When we think about language change, it's often neologisms (newly coined words) that catch our attention. New slang and new terms for technology are perceptually highly salient - they catch our attention and arouse our ire. I've been guilty of this from time to time, as in my abortive Words I Hate series featuring such classics as winningest, biopic, and herbaceutical, and even recently I've complained about consumerology and brownulate. But they aren't the most significant aspects of linguistic change. At least 95% of the words in this entry (excepting the last sentence) have been in the language for hundreds of years, and, as a raw count (i.e. not eliminating duplicates) at least 50% of the words are Anglo-Saxon. And, as I pointed out earlier this year, the annual Banished Words List picks on neologisms mercilessly, when in fact these are largely hardly objectionable except in a subjective sense.

Similarly, although I find new ones virtually every week, my ongoing series of pronunciation polls reflects only a very limited set of words that exhibit variation in their pronunciation outside the normal dialect differences in vowel quality, r-pronouncing, etc. But because it's an issue of pronunciation, and because humans are cognitively attuned to hear various phonemic distinctions in their own languages, once again, they're very obvious.

Syntax, however, is a trickier issue. On the surface, syntactic change seems less significant than other types of linguistic change, because we can almost always sort out the meaning of a sentence even if the word order or phrasing seems a bit archaic. "He sleeps not" is now non-standard, but of course for centuries this formation was a completely standard way to express negation in English, and is in fact considerably more concise than "He does not sleep". Nevertheless, you have only to read closely a little bit of seventeenth or eighteenth (or even nineteenth)-century literature to notice syntactic differences. One of the real challenges I have in my Evolutionary Anthropology course, where we read Darwin's The Descent of Man, is to get the students to slow down and read closely, because if they don't then the language can just wash over them and they will miss important points.

Which brings me to the poll I ran a couple of weeks ago, asking for your input on the correctness of six sample sentences (three pairs that only differ in one point). Bear in mind that I hate syntax, and that it is one of the only reasons why I chose anthropology (with a somewhat linguistic focus) instead of linguistics as a major and eventually a profession. So the analysis that follows may in fact be error-ridden.

To recap, here are the six sentences:

(1) He showed that the administrators were idiots.
(2) He showed how the administrators were idiots.

(3) The administrators who he thought were clever were actually idiots.
(4) The administrators he thought were clever were actually idiots.

(5) He prevented the administrator from being an idiot.
(6) He prevented the administrator being an idiot.

That vs. How
Unsurprisingly (to me), over three-quarters of you agreed that 1 and 2, while both acceptable, mean different things. I agree - to me, 1 means that the subject demonstrated the fact of their idiocy, while 2 means that he showed the manner in which they were idiots. However, in informal speech 2 is actually reasonably common, and I have noticed it increasingly in student papers in sentences like, "He showed how Piltdown Man was actually a hoax committed by Sir Arthur Keith" in a context where the relative pronoun how can only reasonably be interpreted as meaning that he demonstrated the fact, not the means by which, the hoax was committed. In the poll, all of the other responses were chosen by only a few people, so I'm not able to say for sure whether this is a growing trend, but anecdotal evidence from student papers suggests that it is. I have to be careful, though, not to fall prey to the recency illusion. Even if it is very rare in published texts from the past, the same is true of published texts from the present - I have only encountered it in speech and in student papers, neither of which I have access to from the past.

Whom vs. Who vs. That vs. Nothing
Hee hee! I knew it would be a free-for-all in the comments when I wrote sentences 3 and 4, because I intentionally omitted the following:
(7) The administrators whom he thought were clever were actually idiots.
(8) The administrators that he thought were clever were actually idiots.
You will find that in speech and informal writing, 7 is vanishingly rare and getting rarer, while 3, 4, and 8 are all popular to some degree. In writing, 7 is more common but 3, 4, and 8 are also common. Any number of you will insist that 'that' should never be used as a relative pronoun to refer to humans, or that 'whom' or 'who' is absolutely required in this context. You're wrong. You're wrong not because 8 is correct, but because all of these are so common among the best English writers of the past 500 years that it's hard to see the standard by which 'wrong' would possibly be judged. You can't even apply the 'replace the relative clause with a pronoun' rule to decide between who/whom in this case. This isn't some loosey-goosey descriptivism, mind you: it reflects actual usage, true, but not just 'any old usage' - it's the usage of trained, educated, skilled writers who pay attention to their writing, and *still* there is variability. This is because, like it or not, the Big Book of English Grammar school of thought is dead, dead, dead, and really hasn't ever been alive. For the record, and setting aside the restrictive vs. non-restrictive clause issue in terms of comma placement, I use all of these, but probably 4 most of all. The absence of a relative pronoun here is unproblematic and standard. In fact, I wonder whether the reason I find it pleasing is that it avoids the whom/who/that issue entirely, and thus is inoffensive to all (well, except for the 13% of you who think that 4 is acceptable only informally, or the one person who holds that 4 is incorrect).

From-Deletion
One of Arthur's books contains the following sentence:
(9) The scarecrow tries to stop them eating Farmer Sparrow's seeds!
In formal contexts, I would say or write stop them from eating, but in informal conversational contexts, I may well delete the preposition. In our sample sentences 5 and 6, 'stop them' is analogous to 'prevented the administrator' and 'eating' is analogous to 'being'; I'm not sure whether it makes a difference, though. But clearly you found 5 far more acceptable than 6; over half of you found only 5 acceptable, and another sixth found 6 to be okay only in informal contexts; conversely, no one found only 6 acceptable. I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what the trick is here. It may have something to do with the verb 'prevent', but I don't think so. It may have to do with assumptions about the deleted preposition, which could create a semantic difficulty (e.g. 'from being an idiot' vs. 'while (he was) being an idiot'. Or it may have something to do with the phrase 'being an idiot', but again, I don't think so. But then again, I am an idiot (relatively) when it comes to sorting out these problems, and someone will have to stop me (from) being obsessed with the question.

(For the record, though: I don't think that all administrators are idiots!)

Tags: language