Search results for 'tag:Constructions tag:Pronouns' matching tags 'Constructions' and 'Pronouns'

Re: Suggest + "not do" - verb pattern

YoungCalifornian — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:33:12 GMT

Tanit
But I'm stuck with a sentence where "to do" is replaced by "not to do":

    a1) I suggest not doing X.                         (I reckon this is fine)
    a2) I suggest not to do X.                          (???)
    b1) I suggest [that] Y shouldn't do X.         (I reckon this is fine)
    b2) I suggest [that] Y [not do | don't] X.      (this sounds terribly bad!)

Your questions stem from the use of the mandative subjunctive, which arises in turn from the use of the verb "to suggest." However, you've complicated things by using the complicated predicate "to do X" in your sentences' subordinate clauses. I'm assuming that "Y" always represents a personal pronoun (or proper noun), but "X" could be either a demonstrative pronoun (or regular noun in certain cases) or a verb depending on your meaning.

a1) This construction is fine if "X" is a demonstrative pronoun, but incorrect if represents a verb.

a2) This construction is incorrect. If "X" is a demonstrative pronoun, the verb "to do" must be changed from the infinitive to the subjunctive and a personal pronoun added so that the sentence reads I suggest Y not do X. This makes the subordinate clause a content clause, which means that the word "that" could be added as you've done in example b2). The sentence will not work at all if "X" is a verb.

b1) While this construction is not grammatically incorrect, it can sound too passive when "suggest" and "should" are in close proximity. Anyway, that's assuming that "X" is once again a demonstrative pronoun. This construction will not work if "X" is a verb.

b2) It may not seem like it, but switching between "not do" or "don't" (i.e. "do not" ) dramatically changes this sentence. They cannot be used interchangably in this context. As I mentioned above, the "not do" construction works fine if "X" is a demonstrative pronoun. However, if "X" is a (subjunctive) verb then "do not" or "don't" (or does not/doesn't for singular third person pronouns) must be used.

I apologize if this sounds complicated, but it's a result of using an auxiliary verb in your example predicates. If you replace "to do X" with a simpler verb it would probably be clearer. Basically, your two options are to follow the verb "to suggest" with either a gerund or the subjunctive. Either way, the word "not" would precede the dependent verb should you choose to make it negative. Looking ahead, I've used the verb "to interview" in an example of each construction.

Gerund: I suggest (not) interviewing...
Subjunctive: I suggest (that) he (not) interview...

Here's the sentence I'm trying to write (it's for a research paper):

1. "Issues of availability, together with constraints on time and scope of the research, suggested not interviewing any member of the scientific committee."
2. "Issues of availability, together with constraints on time and scope of the research, suggested not to interview any member of the scientific committee."
3. "Issues of availability, together with constraints on time and scope of the research, suggested that no member of the scientific committee should be interviewed."

I'd go for no. 1 (no. 3 seems to carry a different meaning ... or am I wrong?), but I am not sure about that. What do you think?
I'm also trying (with little, if any, success) to work out the general pattern.

Both the first and third examples work. The first is the gerund construction, the third is the subjunctive construction. The second is incorrect. However, despite being technically correct, both the first and third examples still sound awkward. Ultimately, I think this is because it sounds strange for "issues" to suggest something directly. Typically they would suggest something to someone. For instance, I think that "Issues of availability... suggest not interviewing any member of the scientific committee to me" or "Issues of availability... suggest to me that no member of the scientific committee should be interviewed" both sound better.

Re: Him killed I!

Huevos — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:32:13 GMT

Anonymous
Is that correct? it seems wrong

It's not wrong. Normally in English sentences are ordered "Subject (S), Verb (V), Indirect Object (IO), Direct Object (DO)" but can run OSV, and, where pronouns are used in substitution of either the subject or object (e.g. your sentence) there are no word order constraints so OVS is possible. That said, such a construction is pretty unusual and almost certainly would be limited to use in literature for effect.

Re: if you were

MrPedantic — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:27:04 GMT

There seem to be some constructions in which the subject pronoun is never used as a subjective complement, e.g.

Context: expecting some friends to call.

