User talk:Doric Loon

This is the talk page of Doric Loon, which is the Wikipedia nickname of Graeme Dunphy. When you begin a new message section here, I will respond to it here. When I leave message on your talk page, I will expect your response there. This maintains discussion threads and continuity.

Where I live, in Germany, the time now is 13:13 [refresh]. If it's the middle of the night or during the working day I may well not be online.

Proposed deletion of Boppard line

The article Boppard line has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Does this exist? Nothing on the internet for this term. No books or journal appearances. Seems like OR

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Doric Loon is a scaredy-cat

After seeing your edit here, I wonder why you haven't deleted similar verbiage in the Infinitive - Phrases and clauses section, and why you haven't nominated the entire Non-finite clause article as ready for AfD. Apologies if you prefer seeing such original research thrive at Wikipedia. Why haven't I done the dirty work myself? Same reason you haven't. Cheers and a bottle of aspirin if needed. Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:03, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Ha ha! @Kent Dominic, it's always good to hear from you. Yes, I like to dose my fights carefully. You remember last time I tried deleting a nonsense article on grammar (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Prepositional adverb) - there's always some twerp who wants to keep it because the word is out there on the internet somewhere. Doric Loon (talk) 16:44, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure if your deletion is justified by referring to twerps finding things "out there on the internet somewhere". Have you checked Huddleston and Pullum? I suspect that infinitive relative clauses are in there.

In addition to which, that article is not confined to traditional English-style relative clauses; it purports (not always very successfully, in my view) to cover relative clauses as a universal phenomenon. Bathrobe (talk) 18:42, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Bathrobe, you are of course right that my flippant remark was mildly cheeky and I withdraw it if it caused offence. I was actually thinking of "prepositional adverb" when I wrote that. The problem here is mainly one of due weight. The overwhelming majority of people using grammatical terminology are language learners, or if you want to limit the view to professionals, the majority of language professionals are language teachers. Then there is a vastly smaller circle of academic linguists, and within this there are any number of fringe theories. What I keep finding myself up against is wiki-users whom I suspect are happy amateurs (though I might be mistaken) who have got hold of an idea somebody floated somewhere and want to give it priority over mainstream grammatical terminology. If reliable sources prove notability (which requires more than just a handful of papers having used a proposed linguistic term - it requires it being a significant part of linguistic debate) then by all means we should write it up, but not pushing it in such a way that ordinary language learners can't use Wikipedia to find basic info on the terms that are actually in their textbooks. THAT's my bugbear. Pax tecum. Doric Loon (talk) 19:25, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

I am not at all offended. Grammar/linguistics is a maddening "science". Linguists are always trying to come up with more scientific / logical / enlightening analyses, which tend to entail a whole slew of new terminology -- typified by but not confined to the inveterate Noam Chomsky. Nevertheless, some attempt has to be made to move beyond conventional or traditional grammatical theories. There are times when this might best be handled as a description in traditional terms, followed by a recasting in newer terms. For example, the traditional definition of a relative clause as found in English (one using a relative pronoun in a finite clause) could be followed by an explanation that many languages specifically use non-finite verbs (often characterised as 'participles') in relative clauses. This has led many linguists to reconsider English participial clauses ('the man running down the street ') or infinitival clauses ('the person to meet'), treating them as nonfinite 'relative clauses' modifying a noun. (It should also be noted, however, that the English infinitival relative clause is relatively rare typologically.) Bathrobe (talk) 01:43, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe Yes I agree with you on the order of handling this - traditional grammatical concepts first, then a section on what different linguists have done with it.

I don't have a problem with linguists creating new terminology for new ways of looking at things. Where I feel the thinking gets muddled is when existing terminology is reassigned. To stick with your example, the term "relative clause" was coined for analyzing Latin and Greek in the classroom, and refers specifically to a clause with a relative pronoun. I can see why one might look at other languages which do the equivalent job differently and say those other constructions are like relative clauses. But if we say they ARE relative clauses then transfer that back into a language like English and say that those other constructions are relative clauses in English too, we have lost our ability to distinguish clearly between different phenomena existing in parallel in English. I had one guy on Wikipedia who tried to tell me we should abandon the distinction between prepositions and adverbs because in - achme, Indonesian it might have been? - they are the same. Sure, but try teaching German without that distinction in place! I would rather have more distinctions than less. Doric Loon (talk) 08:31, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

I think it is far too late to shut that particular stable door. 'Relative clause', derived, of course, from European grammar, is now the standard term in linguistics. In fact, the Japanese and Chinese terms for 'relative clause' are a direct translation from English -- carried over from English grammar classes, of course. Bathrobe (talk) 09:50, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe Sure. Which is why I said to Kent Dominic that I choose my battles carefully. A lot of the time, trying to cut through the confusion of varying linguistic terminology on Wikipedia is a lost cause. But it is still worth reminding ourselves that ordinary bods struggling to learn some French for their holiday are likely to be our main readers. Doric Loon (talk) 11:04, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

I tend to agree with you to some extent, although I don't think that the true role of Wikipedia is to present a potted summary of conventional grammar, notwithstanding the demographics of the readership. But the article on relative clauses is a particularly bad one, IMHO. For instance, it baldly asserts that that is a relativiser rather than a relative pronoun, which flies in the face of customary usage. The reanalysis of that actually dates back to Jespersen, I understand, and there are good arguments for and against it. The dispute over the nature of that has been described by one linguist as a "centennial dispute". But for the article to breezily state that many languages use relativisers like that, without even giving a hint of the background of this particular analysis, is certain to cause complete bewilderment among most readers. Sometimes I think that the whole point of such bald formulations is to give linguistics undergraduates a chance to flaunt their newly acquired knowledge. Everyone has got it wrong all this time; I'm socking it to you with the "truth" according to modern linguistic theory. Bathrobe (talk) 19:29, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe Yeah, maybe that's what I meant by "some twerp". Rewriting that article could take a lot of work, that/which would possibly be immediately sabbotaged. Are you up for it? (I just read your userpage, which I loved BTW, so I know you know the problems!) Doric Loon (talk) 20:44, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

That userpage was written a long time ago (late 2000s) and only slightly updated some years ago to keep pace with circumstances. I wouldn't write it that way now.

I'm interested in the topic but am far from reaching a point where I would feel confident rewriting the article. Relative clauses are easy enough (well, relatively so) for European languages but attempts to extend the concept to unfamiliar, non-European languages can be problematic. After all, there are languages where the "relative clause" is barely a clause at all; more a separate sentence. How do you square that with the basic idea of a relative clause as a clause embedded in a noun phrase? Internally-headed relative clauses bring their own problems. The only common typological thread appears to be a desire to equate SOMETHING to European-type relative clauses. Add to that the formal framework of generative grammar, which operates quite differently from old grammatical approaches (traditional or structuralist), and you have a recipe for utter confusion. Bathrobe (talk) 01:06, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Ooh, Doric Loon and Bathrobe, sorry I'm weighing in late to what I respectfully characterize as the type of rant I sometimes can't contain myself from spieling. Here's a reiteration: Twerps like yours truly have the temerity to conclude that terms like relative clause and prepositional adverb are traditionally accepted or respectively proffered by linguists as protologistic brainchilds with at least an arguable bit of rationality. I pat the backs of the intrepid who do the dirty work of calling out how a non-finite clause is not normally considered a relative clause while I merely shake my head at how the term relative clause itself continues its linguistic cachet. I've deep-sixed the term in my own work except to define it as:

(grammar) an old-fashioned taxon (invented in the late 19th century) intended to classify a postpositive clause or a postpositive phrase that:

1. defines or qualifies the identity of an antecedent object or subject. (Cf. postpositive adjectival clause.)

2. expounds a contextually adjacent element within a sentence as an interpolation rendered in speech via a slight pause or in text via certain punctuation. (Cf. parenthetic adjectival clause.)

As such, a postpositive adjectival clause can be asyndetic (e.g., "The term I invented isn't widely known"), syndetic (e.g., "The term that I invented isn't widely known"), or parenthetic (e.g., "The term, which I invented, isn't widely known"). Each clause adjectivally characterizes "term."

Furthermore, I keep myself from retching at how almost everyone in the English-speaking world blithely construes "I bought the shirt that fits" to contain "that" as a relative pronoun and "that fits" as a relative clause.🤢 Instead, how does this twerp see the example? I'd say "that" is an conjunction (i.e., an adjectival conjunction) and "that fits" is an adjectival phrase (i.e., defined MUCH differently than how the Wikipedia article treats adjective phrase) characterizing "shirt".

I cannot, for the life of me, justify how the "that" in "I bought the shirt that fits" is a pronoun tantamount to "shirt". Such an interpolation results in "I bought the shirt [shirt] fits."🤢

Why do I abjure taxons such as relative pronoun, relative clause, restrictive relative clause, nonrestrictive relative clause, embedded relative clause, bound relative clause, free relative clause, etcetera? Cuz nobody except linguistic twerps and geeky ESL teachers know what those terms are supposed to mean, and the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai (inter alia) translations for those terms ignore the sense of "relative" in each case. Who can blame them?

Trivia Question: Do either of you two know how, when, & why the term "relative" was coined conscripted for English language analysis of certain Latin and Greek clauses? It took me years to find the answer, which was innocuously suited for its bygone purpose but ill-adapted to crosslinguistic pursuits. (Hint: When I told my students the answer to the trivia quiz, they invariably replied, "But, everything in a sentence sorta relates to other stuff in a sentence, right?") Unlike "relative," linguistic terms like parenthetic, asyndetic, postpositive, and adjectival have conceptual analogs in every language.

Feel free to disagree with any or all of the above, but give me props for a pretty good rant that I hope didn't waste too much of your time. I gotta run now. I have something that needs tending. Namely, I've gotta go blast the twerp who thinks "that needs tending" is a relative clause rather than an adjectival phrase relating to "something". < The mention of "relating" constitutes another hint to the triva question.

P.S. If any other twerp corretly points out how, in archaic uses, a so-called relative clause can occur other than on a prepositive basis (e.g., "That you are right is unquestionable"), I don't stand corrected but merely assert how the definitions in my work comprise neither a dictionary nor an encyclopedia but a glossary of only the terms as used in the corpus of my work as a whole. Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:51, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Well, Kent, you are certainly no scaredy-cat!

People refer to the "relative clause" as though it were brought down from Mt Sinai, but it's nowhere near as old as that. I've found just a couple of relevant sources.

One is the OED. The grammatical term relative in its original sense meant nothing more than relating to an antecedent. The earliest citation in English is actually metaphorical:

[God] a graciouse antecedent. And man ys relatif rect yf he be ryht triwe; He a-cordeþ with crist..In case..In numbre.

The second is an article on Cartesian linguistics by one Vivian Salmon, who pointed out that the concept of a "relative clause" as a clause referring to an antecedent appeared only in the 17th century as grammarians became aware of a distinction between main and subordinate clauses.

If you have anything else I'd be fascinated to hear about it. Tracing this sort of thing is difficult as you need to be multilingual and have access to original sources in multiple languages, particularly Latin, Spanish, and French.

The Japanese and Chinese translations (Japanese likely came first) are rather meaningless as they mean something like 'related clause' or 'relating clause'. The Japanese have their own native terminology for adnominal clauses (not confined to relative clauses) but frequent use of the translated term in Chinese is fairly recent, probably 20th century. (Again you would need access to relevant sources in the two languages. I'm not such a language sleuth that I'd want to spend the next couple of years finding out.)

So pray do impart to us the knowledge you have shared with your students. You present yourself as something of a curmudgeon (I would not describe you as a 'twerp') but this is actually quite important and useful stuff!

Bathrobe (talk) 19:10, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic I am now REALLY regretting introducing the word "twerp" - our quips come back to haunt us. I too would like to know more about the origin of this and other grammatical terms, so if you have it, spill. We've talked before at length about old and new terminology so you already know what I think: if a term is widely familiar and designates a phenomenon that needs designating, I don't care if its etymology is illogical. You're quite right that all kinds of clauses "relate" in some way and could have been called "relative clauses", but in fact only one kind was, and if there is a consensus about what's meant, I'm comfortable with it.

@Bathrobe Thanks for those interesting references. Doric Loon (talk) 07:43, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

@Doric Loon:Okay, let's fight...

