[PLUG-TALK] Language favor needed

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Thu Jan 17 18:55:04 UTC 2008


Thanks to all who replied! I did the presentation yesterday and it went very well. 

For those who are interested in such things, here is a compilation of the results of the survey:

Data Set 1 (subjunctive v. indicative)
1.	I think that the movie  _________  in two minutes.	
	begins 100%
	
2.	I demand that the movie   _________  in two minutes.
	begins 14%, begin 80%, began 6%

3.	I would prefer that the movie  _________  in two minutes.
	begins 19%, begin 72%, began 9%

4.	I realize that the movie   _________  in two minutes.
	begins 100%

5.	I know that the movie  _________  in two minutes.
	begins 86%, begin 14%

6.	I recommend that the movie  _________  in two minutes.
	begins 19%, begin 91%

Discussion: Some of the data was massaged a bit. For example, several people entered forms of "start" in the blanks. These were changed to the equivalent forms of begin because the purpose of the survey was to find how much life the English subjunctive still has left. Thus the important part is the structure of the word chosen, not the actual word chosen. (The English subjunctive has been slowly dying ever since the Angles, Saxons and Jutes landed in England in 459 CE.) That 15-20% do not use it in (2), (3) and (6) above is significant. Even more interesting is that the age of those who do not use it is uniformly younger than those who do. And to me the most interesting result is that 14% used the subjunctive in (5), a sentence which does not require the subjunctive. I attribute this to hypercorrection, evidence that native speakers are confused about where to use the subjunctive. 

Data Set 2 (verb second rule)
Anglo Saxon rigorously followed the verb second rule, as does present day German. The verb second rule requires that the verb be the second element in the sentence; any constituent can be first, but the second element must be the verb (except in subordinate clauses). In English the verb second rule has been replaced with SVO word order, which has resulted in some very bizarre structures - e.g., English "do." (SVO = subject, verb, object.) 

The responses to the data showed that English speakers do not like putting anything at the beginning of the sentence except the subject, and that the verb second rule is all but dead. Sentence (6) illustrates this very well:

6.	He was late only once.
	Only once ___

The responses to (6) were mostly "Only once was he late" (verb second rule), but 38% responded with "Only once he was late" (SVO).

Even more interesting were the responses to (11) and (12):

11.	I saw nothing unusual last night.
	Nothing unusual ___
12.	I saw something unusual last night.
	Something unusual ___

The majority of the respondents just about completely rewrote the sentence, e.g., "something unusual passed by my eyes last night." Several passivized the sentence - "something unusual was seen by me last night." Only two responses preserved the verb second rule, "somthing unusual saw I last night," although several were happy converting it to SVO, "something unusual I saw last night." 

Upon further reflection I determined what the problem was in sentences (11) and (12). The problem was that "something unusual" and "nothing unusual" are not just ordinary noun phrases, they are the objects of the sentences. Modern English is determined to be steadfastly SVO, which means that you just can't put the object up front, and certainly not before the verb. Forcing native speakers to start the sentence with the object made them squirm every which way they could to get out of it.

Thanks to all who participated. It was a very fun and interesting little exercise!



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