<doorbell rings>

"That'll be them now."

(Not "That'll be they".)

Context: waiting for your flight to be announced

<flight is called>

"That'll be us."

(Not "That'll be we".)

MrP

Re: if you were

MrPedantic — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:14:03 GMT

I think the best policy is to be aware that native speakers differ, and to avoid such constructions in situations where a particular speaker's opinion might be important.

For instance, I would naturally say "It was him that told me", rather than "It was he who told me"; but if I suspected that my addressee might take exception to an object pronoun, I would simply rephrase it (e.g. "He told me", "He was the one who told me").

MrP

Re: sentence type 1(Subject + Verb)

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:03:44 GMT

You are confusing sentence 1 with the need in your mind for the structure of sentence 2. But sentence 1 is complete in itself. If the question is asked, "Where is John?" An appropriate and complete sentential response would be "He left." Not "He left the party" or "He left our presence" for these would be too complete. All a sentence needs to be considered a complete thought and therefore all it needs to be considered complete is for it to have a subject and a verb. The subject can be a pronoun and the verb can be an intransitive verb. "Left" is an intransitive verb. If you insist on asserting that only sentence 2 is complete, then you are insisting that there are no such things as intransitive verbs, or that transitive verbs can never be used intransitively. If that were, one would never apply other grammatical forms in similar constructions. The gerund (the verbal noun) would never have been conceived, nor the participle.

Re: These ones and those ones

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:25:00 GMT

Anonymous
It is true that "ones," according to proper grammar should not follow "these" or "those" only because one is a singular object. If there is a plural number, "one" becomes inappropriate however there are few people I know (I live in the midwest US) that do not use this construction, as in common speech leaving an object out of a sentence sounds strange or over educated.

My wife and I both hail from the Southwestern US (California and Arizona, mainly), and we disagree on this. I've never used "these ones" or "those ones", and I think it sounds clumsy and unnatural. She and her family have always used it, and don't don't an eyelash over it. It's sort of like when you're a good speller, but you need to see the written word, to see how it looks, to know if it's right or not. I'm not a grammar expert, but I understand English better than most, and when I hear that it just makes me wince ever so slightly.

Grammar Geek
Anon, what pronoun would you suggest then for something to replace "pens" in the second and third line below?

I'm looking for a particular set of drawing pens.

Are these the pens you're looking for?

Thanks, but no, those aren't the pens I'm looking for.

(I agree that "Those ones aren't the right ones" is wrong - it's simply "Those." But I don't agree that ones can't be plural.)

See, this the weird thing. While that last sentence doesn't sound right, this one does:

Are these the pens you're looking for?

Thanks, but no, those aren't the ones I'm looking for.

Re: Abnormality of motor

Goodman — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:13:10 GMT

<<<>>>The abnormality of fan motor for computer no.1, which motor tripped as the operating temperature at 28C, has been vertified by technician.

Yes, the sentence sounded bumpy and stiff, aside from grammatical mistakes. Technical report needs to be clear and accurate. That's the reason I gave you the breakdown and the construction possibilities.
Tripping - is a terminology used sepcifically in the electrical field to mean "open circuit" by default. A motor can trip the breaker but does not trip itself. Unless it's a thermally protected motor which is not the case in personal computers. There are bigger cooling fans used in mainframe computers and large electronics which have resettable fuse or circuit breakers.
The relative clause usually requires no "comma".
Depending on the construction of the sentence, "Which" usually links the noun or pronoun to the clause. i.e. I've just moved to a new apartment which is only 10 minutes from my office.
In your constrcution, "fan motor" and "computer" were incorrectly linked to the realtive clause, in my opinion.

Re: the middle voice option

Dawnstorm — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:09:34 GMT

Hi,

I'm really enjoying this. You're making me think.

I'm going to take your points out of sequence. I think I'm still replying to your post; if I misrepresent what you're saying, please correct me.

