Showing posts with label grammar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grammar. Show all posts

-ed versus -t

Feb 9, 2025

Ben Yagoda (Friend of SbaCL and Not One-Off Britishisms blogger), who had recently noticed a US journalist saying learnt instead of learned, asked whether I'd covered the ‑ed/‑t alternation. It's one of those things that I've been putting off for a long time because it would be a very long post. Now I've been shamed out of my laziness.

In order to do this in any kind of sensible way, I feel like I need to explain some things about the past tense in English. I'll try to introduce terms gently, with links to sites with deeper explanations. At points I will be a bit sloppy and use more familiar (and less precise) terms (like past-tense). And I'm going to be very sloppy about phonetic spelling, both because not everyone knows the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and because if I tried to use the IPA we'd have to get into not-especially-relevant differences in pronunciation of many of these words. 

The origins of ‑ed

Let's start by thinking a bit more about ‑ed. Old English had different categories of verbs that were put into past tense (preterite) in various ways. The so-called strong verbs were those that changed their internal vowel. Some of those are still 'strong' in Modern English, like drink/drank and write/wrote. 

Those that ended with the (then multiple) suffixes that would eventually become ‑ed are weak verbs. They don't undergo an internal change to make past tense; a suffix is just stuck on the end.

Nowadays, we think of strong verbs as "irregular verbs" and ‑ed verbs as "regular" verbs, but back in Old English the verbs that we now think of as "irregular" fell into regular patterns in a more complex system. 

For centuries, English has been bending toward verb weakness. Many Old English "strong" verbs are now made past-tense with ‑ed, like starved (rather than something like storve) and baked (not boke). 

But ‑ed is only the spelling of the past-tense suffix

We tend to think of ‑ed as the past-tense suffix because it's how it tends to be represented in spelling. That spelling makes it look like it has two sounds, but a common lesson in English Linguistics 101 is that spelling is misleading. Notice how we pronounce ‑ed in the following words:
  • stopped, stoked, passed, slashed, torched = "stopt", "stokt", "past", "slasht", "torcht"
  • strobed, flogged, buzzed, judged, blamed, pinged = "strobd", "flogd", "buzzd", "judjd", "blamd", "pingd"

That is, each of these past tense forms is pronounced with one syllable. The ‑ed does not represent a vowel+consonant combination. Buzzed isn't "buzz-ed", it's "buzzd". 

If you don't hear the difference between those, think about learned in these two contexts:

I learned a fact versus a learned scholar 

The first has one syllable ("lernd"), the second as two distinct syllables with a distinct vowel in the ‑ed. That two-syllable learnéd (sometimes spelled/spelt with the accent mark) is a special case; it's an adjective, rather than a verb. We're going to stick to verbs, not adjectives in this post, but that adjective is handy for illustrating what we're not doing in words like buzzed. We're not pronouncing a vowel in ‑ed.

Some other ‑ed verbs do have a pronounced vowel in ‑ed:

  • tasted, boarded, dated, padded, minded: each has two syllables.

If you start from the spelling, you might think that buzzed is buzz+ed and the E has got(ten) lost. But language doesn't start from spelling, it starts from sounds. Instead of the suffix being ‑ed, with some weird places where the vowel is dropped, it makes more linguistic sense to see the suffix as ‑d and to observe that we have rules for what to do when that [d] rubs up against other sounds in pronunciation. The rules are:

  • The [voiced] -d becomes [voiceless] ‑t when it follows a voiceless consonant sound. (We say it assimilates to voicelessness. Assimilation makes things easier to say quickly.)
  • A vowel is inserted (epenthesized) when we try to attach the suffix ‑d to a /t/ or a /d/ sound. These consonants are pronounced by tapping the gum ridge behind the teeth with the tip of your tongue (they're alveolar plosives). and if we tried to pronounce them together, you'd not be able to hear them both. (In English, we would pronounce padd the same as pad.) So, inserting the vowel makes the doubled alveolar consonants pronounceable for the speaker and hearable for the listener. 
  • In all other cases, the suffix remains ‑d in pronunciation.
Because we follow rules when we pronounce all those variants of -(e)d and nothing else changes, those are very regular verb endings. Notice that nothing major changes in the verb root. The a in taste is the same as the a in tasted, and the o in stop is the same as the o in stopped, etc. In the irregular verbs discussed below, that's not always the case. 

This all means means that the difference between learnt and learned is very small: just the difference between saying the [t] sound and saying the [d] sound. We're not saying more sounds if we say the version that's got more letters. 


Late addition: Marianne Hundt reminds me that things are not always straightforward—there can be back and forth between regularization and irregularization in the timeline. What follows us just about where we are now.

t/d variation

Now we move to the ones that seem irregular in Modern English and whether they are the same in British and American English.

