Search results for 'tag:Genitives tag:Inflections' matching tags 'Genitives' and 'Inflections'

Re: Proficiency alongside "poverty".

Cool Breeze — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:49:45 GMT

MrPedantic wrote:
It interests me that some modern languages have at least the appearance of greater simplicity (e.g. the loss of inflection) than their counterparts of 900 years ago. This seems counter-intuitive: you would expect a language to evolve towards (not from) complexity.

Hello MrP

As far as English is concerned, the loss of inflections is largely due to massive foreign influence that lasted for centuries. Even native speakers of English began to drop inflections that could be dispensed with when they heard nonnatives use these uninflected forms. Learning a foreign word is always easier than learning to use it grammatically. Many Italian men know little about Finnish grammar but when they say I love you in broken Finnish to a fair-haired Finnish woman, she understands immediately.

If a language can't fulfil its needs, it will grow more complicated with time. That has happened to English as well. There was only one relative pronoun in Old English - and it was uninflected - and that clearly wasn't enough for seamless communication. Therefore people began using which, who and what as relative pronouns in addition to the original that. This way a handy genitive (whose) appeared. Unfortunately it is considered stilted by many in some contexts despite its neatness.

Another development, this time inexplicable and totally useless, towards complexity was the appearance of the auxiliary do in questions and negations. In Shakespeare's day it was possible to say Know you him? or Do you know him? and the modern usage became the norm after his death. As there is nothing similar in other Germanic languages, learning to use do correctly is a minor hindrance to learners in the early stages of language acquisition.

Cheers
CB

Re: Saxon genitive

Evenstevens — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:14:11 GMT

Pemmican wrote:
Why do you disagree, milky???

Btw: Why is it called "Saxon Genitive"? Does anyone know??

Becuse it is the only noun inflection surviving from Old English or Anglo-Saxon

Sorry, there is one more: the plural 's'

Inchoateknowledge

Re: About English plural 's'

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 12:54:12 GMT

Pemmican wrote:
The "-s" is the most common suffix left in English by now, it took over several functions:

a) plural indicator: one apple - two apples
b) 3rd ps sg inflection indicator: sing - he sings
c) genitive ending: Jon's house

In my opinion, the -s in b) will certainly disappear sometime, it was already mentioned, that it is very often dropped already. In Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, the inflection endings have vanished completely already and all persons take the same form of the verb.
The -s will also disappear in the function of genitive indicator. There's a tendency to replace it by the preposition of and the following noun in the object case. E.g. Jon's house --> The house of Jon (this will get more common also in these cases with people, not only items).

But the -s will certainly not disappear in its function as a plural indicator, I'd rather say that it will get more common as it already is by now. More and more irregular plural forms will vanish and be replaced by -s instead, also 'sheeps' instead of 'sheep' as the plural form is more probable than keeping the irregular form 'sheep'.

Re: About English plural 's'

Su Cheng Zhong — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:58:55 GMT

korin said:
>Over approximately 1500 years, the mammoth set of inflections of the Old English has virtually been discarded leaving only 's' (plural nouns, 3rd person singular verbs, and saxon genitive) in modern English. English has become a rather analytic lg, where most of the syntactic relations within a sentence are expressed by means of word order.
I always confused by the 3rd person singular verbs. If some one like, can you explain the following sentence, for me?
"Jones shake(s) hand(s) with Tom."
The question is that how we calssify the subject and object, singular or plural? I always wonder that the shaking hand(s) is like the meaning of shaking a bar. For shaking hand(s) means that you wave your hand and cause other hand waving. So it should be 'Jones shakes Tom's hand', not 'Jones shakes hands with Tom'. For Jones' hand is initiative and Tom's hand is passive. If you regard both hand were shaken simultaneously, then, who are (is) subject? Are both Jones and Tom are subject? Then we have to say, 'Jones and Tom shake hands.'

Re: About English plural 's'

equivocal — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:53:56 GMT

The "-s" is the most common suffix left in English by now, it took over several functions:

a) plural indicator: one apple - two apples
b) 3rd ps sg inflection indicator: sing - he sings
c) genitive ending: Jon's house

It would be erroneous to say that the suffixes in a), b) and c) are the same. Orthographically maybe, and that only would be for a) and b). Even then only for regular plurals and verbs. c) has an apostrophe which makes a world of a difference. They are different suffixes sharing some similar properties.

eq

Re: About English plural 's'

Pemmican — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 23:37:29 GMT

The "-s" is the most common suffix left in English by now, it took over several functions:

a) plural indicator: one apple - two apples
b) 3rd ps sg inflection indicator: sing - he sings
c) genitive ending: Jon's house

In my opinion, the -s in b) will certainly disappear sometime, it was already mentioned, that it is very often dropped already. In Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, the inflection endings have vanished completely already and all persons take the same form of the verb.
The -s will also disappear in the function of genitive indicator. There's a tendency to replace it by the preposition of and the following noun in the object case. E.g. Jon's house --> The house of Jon (this will get more common also in these cases with people, not only items).

