{"id":2903,"date":"2011-01-13T09:37:59","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T14:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2903"},"modified":"2024-06-15T05:43:12","modified_gmt":"2024-06-15T10:43:12","slug":"a-peeve-for-the-ages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2903","title":{"rendered":"A peeve for the ages"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> The image on the right reproduces a brief passage from a\u00a0letter<\/a> that Robert Southey wrote to his friend Grosvenor C. Bedford, on October 1, 1795. (Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)<\/p>\n

Read it, and see if you can figure out what aspect of it Richard Grant White in 1869 called<\/a> the worst of \"those intruders in language … which, about seventy or eighty years ago, began to affront the eye, torment the ear, and assault the common sense of the speaker of plain and idiomatic English\".<\/p>\n

Give up?<\/p>\n

It was the progressive passive, and White responded to it just<\/p>\n

… like a fellow whose uttermost upper grinder is being torn<\/strong> out by the roots …<\/span><\/p>\n

Even in 1869, White was forced to admit that this construction \"seem[s] to many persons [to be] of established respectability\"; and today, it's hard for most people to grasp that there was ever a problem with it at all.<\/p>\n

But it's true that the progressive passive first appeared in the English language in the second half of the 18th century, replacing what historians of English grammar call the passival.<\/em><\/p>\n

All of this came up in a marvelous invited talk at the recent LSA annual meeting: Joan Maling<\/a> on the topic \"Nothing personal? \u00a0The emergence of a new syntactic construction in Icelandic\". I'll have more to say about Joan's work on Icelandic, but I thought the English passival-to-progressive-passive evolution — and Richard Grant White's epic peeve in response — was worth a post of its own.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The relationship among the relevant set of forms can be seen in this list from Platt and Denison, \"The language of the Southey-Coleridge\u00a0Circle<\/a>\", Language Sciences<\/em> 2000:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

An example of the passival, in an 1807 letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra:<\/p>\n

Our garden is putting <\/strong>in order, by a Man who bears a remarkably good Character, has a very fine complexion & asks something less than the first.<\/span><\/p>\n

And here's one in a passage from Northanger Abbey:<\/p>\n

The bustle of going was not pleasant. — The clock struck ten while the trunks were carrying<\/strong> down, and the General had fixed to be out of Milsom-street by that hour. <\/span><\/p>\n

And finally, for all you connoisseurs of fine whines, the full text of Richard Grant White's \"Is Being Done<\/a>\", The Galaxy<\/em>, 1869:<\/p>\n