• The terms relative clause and relataive pronoun are widely familiar. X
• The terms relative clause and relataive pronoun designate a phenomenon that needs designating. X
• The etymology of the terms relative clause and relataive pronoun is logical. X/O [The etymology is what it is. It's original use served a reasonable purpose and was linguistically consistent.]
• The evolutionary use of the terms relative clause and relataive pronoun is logical. O

Specifically, Henry Sweet limited his use of the terms only to bona fide clauses: The cat, which ran away yesterday, turned up this morning; Hogwarts, where Harry Potter was schooled, is a fictional academy; 1776, when the American colonies declared independence from England, was a seminal year. But nowadays only twerps like me point out how Henry Sweet's brainchild has been coopted to apply to phrases: The cat which ( or that) ran away yesterday turned up this morning; Hogwarts is an academy that is fictional; J.K. Rowling is the woman who wrote the Hary Potter series; 1776 was a year that was seminal. Let the traditionalists call me a heretic, but I say those latter instances of "which", "that", and "who" are conjunctions re the repsective verb phrases "ran away yesterday", "is fictional", "wrote the Hary Potter series", and "was seminal".--Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:35, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I was wondering about your use of the terms 'adjectival phrase' and 'verb phrase'.

"ran away yesterday" as a phrase (whether verb phrase or adjective phrase) is quite peculiar. According to my (probably dyed-in-the-wool) understanding, a phrase doesn't normally include a finite verb (i.e., "ran"). Only a clause contains a finite verb. Bathrobe (talk) 04:16, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Also presumably including "The man who shot Liberty Valance was the greatest one of all" and "1776 was a year that will go down in history"? Bathrobe (talk) 16:42, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the continued additions! You might be interested in a paper by Francis Cornish, entitled Revisiting the system of English relative clauses: structure, semantics, discourse functionality . It raises a number of cases that don't properly fit into the accepted categorisations, some of which seem similar to the ones you raise. It's available online here: https://hal.science/hal-03769045/file/Final%20corrected%20vsn%20of%20English%20Relatives.pdf Bathrobe (talk) 01:09, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

The Salmon paper can be found here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4175030

It's a scathing takedown of Chomsky's book Cartesian Linguistics by someone who actually knows about the linguistics of that period and its historical background.

The paragraph in question runs:

"These are only a few of the examples which might have been offered to demonstrate how the Port-Royal concept of underlying propositions in connexion with certain nominal phrases* was firmly rooted in traditional grammar and logic. Chomsky quotes two further features of the discussion which might generally be regarded as evidence of their originality; one is their realization of the unusual position of the relative at the head of its proposition in oblique cases, and the other is the concept of relative propositions as 'subordinate' ('incidente') to main clauses, 'subordination', according to Sahlin (1928: 104), describing a category of proposition which is not noticed by grammarians before Port-Royal. Neither feature is original. The position of the relative pronoun is noted by Johann Alsted in his account of 'grammatica generalis' when dealing with the construction of the sentence; oblique cases, he says - apart from the vocative - are normally postpositive to the verb 'except for the oblique cases of the interrogative and relative pronoun, which are placed in front of the verb as . . . Libri, quos legis, sint utiles' (1630: 271). Alsted was also among the first to realize the distinction between main and subordinate clauses, since he writes of causal conjunctions 'which render the cause of the superior [or, possibly, 'preceding' superioris] sentence' (1630: 276). At about the same time two Englishmen, William Brookes and Joseph Webbe, used the term 'prime clause' to describe one to which others may be annexed, or which has 'a second clause or clauses contained in it' (MS. f. 283 v.). [Webbe, incidentally, uses the term 'relative clause' in this debate with Brookes, which concerned the acquisition of language. It is preserved only in manuscript (cf. Salmon, 1964)]."

• The Port Royal sentence in question is Dieu invisible a créé le monde visible, where invisible is interpreted as qui est invisible and visible as qui est visible.

I am now wondering whether this passage really supports what I wrote above, but it appears from Salmon's words that "relative clause" was first used by Webbe. I actually downloaded the entire book "The Study of Language in 17th Century England" a few years ago but the site I downloaded it from has now disappeared.

If you are interested I can send it to you. Bathrobe (talk) 01:25, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe: My un-corroborated sources say the British philologist Henry Sweet coined the terms relative clause and relative pronoun in the late 19th century and that he used relative exactly as you characterized it. Even if he's not the actual culprit, my work doesn't name him. I don't want to stand accused of accrediting villifying the wrong person. Kent Dominic·(talk) 02:34, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Salmon credits Webbe with using the term "relative clause", but this doesn't necessarily imply that it then passed into ordinary usage. It might have been a nonce term that never caught on.

Sweet was not actually a traditional grammarian. He was one of a group of grammarians who pushed traditional grammatical studies in more "scientific" directions, if you will. Others include Poutsma, Kruisinga, and Jespersen. But the term "relative" was used in grammar well before this.

For example, the following is from Pinnock's A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1830):

M. Which are the RELATIVE PRONOUNS?

P. The relative pronouns are who, which, and that.

M. Why are these pronouns called relative?

P. Because they always relate or refer to some noun, or pronoun mentioned in the discourse, and which is therefore called the antecedent; as, "That is the man who is so learned;" the substantive man is the antecedent to the relative pronoun who.

Who relates only to persons, and is thus declined :

Nominative. Possessive. Objective. (Who, whose, whom).

Pinnock classes "that" as a relative pronoun. See this example:

"This is the book which you gave, or that you gave me."

Also:

"That, as a relative, is used to prevent the too frequent repetition of who and which; as, "The boy that loves study, will soon acquire knowledge.""

(Sorry for messy use of italics and inverted commas.) Bathrobe (talk) 03:02, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Note also:

3. What is a kind of compound relative, including both the noun to which it refers, and the relative, and is mostly equivalent to that which; as, This is what I wanted; that is to say,the THING which I wanted.

4. Who, which, and what, have their compounds; namely, whosoever, whichsoever, and whatsoever, or whoever, whichever, and whatever. Bathrobe (talk) 03:13, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Finally, I'm curious how the term "relative clause" spread so quickly to French (proposition relative, proposition subordonnée relative), German (Relativsatz), etc.

Bathrobe (talk) 04:22, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Ok, looks like this thread is dead. Kent's sources on Henry Sweet appear to be at least partly wrong. His analysis of verb phrases is peculiar and some of the examples are odd. I don't know how to analyse or respond to them. I guess there isn't much mileage to be gained from thrashing the topic any further. Relative clauses are difficult. Dealing with them using established sources and definitions keeps raising more issues. I do have more thoughts (still pretty inchoate) but it's clear that any attempt to synthesise established sources (there is a lot written about them within different paradigms) would constitute "original research" and would probably be wrong. It has been interesting and enjoyable talking to you. Bathrobe (talk) 18:18, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe You're right, and I think we won't solve anything here. But I've enjoyed hearing your thoughts. The Cornish article really was interesting. As for our Relative Clause article, I agree that a synthesis would almost be OR. Maybe we just need to be a little clearer about different views. Instead of saying "a relative clause is..." we say "the term relative clause was first used by ... to mean..., then was used in a broader sense by ..." Doric Loon (talk) 19:52, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

You say "maybe we just need to be a little clearer..." (instead of they? What, so indeed you are a scaredy cat? Ha! (Me too, when it comes to proferring perfectly reasonable OR that conflicts with published tripe.) Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:45, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Not dead yet...

I asked ChatGPT to weigh in on the relative clause coinage thing. Here's the reply: "The term 'relative clause' was actually coined by Joseph Priestley, an English polymath, in the 18th century. Priestley was a scientist, theologian, and grammarian who made significant contributions to various fields. He introduced the term 'relative clause' in his work on English grammar, specifically in his book titled 'The Rudiments of English Grammar' published in 1761.

Henry Sweet, while a significant figure in linguistics, did not coin the term 'relative clause.' Instead, he made contributions to phonetics, historical linguistics, and language studies during the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

Take that for what it's worth. As for some other stuff, in my lexicon:

• An adjective phrase is a phrase with an adjective as its head. E.g., "I had a perfectly wonderful day."
• An adjectival phrase is one of six varieties of phrases that constitue or function as an adjective phrase. E.g.:

1. An adjectival phrase ellipsis: "What [in] the heck did you do?"
2. An adjectival prepositional phrase: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
3. An attributive adjectival phrase: "This is a grandfather clock;" "Don't crowd my fishing spot."
4. An incipital adjectival phrase: "Extremely peeved, Deborah stormed from the room."
5. A postpositive adjectival phrase: "A corridor radiating from the lobby."
6. A prepositive adjectival phrase: "I live near Louisiana Highway 87."

None of the examples re those six varieties contain adjectives, which is why I can't justify calling them adjective phrases despite how the phrases function adjectivally. Please don't start me on a collateral rant by suggesting "peeved" and "radiating" are adjectives rather than adjectival participles. Ha! 😁

As for your comment about verb phrases, I don't see any oddity in my analysis or examples. My lexicon's definition for verb phrase is nearly identical to the lede in Wikipedia article on verb phrase. Although I'm largely responsible for the rewording in that lede, I couldn't bring myself to use the term argument (linguistics) in my own lexicon (wherein 18 varieties of verb phrases are identified and defined). Instead I use complement as defined in a way that agrees with the Wikipedia article on complements.

FYI, my lexicon is 100% original research, which is why I don't interpolate it into the articles themselves here. I'm content to excerpt parts of it in these rants on the talk pages, as if anyone but grammar weenies and fellow twerps scholarly types might be interested. Truth be told, this whole topic doesn't really fascinate me. Rather, it brings out the OCD in me when I read linguistics stuff that might hold up from the naive set analysis provided by a given author but - IMHO - fails miserably when put to an axiomatic set theory analysis in which EVERY word comprising a linguistics proposition is defined, and every linguistic term of art - including the sum of its parts and each discrete word comprising parts of a multi-word term - is uniquely defined within the context used.

Like you said, the established sources and definitions keep raising more issues. I refuse to stand for it, hence, I went the axiomatic set theory route of defining ALL of the traditional linguistics terms that I found to be useful while shunning those that have outlived their utility for my purposes. (E.g., just ask Doric Loon the difference between what traditionalists call a stranded preposition and what I call a postposition). Do I care how traditionalists would say "I never saw the car that you were looking at" contains "that" as a relative pronoun and "at" as a stranded/dangling preposition? Only when I need a fix of fingernails screeching along a chalkboard.

After completing 99.7% of my 8-year project in that regard, do I care how linguistic traditionalists would think I'm crazy to say "I never saw the car that you were looking at" contains "that" as an adjectival conjunction and "at" as a postposition? Indeed I'd be delighted to hear arguments that put ME on blast rather than offering serious consideration of my lexical work in its entirety. If those same traditionalists don't like how I characterize "I never saw the car you were looking at" elides "that" to create an asyndetic adjectival clause, I would retort by asking how it makes sense to go around eliding so-called pronouns and to spare walking me down the reduced relative clause and complementizer, and non-finite clause rabbit holes. Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:39, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Not dead yet...

Glad to hear it! I wasn't dismissing what you said, by the way, just asking for clarification, which you seem to have provided. (But first, I need to look at your comments a bit more closely.) Bathrobe (talk) 02:14, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I've downloaded the Priestly grammar of 1761 and was unable (doing a quick search on the terms 'relative' and 'clause') to find 'relative clause' mentioned. Priestly does refer to 'relative pronouns' in a similar way to Pinnock (they are mentioned along with personal, possessive and demonstrative pronouns).

Lowth's A short introduction to English grammar of 1762 uses only the term "Relative".

Lindley Murray's English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners refers to "relative pronouns" (but not clauses).

My apologies for doubting your use of 'verb phrase'. This is indeed a term used in transformational syntax (very familiar from tree diagrams à la Chomsky), in which 'phrase' makes no claim about the presence or absence of a verb. Bathrobe (talk) 01:29, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe Yes, that makes sense that "relative pronoun" came first. In my own mind, "relative pronoun" is the central idea, and "relative clause" follows automatically because the whole point about a relative pronoun is that it connects a clause to the sentence. Maybe that's why I find it so unhelpful to talk about relative clauses that don't have relative pronouns. Doric Loon (talk) 11:37, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

@Doric Loon: Now you're revealing how both of us are scaredy cats:

You find it unhelpful to talk about relative clauses that don't have relative pronouns but you don't accordingly edit the relevant Wikipedia articles in fear of the reversion vultures who'd pillory the perfectly rational edits based on original rsearch objections ceding the lame, outmoded thinking published by sources who ply most everyone re the conceptual underpinnings of relative pronouns and relative clause. < An intentionally lon run-on sentence with three relative clauses adjectival conjunctions.

