"The eye of the needle … is being tried to be threaded…"

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Adam Cancryn, "Why a GOP senator from Trump country opposes the Senate health bill", Politico 7/9/2017:

“Collaborating with Democrats on the other side, to me, is not an exercise in futility,” Capito said, noting that she has spoken with Manchin and other Democrats about tackling health care together. “That may be where we end up, and so be it.”

Speculating further than that, she added, is premature. Senate Republicans could quickly strike a deal, pass a bill and follow through on their seven-year repeal pledge before the month is out.

“I think that remains to be seen,” Capito said. “That’s the eye of the needle, and I think it’s being tried to be threaded. But I’m not sure.”

Passives of the form "being tried to be VERBed"  as a passive equivalent to "trying to VERB" are pretty common. Instances of "being attempted to be VERBED" are also Out There. . It seems that "being hoped to be VERBed", etc., are rarer.

Assignment for corpus linguistics 101: compare the counts of "being Xed to be VERBed" and "Xing to VERB"  in e.g. COCA for X=try, attempt, hope, want, need, etc. What pattern emerges? What explains it?

 



6 Comments

  1. Guy said,

    July 10, 2017 @ 2:25 pm

    I admit I would have regarded this as a production error. I suppose the corresponding active would be something like "they are trying the needle to be threaded"? The natural form that avoids any passive would be "they are trying to thread the needle" but this lacks the complements that would ordinarily correspond to a passive. Though of course not every passive has a corresponding active.

    [(myl) It seems that some people are happy with relationships like

    is trying to VERB Y
    Y is being tried to be VERBed

    ]

  2. Christopher Henrich said,

    July 10, 2017 @ 5:26 pm

    Consider this hypothetical transformation:

    is trying to VERB Y
    Y is being tried to VERB

    Ugh. The only merit of that is that it reconciles me to what Sen. Capito said.

  3. JPL said,

    July 10, 2017 @ 7:57 pm

    Putting the corpus facts on one side for the moment, an alternative expression using a passive might be: "That's the eye of the needle, and I think threading that needle is being tried. But I'm not sure." The complement of "try" can maybe become a subject of a corresponding passive, but what is then lost is the idea that "threading the needle" is the intended goal of the trying. (You now have the "threading" being considered as a possible alternative idea, so that's an additional non-equivalence between the active and the passive for this sentence. ("… to thread that needle is being tried." — ? I don't know.)) "[eye of the] needle" is the complement (semantically) of "thread", so syntacticians can tell us whether it can "cross over" to become the passive subject of the "try" clause here, whether it conforms to the recognized rules or is an innovation. (Would that be a case of the "displacement" property?)

  4. DaveK said,

    July 10, 2017 @ 11:19 pm

    For me, the idiomatic way to say it would be "that's the eye of the needle and they're trying to thread it". Nothing against passives but I've never heard two of them being joined together like that

  5. cool math games said,

    July 11, 2017 @ 4:25 am

    “Collaborating with Democrats on the other side, to me, is not an exercise in futility,” Capito said, noting that she has spoken with Manchin and other Democrats about tackling health care together. “That may be where we end up, and so be it.” Really?

  6. Rubrick said,

    July 11, 2017 @ 1:21 pm

    My hunch is that this might have resulted from discomfort with "That's the eye of the needle, and it's trying to be threaded" seeming to ascribe the act of trying to the needle, not to the threaders. The construction actually used doesn't exactly solve the problem, but it does perhaps muddy the waters enough that the listener just goes with the general idea instead of picturing a needle shouting "A tiny bit to the left and you've got it!"

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