The virtual linguist

Shakespeare's grammar

When people talk about Shakespeare's contribution to the English language, they usually refer to the words he used. His works contain the first recorded use of many words, including bandit, dwindle, excellent and tranquil. That does not mean that he coined the words, just that no-one can find any written evidence of them before him. An academic from Strathclyde University has said that Shakespeare was no more inventive than his contemporaries when it came to vocabulary, but where he was really innovative was in the grammatical constructions he used. One example is his use of adjectives to describe inanimate objects; talking of horses and their "proud hoofs" was ground-breaking at the time.

 

Here's a Daily Telegraph article on the subject.

How to spell and pronounce 'mouth'

"I'm not sure if I've spelt 'mouth' correctly", wrote a colleague in an email asking me to proofread a short text she'd written. Strange question from a highly educated editor? No, actually a very understandable question. She was using 'mouth' as a verb and, because the 'th' of the verb 'to mouth' is pronounced like the sound 'th' in the, this or either (/ð/is the phonetic symbol), she wondered whether 'mouth' had an 'e' at the end, like similar noun-verb pairs where the 'th' of the noun is pronounced like the 'th' of thing, thin or thirst (phonetic symbol /θ/), but the verb form adds an 'e' and the pronunciation changes to /ð/: teeth/teethe, breath/breathe, cloth/clothe, sheath/sheathe, wreath/wreathe.

 

Mouth is unusual in that the noun doesn't add an 'e' to become a verb, yet the pronunciation of the 'th' changes. I can't think of any other noun-verb pair that is the same. Smooth and to smooth are both pronounced with a /ð/ sound, but then 'smooth' is an adjective, not a noun. Earth and to earth, berth and to berth and froth and to froth have /θ/ in both, but no extra 'e' in the verb form.

Favour vs favours

Boris Johnson, mayor of London, was described in an article in The Independent a few days ago as a man on whom Mrs Thatcher's favours fell. The full description was:

"Johnson, by contrast, has been disarmingly nonchalant about his peculiar, anachronistic personality ever since he emerged into the fierce sunlight of Thatcher's approval as her favourite right-wing journalist. Like all the men on whom her favours fell, he had not only intellect but charisma."

 

A couple of days later there was a correction in the newspaper's Errors & Omissions section. As editor Guy Keleny wrote, Mrs Thatcher bestowed her favour on people, not favours.

 

What a difference an 's' makes. Favours in the plural has a particular meaning, albeit slightly old-fashioned these days. As the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) explains, the word favours in the plural is "used with reference to a woman allowing a man to have sexual intercourse with her". This is also in the OED, but it doesn't give a definition as such, merely uses the word 'euphemistically' to introduce a number of citations eg one from Thomas Medwin (author of Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron) in 1824: "One who had bestowed her favours on many".

Wreaked havoc or wrought havoc?

You'll see both 'wreaked havoc' and 'wrought havoc' in many newspaper articles today, discussing the unrest in some cities. Which is correct? Strictly speaking, both are. 'Wrought' is often erroneously thought to be the past tense of 'wreak', but it isn't; it is an archaic past tense form of the verb 'to work' (as in 'wrought iron', for instance). The reason why both 'wreaked havoc' and 'wrought havoc' are ok is because the expression 'to work havoc' used to be common, so, of course, its past tense was 'wrought havoc'. Now, however, those newspapers and websites which use 'wrought havoc' (such as this BBC page) never use 'work havoc' in the present tense.

Injunction

The verb from the noun collection is collect, there is demonstration and demonstrate, reduction and reduce ... so injunction and ...?

 

Although rarer than the noun injunction, there is a verb 'to injunct' and it has appeared in some newspaper reports recently eg 'Has the rush to injunct gone too far ...?' asks this Guardian article (about half-way through) and '... Sir Fred Goodwin [...] had no right to injunct information ...' in this FT piece (third paragraph).

 

The OED describes the verb 'injunct' as colloquial. It is first attested only in the late 19th century, so injunct is a newer word than the noun injunction. The OED definition is 'to prohibit or restrain by injunction'.

 

Injunction, on the other hand, is first attested in the early 16th century. The first definition given in the OED is 'the act of enjoining' and, indeed, the noun 'injunction' comes from the verb 'to enjoin' (= to join together), which is a couple of centuries older. The legal sense, which we use today, namely a restraining order, was also in use in the 16th century.

 

The term for the situation when the longer word comes first, and then loses a suffix to become a shorter word, is 'back-formation'. Burgle is a back-formation from burglar, editor is a back-formation from edit and pea is a back-formation from pea.

I saw him walk or I saw him walking

Someone asked me whether there was a difference between 'I saw him walk along the road' and 'I saw him walking along the road'. Both are grammatically correct, but there is a slight difference in meaning. When saw (or another verb of perception eg hear, notice) is followed by the base form of the verb, or the infinitive without 'to' (as 'walk' in the sentence above) the emphasis is on the result of the action. When the -ing form is used the emphasis is on the process, or the continuation of the action.

