Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 October 29

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October 29

Apostrophe usage

Which is correct (or are they both acceptable): "Adam and Eve's expulsion" or "Adam's and Eve's expulsion"? If the former is preferred (which I suspect), why does only "his and her expulsion" sound right, not "he and her expulsion"? Clarityfiend (talk) 04:42, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Either one could work, but "Adam and Eve" are often treated as a unit. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:00, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

"Adam and Eve's expulsion" and "Adam's and Eve's expulsion" are both grammatical, and I find both idiomatic (the former more so). ("Adam's explusion and Eve's" is also grammatical.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language points out a difference between the two: since Gilbert and Sullivan worked as a pair, #"Gilbert's and Sullivan's popularity" sounds odd -- much odder than "Verdi's and Puccini's popularity". *"He and her expulsion" is straightforwardly ungrammatical (as is *"him and her expulsion"). CGEL claims to be no more than a descriptive grammar, and so it's no surprise that its treatment of this matter (pages 1330 to 1332) doesn't attempt to explain why case-marking works differently with pronouns. The question interests me, but unfortunately duckduckgoing "case-marking english pronoun coordination" and the like doesn't bring up anything that promises to be directly useful; rather, there's a lot about "Me and Steve played tennis", "You must explain yourself to your mother and I", and similar nominative/accusative oddities. -- Hoary (talk) 05:32, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't quite follow your final sentence, but in any case I don't see the two sentences as the same. "Me and Steve played tennis" is "informal but grammatical"; "You must explain yourself to your mother and I" is just an error, and there is nothing to be said in its defense. --Trovatore (talk) 06:46, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Two kinds of wrong. Is one any more or less wrong than the other? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:07, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I think so, yes. "Me and Steve" has a long history (arguably comes from French). "To your mother and I" is a hypercorrection, which seems in some sense like the worst kind of error, because it doesn't arise organically from the language, but rather is a failed attempt to apply a misunderstood rule. --Trovatore (talk) 07:15, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

For me (for my idiolect), "to your mother and I" would indeed be a hypercorrection. I wouldn't call it the worst kind of error, because it doesn't affect the meaning in the slightest: if it's an error, it's entirely benign. I dare say it's a hypercorrection for you, Trovatore, as well. But this doesn't mean that it's a hypercorrection for all or even most of those who use it. The fact is, it's widely used. See for example the paper "Between you and I: Case variation in coordinate noun phrases in Canadian English" (doi:10.1075/eww.35.2.03pra). Moreover, for those (unlike you and me) who do use nominatives in [what are for you and me] accusative contexts, there appear to be rules governing which pronouns can be marked nominative (see CGEL). ¶ However, we're getting away from the original, interesting question. -- Hoary (talk) 07:45, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

What I meant in my last sentence was that when I searched for theoretical material about genitive marking (or not) of coordinated pronouns, I found little, but I found a lot about nominative/accusative oddities. My second example, "You must explain yourself to your mother and I", is ungrammatical for me, and so I'm not surprised if it's ungrammatical for you as well. However, there is plenty of evidence that constructions such as this are used by native speakers of English who do not thereupon correct themselves. For most of these speakers (writers), it's not possible to dismiss nominatives in accusative contexts as mere performance errors. There's a considerable literature about this; most of p.463 of CGEL is devoted to it. -- Hoary (talk) 07:26, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

You wouldn't say "explain to I", so "explain to your mother and I" is not correct. Similarly, you wouldn't say "Me went to school", so "Me and Steve went to school is not correct either, unless you're Tonto or are using poetic license in a song such as "Me and Bobby McGee" or "Me and you and a dog named Boo". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:48, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

No, I wouldn't say "Me went to school". In an informal context, I'd be quite happy to say "Me and Steve went to school". Moreover, corpora show that plenty of native speakers of English aside from me do say this. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is a dispassionate description of the English language; it notes that this is widely used (see pp.462-463, wherein examples are marked with a "!"). I don't have either the Comprehensive or the Longman reference grammar with me now, but I'd be surprised if they don't say much the same thing. (You might also look at the introduction to the paper "Between you and I": I provided the DOI, so this paper is easy to get hold of.) -- Hoary (talk) 08:13, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

It sounds hickish. Dizzy Dean used to refer to himself and his brother as "Me 'n Paul". The novelty of that was that it betrayed Diz's lack of education. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:50, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreeing with Hoary (as an aged Brit): "Me and Steve . . ." (or Steve and me . . .") is something I, despite being public-school educated (i.e. private school educated in US terminology) would and do say in casual or 'street' conversational register, but in any considered context I'd say "Steve and I . . ." (though never ". . . I and Steve . . .").