I, on the other hand, find it unhelpful to talk about so-called relative clauses that don't comprise a clause (i.e., a subject and a syntactic predicate) but comprise only an adjectival verb phrase, e.g. "The Spy Who Loved Me" or "The cat that ate the canary." The reversion vultures would have a field day if I edited article here based on my novel stance that the abovementioned "Who" and "that" are better deemed to be conjunctions rather than pronouns. And, rabid transformational grammarists would be quick to point out how "I like the poem [that] you wrote" contains "you wrote" as a reduced relative clause while generative grammarists would say "you wrote" entails "that" as an elliptical complementizer.

To that I say, folks should use whatever linguistic terms might float their boats, but applying outmoded terminolgy to adjacent linguistic concepts yields some pretty ridiculous arguments. If I'm accused of creating some protologistic linguistic terms to augment or supplant the outdated ones, all I can say is that - as a whole - they hold up to rigorous analysis. Can't say the same about the conceptual underpinnings of a host of linguistic terms. Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:46, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

rabid transformational grammarists would be quick to point out how "I like the poem [that] you wrote" contains "you wrote" as a reduced relative clause

I'm not sure they would. Your link doesn't refer to this kind of construction.

In "I like the poem [which you wrote]", I suspect the process would involve somehow moving "poem" from the object position to the head of the clause, thus creating a gap in the object position, and replacing "poem" with "which". I'm not sure how it would be treated with "that" as a complementiser, but again I think "poem" would be deleted. This is not a "reduced relative clause". Reduced relative clauses according to your link involve (a) the deletion of the relative pronoun or (b) participial relatives involving the deletion of the relative pronoun and the auxiliary verb "to be". I'm not au fait with all the ins and outs of transformational grammar, but essentially that's how they would approach it. Bathrobe (talk) 09:10, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Apologies! IIRR, the word within the clause corresponding to the antecedent is replaced by a pronoun (which, who....), which then moves to the lefthand edge of the clause, optionally accompanied by any preposition (a process known as 'pied-piping'; like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, the pronoun is able to drag the preposition with it). 'That' does not trigger pied-piping. Of course, transformational grammar has gone through many changes since then. Bathrobe (talk) 11:45, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe: I think you meant to say, "'phrase' makes no claim about the presence or absence of a verb subject". Kent Dominic·(talk) 16:52, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe, P.S.: Thanks for looking up the stuff re Priestly. After reading it, I asked ChatGPT: 'Did Joseph Priestley introduce the term "relative clause" or merely the term "relative pronoun"? ChatGPT replied, "My apologies for the confusion. Joseph Priestley did indeed introduce the term "relative pronoun," not "relative clause." The credit for introducing the term "relative clause" actually goes to Scottish philologist James Beattie, who used it in his book "Elements of Moral Science" published in 1790. So, to clarify, Joseph Priestley introduced the term "relative pronoun," while James Beattie introduced the term "relative clause." Thank you for pointing out the discrepancy, and I apologize for any confusion.' Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:52, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe, P.P.S.: I just downloaded James Beattie's "Elements of Moral Science." As far as I can tell, there's no mention of "relative clause" per se. Instead, on pp 29-30, it reads, "Some [pronouns] may introduce a sentence, and are therefor called prepositive, as I, thou, he, she, this, that, &c. Others are termed subjunctive or relative, because they subjoin a clause or sentence or something previous, as qui, quæ, quod, who, which, that." So, to my sensibilities, whether James Beattie should be properly credited with coining "relative clause" isn't as significant as it seems he conflated the purpose of a pronoun and the purpose of a lexical item that subjoins stuff. These days we say a lexical item that syntactically ABC-joins stuff is a conjunction. Apologies to the twerp who argues that a subjunction subjoins (rather than conjoins as conjunction) a subjunctive clause, e.g., "I suggest that it doesn't matter". Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:32, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it's significant that the purpose of relative pronouns is to join sentences or clauses. Earlier sources seem to concentrate solely on the fact that relative pronouns refer to an antecedent, taking for granted (or oblivious to) their syntactic role.

I did a search for Relativsatz on Google Books. The earliest I found was from the early 19th century and was used with reference to Latin grammar. Is it possible the Germans were there earlier? Or is this just a limitation of our sources?

I'm wondering about your term "postposition". This suggests that to in "The man to whom I spoke" and "The man whom I spoke to" are different parts of speech.

Bathrobe (talk) 21:38, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe: I admit I have tons more suspicions than actual info re the etymology of relative clause and relative pronoun. The journalist in me wants to say stuff like, "According to Source A, relative clause was coined by Person B in year C, but according to Source X, it was coined by Person Y in year Z" without making any definitive assumptions or assertions about the truth of the matter. Personally, the thing for me is that I no longer use those terms which, on my own authority in my proprietary work, I pronounce as being outmoded.

As for postpositions, yes, I unequivocally consider it to be a part of speech lexical category apart from a preposition. I should add, however, that I neither use nor define the term postposition in my work's lexicon of terms. Instead I use the term postpositional particle. Explaining why is a whole 'nother topic stemming from the following:

1. One character in my novel uses a southern U.S. dialect to say, "Grandpa, you could remember the place where Wallace Olivier is at, could you?"
2. Another character with a standard U.S. idiolect says, "T.S., here’s a dispatch you might want to look at from a self-storage place in Olivier, Louisiana."
3. The narrator (with a standard U.S. idiolect) at one point says, "Judge Prosser embraces collegial manners of workplace etiquette on the New York Court of Appeals, his status as its elder statesman notwithstanding."

Item #1 comes closest to what traditionalists despise as being a stranded preposition but generative grammarians would call a postposition. Yet, I can't point to an object in the given sentence relating to at without the linguistic bait-and-switch wink and grin that interpolates "which" as the presumptive object, a la, "Grandpa, you could remember the place at which Wallace Olivier is, could you?"

Note: One of my paradigmatic constraints is to characterize each lexical item solely in terms of its syntactical context, not in terms of a linguistic equivalent that might be otherwise interpolated in the abstract.

Why else don't I call the #1 at a postposition? Cuz it syntactically differs from #2 despite what might appear at first glance. #2 must be semantically construed as look at a dispatch, but the "at" occurs postpositively whether it's argued to have a nominal relation to "dispatch" (as worded in the original) or a verbal relation to "look".

In my view, this instance of "look" can only be construed to be an intransitive verb in the manner of look at being a verb phrase versus a phrasal verb. Accordingly, my definition of postpositive particle is worded so that it can apply to instances involving both #1 and #2.

Note: In that phrasal verb article, I would delete the entire sections labeled Verb + preposition (prepositional verbs) and Verb + particle + preposition (particle-prepositional verbs) as being conflated with a verb phrase. Despite how I might be liberal with my rants, like Doric Loon, I like to dose my editing fights carefully, and it's not worth the hassle to point out how reams of the uncited OR in that article is worth less than the paper on which it's uploaded it's uploaded on.

It took me a long, long time to decide whether "notwithstanding" should be construed as postpositional particle or as something else. Indeed it was the wacky Merriam-Webster dictionary's definition of notwithstanding together with the etymology of notwithstanding by etymonline that helped me decide. Think about it: If worded as "Judge Prosser embraces collegial manners of workplace etiquette on the New York Court of Appeals, his status as its elder statesman not with standing", then "not with standing" is an adverbial phrase, not an adverb as asserted by Merriam-Webster. So, is "notwithstanding" an adverb as a discreet word exmaple in #3?

As a discrete word, notwithstanding would be a preposition if #3 were re-worded as "Judge Prosser embraces collegial manners of workplace etiquette on the New York Court of Appeals notwithstanding his status as its elder statesman," but I'm paradigmatically constrained from interpolated linguistic interpretations. Consequently, the "notwithstanding" used in #3 must be a postpositional particle of the variety generative grammarists would deem a postposition.

A quick rant about well-meaning linguistic twerps who publish stuff on this topic: they tend to give a myopic view of a pet lexical item and support their arguments with simplistic, cherry-picked examples (e.g. Which town did you come from?) while leaving harder-yet-still-colloquial examples unaddressed. I consider it disingenuous to say, for example, "Where are you at?" entails a stranded preposition when "at" (a) isn't pre-positioning anything, and (b) has no lexical item that could be otherwise construed as an object which might inversely complement "at" within the example. (I.e., I think it's a semantic stretch to say "where" may be construed as an object rather than as an adverb in the given example.) On the other hand, I feel comfortable calling "at" a postpositional particle cuz (a) it's post-positioned, and (b) it's a particle, which my lexicon defines in ways that, IMHO, surpasses what's given in the article here.

Getting back to the titular topic, I'm fearless in thumbing my nose at stuff that traditional grammarists and linguists take for granted or assume without adequate definition or circumspection. I'm a scaredy cat when it comes to pointing out all the discrepancies that are rife within related published sources that nonetheless have been (a) guilelessly cited and (b) expanded upon via laughable OR here. Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:04, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Alas, poor Doric appears to have dropped out of this conversation on his own talk page.

Language is endlessly fascinating. That could be why new theories and interpretations keep springing up to explain it. Bathrobe (talk) 19:29, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe @Kent Dominic Haha, I go off for the weekend and find you two have left FOURTEEN messages on my talk page! Some of this is great stuff. Question: do we now have RS for Beattie and Priestly? That at least could be introduced to relative pronoun and relative clause - I'd be happy to do it, or you can, whatever. I find "history of the term/concept" sections are not only very interesting in their own right, but strategically useful because they are usually uncontroversial, in the sense that the editors who tend to block attempts to rewrite articles on grammar will leave these alone. I have often found that this route allows us to establish early on in the article what the traditional usage is, and more modern expansions or alterations of the understanding of the term then have to appear further down in contrast to it. If you want an article on a topic like relative clauses to cover the full variety of ways that different schools have used the term, it can be very difficult to agree on an article structure, but a chronological approach often can get agreement. Doric Loon (talk) 08:16, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

At the moment I regrettably don't have time to do this, nor am I sure I would be up to it. What would be the best way to approach it? I agree that it's unusually interesting, not least because it shows how we got here. The roots of "traditional grammar" are surprisingly shallow / go back an awful long way, depending on how you look at it.

Something relating to Latin, on which Kent Dominic raised the question as to how, when, and why the term "relative" was conscripted for English language analysis of certain Latin and Greek clauses, would make it even better. (Without having done any due diligence, I'm assuming this would go back to Donatus or Priscian? That would take us back to mediaeval times and earlier, where I am completely at sea....) Bathrobe (talk) 02:03, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Found the following in a thesis by one Fabio Fortes (Priscian and the Graeco-Roman bilingualism: an example of cross-linguistic analysis within Priscian's De Resumen constrvctione (Inst. gramm. XVII))

Excerpt 1:

As stated before, cross-linguistic analysis stands for the explanations of Latin linguistic phenomena through comparisons or contrasts to Greek language. In Priscian’s De constructione, such analysis takes place particularly when explaining topics of Latin language absent in Greek and never dealt with by Apollonius. In order to give an account of such linguistic topics, Priscian appeals to the systematic comparison and confrontation with Greek language.

As an example, we will show the way Priscian addresses the absence of articles in Latin. Through the treatment given to such topic, we shall notice that Priscian highlights the differences between both languages, rather than their similarities, which engenders some difference between Priscian’s and Apollonius’s grammatical account on this subject.

(In accordance to the limited pages of this paper, it is not our goal to give a full account of the differences between Apollonius and Priscian. Partially, we have done it in our PhD Dissertation (Fortes 2012); partially it is also carried out by Schmidhauser (2009).)

The absence of articles in Latin was a well-known fact by Latin grammarians, and, in the same way, clearly addressed by Priscian in many parts of his treatise. On the other hand, throughout Book I of Περὶ συντάξεως, Apollonius Dyscolus has given us an account of Greek articles. These articles were the ones called by him ‘prepositive articles’ (ἄρθρα προτακτικά), (close to what we still call nowadays ‘articles’) and also those he named ‘post-positive articles’ (ἄρθρα ὑποτακτικά) (corresponding to what we nowadays call ‘relative pronouns’).

