The virtual linguist

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'.

Shew

My son, who's studying history, asked me about the word 'shew' which he often comes across. 'Shew' is an old variant of the verb 'show'. It was pronounced like 'shoe'. It is found a lot in the Bible, and the OED says it was not uncommon in the first half of the 19th century but is obsolete now. Chambers doesn't go as far as to say it is obsolete; at the 'show' entry it has 'shew' which has before it the words 'now rarely'. The internet is full of comments on forums from people who insist that they, or their relatives, were using the 'shew' spelling in the 1940s, and the respected late journalist Miles Kington insisted in this article that he had seen a sign at a railway station in the 1940s that read 'Tickets must be shewn at entrance to platform'.

 

'Show' is an interesting verb because it has a mixture of strong (vowel-change) endings, and weak ones. The past tense is 'showed' (I showed him my etchings) and the past participle is usually 'shown' (Have you shown her your etchings?), on the same pattern as blow - blown and know - known. The past tense of 'shew' is, or was, 'shewed', and the past participle was 'shewn'.

 

I said the past participle of show is usually shown, but you often see 'have showed'; there are several examples on today's Google News pages, and that's probably fairly typical (eg 'new figures have showed' in this Press Association article). You are less likely to see showed as the past participle in a passive sentence, however; so 'it was shown' is much more common than 'it was showed'.

These kind of questions or these kinds of questions?

A correspondent asked me whether it is ok to say 'these kind of questions'. The usual advice given regarding sentences such as these is that they are ungrammatical, and it would be better to say 'this kind of question', making everything singular, or 'these kinds of questions', making everything plural.

 

However, the 'these kind of' structure is very common in speech, and there are as many examples of 'these kind of' as there are of 'these kinds of' in the British National Corpus. The OED tells us that the phrases 'all kind of'' and 'no kind of' were once treated more or less as adjectives, and since adjectives don't inflect in English, the 'kind' in these expressions never varied, even when followed by a plural noun. Shakespeare, for instance, writes in King Lear "These kind of knaves I know". And Jane Austen wrote in Sense and Sensibility "I know so little of these kind of forms ...". 'Kind' is related to the word 'kin', and since 'kin' has no plural, or, rather, it is already a sort of collective noun, so 'kind' was considered plural in meaning too. I've found one citation containing 'kinds' in the plural in Johnson's Dictionary; it's "Thus far we have endeavoured in part to open of what nature and force laws are, according to their kinds" from Richard Hooker, who was writing in the late 16th century, but it wasn't used much before this, as far as I can ascertain.

 

My advice is to stick to the 'these kinds of questions' structure, but don't worry too much if you say 'these kind of' -- you're in good company!

Do-gooding or doing good?

I was watching Ian Hislop's Age of the Do-gooders on iPlayer earlier (you can watch it on iPlayer until 27 January here if you are UK-based) and he used various words and phrases based on the phrase 'to do good'. One of them was 'do-gooding'. I looked this up in the OED and the word was first attested in the 1930s, when it entered the language both as an adjective (do-gooding people) and a noun (the tax burden of the do-gooding).

 

This word can sound rather odd to a native English speaker, as the suffix -ing usually is tagged on to verbs, so it would be more intuitive to put -ing on the verb do, rather than the (here) noun good. However, hyphenated words are often treated as a whole unit and behave like single words. Mothers-in-law is the correct plural of mother-in-law, but you do hear and see 'mother-in-laws' (perhaps because it sounds fine to our ears as 'my mother-in-law's visit' is perfectly grammatical).

 

Apart from do-gooding, the OED also has the nouns do-goodism, do-goodery and the very common do-gooder, as well as the adjectives do-good and do-goody.

Shellacking

President Obama described the defeat his party suffered in the recent mid-term elections as a 'shellacking'. Shellacking as a noun is in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but not in the shorter Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE), nor in Collins. The word dates back to the 1930s and the OED says it is "chiefly US". The definition, apart from the literal 'a coating of shellac' is 'a beating or thrashing, a pasting, or a defeat'. The word comes from the noun shellac, a lac resin used as a varnish and formerly used in the manufacture of gramophone records.

 

There aren't many verbs ending in the letter C in English (the commonest are picnic, bivouac, panic, mimic, frolic and tarmac), but the general pattern is for a K to creep in before a suffix beginning with a vowel: panicked, mimicking, picknicker. There is usually no K if the suffix begins with a consonant: frolicsome, trafficless. Nor is there usually a K in the third person singular form of the present tense: mimics, picnics, frolics, tarmacs. In Collins Dictionary the verb to shellac follows this pattern (shellacs), but the ODE has shellacks. The OED doesn't give any form (although it has an 19th-century citation where 'shellacing' is written without a k). Inflected forms from the verb 'to arc' don't usually add a K either (arcing, arced). You would write lip-synced or lip-synched, but not lip-syncked, -nck- not being a usual English combination of letters.

Summer day or summer's day

I was writing a definition and example sentence for a children's dictionary earlier and wasn't sure whether to write "it was a boiling hot summer day" or "it was a boiling hot summer's day". There are far more hits for 'summer's day' on the web, but the results are heavily skewed by the line in Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ...".

Plenty of sites on the internet purporting to teach English or to give advice on grammar say that the apostrophe is necessary because it denotes a possessive (the day belongs to the summer), but then no-one would say "an autumn's day" or "a spring's day". In those cases it seems pretty clear to me that the correct version is without the apostrophe. The British National Corpus has several entries for "a winter day" and "a summer day", but no entries for "a winter's day" or "a summer's day".

'Winter day' is a headword in the OED, although there is a note that 'winter's day' is more common. At 'summer' there is the explanation "The possessive summer's is similarly used, but now chiefly with morning, evening, and night". No mention of 'day' there, although interestingly,'summer's day' is in the OED as an entry in its own right.

There was an Old Frisian word sumersdey, spelt with an s and originally meaning midsummer day (or should that be midsummer's?) and perhaps that is the reason that 'summer's day' sounds so normal, whereas 'spring's day' doesn't.