By "considered" I mean in any formal or semi-formal situation, or if addressing several people at once even if in a pub (assuming I'm a regular there). In the UK, using casual style in a more formal situation may earn some unstated distain from some of one's listeners, but using over-formal style in the wrong time and place (such as a rougher pub where one isn't known) could, possibly, get one's head kicked in, so it's important to know how formal or informal one should be in any given time, place and company. Note however that "Me and Steve . . ." is both natural and correct in some UK regional dialects. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195) 90.202.208.54 (talk) 13:28, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

English has no case in nouns. Apostrophe-es is not case, but a clitic. It goes at the end of the noun phrase. ("The woman I was talking to's dog".) With "Adam and Eve's expulsion", the clitic docks to the noun phrase "Adam and Eve". "Adam's and Eve's expulsion" is being treated as two noun phrases. The difference is as described above: If the two nouns are a semantic unit, they take a single clitic,, if they're semantically distinct, they may take two. If apostrophe-es were genitive case, both nouns would *have* to take it. Since English pronouns, unlike nouns, are inflected for case, you do need the genitive for both: "his and her expulsion".

Conjunctions (at least "and" and I think also "or") trigger the objective case of pronouns: "me and her went to the store". Your English teacher will "correct" you and tell you that's wrong (probably because you don't say it that way in Latin), but why does she need to? She doesn't have to tell you not to say *"her went to the store" or *"didn't her go already" -- no-one would ever say that, at least not in my dialect -- so why do people say "me and her" in the first place? Easy -- that's how English grammar actually is. We'd all speak that way if we weren't told not to in school.

The hypercorrection "between you and I" occurs because there is no case distinction in English pronouns when they're conjoined. When your teacher tells a child "her and me" is wrong, they go on to replace it everywhere precisely because there is no distinction in English, and to learn a distinction is an additional process -- effectively learning an element of the grammar of a foreign language, and not everyone gets that far. You'll also hear "They saw you and I" -- you can easily learn to replace the objective case with the subjective in "X and Y" phrases, but it's much more difficult to learn to sometimes use one case, and sometimes the other, according to artificial rules that you have to learn at school and that come naturally to no-one (practically no-one, anyway). Even if your parents made the distinction while you were acquiring English as a child, and never made a mistake in front of you, as soon as you go outside you'll hear the lack of distinction, and we pick up language from our childhood friends perhaps as much as we do from our parents.

— kwami (talk) 16:40, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

You're on the right track, kwami. It strikes me as a bit odd to say that "'s" isn't (or is) a case, but I agree that it isn't an inflection (which I imagine is what you meant) and is a clitic. I also wonder about the idea that coordinators (or "coordinating conjunctions" if you must) trigger the accusative (or objective) case in pronouns. I'd say that they license it. (My own hunch is that they remove any constraint on case-marking, so the pronouns default to accusative: note that the response to "Who wants more dessert?" is "Me!". But I'd want to consider German before continuing.) Perhaps there's a study somewhere of case-marking of coordinated pronouns by young L1 speakers of English. This hypercorrection (if it is hypercorrection) doesn't seem uniform across number and person: I'd be very surprised to encounter "They saw you and we", for example. -- Hoary (talk) 22:56, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

The use of "me" as an answer to "who wants?" is an example of the disjunctive pronoun, standard in French and the norm in colloquial English (American, at least). μηδείς (talk) 01:48, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Okey dokey. (If this weren't my semi-native language, I swear I'd go mad trying to master it.) Thanks. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:20, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

how do you say "been" if you don't use participles for the perfect?

I know a fair number of people who don't use participles for the perfect. They have just three TAM forms of the verb: past, non-past and progressive. For example, I heard "has went" for "has gone" in a 60 Minutes interview last week, and I've met people who do the same. (Presumably they do have "gone" in fixed expressions like "all gone", they just don't use it to form the perfect.)