Excerpt 2:

From another thesis (Priscian: A Syntactic Interpretation of a Graeco-Roman World by Biagio Gatto)

Priscian transfers into Latin the definitions of the linguistic unit under discussion together with its properties. For example, when Priscian had to describe the use of relative pronouns, he easily adapted Apollonius’ teaching because Greek and Latin did not differ in this respect. It is understood that the syntax of a relative pronoun always needs a verb to complete the clause, both in Greek and in Latin; in this regard Priscian writes: “it is necessary that, when following its antecedent, the pronoun qui as the Greek ὅς be referred not only back to the antecedent, but also be governed by a verb that follows, for example: uirum cano, qui uenit.” (183) The rule given by Priscian describes correctly the use of relative pronouns in Latin, but it should be noted that the way in which he outlines the rule, by stressing the position of the pronoun between an antecedent noun and a following verb, depended on the idiosyncrasy of Greek grammatical thought which distinguished between prepositive and postpositive articles, the latter being to us the relative pronouns.

End of excerpts.

From these one gains an insight into Priscian's Latin grammar as developing a poorly differentiated concept in Apollonius's Greek grammar. In doing so he hints at the concept of a relative clause (namely, one which has a verb).

Priscian was built on by mediaeval grammarians, but exactly how I do not know. Moreover, both Priscian and the mediaeval grammarians apparently formed a basis for "traditional grammar". As you can see, I am groping in the dark here. Bathrobe (talk) 03:34, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

I've found the time to track things down further through Google Books.

William Ward's A Grammar of the English Language of 1767 contains the first mention I could find of the expression "relative clause". There could easily be earlier ones, since Google Books is hardly comprehensive or complete, but Ward is very thorough in his treatment and explains very clearly the nature of relative pronouns and relative clauses. The entire book can be downloaded.

Ward is extremely interesting in the light of modern-day grammatical debates. He discusses the particle that, which is not a relative pronoun but shows a sentence as depending on other words.

Bathrobe (talk) 21:07, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, rummaging around the Internet demonstrates the difficulties of pinning down accurate information. Some sources state that Priscian denied that (what we call) "relative pronouns" belong to the class of "pronouns" (see Early Medieval Commentary on Priscian's Institutiones grammataciae (Luhtala), which states: "When Prisican defined the pronoun as being used instead of proper names, he excluded what we understand as relative pronouns from the category of pronouns, because they do not signify a definite substance".) How do you square that with the statement (above) that Priscian wrote that “it is necessary that, when following its antecedent, the pronoun qui as the Greek ὅς be referred not only back to the antecedent, but also be governed by a verb that follows, for example: uirum cano, qui uenit.” Is the term "relative pronoun" being used anachronistically?

Since I don't know Latin and don't have access to a lot of the sources, I am hard put to draw any logical conclusions from this. In particular, if Priscian didn't regard the relative pronouns as "pronouns" (as is claimed), how did grammarians such as Ward come to treat them as such?

I am inclined to tread carefully since I don't have access to the relevant sources and languages. Bathrobe (talk) 02:23, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Bathrobe, well I can tell you straight off that both Latin and Greek had relative pronouns, and since we can analyze these languages using the most modern linguistic insights, it is certainly not anachronistic to say that. However it may be anachronistic to talk of relative pronouns as a category in Priscian's thought, or as a category in classical grammar theory.

By the way, if you don't know Latin, you may have missed the interesting point that fero (to carry) is irregular, and has the supine form lātum, so that English refer and relate are from the same Latin verb. (Likewise transfer and translate, and other pairs). So it is called a "relative" pronoun because it makes "reference" to an antecedent.

Well done on finding Ward. I've downloaded it and browsed, and there is so much here that is interesting. I am absolutely fascinated that on page 60, ward treats the English progressive verb forms as being "the middle voice" - obviously an analysis derived from Greek. I find him talking about relative pronouns on pp 35-36, and relative clauses on pp 93-95 - is that the section you are looking at? On page 94 he does recognize that as a relative pronoun. I am thinking that something of this should go into the article. Doric Loon (talk) 14:31, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh, and I've just seen that there is more in Ward, at pp 214-218. Doric Loon (talk) 14:58, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, Latin and Greek both had relative pronouns. What is interesting is that Apollonius Dyscolus, who produced the most complete summation of Greek grammar, called them ‘post-positive articles’ (ἄρθρα ὑποτακτικά), essentially lumping them together with the articles, as we now call them, which Greek had but Latin lacked. Since Priscian was THE Latin grammarian for later Western tradition and based himself on Apollonius, his treatment and naming of relative pronouns and relative clauses is crucial in understanding how traditional grammar got to where it is. It becomes difficult when sources are contradictory, and of course when they use modern terminology ('relative pronoun') without saying what Priscian himself actually called them. Part of the problem here appears to be the existence of various Latin forms beginning with qu- and how they were treated grammatically.

I spent a fair bit of time going down that rabbit hole. It was rewarding and interesting but only showed me how much more I needed to know in order to be confident in stating anything conclusively. It's very clear to me, however, that glib assertions about "traditional grammar" are just that: glib assertions. You really need to know the whole history. And that includes the Modistae (another rabbit hole) and Port Royal, all important in understanding traditional grammar.

Incidentally, back to the point that started this discussion, you might notice that Russian Wikipedia lacks an article on relative clauses. One of the interesting things about Russian is that both finite clauses using relative pronouns (as in English) and nonfinite clauses using participles are apparently equally valid and productive ways of forming what we would consider to be "relative clauses". No, participial clauses are not traditionally recognised as relative clauses in English, but looking at the larger picture, it seems logical to apprehend them as a kind of "relative clause". Since the 1970s Transformational Grammar has popularised their treatment as "reduced relative clauses", which now seems to have entered the mainstream. However, the transformation in question is actually flawed since uniformly applying it can result in incorrect sentences. (I can supply sources if you want.) Bathrobe (talk) 20:47, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe Interesting. Would it not be more helpful to say that relative clauses and participial clauses are both kinds of post-modifiers? I.e. the main clause has a noun and they are both ways of adding a subordinate clause to expand on the thoughts about that noun. So of course they have parallels.

The point about Dyscolus calling the Greek relative pronouns "post-positive articles" is of course that in Greek, the relative pronoun and the definite article have almost identical forms. This is also true in German, where the same Indo-European *so-/to- root is used as both article and relative pronoun. A remnant of this in English is that, which as a demonstrative is derived from the Old English definite article paradigm, and which is also a relative pronoun. (So if one wants to argue that in modern English, that is not a relative pronoun, one would have to explain when and how it stopped being one.) Incidentally, Latin and Romance use the qu- forms both as question words and as relative pronouns, and these are cognate with the English who/which, which have the same dual use.

I need to learn Russian, don't I? Doric Loon (talk) 09:47, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

"relative clauses and participial clauses are both kinds of post-modifiers"

Actually, the participial type is prenominal. See, for instance, these two sentences:

я прочитал книгу, которую вы мне прислали 'I read book, that you me sent'

я прочитал присланную вами книгу 'I read sent by-you book'

The two are now distinguished grammatically with two different terms, определительное предложение for the first, причастный оборот for the second (причастие means 'participle'). But a couple of centuries ago the two types were not strictly distinguished, with определительное предложение being used for both. Russian 'participial clauses' are extremely versatile compared to English.

Bathrobe (talk) 11:09, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

See also this article about "Two Types of Relative Clauses in Finnish" by Kazuto Matsumura: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/gengo1939/1982/81/1982_81_60/_article/-char/en

The two types are European-style relative clauses (using relative pronouns) and participial clauses. From the Western point of view this might be seen as a quaint, slightly off-the-wall Japanese viewpoint, but it comes across to me as a reasonable argument against imposing the European relative-pronoun type as a universal standard. The Japanese "relative clause" is similar to the Finnish participial clause. The Russian and Finnish cases suggest to me the heavy weight of history and culture in linguistics.

Bathrobe (talk) 19:01, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

The question of how Priscian treated our relative pronouns is really bugging me.

I have found an article that begins thusly:

Quis accipit praemium?

Qui interficiet tyrannum, praemium accipiat.

Quem accuso?

Hominem, quem vitupero accuso, et ille est idem isti.

How many pronouns would the medieval professor of linguistics or philosophy of language — the grammarian — detect in these exchanges? From the modern perspective, this is a trick question. For our medieval theorist, only the relative pronoun ‘he’ (ille) and the demonstrative ‘him’ (isti) are true pronouns. ‘Who’ (Quis, Quem) is an interrogative noun here; its signification is extremely broad; and a question asked with quis or quem calls for an answer featuring a referring expression whose signification is narrower, e.g., ‘Ajax’, or more narrow still, e.g., ‘that Ajax’, pointing to Ajax. ‘Whom’ (quem) in the answer to the second question is a relative noun; its signification is fixed by its antecedent, hominem. Qui in the first exchange is an infinite noun, since the point of the answer is that ‘whoever’ kills a tyrant should get a reward. Idem can function as a relative pronoun, as in Ajax venit ad Troiam, idem fortiter pugnavit; but it is an adjectival noun here. For our medieval grammarian, aliquis, ullus, alicubi, talis, and qualis are all nouns as well.

Thus for the medieval grammarian a very large number of referring expressions are considered nouns. The theory of the pronoun develops in tandem with the theory of the noun. This approach has its roots in

Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae. Early medieval grammarians writing commentaries on the text were content to follow the text with its crisscrossing organization and ad hoc solutions to particular problems of syntax. But when, in the course of the thirteenth century, grammar set out to redefine itself as a linguistic science on the Aristotelian model, problems arose. Many of these are simply the result of the intersection of a theory from late antiquity and later medieval grammarians who have a much greater interest in scientific rigor understood on the Aristotelian model; but others arise from genuine pressure points in Priscian’s approach that are revealed by this more rigorous reasoning. Theories about the noun and pronoun are located at such a pressure point.

End of quote.

The trick question, then, appears to be based on the fact that mediaeval grammarians, and presumably Priscian?, didn't call our modern relative pronouns "relative pronouns" at all. "Relative pronouns" were simply ordinary pronouns that referred to antecedents. And our relative pronouns were, it seems, "relative nouns"?

So how and when did the modern terms "relative pronoun" and "relative clause" come into use? It would be nice to be able to flesh out this story, but it's difficult to find any (free) sources that elucidate exactly what happened. Bathrobe (talk) 10:23, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Have found an article that seems to cover precisely this topic: https://www.persee.fr/doc/lfr_0023-8368_2003_num_139_1_6489 Will skim/read it before saying anything more. The English-language summary reads as follows:

The aim of this article is to study stages in the description of what we today call the 'relative pronoun' in the Latin tradition over a very long period (from Antiquity to the 17th century). For ancient grammarians, the first difficulty was to show the specificity of the relative among others qu- forms (interrogative, indefinite), a specificity that is represented only imperfectly in the morphology. But they also had to decide whether qui is a 'pronoun' (as it for Donatus) or a 'noun' (as it is for Priscian). Priscian already analyses quite clearly the syntactic function of qui as relative. But it took a very long time to recognize its double function, anaphoric and subordinating. Unexpectedly for us, the relative had to lose its anaphoric function, being only an anaphoric indicator followed by the repetition of the antecedent (for Linacre and Sanctius); by Port-Royal, the relative 'pronoun' fully recovered the anaphoric function, but the propositional analysis also made it possible to insert a proposition incidente into another proposition. As for quod, its analysis as being only a relative and the difficulty in recategorizing it prevented grammarians from recognizing it as a conjunction.

Bathrobe (talk) 18:18, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, this thread has been quite fruitful for me personally. It's yielded lots of reflections on "relative clauses" and information about their treatment through time. Needless to say, it's difficult to tie everything together -- but that applies to the topic of relative clauses in general.

While the article itself is certainly a patchwork of edits resulting in scattershot coverage, it's also illuminating in certain ways (for example, the way that non-English relative clause patterns are literally translated into English to allow readers to see what they are like, although this very much smacks of original research). I have not abandoned my view that any cross-linguistic treatment of relative clauses tends to impose the mould of English, French, etc. onto other, rather different languages.

Kent's predilection to thumb his nose at "traditional grammar" is perfectly understandable. However, it's clear that the concept of a "relative clause" didn't suddenly arise at the end of the 19th century. It's also clear that "traditional grammar" as we know it did not come down directly from the ancients; it was developed over time through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and didn't reach its modern form until roughly the 16th century (the familiar cast of characters is on display: Roger Bacon, Scaliger, Sanctius, Port Royal....)