In each case, I've had a look at the Corpus of Global Web-Based English to see what percentage of the BrE/AmE usage is in the irregular form. So, where it says 98% in the first table for bent, it means that 98% of the examples are bent and 2% are bended. I've rounded all the percentages to the nearest whole number. 

Here, I'm only worrying about irregulars with a -t marking the past tense. If you're interested in other irregular past-tense forms, I have some other blog posts for you.

final d > t (no vowel change)

British and American English don't differ in using these irregulars:

Base form Past form AmE % BrE %
bend bent 98* 98*
lend lent 100 100
send sent100 100
   spend    spent 100 100

While we have a pattern here of end>ent, it's not a regularity. No one says tent as the past tense of tend, or ent as the past of end. I haven't tried searching for rend/rent because I'd be overwhelmed by the 'lease' meaning of rent.

*Bended is like learnéd, in that it's used as a participial adjective (as in on bended knee). So, the 2% or so of bended are a different thing. As a verb, everyone's saying bent: I bent the rules, not I bended the rules. 

-pt versus -ped with vowel change

Here we see AmE moving toward regularization for creep and leap, but not other rhyming verbs. Irregularity is easier to maintain in much-used verbs—we learn the irregular form because we hear it. When we go to make a past-tense for a verb we've heard less, we often have to make up a past-tense form on the spot, and that is most easily done with -ed. It's a bit surprising that wept is still so strong, considering it's the least-used of any of this set.

Base formPast formAmE %BrE %
creep crept 62 92
leapleapt5279
sleepslept100100
sweepswept100100
   weep    wept9998

These irregulars all have a vowel change in common: the -pt version has a "short E", while its -ed counterpart (creeped, sweeped) has a "long E"—even leapt, whose spelling seems to indicate otherwise. 

This case is different from other possible -pt endings, like slipt and stript. Since slipt is how slipped is actually pronounced (see above), slipt/slipped is just a spelling difference, not an irregular verb issue. (They are also spelled/spelt with a 'd: slipp'd and stripp'd.) The numbers for these are so low that they would show up as 0 in the table, but there's an interesting detail about those tiny numbers: slipt is only present in the GB corpus (6 times), and stript is only in the US corpus (10 times). 

-Nt versus -ned with vowel change  

In these ones, a final nasal consonant is followed by the -t suffix. The irregular forms also have a vowel change: the -Nt version has a "short E", while its -ed counterpart (leaned) has a "long E". 

AmE uses regulari{s/z}ed leaned, while BrE still mostly uses leant, but both have mostly regulari{s/z}ed dreamed, and no one is saying meaned. 

Base formPast formAmE %BrE %
dreamdreamt1633
leanleant375
meanmeant100100

I have to wonder if the loss of leant is related to its having homophones: lent, as a past tense of lend.

-rnt versus -rned 

These have no vowel change. So, in spoken language, the difference is between saying burnt and burnd.

Base formPast formAmE %BrE %
burnburnt2342
earnearnt03
learn  learnt444

These are a little tricky because burnt is more common than burned as an adjective (e.g. burnt offerings), and as we've already seen, there are some funny things going on with learned as an adjective. But it's hard to trust that automatic processes for the corpus have accurately tagged the adjective use, so I haven't used that tagging to come to the numbers above. They include everything.

I had the feeling that these differ in preterit (I learnt French) and perfect (I have learnt French) forms. So, I searched for these in the formula "PRONOUN [has/have/had] VERB+ed/t". The numbers for BrE irregulars go down in this condition (I tried it with other pronouns too), which tells us something, but I haven't got time to look into what it tells us. (Given that we no longer have the risk of errant adjectival learneds, I expected the percentage to go up!)

Past form AmE preterit AmE perfect BrE preterit BrE perfect
 burnt    17 21 33 39
learnt 3 6 31 36

So, I was right that there's more -rnt in the perfect than in the preterite, but it's a smaller gap than I'd thought I'd find. 

-led versus -lt

Finally, the Ls, one of which you've seen already in this post: spelled/spelt.
These fall into two categories, with and without vowel change. 

The vowel-changing ones are solidly in the "irregular" category, with a bit of movement in the rarest of those, kneel>knelt.

With vowel changePast formAmE %BrE %
dealdealt100100
feelfelt100100
kneelknelt8589

We see some of the biggest differences between AmE and BrE in the non-vowel-changing ones—with some caveats about homonyms below.

Without vowel changePast formAmE %BrE %
buildbuilt100100
dwelldwelt8683
smellsmelt1348*
spellspelt749†
spillspilt1138^
spoilspoilt551

*Smelt is a bit tricky because it can be a verb in its own right (smelting metal) and it's also a fish that's eaten in North America. The corpus, however, is bad at distinguishing these things. The majority of smelts in the results reported here are the past tense of smell, but it would be too much work to tell you exactly how many.
smelt!