 

The difference is perhaps clearer in the sentences 'I saw him do it' and 'I saw him doing it', and it is clearer still in 'I saw him drowning but he was rescued just in time'. You definitely need the -ing form here; 'I saw him drown but he was rescued just in time' is not a possible sentence, as the form 'drown' shows he couldn't possibly have been rescued.

Y'all

Discover English, an EFL textbook for children published by Pearson, mentions girls dancing to Will Smith's Switch in Chapter 1. I was using the chapter to teach English via Skype to an eleven-year-old girl, and wondered if I could incorporate some of the lyrics of the song in the lesson. I couldn't, because I didn't understand them myself, but I noted with interest Smith's use of y'all.

 

By coincidence I had just read the short chapter, or interlude, on y'all in David Crystal's The Stories of English. He says that y'all originated in the southern states of the USA at the end of the 19th century. It was first mostly used by African Americans, but its usage among all social groups of all American regions soon spread. Crystal notes that y'all is usually used when addressing a group of people, but he has also heard it used to address two people, and to address a single person.

 

Standard English has one word for you, although it used to have an informal singular form thou (thou was the subject, and thee was used when the object of the verb). The current word you was once only the object form; the subject form was ye. Some dialects still differentiate between you in the singular and you in the plural. My Irish in-laws frequently say ye to address a group and my own dialect (Liverpool) has youse. A friend of mine who taught in a school in Liverpool about twenty years ago said one day to a boy in her class 'Stand up, Hughes' and every child in the class stood up!

 

Like y'all, youse sometimes refers to just one person. By coincidence, I spotted a written example of this in yesterday's Daily Mail. The sports correspondent (or maybe he's the showbiz correspondent) had criticised Wayne Rooney in an article a few months ago, and now he found himself a few yards away from the footballer at Dubai Airport. Mrs Rooney -- Coleen, who is a Liverpudlian like her husband -- came up to the (one) correspondent and said "What gives youse the right to criticise us?"

'All who sail in her' or 'all that sail in her'

A Welsh friend of mine (who blogs as Taffdancer) keenly follows the news from Wales. Today Prince William and his fiancée Kate Middleton were launching a lifeboat in Anglesey, and my friend asked me whether William had made a mistake in saying 'God bless her and all that sail in her' (you can hear him on this video), instead of 'all who sail in her'.

 

Most grammar books say that 'who' should be used in relative clauses when referring to people. However, the respected Michael Swan in his best-selling Popular English Usage says that 'that' is often used instead of 'who', especially in a conversational style, and he gives as examples 'She's the only person that understands me', 'where's the girl that sells the tickets?' and 'he's a man that people like at first sight'.

 

Moreover, Acts 27:24 of the King James Bible has the phrase "lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with thee". Perhaps that is where Prince William got his grammar from.

 

Verb aspect matters when judging people's intentions

The verb form used to describe an action can affect how that action is perceived, according to William Hart of the University of Alabama. This could have serious implications during a criminal trial, possibly meaning the difference between a guilty and innocent verdict.

 

Hart was aware of existing research studies in different fields. One set of studies to do with language showed that if the progressive aspect is used ('was doing' as opposed to 'did') to describe an action, then that action is more vivid in the reader's mind. Other research studies, unconnected with language, had found that people who pictured an action more vividly were more inclined to think that someone had done it intentionally. So Hart and his colleague Dolores Albaraccin set out to discover if the language used when describing an action affected intentionality.

 

Volunteer subjects read a purported criminal report where the aspect of the verb varied (he was pulling out a gun vs he pulled out a gun). Those who read the progressive forms of the verb (was firing gunshots etc) thought that the perpetrator was pulling the trigger with more harmful intent than did those who read perfective verb forms (he fired gunshots).

 

Hart described it as 'startling' that the ability to think about other people's goals and intentions can hinge on one small point of grammar.

 

Read a summary of the story here.

Double genitive

Someone asked me why it was necessary to have the apostrophe s ('s) as well as the word 'of' in a structure like the following: a friend of my mother's. 'Why not just "a friend of my mother"?' she asked, since the 'of' already shows possession.

 

The 18th-century nitpicking grammarians got uptight about this so-called double genitive, and pronounced it incorrect. But their reasons for doing so were mainly because they were in the habit of comparing English to Latin; because Latin did not allow a double negative, nor, so they believed, should English. However, English is not Latin, and this is a very old construction in English. It had existed long before the 18th-century nitpickers started worrying about it.

 

In the sentence above, you could remove the 's from 'mother's' and still get a clear, unambiguous sentence, which would also be correct English: a friend of my mother. However, if you change the word 'friend' to 'picture', ambiguity is an issue. 'A picture of my mother' is a picture depicting my mother; 'a picture of my mother's' is a picture that belongs to my mother - quite different meanings.

 

This construction is called the double genitive, double possessive, or post-genitive. Note that if you are using a pronoun instead of a noun, the possessive is the only possibility: a friend of yours, an uncle of mine (not 'you' or 'me').

 

The apostrophe is used for other purposes apart from indicating possession. It is used in phrases like 'an hour's time', 'it's all in a day's work'.