Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 March 29

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March 29

"She insists me to mow the lawn" vs "She insists on me mowing the lawn" or "She insists on my mowing the lawn"

Which one is correct? 140.254.70.165 (talk) 11:43, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

The first is categorically incorrect. The last option uses "mowing" as a Gerund (a verb acting as a noun) and so the use of the possessive "my" is correct. To my British Emglish ears, this sounds the best. The second option uses "mowing" as a participle, and is still correct.--Phil Holmes (talk) 11:47, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Why not "she insists I mow the lawn (every week)." or

"she insists I should mow the lawn."?Llaanngg (talk) 11:50, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

• Most natural to my ears would be "She insists that I mow the lawn". But the last two seem natural as well, as do suggestions offered above. The first is not correct, because insist can only be an intransitive verb and thus one can not insist an object. --Jayron32 12:35, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

The 1st example is wrong, but not for this reason. "Insist" has a transitive use as well. "We insist that you stay for dinner." is perfectly fine. But structures like "me to mow" or "me to do ... " is are not. That's different from "She told me to ... ". If a clause is a direct object, its pronoun is nominative because the whole clause is the object. --Llaanngg (talk) 15:21, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Since the grammar police are already here, "structures...is not" should be "are not". :-) StuRat (talk) 15:28, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Yep, me got that wrong.--Llaanngg (talk) 15:30, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

User:StuRat, we expect the same degree of instant obeisance when we point out that the neuter personal possessive pronoun/adjective its "should be" written without an apostrophe, to distinguish it from the abbreviation it's (short for "it is" or "it has").  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:22, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree that the first option is completely incorrect. The other two suggest slightly different things. "She insists on me mowing the lawn" puts the emphasis on who has to do it (Me! Not someone else). "She insists on my mowing the lawn" puts greater emphasis on what has to be done: I would rather pressure wash the drive, but have to mow the lawn instead. 217.44.50.87 (talk) 15:41, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

"She insists on me mowing the lawn" means she is insisting that nobody but the speaker mow the lawn, and carries no sense of urgency that the lawn be mowed soon. "She insists on my mowing the lawn" means she is urging that the lawn be mowed promptly, and in this case, it is implicit that the lawn should be mowed by the speaker, but that is of less importance than that the lawn needs to be mowed promptly. Context should determine which version is appropriate, but in informal speech, the 'me' version is used far more frequently. Akld guy (talk) 21:15, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I disagree that the unbolded printed sentences make those distinctions. prosodic stress is the way such distinctions are drawn, which is a feature of spoken language, not of written (excepting typography like bold or italics, etc.) I can also say "She insists on my mowing the lawn" and when I say that aloud, it has the same sense as the "me" sentence. The difference between the use of "me" and "my" is probably more dialectical, where some dialects prefer the use of the object pronoun and others the possessive in those cases. --Jayron32 11:46, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

I did not bold the 'me' to indicate voice stress, but to differentiate between 'me' and 'my'. That was probably the wrong thing to do. But I still think I'm correct. Akld guy (talk) 13:36, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

The use of "on me/my" doesn't flow smoothly into my South African English ears, "She insists that I mow the lawn" is much more natural to me. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:52, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Ein kühles Helles

In a 1976 German language Donald Duck pocket book, Donald eats a sandwich and finishes it off with a glass of beer, saying "Und noch ein kühles Helles hinterher!" I was thinking about why Helles is capitalised but kühles is not, even though both hell and kühl are adjectives. Is this because in German, adjectives can be nouned simply by capitalising them, and Donald is saying "a cool (light one)", but German lacks the nominal noun "one" and simply uses the adjective itself as the noun? JIP | Talk 20:46, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

It's a beer...(it should actually be "ein kühles helles Bier", but as one omits the word beer, "Helles" becomes the noun. Lectonar (talk) 21:02, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Strike that...it is actually a noun: Helles. Live and learn. Lectonar (talk) 21:04, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

In german one can simply use an adjective as a noun (but note that it keeps the grammatical gender of the left-out noun). It just gets a capital. In case of ein Helles this is done so commonly with the meaning of "a pale beer" that the word got its own entry as a noun in the dictionaries. Using adjectives as nouns is common in many languages, like german, dutch, french and latin. English is the only language I know of where it is common to use a short word as a placeholder for the noun ("one"). So yes, you're right. Both of you. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:34, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

It happens in English too - "I'd like a draft/light please" - that I'm asking for a particular variety of beer is understood from the context. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:56, 30 March 2016 (UTC)