†Spelt is another problem one because it is the name of a grain. I tried sorting out the noun uses from teh verb ones, but it turns out that most of the ones tagged as "noun" in the corpus are, in fact, instances of the verb. So the numbers here include all spelts. 

^In the case of spilt, I wondered how much adjectival use mattered, particularly in the phrase "cry over spilled/spilt milk".  So, I searched for "spilled/spilt milk" and found that Americans are pretty evenly split on spilled versus spilt in the phrase (36 hits vs 32), whereas in British English it was 76 versus 18 hits. Those spilt milks account for 14–18% of the spilt percentages above (which is to say, that phrase isn't adding much to the AmE/BrE difference).

miscellaneous irregulars 

There are a few more irregulars-ending-in-t; these ones end in fricative sounds. But it's not worth saying much about them, since they're much the same in British and American English.

leave>left: Everyone uses the irregular for this one. Where leaved happens, it has to do with leaves (like on a tree or a table), not leaving.  

vex>vext: The -t version is still playable in Scrabble, but the corpus tells us no one's using it in UK or US. I'm not even bothering to look for other verbs ending in x. 

dress>drest: No one's using this one either! But...

bless>blest: We find a bit more of this one, since old-fashioned spellings are common in religious language, either because they're quoted from long-ago translated scripture or because they're styled to sound like scripture. Still, only 2% of the AmE "past" forms are blest and only 1% of the BrE.  (I say "past" because a lot of them are probably adjectives.)

The moral of the story is...

While some -t spellings are more common in current BrE than in current AmE, it would be wrong to call them "the British spelling", with one exception: leant.  There we have clear evidence of a transatlantic divide where the -t version is the firm majority in the UK and the -ed version is much preferred in the US. 

In the other cases, there may be more preference for one or the other in US or UK, but the same forms have the majority/minority in both countries (at least in this corpus, which was collected 12 years ago). That is to say, you're much more likely to see spelt from a British writer than an American one, but an awful lot of British writers are writing spelled. Learnt will tell you that a document is almost certainly not American, but learned will not tell you that the writer isn't British—and so forth. 
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mean to

Jun 12, 2023

Reader Sam* recently wrote to me with the following: 

A usage that surprises me every time I hear it is “meant” in the sense of “supposed” or “should be”.  For example, in a BBC news item today the correspondent said that there were “meant to be elections this year in Pakistan.” The emphasis seems to be on obligation rather than intention.

[...] do you think this is a recent development, or has British English always had this usage?


Intention has always been part of mean's meaning. The oldest sense in the OED is a transitive form that simply means 'to intend [something]'—a sense that is today heard in the phrase I meant no harm. Other  intention-y meanings sprang from that. But this mean+to-infinitive usage that Sam mentions has weakened from the 'intend' meaning to signify something more like 'be expected'. 

In the third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996), this use is discussed under the heading 'a new passive use'. So, yes, it's new. By 2008 in the Oxford Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage, second edition, the usage is "so familiar"—at least to British readers:

In the passive, to be meant has for long had the sense ‘to be destined (by providence), to have special significance’:

When I need you, you are here. You must see how meant it all is—Iris Murdoch, 1974.

During the 20c this use was joined by another passive use in which meant followed by a to-infinitive means little more than ‘supposed, thought, intended’:

For today he was meant to be having dinner with Stephanie at the Dear Friends—A. N. Wilson, 1986.

This altered meaning is now so familiar that its relative newness can cause surprise.

By the third edition (2016), the 'supposed/thought' angle is not even discussed, which seems to indicate that it's no longer seen as a potential usage problem in British English:

In the meaning ‘to intend’, mean can be followed by a to-infinitive (when the speaker intends to do something: I meant to go), by an object+to-infinitive (when the speaker intends someone else to do something: I meant you to go) and, more formally, by a that-clause with should (I meant that you should go). Use of mean for +object+to-infinitive (☒ I meant for you to go) is non-standard.

The Oxford English Dictionary (in an entry revised in 2001) has this sense:

In passive, with infinitive clause: to be reputed, considered, said to be something. Cf. suppose v. 9a.
1878   R. Simpson School of Shakspere I. 34  It is confessed that Hawkins and Cobham were meant to be buccaneers, and it is absurd to deny the like of Stucley.
1945   Queen 18 Apr. 17/1   ‘Such and such a play,’ they [my children] will say, ‘is meant to be jolly good.’
1972   Listener 9 Mar. 310/1   America..is meant to be a great melting-pot.
1989   Times 30 Mar. 15/1   It [sc. evening primrose oil] is also meant to be good for arthritis.

None of these (Oxford-published) sources mark these usages as particularly British, but over in America, Ben Yagoda at his Not One-Off Britishisms blog discussed meant to in 2019 as a British usage that is 'on the radar' in American English. 

