone else grabbed the easy jobs with me being left to scrub the oven could be revised as since everyone else grabbed the easy jobs, I had to scrub the oven. Or it could be split into two sentences joined by a semi-colon: Everyone else grabbed the easy jobs; I had to scrub the oven. Instead of with, find the connecting word, phrase, or punctuation that best shows the relationship between the final thought and the first, and then recast the sentence. (section 5.190) Now that you have that, here are my responses to your other points. Ricardiana (talk) 16:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC) First, I disagree that a phrase or sentence must be unrevisable in order to be good. I know you said "replaced by neater grammar", but that begs the question (in the technical sense, not the sloppy Law and Order sense) of which grammar is neater. Ricardiana (talk) 16:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC) I am glad that someone has finally started to examine a real sentence from a real book - everyone so far seems to agree that the construction can be ugly, so it has not been helpful to see a parade of made-up straw man examples that are in fact ugly. As to this real example - you find it also ugly. I don't. This is an aesthetic difference, I guess, of which more below. Yes, it can be re-phrased. So can anything. Perhaps the second construction is better - in the absence of a grammatical justification (and by that I mean a source and some technical terms), it's a matter of opinion. Ricardiana (talk) 16:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC) You asked for an example of an instance of this construction that I think couldn't be rephrased with neater grammar. I refuse the challenge on those terms, because, as I've said, anything can be rephrased and the discussion of what constitutes neater grammar is so far being conducted largely on aesthetic terms. The main non-aesthetic criterion that's so far been given is "logic". Here is a sentence that I think is fine. The "logical" relationship in the sentence I am about to give is perfectly clear, and I might add that this type of construction is quite common in scientific texts: "All we are assuming about the Wiener- Kuratowski implementation is that "x = (y, z)" is stratified with 'x' being given a type index two greater than the index assigned to 'y' and 'z.'" Set theory with a universal set: exploring an untyped universe, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 75. Ricardiana (talk) 16:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC) I don't think it's fair to find Chicago's mention of the construction to be significant and then to dismiss Yale UP; that strikes me as cherry-picking our authorities. ~ Incidentally, I gave other examples on the peer review page, and there are extra examples from uni. presses in my sandbox; it's hardly just Yale. Oxford seems to be most fond of the construction. ~ The fact that Chicago is fence-sitting is, of course, an indication that they feel it's poor grammar, and a giveaway that they have no idea why this is so. Apparently, no one else does either, but this seems to affect confidence but little. That in turn is a dead give-away that the objection is primarily an aesthetic one. Such aesthetic objections, I find, are most common in those who tend primarily to read books written in the 20th or 21st centuries. I know that I have seen this construction in Victorian novels, although I can't find an example at the moment; you have conceded that Jane Austen uses it; Hans, below, cites Lewis Carroll. My aesthetic sense tells me that this construction can be fine and grates on people's ears because it is old-fashioned, pure and simple, not because it is wrong. I am flatly not bothered by many of the examples that bother others. To argue that a bad "odour" makes a construction one to be avoided is to prioritize one aesthetic sense over another. Why is that? What makes one aesthetic sense better than another? Ricardiana (talk) 16:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC) My answer: aesthetic sense shouldn't be the criterion here, as the repeated talk of odours and trashiness and slovenliness indicates that it is. I just want to reiterate: this discussion is filled with daintiness. Everyone seems to "mind" things or graciously not "mind" them. This is a dangerous way to go about making grammatical decisions, as the history of grammar shows. The word "firefighter" sounded "wrong" to people when it was put forward as a non-sexist alternative to "fireman". So it sounded wrong - too bad. Now it sounds fine. The "it sounds wrong" argument needs to stop because it's not an inherently good criterion. Ricardiana (talk) 16:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC) So, what would be good criteria? Isn't Chicago's condemnation enough? No, because they are fence-sitting; they have no grammatical justification; and they do not acknowledge the diversity of the construction. Further, their condemnation strikes me as similar in kind to prohibitions against starting a sentence with "and" or "but". Some "rules" are simply conveniences for teachers who must suffer through papers that vary, often, from poorly written to dreadfully written. I teach at a university, and have also tutored there, and I see all the time sentences beginning with "and" or "but" that are just awful and should have been mercilessly aborted. And yet, grammatically, beginning a sentence with one of those words can be fine; teaching students how to discern when it's fine and when it's not, especially when they receive little to no grammatical instruction in college and have often received little to none prior to college, is ... difficult. And so many teachers prefer to just prohibit certain words, because it's easier than knowing and teaching the difference. That is what Chicago has done; they teach ... in their measly paragraph ... avoidance, based on the really poor examples, without acknowledging that such constructions are not always so poorly done (I'd love to see the Jane Austen sentence, for example) and without bothering to explain, or even knowing, the difference. Ricardiana (talk) 16:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC) Hans Adler has already pointed out how these constructions (I think we should use a plural to indicate the diversity here) can be grammatically justified. Here's more. I'm not going to give all the publication details because I found all these through Google Books; anybody can find the information and I'm getting tired of typing. Later I may come back and add the quotations, but for now I'll just list references regarding only the use of the possessive before a gerund. Since I'm not typing up the quotations, I'll just sum up here that the argument, grammatically speaking, is what type of word can precede a gerund. Must it be a possessive? Can it be a genitive? Can it be in the objective case? Etc. This is where the debate lies. The entry on "Genitive before a gerund" in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English by Kenneth G. Wilson, p. 210, says that the construction of g before g used to be taught as a matter-of-course (as correct) and has now fallen into obscurity. (This explains why it "sounds wrong.") William Safire in The right word in the right place at the right time beginning on p. 1 cites a dispute over the issue of possessive before gerund in the 1920s between W. H. Fowler and Otto Jesperson. Fowler was against it, Jesperson was for it. Safire ... unsurprisingly ... is against it. Antonin Scalia (!) ... yes, it's in the chapter ... is for it, on occasion. Words to the Wise by Michael Sheehan, p. 102, says that the question of what can precede a gerund turns on what you want to emphasise in a given sentence (this was Scalia's argument, actually) and that authorities are divided pretty much 50-50 on the question. Note 6 on p. 228 of Nineteenth-century English by Merja Kytö, Mats Rydén, Erik Smitterberg says that these gerundial constructions were first condemned by the Fowler brothers. The chapter to which this is a footnote investigates the occurrence of the construction in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries; it appears to have been used little, if at all, in the 18th century, and to have been very commonly used in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th, before Fowler & Fowler decided against it, after which usage is still frequent, but less so than in the 19th c. The chapter argues also for the inherent grammaticality of these constructions. There is a discussion of the issue beginning on p. 48 of TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH SECOND SERIES (1901). The author argues again that the choice of word prior to the gerund should be based on what word you want to emphasize. There's more, but that's enough for now. Ricardiana (talk) 16:47, 2 June 2009 (UTC) One more: there is an extended discussion of the issue here in the American Heritage® Book of English Usage. A sample (because I can cut and paste): "gerund and possessives (fused participle). Some people insist that when a gerund is preceded by a noun or pronoun, the noun or pronoun must be in the possessive case. Accordingly, it is correct to say I can understand his wanting to go, but incorrect to say I can understand him wanting to go. But the construction without the possessive, sometimes called the fused participle, has been used by respected writers for 300 years and is perfectly idiomatic." Ricardiana (talk) 16:57, 2 June 2009 (UTC) Tony, I think you might be interested in the entry for "possessive with gerund" in MWDEU. It quotes the following examples from an 1867 letter by Lewis Carroll: "in hopes of his being able to join me" and "the music prevented any of it being heard". I think that's basically what this section is about – otherwise sorry for the intrusion. They give a history of the dispute whether such constructions are admissible at all, and if they are admissible, whether the possessive is allowed or perhaps even required. It starts: "From the middle of the 18th century to the present time [...] grammarians and other commentators have been baffled by the construction. They cannot parse it, they cannot explain it, they cannot decide whether the possessive is correct or not. The earliest commentators, Harris and Lowth 1763, were distinctly hostile to the possessive case." They conclude: "Both forms have been used by standard authors. Both forms have been called incorrect, but neither is." --Hans Adler (talk) 13:36, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

To check out / PALCI / ILL

 * Jesperson, A modern English grammar on historical principles.