But, what about BE? Is it an exception, the only verb with four TAM forms, with "has been"? (I don't mean fixed expressions like "how have you been?", but in productive use of the perfect.) Or do people use the past-tense form as they do with other verbs, for ??"has was"? I don't recall ever hearing that.

— kwami (talk) 16:13, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I am sorry, but whoever says "has went" is totally wrong. I have never heard a single native English speaker who speaks this way. The standard form should be "has gone". Please see broken English. I am aware that some people may use "is" instead of "am". (Example: I is good.) But that is not grammatically correct in the main branches of English, and native English speakers will think you're uneducated if you dare to speak that way. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 18:22, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I am a native English speaker, and an American who's actually been asked if I were English, and I sometimes produce that formation. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. μηδείς (talk) 01:44, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry μηδείς, which is it that you produce: "He has went" or "I is good"? And second question, you genuinely think it is correct, you don't say it to be funny? --Lgriot (talk) 13:46, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

@Lgriot: I said "has went" about a month ago, and laughed when I realized what I had said. I only produce it rarely, and not intentionally. (It seems to show up in my speech in cases like "have you ever went" when the participle and the auxilliary are separated. I can't imagine ever saying "I have went to the store.") My late neighbor, however, (born ~1900) used it exclusively. I don't know where she was born, but it may be a regional or generational thing. My mother has also said it occasionally, and she was the one who pointed out that our neighbor said it exclusively. We all speak/spoke with a Delaware Valley accent natively.

I won't have time to look for an RS until dinner time, but this search of "Delaware Valley" "have went" shows well over a thousand ghits where the terms are used in the same text. μηδείς (talk) 15:25, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks @Medeis:, I was going to follow with a "Where from" question, but you have preempted that already. Cool bit of trivia. --Lgriot (talk) 20:17, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

@Lgriot: All of the first 100 ghits show quotes where the term is used, a majority of them from sports commentary (!), which shows the linguistic register of the term; with the two the exceptions being this thread and this wiki which mentions the formation indirectly, but references it to a real-life quote ("He'd have went up the road a piece to get on the main road") published in the University of South Carolina, College of Arts and Science's "Dictionary: Southern Appalachian English" under the entry for "piece". Obviously the term is attested in at least the older parts of the US. μηδείς (talk) 21:04, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

"Uneducated" -- but that's precisely the point. You have to be educated into not speaking this way, which means that it's normal English. "Totally wrong" is a judgement call, like claiming American English is "wrong" because that's not how the Queen speaks. — kwami (talk) 07:13, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Huh? Are you saying people are born with the innate ability to speak bad English, and have to be educated to speak properly? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:32, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

No, he's saying that people will speak, without any formal education, the dialect of their environment (family, friends, culture). In most cases, Standard English (whatever form that is) is an artificial dialect and that the rules of standard English often have to be taught formally. Yes, some people will probably speak Standard English (again, whatever your local standard is) in the home, but large numbers of people do not, and they are not wrong. --Jayron32 11:18, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

A sentence structure is most certainly wrong, if it does not conform to the (national) standard. So, an American who uses Standard American English will say “I has went” is grammatically incorrect. It may be regionally understood as a dialect, but it is still wrong compared to the standard. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 00:49, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Of course, it's wrong in the specific varient known as American Standard English. But wrong in a specific context is quite distinct from saying wrong absent of any context. If you change the context, you change the values by which you assess wrongness. All languages, even unstandardized ones, have consistent rules by which one can assess whether a usage is normal or marked. But to say that a usage is absolutely wrong in all possible contexts in language is just nonsensical. --Jayron32 11:51, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Since I’ve never really changed the context and I’ve always referred to American English, I think the main takeaway is miscommunication. So, with that said, I think you’re just rephrasing what I said in your own words. In any case, I never meant to imply “absent of context”. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 01:32, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

“ and anyone dies when somebody shoots
and the sheriff arrives after everyone's went;
which isn't,perhaps,an environment

where you would(and I should)expect to find
overwhelming devotion to things of the mind.
But when it rains chickens we'll all catch larks
--to borrow a phrase from Karl the Marks. ” — E. E. Cummings, Ballad Of An Intellectual

--Trovatore (talk) 18:33, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

• Never heard that. And I think I may have heard sort of the converse – “I been there”.