Mean has many senses that (chiefly AmE) smush (also smoosh) into each other, making it tricky to analy{s/z}e.  Take an example like America is meant to be a great melting-pot (that hyphen is very British, by the way). It probably means 'reputed' (i.e. people say it's a melting pot). But it could mean  'intended' (i.e. the Founding Fathers wanted it to be that). Meant in the rest of the 20th-century OED examples can be replaced by reputed, but reputed doesn't seem like the right synonym for the A. N. Wilson example in Fowler's or the Pakistan election example in Sam's email. 

In the GloWbE corpus (data collected in 2012–13), is meant to usually doesn't look very British. For example, here are the results for "is meant to be [adjective]". As you can see (if you click to enlarge), items like is meant to be fun occur at similar rates in American and British. The results are very similar for is meant to be a (as in is meant to be a melting-pot). 




The bar chart shows that the American examples are fewer overall, but not all that different (the black line is to facilitate comparison). 



There is something interesting going on in that adjective list, though: Americans are using is meant to be with very similar adjectives: fun, funny, humorous, entertaining plus odd-one-out free. The British adjectives are more diverse, which probably signals that this 'supposed to be' meaning is more established in BrE and Americans use it in more limited ways.**

In Sam's example there were meant to be elections, the grammatical subject of be meant to is the existential/dummy subject there. If we look for that, a US/UK divide seems clearer. North Americans don't really say there [be] mean to, which will be why that example stood out for Sam:


There does occur slightly less in the US data overall—about 7% less than in British. So that might be a contributing factor. But, to me, it looks like the is meant to construction just isn't as much at home in AmE as it is in BrE at this point. And that's to be expected, since it's a usage that seems to have started in Britain only after American independence. 

I should probably say something about the usual translation of be meant to: be supposed to as in The weather is supposed to be nice. This is much older than meant in the sense of 'expected/assumed'—the OED's first example is from 1616. The 'ought to' meaning, as in I'm supposed to be in bed by now, comes much later—the OED's first citation is from 1884 in Britain. So, we can't call supposed to "AmE" as opposed to BrE. But since meant to has taken on some of supposed to's jobs, and meant to is more British, it's not surprising to find more supposed to in AmE:





I'm really meant/supposed to be in bed by now. So I shall leave it at that! 

------------

*@LKMcFarlane, 
@Miranda_Neville & @PamRosenthal, 
@aaj1an  
and possibly others have raised this topic with me years before. Sorry it's taken so long! 

**Note that there's always the risk in GloWbE data that writers represented in a particular column are not really from that country. For instance, this data might include British commenters on American websites and vice versa. So, to be safe, I checked that is meant to is also found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which doesn't rely so much on internet English. It is. 








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(at) home

May 11, 2020
One of the things I've found most useful during lockdown is to have routines that distinguish the days. The routines have become most distinct on weekends: Saturday is Cleaning Day and No-Laptop Day; Sunday is Blogging Day. After the last topical blog post, I planned to do another topical one this Sunday, regarding a UK government slogan. But then on my no-laptop Saturday, THEY CHANGED THE SLOGAN. They timed it just to make me look untopical. Grrr.

Anyhow, here's the graphic that we've been seeing on our televisions for the past seven weeks:


And too-many-to-mention people have got(ten) in touch with me to ask whether (or complain that)  stay home is a rather American phrasing for Her Majesty's government. Indeed, it is. Both AmE and BrE can say stay at home, but AmE is very comfortable with the at-less version, while BrE isn't.


These GloWBE data are from about 7-8 years ago. Here's what it's looked like in the News on the Web corpus for 2020 so far.


So, despite the prominence stay home slogan in the UK (and its news), it remains more usual to have the at in BrE, in edited news text. AmE really doesn't mind, though the phrase stay at home brings to my mind its use as a hyphenated modifier, as in stay-at-home parent. Such adjectival use, if properly hyphenated, would not appear in the above figures.

Presumably, the slogan is Stay home because it parallels the cadence of Save lives. (Fritinancy has pointed out that stay home/save lives is a World Health Organization slogan, so that's probably how it got to the UK. The govenment could have translated it, but didn't.) The parallelism becomes clearer when the NHS line is left out or where the parallel Stay–Save lines are graphically linked, as in:


But even Her Majesty's Government is not consistent in using the at-less version:


Enough of the sloganeering, what about the grammar?

Home can be a noun, as it is in sentences like:
  • You have a beautiful home. 
  • My home is wherever I lay my laptop.
You can tell it's a noun (for sure) in those places because it's part of a noun phrase, introduced by determiners (a, my), with optional adjectives (beautiful) or possibly other modifiers (e.g. ...that I'd like to visit).