I will add that I don't find Kent's proposed grammatical system convincing, although he has only given us hints, so it would be foolish to conclude anything from that. But notwithstanding the myopic view presented by "twerps" who serve up "simplistic, cherry-picked examples", the traditional and transformational analyses of relative clauses do capture a significant generalisation, namely the almost completely regular correspondence between The man to whom I wrote the letters and The man (who) I wrote the letters to. To treat the former as involving a "preposition" and the latter a "postposition" seems awkward -- they essentially become different structures. Still, I haven't seen enough of "Kentian" (or "Dominican") grammar to draw any real conclusions.

(Let me hasten to add that I do not subscribe to Chomsky's criteria of descriptive or explanatory adequacy of grammars. Nor do I believe that Chomsky's appeal to an innate human ability to learn language and "universal grammar" justifies his rampant adoption of formalisms like X-bar theory (since abandoned, like so much else) or "Merge". While Bacon and others of that era had already adopted the notion of "universal grammar", Chomsky's claim that they are his intellectual forebears comes across to me as self-serving nonsense. Chomsky is merely reacting against the structuralist school, which tried to shake free of traditional grammar and clear the decks by considering "just the facts, ma'am", justifying their analyses in terms of the objective distribution of grammatical forms (morphemes) -- a little like Kent's division into "prepositions" and "postpositions". I am doubtful that Chomsky's crazy formalisms are really what earlier scholars had in mind when they referred to "universal grammar".) Bathrobe (talk) 01:47, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Far be it from me to believe that anyone might immediately, if ever, find my protologisms to be convincing along the lines discussed above. I hasten to add that I make a distinction between analytical grammar and descriptive linguistics. Specifically, people will forever use words in syntaxes that suit a given purpose whether grammarists consider the resulting phrasing to be traditional, pretty, coherent, or otherwise. My linguistic protologisms and corresponding definitions merely offer a taxononmy that is 100% paradigmatically consistent within the set of terms provided therein. E.g., it doesn't define a clause as having a subject and predicate while also admitting of a non-finite clause that lacks a subject a la the examples given in that article (which scaredy-cat Doric Loon and I are too busy, weary, or scared to emend).

The cross-linguistic implications are what got me started down this track. Not until I learned how Sino-Asian languages deal with the so-called relative vocab did I recall from my 5 years learning Spanish that que, as a word introducing a subordinate clause adjunctive clause, is construed as a conjunction, not a relative pronoun.

Now, if you deal only with English language moulds, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a linguistic taxonomy to which interested parties agree. I, on the other hand, regualarly dealt with ESL students who challenged me to justify why a subordinate clause was somehow subordinate, which has a polesmy that includes pejorative. (Adjunctive, by contrast, carries no such baggage.) ESL students constantly asked why we could call, e.g., "to" a PREposition when it occurs in a POSTposition, and so on. For me, there's something to be said for using the ordinary sense of a word when employed in a taxonomic paradigm.

As for what Chomsky says about all this, I won't claim he was all wet, only that his head-spinning array of esoteric terminolgy and spurious theory makes me pleased with my ability to disremember most of it. My taxonomic paradigm has not one iota of interpolated theory and is purely descriptive based on syntax. Show me any grammarist or linguist who can use traditional taxons to reasonably explain all of the anomalies in our English usage and I'll treat you to a lifelong supply of coffee or tea. E.g., show me someone who can explain the parts of speech - both in phrasally and via its SUP - re "You had better listen" or "I have to go" using traditional taxons that don't result in linguistic paradoxes and the promised coffee or tea is all yours.

HINT: (1) Is "have to" a modal verb, not a phrase involving a separable finite verb and a "to-particle' collated with "go" rather than with "have"? (2) Assuming "had better" entails better as an adverb, does "had" consitute a modal verb implying futurity? My paradigm accounts for such apparent anomalies in a way that traditional analyses can't.( Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:09, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Kent, I should have known you would launch into a rant, but anyway, your explanations are always entertaining, if not always completely enlightening. (I'd really like to see how it works as a system rather than read how existing terminology confuses ESL students -- although that might be the sole point of your criticism. In fact, I wholeheartedly sympathise -- you certainly wouldn't be the first person to criticise grammatical terminology, traditional or otherwise, as a distraction rather than a help.)

I did like the way you expressed yourself on Chomsky (how his "head-spinning array of esoteric terminology and spurious theory makes me pleased with my ability to disremember most of it").

At any rate, I'll stop waving the red cape here. I'm not really interested in provoking you on your terminological innovations. I'd merely like to point out that you are incorrect in blaming the terminology on some late 19th century grammarian. It goes back considerably further than that, although the meandering path that led us to where we are is certainly confusing.

There is one sentence in the French-language article by Bernard Colombat that states a point that is important for the foreign student of English, at least those coming from languages where personal pronouns (it, he, she, they) are essentially identical to demonstratives (this, that): "Dans la tradition latine, le terme relatif (relatiuum) veut dire avant tout anaphorique et s'oppose à démonstratif, c'est-à-dire déictique. Il désigne la reprise d'un élément déjà présent dans le discours, alors que démonstratif est utilisé pour la désignation d'un élément extérieur au discours, appartenant à la réalité extralinguistique." Failure to appreciate that it is different from that can hinder the learning of English-language patterns. Bathrobe (talk) 19:51, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for indulging me in all this venting. Hope the time you spent reading was worth the price of admission. Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 00:29, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Of course it was! Your rants are thought-provoking and stimulating. Bathrobe (talk) 01:35, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe Thank you so much for taking part in this conversation - the largest part as it turned out. I'm sorry I've been too caught up in other things to contribute as much as I wanted to, but this has been genuinely enriching, and you have given me great sources for delving into it more deeply. I am still keen to put a bit of this history stuff into the relevant articles, but I don't want to rush into that, so I'm gathering my thoughts there. More anon. Doric Loon (talk) 21:47, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Agree. It's all a bit overwhelming. Bathrobe (talk) 01:39, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Not a random Q

I don't have your email to pose this question that's only tangentially related to the Wikipedia article on phrasal verbs, so please indulge me by replying here: In "I'll sort through this stuff tomorrow," do you consider sort through to be (1) a transitive phrasal verb comprising sort as a transitive verb and through as (shall we say) an adverbial particle, or (2) an intransitive verb phrase collocating sort as an intransitive verb and through as a preposition? (I'll say with confidence that we can agree sort through is wrongly construed to be a phrasal verb comprising sort as a verb and through as a preposition.)

IMHO, there's no intrinsically correct answer from a semantics POV, but I've staked out a grammar position favoring the former of the two analyses. Why? Under the former analysis, it's not like you can cogently substitute another adverbial particle like "I'll sort around this stuff tomorrow". By contrast, the latter analysis allows cogently substituting a preposition re a verb phrase (i.e., NOT a phrasal verb) that comprises a collocation like dance on... a la, "dance on someone's grave", because it makes perfectly cogent albeit non-idomatic sense to dance off the grave, around the grave, near the grave, or to the grave, etc.

Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 22:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi there @Kent Dominic, good question. First off, you can e-mail any Wikipedian by going to their user page, looking under "tools" in the left-hand margin, and clicking on "e-mail this user". 'Course it only works if the e-mail address they used when they first created their Wikipedia account is still valid, but mine is. If you want them to reply directly to your own e-mail address, i.e. to take the conversation right off Wikipedia, you would have to tell them what address to reply to, because the default reply to a mail sent from Wiki goes back through Wiki.

I'll sort through this stuff is a puzzler. My first thought was that it is phrasal verb in the strict sense, i.e. through is a particle/adverb/whatever and not a preposition. To me the prosodic division that I hear in my head is I'll | sort through | this stuff. If I experiment with I'll | sort | through this stuff, I have to say it about five times before it sounds right. But if I try putting through after the noun, I get the opposite effect: I'll sort this stuff through at first sounded odd, but gradually my ear readjusted and I thought, well that might be possible after all. I wonder if "sort through" is in the process of transition, originally a prepositional phrase that is gradually becoming reanalyzed as a phrasal verb in the stricter sense. Maybe current usage varies? What you need, to be sure, is a corpus search. Doric Loon (talk) 11:05, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the info re email & the reply re the Q.

In my way of thinking, I have to stand on my head to imagine how the common meaning of "sort through this stuff" might entail "through" as a preposition. Granted, a grammatical analysis allows an elliptical meaning of "I'll (engage in the gerundive) sort(ing of something while I laboriously proceed) through [preposition] this (exophorically obtrusive) stuff."

Your "sort this stuff through" analysis labeled the postpositonal "through" a preposition. In my lexicon, "through" as a postpositional adposition in that case would be labeled not a stranded preposition but a postpositional particle, same as the "to" in "someone I talked to"...

NOTE: Explaining why I call it postpositional particle rather than a mere postposition is a whole 'nother long story relating not to linguistic substance but to an inauspicious remedy that I had to apply to a separate set of taxonomic factors. With that separate remedy now in place and my skunking of a , I can safely change pospositional particle to postposition, but re-encoding all the relevant links would be the type of all-day task that I don't relish.

On the other hand, if we deem "sort through this stuff" as a transitive phrasal verb comprising "sort" as a transitive verb and "through" as an adverbial particle, then "sort this stuff through" remains an adverbial particle.

NOTE: My lexicon indeed distinguishes a prepositve adverbial particle (i.e., the to of a to-infinitve) from a postpositive adverbial particle whether as "wrap up (where "wrap up" is a phrasal verb) or as "wrap the work up" (where "wrap the work" is a verb phrase) or "sort this stuff through", etc.

I don't mind being perhaps the lone person in the galaxy to distinguish a phrasal verb from a verb phrase as just described. Liken me to the first physicist who wildly hypothesized that an atom has separable parts, or the one who later theorized that there's dark matter both inside and outside the orbits of an atom's electrons. (Me: Excuse me, Professors of Linguistics, isn't there some stuff we should grammatically recognize as a transitive object between the "sort" and the "through" in the "sort through" phrasal verb purported in a "sort this stuff through" example?"

Silly me. If there's a grammatical hair to split, I demand that it be done via a cogent explanation within a rational linguistic taxonomy. 602,000 words later and almost there, I'm literally (as we speak) 99.7603% ready to offer my Grand Unified Theory of Everything Relating to Linguistics. ← Not the actual title. :/

Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:00, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

P.S. My work is primarilly designed to (1) parse the grammar and vocab used in the work itself, but secondarily (2) to enable parsing the grammar of exophoric lexical items. Specifically, the work enables linguistic dweebs as well as regular students to identify syntax apart from the work, such as:

1. the transitive phrasal verb "swing ^{[transitive verb]} through ^{[adverbial particle]} the ball"

versus

2. the intransitive phrasal verb "learning to swing ^{[intransitive verb]} through ^{[adverbial particle]} on ^{[preposition]} the ball"

versus

3. the intransitive phrasal verb "I'll swing ^{[intransitive verb]} through ^{[adverbial particle]} on ^{[preposition]} Friday"

versus ones that give ESL students fits:

4. the intransitive phrasal verb "I'll swing ^{[intransitive verb]} through ^{[adverbial particle]} Friday ^[adverb], or "I'll swing through this afternoon^{[adverbial phrase]}" (composed with an elliptical SUP: during ^{[preposition]} this ^[determiner] afternoon ^[noun])

...

1. the transitive phrasal verb "run ^{[transitive verb]} across ^{[adverbial particle]} the street" (i.e., to incidentally encounter an unfamiliar street)

versus

2. the intransitive verb phrase "run ^{[intransitive verb]} across ^{[preposition]} the street" (i.e., to get to an adjacent side of the by transiting quickly on foot)

Unlike a standard dictionary, whose hyperlinks (if any) tend to correspond to an entry that may involve a verb with polysemy that's both transitive and intransitive, requiring a reader to determine which sense is indicated in an entry for (e.g.) swing, my lexicon has hyperlinks with hypertext indicating the lexical category and definitions or synonyms for each of the 602,00 words as used in their varying contexts, and the hyperlinks themselves are linked to the exact sense of the word regardless of how many senses are defined under the pertinent lexical category no matter how many lexical categories comprise a particular entry.