This also brings up the question of whether there are any other verbs like “to be”, with a mandatory past participle in this version of the vernacular. Loraof (talk) 18:29, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

• Mandatory past participle in vernacular, along with “to be”: “to do” – I’ve never heard anyone say ?”I’ve did that”. Loraof (talk) 18:39, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

• I think I've heard that, but would want to hear it again to be sure. The participle for the past, "I done it", is very common. But very many fewer Ghits than "has went", and most of those seem to be "has DID". — kwami (talk) 07:13, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

• Also in some people’s vernacular, we have “I done gone”, with a double past participle. Loraof (talk) 18:33, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Do people ever say “I done went” (past participle helper + preterite)? Loraof (talk) 16:30, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

• Not only do I hear his usage often (I had a neighbor who said it constantly, so much that we tittered when she said it) "has went" garners 505,000 ghits. The form "went" is indeed not just the archaic preterite but also the past participle of wend, hence the suppletion for gone in the perfect form is unsurprising. μηδείς (talk) 18:45, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I know a Jamaican lawyer who speaks like that to her friends - the accent makes it very difficult to follow but I understand some of it. Then she speaks to a client and switches into perfect upper - class English. See Jamaican language. 82.14.24.95 (talk) 18:49, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

I'd look in COCA for "has [preterite]", and look through the resulting snippets for examples. I wouldn't be surprised to find "been" used by itself. NB in some lects (famously, in AAVE), there's a distinction between /bɪn/ and /bin/: a distinction that of course the spelling "been" usually blurs. -- Hoary (talk) 23:13, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

@Hoary: in AAVE, what is the use distinction between /bɪn/ and /bin/ ? Loraof (talk) 16:34, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

@Loraof:: Please see African American Vernacular English#Tense and aspect. (I find the notation there very confusing. A little later, I may find time to tinker with it.) -- Hoary (talk) 22:51, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

@Hoary: Sorry, I don’t see anything in there about the two pronunciations of “been”. Could you clarify? Thanks. Loraof (talk) 23:12, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

@Loraof: I quote: This aspect-marking form of been or BIN [note starts] In order to distinguish the stressed and unstressed forms, which carry different meaning, linguists often write the stressed version as BIN [note ends] is stressed and semantically distinct from the unstressed form: She BIN running ('She has been running for a long time') and She been running ('She has been running').[reference to Green's book] I don't have any copy of Green's book at hand right now, and therefore cannot check (and certainly don't want to tinker with the article); but I believe that the stressed form (here, "BIN") is /bin/ (i.e. the sound of "been" in standard English) and that the unstressed form (here, "been") is /bɪn/ (i.e. the sound of "bin" in standard English). Correct me if I'm wrong. -- Hoary (talk) 05:38, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

This is a nit, but I somewhat object to the assertion that /bin/ is "the sound of 'been' in standard English". In standard American English, which I'm going to insist is a category of standard English, "been" is usually pronounced either /bɪn/ or /bɛn/, depending on region and speaker (personally I use them interchangeably). If you had said "the sound of 'bean' in standard English" I would have had no objection. --Trovatore (talk) 08:19, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, good point, Trovatore. I was careless. And perhaps other qualifications are better added as well. (In contrition, I humbly offer you today's different, small, language-related contribution.) -- Hoary (talk) 09:10, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I have heard Alan Shearer produce these forms quite a lot on national television, for one. "It would have went in". It′s definitely a Thing, and prescriptivists wailing about it being grammatically incorrect is all well and good but centuries of linguistic change prove that such wailing does not stop a Thing from being a Thing.