It can also be an adverb. Now, I have to pause here and say that, as far as I'm concerned, adverb is a garbage grammatical category. It is used to cover all sorts of things that behave in very different grammatical ways—from very (which modifies adjectives), to lazily (which might modify a verb phrase), to undoubtedly (which generally modifies a whole sentence), to well (which does all sorts of weird things and is an adjective too), to not (which modifies sentences or other phrases in much more grammatically restricted ways). Home is not an adverb in any of those ways. It's an adverb in the way that here or away are adverbs—indicating 'where' and often 'to where'.

Both BrE and AmE use home as an adverb. You can see it with various verbs of motion—and how it differs from a more nouny-noun like house, which has to have the trappings of a noun phrase and might need a preposition to connect it to the verb phrase. Compare these, where * is the linguistics signal for 'ungrammatical string of words'.
  • We're going home versus We're going to our house.   (*We're going house)
  • I have to get home by 10  versus I have to get back to my house by 10 (*I have to get house)
But in lots of cases, it's hard to tell if home is a noun or an adverb. In the first few examples, with things like your beautiful home, noun use sometimes rubs people the wrong way. "Why say home when you mean house?" they say. It sounds like advertising-speak, especially as used by (AmE real) estate agents. But I used those examples because home is very definitely a noun there. In other cases like the following, it could be a noun, but it doesn't have to be interpreted as that:
  • Home is where the heart is.  (subject of the sentence)
  • There's no place like home.   (object of preposition like)
Noun phrases can be subjects of sentences and objects of prepositions, and so home can be interpreted as a one-word noun phrase, which is a perfectly fine kind of noun phrase to be if we're treating the noun as non-countable. And it works to treat home as a non-countable noun if we're thinking of it as some kind of abstract state, rather than as just a house. Notice how other abstract nouns like imagination or love are very naturally used all on their own: Imagination opens doors; Love will keep us together.

But it's also the case that the places where we tend to use home as a bare noun are also places where we could use a prepositional phrase, and prepositional phrases can do adverb jobs:
  • At my house is where I like to be.
  • There's no place like under the duvet. 
Which is all to say that saying which part of speech a word is can be difficult—even in context. (Though I'll put my cards on the table and say I would count home as an abstract noun in the last two examples.) The parts of speech that we traditionally use for English may not be (more BrE) up to the job.
(SIDEBAR: This is not an excuse for not teaching grammar in school. This is evidence that grammar needs to be taught more like physics, where we can look at the evidence, admit we don't have all the answers, and evaluate different possible solutions.)

A n y h o w . . . 
We've got this funny word that can be a noun or an adverb—and it's been like this for as long as English has existed. The adverb originally and still incorporates a 'toward(s)' element: going home is 'going to one's home'. So the adverbial 'at home/in one's home' meaning that we get in stay home is a deviation from the original meaning. But it's a deviation that's been around for centuries. Consider these examples from the OED:
In the 1587 example, the ships are docked at their home. In 1615, true zeal loves to keep (at) home. Most of the examples with the verb to be would pass unnoticed in BrE (and certainly in AmE) these days. But the be home examples in BrE in the OED seem to have a bit of a hint of motion to them, in that they are about the future or the past: will be home and have been home. Movement to/from home is implied because person isn't at home at the time that the sentence was written.

All of the OED adverb examples with stay are American, though, including the one from Emily Dickinson (above) and Judy Blume's, which has the familiar stay home shape:
With stay, home loses its 'toward(s)' sense. It's acting like other spatial adverbs like here and away, and perhaps it's the opposite relation with away that has encouraged home to grammatically imitate away in AmE: stay away/stay home. But the adverb home hasn't fully made that trip in BrE, and so if you want to use home with stay, you need the preposition at to hook the noun home onto the sentence. Since home is also a noun in AmE, AmE can use the at home just as easily. A somewhat similar case is what happens with on and days of the week (click the link to read about it), but I would not want to call these cases "the same thing". AmE has lost some prepositions where BrE hasn't, but BrE is losing some where AmE doesn't. In some UK dialects, for example, people can go pub, as University of Kent linguist Laura Bailey has been exploring.

Back to the slogans. The new slogan is "Stay Alert, Control the Virus, Save Lives".

It's presented with green rather than red, to give us a signal that we can "go" a bit more. Maybe. Or something. The comedian Matt Lucas summari{s/z}es Boris Johnson's speech on the matter:


The new slogan is being mocked relentlessly on UK social media within a day of its announcement. Here's what comes up top in my google image search for "stay alert":


The comedian Olaf Falafel has made a Government COVID Slogan Generator (play the video and click on it to stop it on a new slogan):


 

As many have pointed out, it's unclear what we're supposed to stay alert for when we can't see the virus or tell who's carrying it. The UK government seems to love to direct its public with three-part  slogans, as we've seen before with "See it, say it, sorted". One reason that the "stay home" message was heeded was its appeal to protect the National Health Service—and the NHS's absence from the new slogan comes at the same time as many are worrying about backdoor machinations to sell off the NHS to private companies. There is the possibility, though that the "stay home, protect the NHS" message needed to be replaced because it had backfired and endangered people by making them reluctant to use NHS services for non-COVID-related problems.