Even a ridiculously worded sentence like, "It's not that peculiar that that that that professor parsed differs from that that that Doric Loon parsed" has discrete hypertext with separately encoded hyperlinks to indicate:

"It's not that ^{[adverb: "extremely"]} peculiar that ^{[adjectival conjunction re a content clause]} that ^[determiner] that ^{[noun: reference to a lexical item id'd as a "that"]} that ^{[adjectival conjunction re a content clause]} that ^[determiner] professor parsed differs from that ^[determiner] that ^{[noun: reference to a lexical item id'd as a "that"]} that ^{[adjectival conjunction re a content clause]} Doric Loon parsed." Translation: It's not so weird that the instance of "that" which yonder professor parsed differs from the instance of "that" which Doric Loon parsed.

So I lie when I tell people I spend most of my time writing. I should say my time is now spent losing my mind while mostly copying & pasting hypertext and encoding hyperlinks or else doing my best to describe that process on Wikipedia talk pages. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:25, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic :-D

I think you are confused about what I meant when I posited I'll sort this stuff through. That would be evidence that we are dealing with an adverb particle. It would precisely not be a preposition (and would be quite unlike the stranded preposition in someone I talked to, which is a zero relative clause). Look again at Phrasal verbs#Distinguishing phrasal verb types.

HOWEVER, thinking about it again, I don't actually think I would say that. I think I was getting confused with I'll work things through, and I'm going to return to my first instinct that says sort stuff through is unnatural for me. In other words, I'm coming round to thinking that sort through this stuff really does involve a preposition. The verb is sort (in the sense of bring order), and I am doing it through the stuff. I think your explanation of the semantics of this is far too complicated. When I think of sorting through stuff, I see in my mind's eye a pile of papers and I am going through them, in the most literal sense of the word "through", sorting them as I go. (But even if the semantics were opaque, that wouldn't imply that this is not a preposition - uses of prepositions that are semantically obvious are the exception rather than the rule.) Doric Loon (talk) 23:17, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Guess I misinterpreted what you meant by, 'I wonder if "sort through" is in the process of transition, originally a prepositional phrase that is gradually becoming reanalyzed as a phrasal verb in the stricter sense.' Anyway...

A simpler analysis of the above: I'd say the example's "through" has the adverbial meaning of from one end to the other; entirely; thoroughly, etc. In my broader view, I absotively, posolutely, 100% disagree with the comment that the phrasal verb article attributes to Huddleston & Pullum: "Phrasal verbs ordinarily cannot be understood based upon the meanings of the individual parts alone but must be considered as a whole." Name me any phrasal verb and I can stratight away tell you its SUP.

I'm no savant in that regard. I just have too many experiences with ESL students who gave up trying to memorize our plethora of phrasal verbs. They couldn't readily determine the difference between, e.g., speak and speak up (esp. since Sino-Asian languages don't have adverbial particles but instead use an entirely different lexical item to do the same trick), set and set out; read through the page and read through the page; come over to you house and just plain come to your house. It wasn't long before I understood why students would attempt something like "come over your house" knowing that a preposition was involved but being gobsmacked to learn that the over in this case is an adverbial collocation with come and does imply a meaning apart from the mere "come to your house."

A point on which we might disagree: I can't accept that there's a 'most literal sense of the word "through", or a most literal sense of any word, for that matter. That's not to impugn your choice of words, only to say I think words have no intrinsic meaning but instead acquire it via agreement or by logical inference. So, I maintain there's no most literal sense of through as it can mean:

• "I'll see you through" (i.e., as a preposition whose object is elliptical)
• "They saw through^{[adverbial particle]} the scam"
• "They couldn't see through^{[adverbial particle]} the fog"
• "Thanks for coming through^{[adverbial particle]} for us"
• "Foleshill Rd doesn't go through ^{[adverbial particle]} at Coventry. Go around ^{[adverbial particle]} on Ringway Nicholas."

Next question, does Ringway Nicholas turn (i.e., "bend") into^{[preposition]} Ringaway Hill Cross, or does it turn into (i.e., "become" wherein into is an adverbial particle) Ringway Hill Cross? My ESL students asked such questions. I've no shame in admitting that, in the beginning, I knew the simple answers but couldn't rightly grasp how to answer given (1) my dusty recollection of the naive grammar stuff I'd learned in my school days, and (2) my lack of understanding how students were attempting to overlay a COMPLETELY different grammatical scheme relating to their native language. My colleagues typically replied to student questions with, "Just remember 'turn into' is a phrasal verb." Grrr. Pity the student who then misinterprets, "The man turned into his driveway" as "The man turned into his driveway. What, did Harry Potter cast a spell on him? 🤷‍♂️

I kid you not: In 2008, students were nearly unanimous in reporting the news that "Namdaemun was burned yesterday." That phrasing struck me as gramatically deficient given how I'd expect a native English speaker would say, "Namdaemun was burned down yesterday." I learned in short order that:

• In the Korean language, an item in this case can't be said to spontaneously burn. There must be an actor that does the burning, which may result in devastation. So, in the Korean version of passive voice, it can be said that "Namdaemun was burned (implicitly by an arsonist)", which was what in fact happened.
• To say "Namdaemun was burned down by an arsonist" (1) wasn't factually true since it was left mostly standing albeit with much of the roof burned down.
• The Korean version of burn down has no direct translation into English since there are no Korean adverbial particles. A verb other than burn is required, e.g. "Namdaemun was destroyed to the ground by an arsonist with fire." (The Korean language does have prepositions.)

Which brings us full circle...

Did you, via an intransitive verb phrase, use your legs and feet to "run down the correct train platform? Or did you, via a transitive phrasal verb, locate, determine, or find and hence "run down the correct train platform?"

We native English speakers, with the possible exception of comedians, rarely give such questions a second thought. I routinely ask myself how ESLers are likely to misunderstand what we typically take for granted. In this case, I thought I'd ask you to weigh in^{[adverbial particle]} on an item that grammarists and linguists seem to diagree between and among themselves. Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:44, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

How about "set fire to"? Or "set on fire"? You wouldn't use "burn" in English. Bathrobe (talk) 21:06, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic I understand that you are teaching Korean students and your main concern is for their needs. But Korean is not at all like an Indo-European language, I think we can just take that as read, so if you want to do a Korean-perspective grammar of English, fine, do your thing, but if you want say anything that is meaningful outside that Korean context, you have to treat English as the western language it is, which means that we do have adverbs used in particle verbs, and they are quite distinct from prepositions. From what I've heard about the Korean love of precision, I suspect your students would prefer you to teach the distinction than to erase it for them, even if it does gobsmack them the first time they hear it.

You seem confused about this distinction yourself, though, and several of your examples have prepositions that you call adverbial particles. For example, "They saw through the scam/the fog" - here, through is a preposition. Find an equivalent in Latin or German or Russian or Old English and you will see that fog inflects according to the case required by the preposition. English may have lost its cases, but it is still structurally Indo-European, so that test might really help you. The difference between a preposition and an adverb is not semantic, it's structural.

In your examples "The driver turned into the driveway" and "Harry Potter turned into a cat", BOTH have a preposition into. There is no structural difference here, just a difference between a more literal and a more figurative meaning of turn. The figurative meaning doesn't stop into from being a preposition.

By the way, words DO have literal and figurative meanings. Of course a rose by any other name would smell as sweet - there's nothing intrinsic about the word rose that gives it its meaning. The meaning comes from the consensus of the speakers. But that consensus gives it a basic meaning (a flower) and derived meanings (my rose = the love of my life?), and it is perfectly sensible to say that one is more literal than the other. Doric Loon (talk) 09:08, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Ooh, now that was the manner of criticsm I was seeking. I didn't presume you'd give me what I consider to be a traditional analysis of all this, but I was hoping you would since one of the unintended consequences of my work required offering alternative explanations to compete with traditional grammars that have, IMHO, flaws stemming from inadequacies in linguistic terminology – phrasal verb, in this case.

In truth, I'm never confused about the distinction you mention. On the contrary, I'm sometimes conflicted whether to go with what I'd previously learned exactly as you characterized it or to lay out the anomalies I associate with traditional grammar. Hear me out as I parse the "They saw through the scam" example.

I'm certain we agree that the "scam" is an object. In this thread, the bases of my questions for you include these tests:

(A) Is "scam" an argument of the transitive verb "saw"?

(B) Is "scam" an argument of the preposition "through"?

(C) Is "through" an adverbial argument of the transitive verb "saw"?

(D) Is "through" a prepositional argument of the intransitive verb "saw"?

(E) Is "saw through" a phrasal verb entailing a collocation per (C)?

(F) Is "saw through" a phrasal verb entailing a collocation per (D)?

(G) Is "saw through" a verb phrase entailing a collocation per (D)?

Twenty years ago, I'd have said yes to (B) and (D), and I would have second-guessed myself upon reading ng (E), (F), and (G) because I hadn't yet pondered the distinctions between s phrasal verb versus a verb phrase, and I would have wondered whether (B) AND (C) rightly deserved a yes answer.

I won't hold you to what you said two years ago, i.e., "I agree that it is far better to restrict the term 'phrasal verb' to the particle construction. As a teacher, that's what I do too. Unfortunately, the grammar books are inconsistent, so we have to do justice to a complicated situation", but if you're consistent, at the very least you'd have to answer no to (F). Your most recent post suggests you'd say yes to (B). After answering yes to (B), we come to the proving grounds that gave me fits when I applied a traditional analysis.

Ask whether "scam" should be construed to be an argument solely of "through", or whether it should be deemed an argument of "through" AND "saw" given that "through the scam" is an adverbial argument of "saw." That was the seminal issue for me. Puzzling it further, I decided the semantic sense "see through" in the given context was to thoroughly detect, to fully ascertain, to fully observ etc. – all of which include a transitive verb collocated with an adverb synonymous with one sense of through.

Fast forward 20 years and now I answer yes (A), (C), and (E). Now apply this further test...

If you insist on answering yes to (B), (D), and (G) having already said no to (F), then you're stuck parsing "saw" as an intransitive verb. Thus, "They saw."

• Asking how they saw^{[intransitive verb]} yields an adverbial answer like, "clearly," or "with glasses" or "after I explained it to them."
• Asking what they saw^{[transitive verb]} yields an answer like, "rabbits", or "the light", or "the scam."
• Asking how (i.e., to what degree) they saw the scam yields an answer like, "They saw through the scam."

I'l spare you from having to say this: There's the traditional analysis that "They saw (i.e., intransitively were able to see – how?) through^{[preposition]} (i.e., from one end to the other end of) the scam." Yet, here's the kicker: if you look up "see through" (not see-through) you'll find that every dictionary defines it in a transitive sense. That's not to say that (B), (D), and (G) are wrong, only that I think there's a stronger case for (A), (C), and (E) using this final test...

• In "They saw through the scam" construed as an intransitive verb and a prepositional phrase, the sentence is grammatically complete without "through the scam" but contextually incomplete because we won't know what they saw.
• In "They saw through the scam" construed as a transitive verb and a transitive object, it then requires "the scam" as a grammatical complement to apprise us what was seen.

Even so, I'm not saying that "saw through" never entails through as a preposition. If you're using your sense of sight via a window, you can see through the window. Incidentally, my "They couldn't see through^{[adverbial particle]} the fog" example wasn't a bit of confusion, just a cut & past snafu that leaked in from a section that I had deleted re prepositions. Sorry 'bout that. If I were too proud to admit mistakes, I might press that one instance where the movie's SFX producer failed to deliver the scripted mist. When the directer asked what happened, the SFX producer (a non-native English speaker) said, "The crew couldn't see through^{[adverbial particle]} the fog because of faulty equipment". He should have said, "They couldn't see the fog through^{[adverbial particle]}..."😜 Kent Dominic·(talk) 01:04, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

..... P.S. I accept and often use a distinction between a literal and figurative sense. It's the use of "most literal sense" that threw me.--Kent Dominic·(talk) 01:17, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Kent Dominic, in this case you are welcome to hold me to what I said two years ago - I find the term "phrasal verb" is useless if its meaning is imprecise, but it is as good as any other term if we use it to identify a very specific construction, so let's use it in its original stricter sense. I also don't care very much if the second part of a phrasal verb is called an adverb or a particle, but let's agree to stick with: Phrasal Verb = base verb + particle.

