Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 February 13

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February 13

"These ones" ?

Is "these ones" an acceptable alternative to "these" ? For example, "Do you want these ones ?". StuRat (talk) 06:14, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

It's fine in British English. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 06:26, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Perfectly acceptable in the UK and Australia, increasingly acceptable in the US, though with geographical variation. It is simply the plural of "this one", just like "these" is the plural of "this". There are subtle nuances in meaning between the two. E.g., in certain situations, by using "these ones" rather than "these" you can indicate that the class of things you are referring to is the one that is contained in the other. [1]

It may occur in some non-prestige dialects in the U.S. but I don't think it is standard. Rmhermen (talk) 15:42, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

It's not substandard or dialectal, just unnecessarily wordy. μηδείς (talk) 18:11, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Jespersen has a whole section on post-determiner "one" in Volume II of his classic English grammar. The exact phrase "these ones" isn't mentioned, but "those ones" occurred in Kipling and "these young ones" in Shakespeare... AnonMoos (talk) 18:26, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks all. StuRat (talk) 22:12, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Resolved

Quirky placement of modal verbs (American English)

The lecturer on a course I'm doing has an odd habit which I've never come across before, of inverting the auxiliary verb and subject in declarative sentences, e.g. Iteratively can you then pick from that forest the two trees with lowest frequencies...; In time will this forest converge to a lone tree. As far as I can tell he speaks otherwise fairly nondescript GAE (it's this guy). He does this in both spoken and written English. (I believe, though I don't have examples at hand, that he also adds an auxiliary 'do' to imperatives, along the lines of Do you also make sure to free the memory. Again, these are not questions). How common is this feature? Henry^Flower 13:31, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Either he's speaking Yodic, or a couple of question marks have been omitted. Bazza (talk) 14:35, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

No, these are not questions; as I said, they are declarative. Henry^Flower 14:43, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Is he a native speaker? There are non-native speakers who speak with an American accent. Those constructions are not normal for American English, but they are normal for German and maybe other Germanic languages. On the other hand, in normal American English, you can have sentences like "Only after centuries of gradual climate change did the forest attain its present state." This is a survival of the Germanic principle that the verb conjugated for person is always the second element in a sentence, such that if the sentence begins with an adverbial clause, the conjugated verb must precede the subject of the sentence. In present-day American English, I think this happens only when the sentence begins with a limiting adverbial clause involving partial or complete negation (as in "only after centuries" meaning "not right away"). Marco polo (talk) 15:11, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

From Subject-auxiliary inversion: At no time will Jessica say that.; Fred fell asleep, and so did Jim. Fred fell asleep, as did Jim. [likewise, I could go now, as could Jim, a modal counterexample to the tendency for such examples to involve a negative]; Sally knows more languages than does her father. [likewise, the modal She can speak French, as can her father]. See also negative inversion and subject-verb inversion. Duoduoduo (talk) 16:24, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Not an example with an auxiliary verb, but Naked Came the Stranger. Duoduoduo (talk) 16:30, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like George Herbert Walker Bush or his son. μηδείς (talk) 18:10, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

While inversion can be grammatical in standard English in certain constructions, wouldn't others agree that the specific examples cited by the questioner are nonstandard or at least very awkward, at least for American English? 159.182.1.4 (talk) 22:20, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. If I heard someone saying those sentences, I'd assume they were asking questions and my imperfect hearing had failed to register their interrogatory voice tone. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 22:31, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely. I would assume that I had failed to hear the question intonation or that the person is not a native speaker. But the guy in the link (I fixed the typo in the web address) is very definitely a native speaker of US English. The videos are almost two hours long -- at what point in which video does he use the inverted construction? All I found within a minute or so was "...how increasingly is programming becoming...." -- that sounds like an okay inversion after an adverb. My theory is that the guy talks so fast that once in a while his words come out in the wrong order, and that may explain the odd examples of inversions that the OP noticed. By the way, the one context in which these examples or something like them might be found in English is in poetry. Duoduoduo (talk) 23:07, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the ideas, even if we haven't got far towards an explanation! I linked to the videos just to give a general idea of his accent; I haven't hunted through them for specific oral examples, but you may or may not trust me that he does the same in writing as in speaking (which is why I don't think it's because he speaks so fast he gets confused). The original written examples I gave are from here (pdf file). Henry^Flower 00:23, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I think this is just a quirky and atypical idiolect. He does seem to be a native speaker, with some speech patterns typical of New England, where I live and where he's spent almost all of his life. However, his nonstandard use of inversion is not something I've heard much before. Marco polo (talk) 02:42, 14 February 2013 (UTC)