Much more heartening than government messages is the outpouring of NHS-love in the front windows of the UK, where many are putting up pro-NHS messages and messages for other (BrE) key/(AmE) essential workers, with rainbows to cheer us all up. Here's a Google Image search result for "rainbow windows". On the windows, the more common slogan is stay safe.

 

Here's how we did our front window. No slogans, just rainbow:
Stay safe.

 (And if you want to read me railing against the phrase stay safe in American discourse, click here.)
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'X's Y' versus 'the Y of X'

Mar 29, 2020
[I had said I'd be blogging weekly, but that didn't happen when I had to travel for family reasons. I have got(ten) back to it, not that you'll always notice. I've decided that my goal is to *write* for the blog each week, but not necessarily to publish. So, I started writing this one last week, finished this week.]

I'm doing a lot of reading about the genitive case at the moment. Grammatical case is some kind of marking (e.g. a suffix) that shows what 'job' a noun is doing in a sentence. You might know a lot about case if you've studied German or Latin or Finnish (or some other languages), which have case suffixes on nouns. You'll know a little about case from being an English speaker who knows the differences between they, them, and theirs. Modern English marks pronouns for case, but not other nouns, except...

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had a robust case system, which it got from the ancestor it shared with German. The case suffixes pretty much died during Middle English. (English lost a lot of other kinds of suffixes over the centuries too, in part because suffixes are the kinds of things that get swallowed up in speech and in part becuase they're the kind of thing that become vulnerable when different languages come into contact—as happened for English and Norman French nearly 1000 years ago.) But one English case suffix, rather than disappearing, morphed into something else, and that something is the scourge of English spelling, the apostrophe-s: 's. 

So in the Old-English poem Beowulf, you can read about Grendles guðcræft. That -es on the name of the monster Grendel is the forebear of 's. We can translate it as something like 'Grendel's power' or 'Grendel's warcraft'. That (masculine, singular) genitive case marker says that there's a very close relation between Grendel and the guðcræft. Grendel is the power's source or its possessor.


But when that poem gets translated into Modern English, the translators sometimes translate the -es as an 's and sometimes not:
the might of Grendel (Francis Gummere)  
Grendel's power of destruction (Seamus Heaney)
That's because something else happened in Middle English: English started using of in the way that French uses de to express genitive relations—because French got all up in English's business at that point. Because of that change, of occurs only 30 times in Beowulf (where it has its original meaning of 'away from' or 'off'*), but over 900 times in Gummere's translation of it (where it means next to nothing).

So English has ended up with two ways of expressing those kinds of relations. We tend to talk about them as being 'possessive' relations and of the X in X's Y or the Y of X as 'the possessor'.  But the relation is not necessarily possessive. Think about something like the theft of the bicycle and the bicycle's theft: the bicycle doesn't possess the theft. The relations between the nouns in 's/of expressions are varied and hard to pin down (but they are very close relationships, covering a lot of the same ground as the genitive in Old English).

We don't exactly use 's and of interchangeably, though, and even where we can use both we often have preferences for one or the other. One of the strongest predictors of whether it'll be 's  or of is the animacy of the thing in the X position (the 'possessor'). Linguists often talk about an animacy hierarchy in which expressions that refer to  animate things are preferred in certain positions in sentences over non-animate things. In terms of what's animate, humans (the teacher, Heidi) come above animals (the badger, the parrot) and collectives (the company, the union), which come above objects (the table, the book).  All of the below noun phrases are "grammatical" but the higher up the list we go, the more apt people are to use the 's instead of the of phrase, all other things being equal:
the teacher's size        the size of the teacher
the badger's size         the size of the badger
the union's size           the size of the union
the table's size            the size of the table
A lot is going on in that 'all other things being equal' (a phrase used in both AmE and BrE, but AmE also likes all else being equal). Some other things that swing a possessive in favo(u)r of 's phrasing rather than of phrasing are:
  • heavier (more syllables/more complex syntax) possessed NPs rather than lighter ones
    (the table's dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge vs the dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge of the table)
  • the need for denser texts, as in newspaper headlines 
  • speech (rather than writing)
  • informal writing style (rather than more formal writing styles)
  • the dialect being spoken
So, on the last point: English in general used to be a much stronger avoidance of 's on inanimate object names. Inanimate possessors have become more and more accepted in English over the last 200 years or so. But that change has been happening faster in American English than British. This is like a lot (but not all!) of other changes in English (see The Prodigal Tongue, or if you really like to read about statistical methods, Paul Baker's book)—the change has roots deep in English's history, but goes faster/slower in different places. In this change's case (like some others), the "newer" form ('s on inanimates) is perceived as less formal and it's more condensed (and therefore quicker to say/read). Both of these properties might characteri{s/z}e some differences between the cultures that maintain the "standard" versions of English in the two countries. AmE tolerates more informality and more brevity in more situations.