I'm afraid I don't understand how to see through the window (in which you identify "through" as a preposition) is different from to see through the fog (in which you identify it as a particle); nor do I see these as structurally different from figurative uses like to see through the scam / obfuscation / web of lies. They all involve some kind of looking, and there is an obstacle that could stop you looking, and you manage nevertheless to look in one side and out the other.

For me, the difference between a verb with a particle and a verb with a prepositional adjunct is very clear, because the same distinction exists in German, which I know well, and there there is no possibility of confusion, because the preposition influences the case of the following noun, and the particle is prefixed to the verb in the infinitive. So I'm acutely aware of the distinction in English too. But as I said, in individual cases it is sometimes difficult in English to tell which we are dealing with, simply because historically particle verbs evolve out of prepositional verbs, and this process is still productive, so in individual cases we may be in some woolly mid-position were we won't all agree.

Pax tecum, Doric Loon (talk) 11:45, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Let's hope my Stuff, stuff, and more stuff is a clearer version of what I'm trying to say. And, I walked back the "See through the fog" example as being inadvertent. I stand by the "See through the scam" example since the see through collocation connotes transitivity a la fully detect the scam or entirely realize the scam rather than see in the intransitive meaning of being able to use one's sense of sight. Kent Dominic·(talk) 12:05, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Stuff, stuff, and more stuff

I'm neither trying to proselytize nor am I disparaging any contradictory view you might have on the following. This is merely to show how my distinction between a phrasal verb versus a verb phrase limits my ability to edit either article here without a huge conflict of interest. If you have know of any published sources that explicitly contradict (rather than merely ignore) the reasoning evident in the following, please divulge.

• I ran. (intransitive)
• I ran the company. (transitive)
• I ran about. (intransitive phrasal verb with about as an adverbial particle)
• I ran about the company. (intransitive verb phrase with about collocated as a preposition)
• I ran two miles. (transitive; ran = transited two miles at a foot pace exceeding a walk)
• I ran for two miles. (intransitive)
• I ran about two miles. (intransitive)
• I ran about for two miles. (intransitive phrasal verb)

• I summarized. (intransitive)
• I summarized the plan. (transitive)
• I ran through the plan. (transitive phrasal verb connoting that I thoroughly summarized the plan)
• I ran through the plan (intransitive verb phrase whimsically connoting I sprinted into and beyond the plan that was presumably hosted on a mobile whiteboard)
• I ran the plan through. (transitive verb phrase with postpositive adverbial particle)
• I ran the plan through the committee. (transitive verb; through as a preposition)

• I encountered. (intransitive; archaic but not yet obsolete)
• I encountered my teacher. (transitive)
• I ran into my teacher. (transitive phrasal verb; figurative sense)
• I ran into my teacher. (intransitive verb phrase; literal sense)

• I injured. (intransitive; nonexistent sense)
• I injured my back. (transitive)
• I threw my back. (transitive; oblique meaning but I sometimes hear it as an idiolect)
• I threw my back out. (transitive verb phrase)
• I threw out my back. (transitive phrasal verb)
• I threw out my back. (intransitive verb phrase; grammatically correct if envisioned as part of a sequence from a SciFi movie about the part of the body from which aliens throw)

• I considered. (intransitive)
• I considered the idea. (transitive verb)
• I thoroughly considered the idea. (transitive)
• I considered the idea through and through. (transitive)
• I thought the idea through. (transitive verb phrase)
• I thought through the idea. (transitive phrasal verb)
• I thought through the idea. (intransitive verb phrase with such a figurative if not fanciful sense as to render it virtually meaningless for me outside this exercise)
• Contrast "I struggled through the idea" or "I fought through the idea", both of which imply a separate and cogent meaning of through compared to the example in the preceding paragraph despite how I'd phrase it as "I struggled/fought with the idea

• Stand. (intransitive)
• Lift. (intransitive)
• Stand up. (intransitive)
• Lift up. (intransitive)
• Stand upstairs. (intransitive)
• Lift upstairs. (intransitive)
• Stand up the stairs. (intransitive verb phrase qualifying where to stand)
• Stand up the stairs. (transitive phrasal verb = completely raise/lift stairs that are broken, fallen, prone, etc.)
• Lift up the stairs. (intransitive verb phrase qualifying where to excercise)
• Lift up the stairs. (transitive phrasal verb = position the stairs in an upward motion)
• Lift your friend. (transitive)
• Stand your friend. (transitive verb; polysemic meaning: raise your friend or endure your friend)

• Lift up your friend. (transitive phrasal verb)
• Lift your friend up. (transitive verb phrase)
• Stand your friend up. (transitive verb phrase; polysemic meaning to completely disappoint your friend by unexpectedly aborting an appointment or to fully raise your friend who stumbled and fell)
• Stand up your friend. (transitive phrasal verb; ibid)
• Stand up your friend. (intransitive phrasal verb: has a gruesome, nearly unfathomable meaning)

You've probably encountered the ESL term split phrasal verb. I'm glad the term doesn't occur in the Wikipedia article re phrasal verbs. My parsing of syntax takes into practical account where a discrete phrase actually occurs in a given sentence rather than how deviations from a familiar phrase might conform to a linguistic concept of splitting would otherwise affect a given phrase. That's why I cavil at the notion of a split infinitive, or a stranded preposition as well as a split phrasal verb. I.e., in my book, the so-called splitting creates a different syntactic animal.

Incidentally, I liked your most recent addition to the split infinitive article, but I gave it a tweak. Work in some additional changes or toss out my edit if you can't sort out what I put in. < Look, ma, no prepositions! Only phrasal verbs with adverbial particles!

(Ma: Now, now, Kent. The mention of "only" in that last sentence of yours might confuse folks who don't know how you consider a phrasal verb to be a hyponym in the more generic verb phrase hypernym.) Kent Dominic·(talk) 11:51, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Kent Dominic, I think we are more or less on the same page with all of this. But I do think you have a tendency to assume a particle every time the preposition is not literal. To my mind, I ran into my teacher is an intransitive verb with a prepositional phrase no matter whether you mean it figuratively (=encountered) or literally (bang!).

I haven't come across "split phrasal verb" and will do my utmost not to. If splitting means that a word comes between two other words that form a unit, then the English progressive form "I am splitting this infinitive" becomes a split progressive if "I am not splitting this infinitive". Two words that form a syntactic unit don't have to be adjacent, and I personally don't need terminology for such non-adjacentness. I suspect we'll agree on that too. Doric Loon (talk) 12:06, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Harkening back to my playwrighting days…

DL: I think we are more or less on the same page with all of this.

KD: So do I.

DL: But I do think you have a tendency to assume a particle every time the preposition is not literal.

KD: On the contrary, I don’t assume one way or the other. Instead, there’s a consistency to my method of (1) describing the reasoning behind my interpretation of a given text, and (2) my intention in phrasing text that employs a given grammar with which others are free to disagree.

DL: To my mind, I ran into my teacher is an intransitive verb with a prepositional phrase no matter whether you mean it figuratively (=encountered) or literally (bang!).

KD: For me, the idea conveyed by I ran into my teacher is typically clear within a given context. I’d interpret it one way if you ran into your teacher during a break at the consortium; I’d interpret it differently if you ran into your teacher while chasing her down with your car. In either case, WE know what you mean. My interest in pursuing this discussion with you relates to helping those who may not know that, phrasally speaking, run + into ABC sometimes has a meaning apart from run into + ABC. Moreover, for those who don’t know what looks and smells like a preposition ain’t necessarily a preposition cuz they don know what an adverbial particle looks and smells like, they’re screwed when attempting to interpret look up the word or when trying to construe what seems to be multiple prepositions in getting the message through to ABC.

DL: I haven't come across "split phrasal verb" and will do my utmost not to.

KD: I’ll keep you in my prayers.

DL: If splitting means that a word comes between two other words that form a unit, then the English progressive form "I am splitting this infinitive" becomes a split progressive if "I am not splitting this infinitive". Two words that form a syntactic unit don't have to be adjacent, and I personally don't need terminology for such non-adjacentness. I suspect we'll agree on that too.

KD: We agree, but I probably reason against it differently. Specifically, I shun grammatical terms that grammar nerds proscribe rendering in alternative syntax unless they can come up with a pejorative appellation (think "stranded preposition") for the departure. Like, full infinitive is a concept that wastes ink, IMHO, and invites grammar prudes to accuse us Muggles of splitting them as we often do. If you ask me, there are infinitives, there are to-particles, and there are to-infinitive phrases that may collocate said items. Sticking boldly between to and go doesn’t split the infinitive. The infinitive remains. Sticking boldly between to and go doesn’t split a to-infinitive phrase; it qualifies a to-infinitive phrase by including an interpositive adverb within the phrase. You know I could go on to explain how I distinguish an interpositive adverb from a prepositve adverb from a postpositive adverb, but I hope the distinctions are obvious, and I hear someone begging me to shut up.

DL: Wait, would you first explain whether you think "I could go on" involves a bare infinitive (according to the infinitive article's assertion that an infinitive without to is called "the bare infinitive") despite how this instance of "go" is clearly characterized my the modal verb, "can"? I mean, "could" is a finite verb relating to "I", so "go" is an infinitive verb apart from it being the first person form in "I go," right?

KD: Okay, folks, Doric Loon didn't really ask those last two questions for fear of exposure as a scaredy-cat who doesn't get involved in pedantic linguistic battles re grammatical minutiae. Kent Dominic·(talk) 13:42, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic - Who, me? Pedantic? Sorry: Who, I? Doric Loon (talk) 14:29, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

For your inner pedant

Consider the following statements to be catenae:

• I took in ^[particle] the atmosphere.
• We arrived early and they arrived shortly after.
• I never try to repeat myself.
• You really should have been there.

Catena adherents would say the following statements have the same semantic meaning:

• I took the atmosphere in.
• We arrived early and they arrived shortly after us (or shortly thereafter).
• I try to never repeat myself.
• You should have really been there.

In my view, rearranging a syntax might or might not semantically affect the statements’ interpretation, but substituting one part of speech for another definitely affects any grammatical analysis. That’s why I insist on using discrete terms (e.g., pre-, intra-, or post-) for a sentence element upon noting a change in its position within a sentence. Substituting one part of speech for another similarly requires a separate grammatical analysis. (Note: I don’t prescribe one syntactic position versus another, I don’t favor one particular vocabulary selection versus another, and I don’t insist my sometimes non-traditional terminology is better than what we inherited; only that my own linguistic terms, as paradigmatically defined, are internally consistent.)

I use the term catena in my work, but quite differently than way it's described in the Wikipedia article. My own definition for catena is quite simple: a collocated chain, series, or string of words from a given lexical category:

• “Veni, vidi, vici” is a (clausal) catena even if you mix it up as “Veni, vici, vidi”.
• “I ripped it almost perfectly in half” contains an adverb catena that is semantically inscrutable as “ripped perfectly almost in half” just as “You’re really very smart” is an adverb catena that's intelligible versus “You’re very really smart.”
• “My epiphanies are few and far between” is an adjective catena that’s nonsensical as “far and few between”.
• “You’ve got me coming and going” is a (participial) catena can be rendered as “going and coming” but the inversion changes where I’d wind up being. And so on.

All of that is meant to say how I find numerous Wikipedia articles ridiculously assert – via original research – that one given example equates to another despite word inversions, word substitutions, or disparate syntax. Editors, beware: if you are adamant that “Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride” contains a catena equating to “Who nobly dared to stem tyrannic pride”, I see an edit war a-comin’.

________

That song to the choir having been sung, I woke up today recalling that you’d said “historically[,] particle verbs evolve out of prepositional verbs.” I suspect that’s not categorically true. I think a bunch of them, esp. ones involving intransitive verbs (given your view on "run into the teacher"), started out as adverbs whose collocations stuck: look up; call back; carry on(ward); come together; etc.

All right, time for you to admit your inner pedant and argue that "come together" includes together as a modern-day adverb as morphologically compounded from the Middle English "come to gather, which involved to as a preposition and gather as a noun. To that I'd say touché. Then I'd wait to see if someone else chimes in with, "No, it originally meant come to^[particle] gather^[verb]".😁 Kent Dominic·(talk) 22:49, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic Enjoyed the song, clap! clap! Down to the line we agree, and I've nothing much more to say, except that what you are calling catenae I would normally call collocations. I don't use the term catena myself, which saves me arguments with those who want to defend their definition of the term as the only one.