First, the summary of what I'm going to say: A lot depends on theory, and how you frame your terms. To me, ergativity in English is primarily a side topic to voice, and the only "marked" voice in English is the passive. All others rely on semantics and indirect evidence (such as your very detailled and useful post about the transitivity system in English). BUT: how do you frame the evidence there is systematically? In syntax? Make it part of the lexicon? In other words, what exactly is it that the term "ergative" adds to a combination of transitivity and lexical tagging? I'm still thinking about your suggestion to speak of "ergative structures" rather than "ergative verbs". This is an interesting approach, de-emphasising the lexicon in that respect; but I'm trying to ignore it for this post, mostly because I'm not done thinking it through.

Second, I think I've used the term "semantic" very loosely in my other post. There's reference, and then there's cognitive framing. (Or content and point of view.) The cognitive framing is harder to get at and interpret, mostly because these things aren't always immediately visible. We're talking about "ergative structures" in English, or the "middle voice", because we've noticed these constructions in other languages (Basque for ergativity; Ancient Greek for Middle voice; etc.). That is we have to strip away the structure and get down to the point-of-view meaning that the structures imply. And then we have to go back to English and look for expressions of said point-of-view meaning in this language. (Something similar is going on when linguists are probing "shall/will" along the lines of futurity/modality, within the discussion whether English has a future tense or not. The consensus is it doesn't, but the discussion - assuming "will/shall" as tense-modals - has been productive, if not conclusive.) But the thing is this: if you're bringing concepts to a language from outside (which is usual in comparative linguistics) you need an anchor; conventional structural methods - such as your "what syntactic operations yield well-formed usage?" approach - have their limitations. So do semantic (referential or framing). This makes ergativity/unaccusativity hard to think about, before you choose your approach.

Examples follow:

This is about the sentence, "He died a cruel death."

MrPedantic
The object here is a cognate object (it is implied in the verb itself) and thus belongs to a slightly different model. (I would say that it only exists to provide an adverbial opportunity: "he died a cruel death" = "he died in a cruel way".)

I agree that, framing-wise, the object functions much like an adverbial. But it's an "object" in syntax, which has implications that are incompatible with adverbials. Most relevant, here, "die" is now prone to passivisation.

"A cruel death was died," does sound odd (I'll get to it in a minute), but I wouldn't bat an eyelid at "Many deaths were died that night." Interestingly, it's hard to put this into the active voice, mostly because no subject seems appropriate. (?"The Soldiers died many deaths that night."; ?"The army died many deaths that night."...). To me, all the examples I can think of (plural nouns, collective nouns...) don't express the passive meaning. The closest I come is "Many people died that night." Anything else I can think of is of questionable grammaticality.

However, "A cruel death was died," although it sounds odd, doesn't sound ungrammatical in the least (at least not to me). It's also not a semantic problem; I understand the sentence perfectly well, both reference- and framingwise.

The reason, I think, this sounds odd is a pragmatic one. I think this one sounds odd because it's hard to find a context for this utterance that justifies the passive, which is a "marked construction". You generally expect "marked" constructions to be there for a reason. I suspect in the right context the above sentence would be perfectly fine. (It's a matter of Grice's conversational maxims, the maxim of manner, in particular.)

This is where the "frame-semantics" of syntactic constructions become complicated, I think. How do language structures tie in with cognitive structures (e.g. To what extent do we buy the Sapir-Worf hypothesis?)

So, from this I go to self-observation:

MrPedantic
and precisely because of that distinction, I would call "break" here ergative (ex. 5) , and "die" unaccusative (ex. 2).

See, I had the hardest time even to grasp what that meant, not now in this thread, but when I first discovered the distinction. That's because, learning English, I didn't train to see the difference. It wasn't necessary, as ergativity/unaccusativity isn't expressed through syntactic structures, but only indirectly through what operations are possible on the verb; this I pretty much took care off either through lexical list-tagging, or through collocation. If there is a hidden logic to it that I applied in learning, it never became conscious. (It's quite possible that I had a practical knowledge, but no discoursive one of this subject; but why, then, is it so hard to grasp?)

If we go back to the list and sift through the operations there, we'll find that "die" behaves different from "break" in the way we specified. But here's the catch: to apply that structural method, we have to assume that "break" in 5.a = "break" in 5.b = "break" in 5.c etc.; i.e. that "break" is the same lexical item in all these instances. That's because syntax has a hard time to differentiate between "signifier" and "signified", or "sign" and "concept".

