Search results for 'tag:Genitives tag:Word order' matching tags 'Genitives' and 'Word order'

Re: Joy to the world, the lord is "COME" ????

Cool Breeze — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 20:06:53 GMT

I always thought it was a remnant of the French (Norman Invasion, 1066). There is a handful of verbs in French conjugated with "to be" rather than "to have" in the passÃ© composÃ© (past) tense. Rise, [to be] born, arrive, leave, go (all "coming and going" verbs) are some examples. We also sing "He is risen" and we allow for "he is gone" as well as "he has gone".

Hi Philip

There has been vacillation between be and have as the perfect auxiliary in the Germanic languages - that's what I really meant to say in my previous post - but to my knowledge no one has ever maintained this usage derives from French. As a matter of fact, French had little effect on English grammar in terms of grammatical structures although the number of loan words is remarkable.

One of the structures derived from French is the of-genitive, which most scholars believe is based on the de-structure of the French language. And of course the word order of e.g. court martial reflects French grammar.

The only tenses Old English had were the present tense and the preterite (past tense); in other words, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th century didn't take the perfect, pluperfect and the future tense with them from the continent.

Cheers
CB

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'

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: Correct Grammar

Guest — Sat, 15 May 2004 12:48:10 GMT

Interesting question.

The American HeritageÂ® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (referenced at dictionary.com) has this to say :

Some speakers of vernacular English varieties, particularly in isolated or mountainous regions of the southern United States, use phrases such as of a night or of an evening in place of Standard English at night or in the evening, as in We'd go hunting of an evening. This of construction is used only when referring to a repeated actionwhere Standard English uses nights, evenings, and the like, as in We'd go hunting nights. It is not used for single actions, as in She returned at night. Â·Interestingly, these of and -s constructions are related. This -s construction, which dates back to the Old English period (c. 449-1100), does not signify a plurality but is similar to the so-called genitive suffix -s, which often indicates possession, as in the king's throne. Just as this example can also be phrased as the throne of the king, nights can be reformulated as of a night. This reformulation has been possible since the Middle English period (c. 1100-1500). Sometimes the original -s ending remains in the of construction, as in We'd walk to the store of evenings, but usually it is omitted. Using of with adverbial time phrases has not always been confined to vernacular speech, as is evidenced by its occurrence in sources from the Wycliffite Bible (1382) to Theodore Dreiser's 1911 novel Jennie Gerhardt: âThere was a place out in one corner of the veranda where he liked to sit of a spring or summer evening.â Â·Using such of constructions reflects a long-standing tendency for English speakers to eliminate the case endings that were once attached to nouns to indicate their role as subject, object, or possessor. Nowadays, word order and the use of prepositional phrases usually determine a noun or noun phrase's role. Despite the trend to replace genitive -s with of phrases, marking adverbial phrases of time with of is fading out of American vernacular usage, probably because one can form these phrases without -s, as in at night. See note at Smith Island.

Given this explanation, I think the answer is 'no', because it is only used to refer to a repeated action : "did you arrive of a saturday or a sunday" would be correct (in the sense above) only if you and the speaker were discussing your regular arrival at some place, which happened in the past.