But the -s will certainly not disappear in its function as a plural indicator, I'd rather say that it will get more common as it already is by now. More and more irregular plural forms will vanish and be replaced by -s instead, also 'sheeps' instead of 'sheep' as the plural form is more probable than keeping the irregular form 'sheep'.

Re: About English plural 's'

Su Cheng Zhong — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 21:56:27 GMT

>I do not claim that the plural ending 's' will definitely disappear. However, looking at the direction the English language is heading, the disappearance would come as no surprise.

>Over approximately 1500 years, the mammoth set of inflections of the Old English has virtually been discarded leaving only 's' (plural nouns, 3rd person singular verbs, and saxon genitive) in modern English. English has become a rather analytic lg, where most of the syntactic relations within a sentence are expressed by means of word order.

I agree with you. In scientific writing material 'kg', 'sec' etc, didn't put on 's'. People seemed like analytic word than synthetic word. They like 'more common' than 'commoner', 'most pleasant' than 'pleasantest' etc.

Re: About English plural 's'

korin — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 14:34:58 GMT

I do not claim that the plural ending 's' will definitely disappear. However, looking at the direction the English language is heading, the disappearance would come as no surprise.

Over approximately 1500 years, the mammoth set of inflections of the Old English has virtually been discarded leaving only 's' (plural nouns, 3rd person singular verbs, and saxon genitive) in modern English. English has become a rather analytic lg, where most of the syntactic relations within a sentence are expressed by means of word order.

In the colloquial English, quite often you can hear the speakers drop the 's' ending. Sentences like the ones below are not uncommon:
He like music
He don't know it
How much is it? -It's 5 pound.
It's 2 metre long.

I am not a native speaker of English, and whenever I hear one of my friends (ENS) saying something like that I ask them why. The most common answer: out of laziness.

Every language reflects the needs of its speakers. Prescriptivists may take pains to control a language. In most cases they are almost sure to fail. It is the speakers of a language that unconsciously influence the language's shape. Over the last 15 hundred years, as far as the inflectional system is concerned, the native speakers of English have displayed a clear tendency to simplify things.

What is going to happen next?

Re: Gentile

paco2004 — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 02:47:58 GMT

Hello MrP

Thanks for the reply. I am lucky I get an confirmation directly from a native speaker to that I had better not say "I'm a Japanese", though I feel somewhat like unhappiness in your way of discriminating the suffices "-an" and "-ese". By the way I feel the word "Japaneses" is much better than the word "Japanee", whose uses are still not a few (We can hit more than 5000 sites in Google where "Japanee" is used.

H.L. Mencken (1880â1956). The American Language. 1921.

6. The Noun

The only inflections of the noun remaining in English are those for number and for the genitive, and so it is in these two regions that the few variations to be noted in vulgar American occur. The rule that, in forming the plurals of compound nouns or noun-phrases, the -s shall be attached to the principal noun is commonly disregarded, and it goes at the end. Thus, âI have two sons-in-lawâ is never heard among the plain people; one always hears âI have two son-in-laws.â So with the genitive. I once overheard this: âthat umbrella is the young lady I go withâs.â Often a false singular is formed from a singular ending in s, the latter being mistaken for a plural. Chinee, Portugee and Japanee are familiar; I have also noted trapee, specie, 93 tactic and summon (from trapeze, species, tactics and summons). 94 Paradoxically, the word incidence is commonly misused for incident, as in âhe told an incidence.â Here incidence (or incident) seems to be regarded as a synonym, not for happening, but for story. I have never heard âhe told of an incidence.â The of is always omitted. The general disregard of number often shows itself when the noun is used as object. I have already quoted Lardnerâs âsome of the men has brung their wife alongâ; in a popular magazine I lately encountered âthose book ethnologistsâ¦ canât see what is before their nose.â Many similar examples might be brought forward.

By the way do you feel any differences in the sense among "Blairese", "Blairian" and "Blairish"?

Re: Your being?

taiwandave — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 20:05:58 GMT

Miriam,

Many thanks for your thoughtful expansion of Pem's analysis. I'll first address the specific questions you've raised, then re-state more thoroughly the case which the Cambridge book is making for the gerund's redefinition.

Consider the following two sentences:

1. I can't stand your being here.
2. I can't stand your haircut.

A dependent genitive such as "your" requires a noun object. What follows a dependent genitive is, therefore, surely a noun or noun-like. This fact supports the conclusion that "being" in [1] is what is traditionally called a gerund.

The suggestion that "being" might be a verb with "your" as its subject seems absurd: a dependent genitive (e.g. your, our, my, their) cannot fill this role. The following are ungrammatical:

3. His car is blue, but my is red.
4. Our is the right way.

We are traditionally taught that the gerund is a noun-like form that retains some of the characteristics of a verb, and as such is distinct from the present participle. This is, as you noted, a very confusing concept in English grammar.