Notice, for example, how your 5.a is already the transitive, while systematically it should be the intransitive agentive: 5.a *He broke. (i.e. "He caused/performed the action of breaking." as opposed to "He underwent the process of breaking," which is 5.b, now, and would be 5.c)

So I'd amend this, to:

5a. *He broke.

5b. He broke the plate

5c. The plate broke.

5d. The plate was broken.

5e. The broken plate

5f. The plate broke easily

And the comparison with "die" would be two-fold:

1. = sign; 2. = concept

5.1a He died.

5.2a He killed.

5.1b *He died the man.

5.2b He killed the man

5.1c The man died.

5.2c *The man killed.

5.1d *The man was died.

5.2d The man was killed.

5.1e *The died man [cf. The dead man.]

5.2e The killed man.

5.1f The man died easily. (<-- What's the difference to 5.1a? Should I add an * before it, as this is out of place, here?)

5.2f *The man killed easily. (<-- Is this not available, because 5.1f is available?)

5.1a, 5.1c, and 5.1f seem to be much the same. And this is the problem I have systematising a structural comparison. One possibility, I see is to re-cast 5a as reflexive 1. *He died himself./2. He killed himself. I might try to justify this through dying being a process you undergo, thus if you add an agentive/causative to core meaning (which is not in slot a, but in slot c) the verb becomes by necessity reflexive ("He caused himself to die.")

But these things are all a bit... tentative. I fear it's more rationalised than rational, if you get my drift.

[Interesting aside: you used the term "anticausative" alongside "ergative" and "unaccusative" for break in your thread. Bears repeating, as it's something I'm also still thinking about; a very interesting concept I haven't come across yet.]

MrPedantic
But I find a semantic difference too: the first presents the sign from the point of view of the reader, and the second, from the point of view of the writer.

Now, that's an interesting observation. I'd argue that the semantic difference is not referential (it refers to the same state of affairs), but it's a framing difference. If we view the sign as a proxy for the agent, we're importing the difference of active vs. voice into a construction that's free of the syntactic properties that normally accompany this framing device in English. "Reads," then, is ergative, while "says is a straightforward accusative verb (one that takes the accusative (which isn't marked in English - except, perhaps, for pronouns, where it's indistinguishable - morphologically - from the dative; the conventional term would be "direct object").

MrPedantic
Also, although the same few verbs tend to recur as examples in these discussions, actual usage is more imaginative.

That's what makes language so fascinating, isn't it? Nice example, there, too.

Re: preposition+obj pronoun+?

Avangi — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:44:13 GMT

Anewcomer
Avangi: Hey, i know that "a boy" shouldn't use "do" but in this context "a boy" is not a subject and shouldn't use does, however if does is used in the context (context I'm talking about) " I team up with a boy does 5 subjects" it doesn't make sense at all, unless "who" is included before "does", which I already thought to be true (relative pronoun/clause) and so does the "participle phrase" (doing), which i already know that it's widely used.

Hi Anc - I wasn't suggesting you use does instead of do in your "third type of construction." I thought if I understood why you wanted to use "do" it might give me a clue as to what you have in mind. If you could only give us an example using "do" which you're fairly sure is correct, we might then be able to apply it to the case in hand. - A.

Re: "as ... as" expression

Spides — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:30:35 GMT

Your instinct is right--the phrase refers to "last year's figure" but the word "figure" is understood and so dropped. So grammatically the spelling should be year's. However, it has become common ~~especially in conversation~~to drop the 's, and that has slipped into common usage in many cases. It's common for this to happen, as a language is a constantly changing thing. But careful writers will still, I think, make that a possessive form. A similar thing has happened with a sentence like, "James is taller than I." The pronoun "I" is correct because the entire sentence would be "James is taller than I am," but when the understood verb "am" is dropped, many speakers will say, "James is taller than me." That construction, too, has slipped into common usage in writing for many people. In fact, those who insist on the grammatically correct form are thought of as old-fashioned, perhaps, by many.