So, having been thinking about all this, I did a Difference of the Day on Twitter, showing these two charts:


Here you can see that North Americans are much more happy than others to say the book's cover or the book's title or the table's edge or the table's width (or whatever other nouns might go after book's and table's). Here's the flipside, the of versions, which I didn't post on Twitter.



The table chart goes with what we'd expect to see: BrE doing a lot more with of than AmE. But the book table has AmE doing more of the book than BrE. You know why? Because American talk about books more. No, really:


So that's a lot more detail than you needed in order to see the AmE/BrE difference, but, hey, reading is good for you!

*Why does off look like of? Because they used to be the same word!

Some of the things I've been reading that influenced this post:
Carlier, Anne and Jean-Christophe Verstraete. 2013. Genitive case and genitive constructions: an introduction. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Carlier, Anne, Michèle Goyens and Béatrice Lamiroy. 2013. De: a genitive marker in French? Its grammaticalization path from Latin to French. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Lars Hinrichs. 2008. Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres. In Terttu Nevalainen, IrmaTaavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, and Minna Korhonen (eds.), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.

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Book Week 2019: David Shariatmadari's Don't Believe a Word

Nov 29, 2019
Welcome to the third review post of Book Week 2019. In the intro to Book Week 2019, I explain what I'm doing this week. In the end, there will be four posts. I thought there would be five, but one of the books has (orig. BrE) gone missing. Having had a day off yesterday, I will also have a day off tomorrow, so the final review will appear during the weekend. Probably.

Anyhow, today's book is:

Don't believe a word
the surprising truth about language

by David Shariatmadari
Norton, 2019 (N America)
W&N, 2019 (UK/RoW)


David Shariatmadari writes for the Guardian, often about language, and is one of the sensible journalists on the topic. The number of sensible journalists writing about language has really shot up in the past decade, and judging from reading their books, this is in part because of increasingly clear, public-facing work by academic linguists. (Yay, academic linguists!) But in Shariatmadari's case, the journalist is a linguist: he has a BA and MA in the subject. And it shows—in the best possible way. 

The book is a familiar genre: busting widely held language myths. If you've read books in this genre before, you probably don't need these myths busted. You probably know that linguistic change is natural, that the border between language and dialect is unfindable, that apes haven't really learned sign languages, and that no form of language is inherently superior to another. Nevertheless, you may learn something new, since Shariatmadari's tastes for linguistic research and theories is not always on the same wavelength as some other books directed at such a general audience.

Once again, I'm reviewing with a partial view of the book (this is the practical law of Book Week 2019). In this case, I've read chapters 1, 5, and 9 and skimmed through other bits. The introductory chapter gives us a bit of insight into Shariatmadari's conversion to full-blown linguist, as a reluctant student of Arabic who was quickly converted to admiration for the language and to the study of language as an insight into humanity. "It's not hyperbole to say that linguistics is the universal social science", he writes. "It intrudes into almost every area of knowledge."
UK cover

I chose to read chapter 5 because I'd had the pleasure of hearing him talk about its topic at a student conference recently: the popularity of "untranslatable word" lists. Goodness knows, I've contributed to them. What I liked about the talk was his detective work on the words themselves—some of the words and definitions presented in lists of 'untranslatables' are practically fictional. And yet, those of us who don't speak the language in question often eat up these lists because of our ethnocentric need to exotici{s/z}e others. This leads inevitably to discussion of linguistic relativism—the notion that the language you speak affects the way you think—and the bad, old (so-called) evidence for it and the newer evidence for something much subtler. The chapter then goes in a direction I wasn't expecting: introducing Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), an interesting (but far from universally taught) approach to meaning that uses about 65 semantic building blocks to represent and compare meanings across languages. NSM adherents make the case that few, if any, words are truly equivalent across languages. But while any word in one language may have no single-word equivalent in another language, that doesn't mean those words are untranslatable. It just means that translating them can be a delicate and complicated thing.

US cover
The final chapter (9) takes the opposite view to David Adger's Language Unlimited (in my last review), and argues that the hierarchical (and human-specific) nature of linguistic structure need not be the product of an innate Universal Grammar, but instead could arise from the complexity of the system involved and humans' advanced social cognition. While Adger had a whole book for his argument, Shariatmadari has 30-odd pages, and so it's not really fair to compare them in terms of the depth of their argumentation, but still worth reading the latter to get a sense of how linguists and psychologists are arguing about these things.