Some -ing forms really are full-fledged nouns: words such as "building" are, as you said, completely nominalised. But does "building" in "that building is over there" really belong in same category as "being" in [1]? To say that a word is part-noun, part-verb: does that not violate the very idea of what a noun is?

The Cambridge authors would sooner bend other grammatical rules than blur the fundamental distinction between noun and verb. For example, they would consider the dependent genitive in a sentence such as [1] to be a acting as a subject, something that [3] and [4] show as being completely ungrammatical. This they justify in part by pointing out other ways that the dependent genitive in [1] behaves differently from that in [2]. For example, what happens when it is omitted:

5. I can't stand being here.
6. I can't stand haircut.

In [5], the meaning has changed but it is not ungrammatical. They see this as showing "subject-like" behaviour on the part of the dependent genitive, analogous to a to-infinitival that remains grammatical when stripped of its subject:

7. I arranged for him to leave the country.
8. I arranged to leave the country.

Note that the authors consider the "for" in [7] as belonging to the category of subordinators, and to be marking the beginning of a subordinate clause in which "for him" is the subject of the to-infinitival.

At this point I'd like to add a disclaimer of my own. My background is electrical engineering, not English. When I recently took on some English teaching work, I realized that I knew very little about grammar. Since none of the other teachers at the school -- and I'm curious if this is typical -- knew much about grammar, I realized I'd have to learn it on my own. The books I initially found weren't satisfactory, so I ordered Quirk's "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language". While on Amazon, I read a review that mentioned the Cambridge book so I ordered it as well.

I had previously assumed that English grammar was a static field: that it had been boiled down to a set of fixed rules and lists of exceptions, and that any controversy as there once may have been had long since died out. I was surprised and excited to realize that quite the opposite is true.

The rules of grammar as traditionally taught represent a view of linguistics that is decades out of date. Yet linguistics research has up to now had very little influence on commonly-accepted methods of analyzing English grammar. Why? Because it tends to be so dense and jargon-saturated that no one but linguists can understand it. With the publication of the Cambridge book, that has changed. It's clear, it's understandable, and it represents a serious challenge to the old ways of thinking about grammar.

While I've made my best attempts to paraphrase some of the points that the book is making, whatever I write is obviously a very poor (possibly even misleading) substitute for reading the book itself -- something I'd urge you to do.

I'll conclude with a verbatim excerpt concerning the topic we're discussing:

A gerund is traditionally understood as a word derived from a verb base which functions as or like a noun, as in:

Destroying the files was a serious mistake.
I regret destroying the files.

"Destroying the files" could be replaced by "the destruction of the files", where "destruction" is clearly a noun. The formulation "as or like" is used in talking of the functional resemblance between a gerund or a noun, leaving open the issue of whether the word is a verb or a noun. Dictionaries tend to define the gerund as a verbal noun, but there are strong grounds for analysing "destroying" in [both sentences] as a verb, and for drawing a distinction between such words and others ending in -ing which genuinely are nouns and which we refer to as "gerundial nouns":

He was expelled for killing the birds. [form of verb]
She had witnessed the killing of the birds. [gerundial noun]

The verb-forms are traditionally divided into gerunds and present participles, as illustrated in:

Gerunds:
Inviting the twins was a bad mistake.
We're thinking of giving them one more chance.
I remember seeing them together.
She found talking to Pat surprisingly stressful.

Present participles:
Those living alone are most at risk.
Not having read his book, I can't comment.
She is mowing the lawn.
We saw him leaving the post office.
I caught them reading my mail.

Historically the gerund and present participle of traditional grammar have different sources, but in Modern English the forms are identical. No verb shows any difference in forms in [the above examples], not even "be". The historical difference is of no relevance to the analysis of the current inflectional system. We reject an analysis that has gerund and present participle as different forms syncretized throughout the class of verbs. We have therefore just one inflectional form of the verb marked by the -ing suffix; we label it with the compound term "gerund-participle" for the verb-form, as there is no reason to give priority to one or the other of the traditional terms.

This grammar also takes the view that even from the point of view of syntax (as opposed to inflection) the distinction between gerund and present participle is not viable, and we will therefore also not talk of gerund and present participle constructions.

In summary, words with a verb base and the -ing suffix fall into the following three classes:

1. She had witnessed the killing of the birds. [gerundial noun]

2. a. He was expelled for killing the birds. [gerund-participle form of verb]
b. They are entertaining the prime minister. [gerund-participle form of verb]

3. The show was entertaining. [participial adjective]

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Note: following is the definition they give for the term "syncretism":

When two or more lexemes are identical we say there is "syncretism" between them, or that they are "syncretized". For example, there is syncretism between the preterite [past tense] and past participle of "want": both are realized as "wanted".