I think the process at play here is that the preterite and past participle forms (which are the same in most verbs) are reduced to one, one way or the other, in some people′s speech. For "go", "gone" is more often replaced by "went" than vice versa while for "do" the preterite "did" can be replaced by "done" (kids where I′m from will say "I done it, miss" when they finish a piece of schoolwork.) For "be", the first thing that will happen is that one of "was" or "were" will replace the other form entirely - in London people often say "I was, you was" and up north "I were, you were". There may be some dialects that have "I been, you been", perhaps in AAVE? (I recall reading that one dialect of Middle English used "been" in the simple past, too.) – filelakeshoe (t / c)  09:21, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

"Has went" and similar constructions are also normal in some Scots English dialects. Listen, for example, to racing driver Paul Di Resta commentating on Formula 1 qualifying and racing. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.202.208.54 (talk) 13:36, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Okay, but my original question remains: for people who say "has went" and have otherwise conflated the past with the preterite, what do they say for BE? Does that verb retain all three forms? — kwami (talk) 05:18, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Well, but are there such people? That is, do we have evidence there really are dialects that have a general, across-the-board neutralization of the two paradigms in strong verbs (with or without "be" as a sole exception), rather than just variant forms in individual lexical items? In all my readings about variant morphosyntax in English verbs I don't remember having come across a description of such a system, and I would question your assumption that the presence of "has went", in and by itself, implies such. "Went" as a past participle was certainly around in Middle English and remained in use dialectally well into Modern English [1] (Looks like this particular instance is probably a scanning error, but the overall point is still true.). As you are probably aware, "went" was originally a past form of a weak verb, before it leaked into the suppletive paradigm of "go", so it is not surprising it could enter both the past-tense and the participial slot there. While it is certainly true that many strong verbs can display such neutralizations in individual dialects, that doesn't mean any one dialect conflates all of them. But more directly to your question: I have certainly never heard of any dialect that extends "was" or "were" into the participial function; what does occur (quite widely, obviously) is variation between "was" and "were", and occasional extension of "been" into the past tense function. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:11, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

trouble pronouncing "one" like QE2 does

I saw a news item about British actress Claire Foy having trouble pronouncing "one" like HM QE2 does. I found a video[2] of HM saying this word ("One cause for thankfulness...") and it sounds like normal British English to me (US speaker). I didn't locate a sample of Claire Foy's rendition of this word to compare, but youtube audio of Claire Foy in a casual conversation (talk show appearance) has at most a slightly regional UK accent that I'm sure she can control while working. Can anyone explain why there would be difficulty? 173.228.123.121 (talk) 19:34, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Studies of recent change in English often mention change in QE2's pronunciation over the half-century-plus of her Christmas addresses to her "subjects". Foy is young and suppose she was chosen to depict a younger QE2. The video you point us to was made when QE2 was old. I know nothing about this film but presume that Foy is having trouble with QE2's pronunciation as it used to be. I think that if you look further on the interwebs you'll find samples of the latter. -- Hoary (talk) 23:04, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

The story that you linked to has a video where Ms Foy does her own and her queenly version (about 4 minutes in). I would expect the difficulty was not producing the pronunciation per se, but remembering to do so at the same time as doing the actual acting. Henry^Flower 10:29, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article on it is pretty short, but the concept one wants to look into to research this is Idiolect. An idiolect is a person's peculiar and unique way of speaking, and is tied not just to a person, but to a specific time and place. For example, until my early 20s I spoke in a rather heavy New England accent, but after about 5-6 years living away from New England, my accent moderated towards a more General American accent (with a few New Englandisms and pronunciations thrown in). The Queens own idiolect may have changed over the years, as several people have noted. --Jayron32 11:15, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

For an example of HM's earlier accent, see HM Queen Elizabeth II - Coronation Day Speech - 2 June 1953. See also BBC - Queen's speech 'less posh'. Alansplodge (talk) 11:24, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, that last one was Jonathan Harrington in the Journal of Phonetics. It's reported by The Indi here. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:35, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Nancy Mitford has an amusing passage about two characters meeting in the 1930s: "Cedric made great use of the word 'one', which he pronounced with peculiar emphasis. Lady Montdore had always been a one for one, but she said it quite differently—'w’n'." AnonMoos (talk) 12:11, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

The Queen's uncle, Edward VIII, in his 1936 abdication speech uses the phrase "to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do", and somehow manages two syllables in the word "I". Alansplodge (talk) 16:49, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Similarly in New England English, the "i" sound in the middle of words takes on a two-syllable pronunciation, so that "mine" is pronounced distinctly as "mai-yun". --Jayron32 12:49, 31 October 2017 (UTC)