Shariatmadari is a clear and engaging writer, and includes a good range of references and a glossary of linguistic terminology. If you know someone who still believes some language myths, this might be a good present for them. (Though in my experience, people don't actually like getting presents that threaten their worldview. I still do it, because I care more about myth-busting writers earning royalties than I care about linguistic chauvinists getting presents they want.) It would also make an excellent gift for A-level English and language students (and teachers) and others who might be future linguists. After they read it, send them my way. I love having myth-busted students.
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Book week 2019: David Adger's Language Unlimited

Nov 26, 2019
Welcome to the second review post of Book Week 2019. See the intro to Book Week 2019 to understand more about what I'm doing this week. Next up we have:

Language unlimited
the science behind our most creative power

by David Adger
Oxford University Press, 2019


This is a book for people who like to think about HOW THINGS WORK. It's a serious work of popular science writing, which carefully spells out the mysteries of syntax. And by mysteries, I mean things you've probably never even noticed about language. But once they're pointed out, you have to sit back and say "Whoa." Because even though you hadn't noticed these things, you know them. Remember a few years ago, when the internet was hopping with posts about how we subconsciously know which order to put adjectives in? That's kid's play compared with the stuff that Adger'll teach you about the things you know but don't know about.

Adger (who is Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University, London) describes the situation carefully, clearly, and engagingly, using copious examples and analogies to communicate some really subtle points. (I particularly liked the explanation of form versus function in language, which drew on the form versus the function of alcohol. Chin-chin!) He draws in evidence from neurology, psychology, and computer science to both corroborate his points and to introduce further questions about how language works.

As I said in the intro to Book week, I have not read all the books I'm reviewing absolutely cover-to-cover. In this case, of the ten chapters, I read 1–3, 7, and 10—and skimmed through the other chapters. The early chapters make the case that there's more to linguistic structure than meets the eye and that human linguistic abilities must consist of something special—they must be qualitatively different from the types of cognition that other animals use and that humans use in non-linguistic communication. Later ones cover issues like how children experience and acquire their first language and what happens when computers try to learn human language. Throughout, the examples feature Adger's partner Anson and his cat Lilly.  I almost feel like I know them now. Hi Anson and Lilly!

Adger makes clear from the start that his book makes a particular argument in favo(u)r of a particular way of explaining language's mysteries—and that particular way is a Chomskyan way. This means that he makes the case for a Universal Grammar that underlies all human language. I was struck by his willingness and ability to take this all the way for a lay audience. By chapter 9, he is explaining Merge, the key tool of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. 

Now, here I have to say: this is not the kind of linguistics I do. It's not just that I'm not a syntactician—though I have, from time to time, dipped my toe into theories grammatical. It's also that I lost faith in theoretical monotheism when I moved from a very Chomskyan undergraduate degree to a more ecumenical linguistics department for my (post)graduate studies. When I arrived for my PhD studies, the department wanted to know which syntactic theories I'd studied, so they could determine which courses I needed to take. I could not tell them. After four years of studying Chomskyan linguistics, I thought I had spent four undergraduate years studying "Syntax". No one had told me that I was studying a theory of syntax, just one among several theories.

Ever since, I have tended to agnosticism and s{c/k}epticism when it comes to syntactic theory. (This is probably how I ended up as not-a-syntactician; I don't know that it's possible to have a career in grammatical studies without adhering to one theoretical church or another.) Being a lexicologist has meant that I don't have to take sides on these things. And so I play around with different theories and see how they deal with the phenomena I study. When I listen to the evangelists, I listen warily. I tend to find that they oversimplify the approaches of competitor theories, and don't learn as much from them as they could (or, at least, sometimes don't give them credit for their contributions). This is all a very long explanation of why I skipped to chapter 7—the chapter where Adger responds to some non-Chomskyan ideas (mostly personified in the chapter by Joan Bybee).

So (mostly BrE*) all credit to Adger for spending a chapter on this, and for citing recent work in it. I generally thought his points were fair, but I did what I usually do in response to such theoretical take-downs: I thought "ok, but what about..." I do think he's right that some facts point to the existence of a Universal Grammar, but I also think it's not the only interesting part of the story, and that it's premature to discount arguments that explore the possibility that much of what happens in language learning is based in experience of language and general cognitive abilities. But then, I would think that.

I definitely recommend the book for people who are interested in the scientific approach to language, but I'd skip the final chapter (10). It is an oddly tacked-on bit about sociolinguistic phenomena, precisely the kinds of things that are not even approached in the theory the rest of the book has been arguing for.

I congratulate Adger on this strong work that makes extraordinarily abstract concepts clear.





P.S. Since I'm not doing Differences of the Day on Twitter this week, here's little chart of use of all credit to (frequency per million words) in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, for good measure.


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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)