After the line, you got me: I was sloppy. Historically, English particle verbs evolved out of prefixed verbs: OE inngan > English go in. German separable prefixes are an independent but parallel development from the same prefixed verbs. However, if you go further back, most of the Germanic verb prefixes seem originally to have been prepositions. Or maybe not, since it is quite difficult to know how a word like in or to was used in Proto-Germanic. At any rate, there is an organic relationship between the two constructions if you go back far enough.

However, the reason English particle verbs are so dynamic and varied is that the system is still productive, and I suspect that what we sometimes see in the modern language is prepositional verbs morphing into particle verbs. The point I was mooting is that possibly the cases where we find it hard to tell the difference are ones where the process is on-going. They may pass one of the diagnostic tests for a particle verb but not another, or different speakers may have different views on what is natural. Mother Language, like Mother Nature, is capricious and free, and ruffs us up when we try to pin her down. Doric Loon (talk) 09:55, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

All good, all good. I'm adding you as the fourth member of an elite group that I consider the smartest people I know. Here's why I'm not in that group...

Even when I offer perfectly logical arguments, I'm never 100% confident that my premises are valid. Like, I can logically argue that "A: Injure is either transitive or intransitive. B: Injure is nonexistent as an intransitive verb. C: Therefore, injure must be transitive" and hope I hadn't missed an anomalous instance of B. Yet, here's my big boast: I know of no other writer, alive or dead, who is more patient, indefatigable, or obssessively rutheless in making the self-corrections than I am.

Applying that ruthlessness to linguistics is maddening when I parse text using traditional grammar analyses. For instance, if I agree for the sake of argument that "run into a teacher" involves a preposition, it'd be like fingernails on a chalkboard to then hear "the teacher who I ran into." Nevermind whether into is identified as a stranded preposition or a postposition. What would rake my ear is the who rather than whom. Nowadays, the only people who seem to use whom in that instance are the centenarian Catholic nuns who drilled us students in the relevant grammar way back when. (No, those nuns didn't rail against stranded prepositions and insist on wording it as "the teacher into whom I ran," only that the objective case whomcorresponds to into, which at that time was never construed to be an adverb, adverbial particle, or element of a particle verb, etc.)

Fast forward to the present day. I no longer think "the teacher who I ran into" includes a relative pronoun. I don't call who a relativizer despite the conceptual fit; I call it an adjectival conjunction. Accordingly, I have no qualms with one who asserts "the teacher who^{[conjunction]} I ran into^{[preposition]}", but I have a beef with one who asserts "the teacher who^{[relative pronoun]} I ran into^{[preposition]}". I'd a applaud the grammar of one who says "the teacher whom I ran into", but it sounds so anachronistic that it'd probably turn the heads of others who'd think it's stuffy, wrong, or just plain weird.

Granted, all of the foregoing is pedantry on steroids. I don't have hard evidence, but I suspect most people don't spend the majority of their time pondering these matters that I hope to erase from my own brain after immersing myself in it for 12 hours a day, every day, for the past eight years running. Thankfully, my work doesn't involve even the slightest bit of pronunciation, and it doesn't involve presenting etymology such as the matters we sometimes address on these talk pages.

Etymological detective work nonetheless consumes a big part of my time. One such instance involved a point on which you commented. I can't readily track down where, but somewhere we had a talk page discussion whether an infinitive can function as an object. You said no but, in your reply, you transposed my mention of object to a discussion of noun. I left it that, but here's what I had in mind...

My work required parsing the SUP of (1) let go, (2) make do, and to help (do) something. I consider (1) and (2) to be fossil phrases composed of go and do as nouns (despite their appearance that might be casually mistaken as infinitives) with archaic meanings that, with certain exceptions, you'd be hard pressed to find elswhere in ordinary Modern English vernacular. Yet, a phrase like "I stretch to help aid muscle flexibility" includes aid as an infinitive that functions as an object complementing help. I admit that ellipsis is at work since the grammar is more evident if phrased as "I stretch to help to aid muscle flexibility", but I'm limited to parsing text as I find it. So, my work provides an explanation via a zero to-particle, defined as syntax that elides the to-particle from a to-infinitive phrase. Some excerpts:

• A dinner table covered with newspaper to help [to] drain each cooked batch of crawfish.
• A mutual suicide pact to help [to] destroy what’s left of our lives.
• I couldn’t help but [to] notice it.

Meanwhile, if you hear any retching sounds, it's my reaction to how I've found some separate part of my work that needs fixing, re-thinking, rewriting, or deep-sixing. Otherwise I'm retching at the articles here on copula, stative verb, or subject complement, etc.

Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:31, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic I say "whom". Maybe I need a rosary and habit.

An infinitive as an object. Well first off, the object of a verb has to be a noun phrase. Can an infinitive be a (verbal) noun? Sure, in Old English it was, and in some other languages (German: Ich liebe das Singen), but in modern English we use the participle for that: I love singing, with "singing" as a verb-form co-opted as a noun. But that's not your point. You are asking about how to analyze the regular use of the infinitive.

I'm old-fashioned enough to think it is helpful to distinguish the full infinitive from the bare infinitive, both of which can be used as non-finite complements to a finite verb: "I want / decide / hope to sing"; versus "I can sing". So I would say "help" can take either the bear or the full infinitive. But if you want to say that the infinitive marker ("to") is always implied after "help" (i.e. if the infinitive after "help" doesn't have a "to" marker, it secretly has an invisible one), I could see merit in that, especially as the bare infinitive is otherwise only used with modal verbs, and I wouldn't really want to classify "help" as a modal. So OK, an elided to-particle is a fair way to look at it.

But as to the question whether the infinitive (with or without "to") is in some sense a noun in these constructions, my instinct is to say no, because when I say "She helped the old lady cross the road", my brain is processing "cross" as a verb. But that may just be my linguistic training. The real question is, if we were to see "cross" as a noun here, what benefit would that bring to our understanding? Doric Loon (talk) 16:26, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

DL: An infinitive as an object.

KD: Yep.

DL: Well first off, the object of a verb has to be a noun phrase.

KD: I'd characterize it otherwise as a transitive object has to be a noun, a noun phrase, or a nominal/substantive/noun clause-y thingee. (E.g., see content clause despite how I use the term nominal clause.)

DL: Can an infinitive be a (verbal) noun? Sure, in Old English it was, and in some other languages (German: Ich liebe das Singen)…

KD: You're further cementing your membership among the smartest people I know.

DL: … but in modern English we use the participle for that: I love singing, with "singing" as a verb-form co-opted as a noun.

KD: (I'll let it slide without mentioning that you said participle when I’m sure you meant gerund.)

DL: But that's not your point. You are asking about how to analyze the regular use of the infinitive.

KD: Sorry, but you’re somewhat mistaken about my point. I’m asking how to analyze a colloquial use of the infinitive in a case that traditional grammarists can’t dip into a linguistic grab-bag of terms in order to properly identify in the instance of "I stretch to help aid muscle flexibility", etc.

DL: I'm old-fashioned enough to think it is helpful to distinguish the full infinitive from the bare infinitive, both of which can be used as non-finite complements to a finite verb: "I want / decide / hope to sing"; versus "I can sing".

KD: I’m old enough to have used those old-fashioned distinctions, and they’ve benefitted me both conceptually and practically, but I’ve since discovered that they have some limitations in analyzing aberrant cases, so I don’t use those terms spontaneously anymore. I only use them as a placeholder in a discussion such as this.

DL: So I would say "help" can take either the bear or the full infinitive.

KD: Do bears have infinitives? (*Rimshot!*) Gotcha, but…

DL: But if you want to say that the infinitive marker ("to") is always implied after "help" (i.e. if the infinitive after "help" doesn't have a "to" marker, it secretly has an invisible one), I could see merit in that, especially as the bare infinitive is otherwise only used with modal verbs, and I wouldn't really want to classify "help" as a modal.

KD: We’re on the same conceptual wavelength. (Incidentally, I've read published accounts where "help to" as well as "need to" and "have to " are purported to be modals. Keep me far, far away from those nitwits well-meaning but non-circumspect individuals.

DL: So OK, an elided to-particle is a fair way to look at it.

KD: Like I said, I’m not trying to proselytize. I’m just interested in knowing how a smart person considers all this.

DL: But as to the question whether the infinitive (with or without "to") is in some sense a noun in these constructions, my instinct is to say no, because when I say "She helped the old lady cross the road", my brain is processing "cross" as a verb. But that may just be my linguistic training.

KD: Hold on, hold on… As always, I grammatically parse each example in its given, not in the linguistic abstract of a quasi-analogy. You’ve thrown in a "the old lady" as an object of the finite "helped", so the infinitive "cross" is an (adjectival) object complement of "the old lady". So, I’d distinguish "She helped the old lady [to] cross the road" from "She helped [to] take the old lady across the road", whose structure parallels my original example. In either case, "cross" and "take" are infinitive verbs re the relevant part of speech but, in the "I stretch to help aid muscle flexibility" and "She helped take the old lady across the road" examples, the infinitive verbs "aid" and "take" are functioning as transitive objects of the infinitive verb "help" and the finite verb "helped".

DL: The real question is, if we were to see "cross" as a noun here, what benefit would that bring to our understanding?

KD: I hope that point is moot, but you’ve opened up a second can of linguistic worms treasures that I had to work out separately for the benefit of ESL students who asked, in essence, whether the "cross" in your example is finite (and therefore, why not "crosses" as inflected for third person singular?) or just a product of some weird grammatical rule to heighten their frustration with English. My simple answer: in colloquial English, we often elide stuff, so it should be read as "She helped the old lady [to] cross the road".

As I analyzed the text of some 19,000 words in my novel (which I'd written while concerned only with narratological prosody and without then considering how grammatical analyses might play out), I was initially left at a loss when trying to sort out the grammatical structures in these three excerpts:

1. newspaper to help drain each cooked batch of crawfish

2.Tae Sung, come oblige your stepmother with a hug

3. I’ll ask if Chris can go see you at the Saint Edward Cemetery

I’ve no shame in admitting it took me a while to determine how and why the grammar differs in each case, and that it took me an agonizingly long time to decide how to characterize the distinctions. Here's what I determined:

1. newspaper to help [to] drain^{[infinitive verb]} each cooked batch of crawfish

2.Tae Sung, come^{[finite; intransitive]} [and] oblige^{[finite; transitive]} your stepmother with a hug

3. I’ll ask if Chris can go^{[infinitive verb]} [and] see^{[infinitive verb]} you when you get down at the Saint Edward Cemetery

I scoured every linguistic source at my disposal to see if there are any arcane terms for a verb phrase that elides a conjunction per (2) and (3) versus a verb phrase that elides a "to" particle per (1). No such luck. So I had to coin my two new terms consistent with goo-gobs of my own definitions for other linguistic terms. I came up with the term complex verb phrase hyponym as added to my glossary entry for the verb phrase hypernym (which has 15 discrete members as defined from asyndetic verb phrase to transitive verb phrase based on the particular argument of a given phrase) as follows:

complex verb phrase

grammar –

1. a verb phrase that elides the to-particle from a to-infinitive phrase; Example: The Batistes’ thrifty setup included a dinner table covered with newspaper to help drain each cooked batch of crawfish.

2. an asyndetic verb phrase that collocates:

a. a pair of finite verbs; Example: See come oblige (someone).

b. a pair of parallel infinitive verbs; Example: See go see (someone).

See generally complex² and verb phrase.

See also verb catena.

Yes, every word or phrase in that definition, as is true for all but 1,410 words and phrases left to address in my work’s 602,000-word master document, have an individualized definition as hypertext with a hyperlink to its respective sense under its entry in the master glossary.

This long-winded post bring me to a final point about infinitive verbs. Awhile ago you seemed a bit nonplussed by my use of the term canonical form as you wondered here, et seq. To expand on the reply I gave then, my glossary doesn’t include the term canonical form, but it does include definitions for 11 terms from canonical adjective to canonical verb. I had to distinguish a canonical verb (defined as "a verb that occurs in a simple, basic or root form") from citation form for three reasons:

• My work makes no use of the sense associated with citation form.
• Regardless, citation form varies depending on the dictionary – some of which use the *ahem* full infinitive and some use *ahem, ahem* the bare infinitive.
• The citation form of a verb is an infinitve as a hyponym within the set of canonical verbs; a canonical verb is a hypernym as a set that includes infinitives and finite verbs whether as modal verbs or as finite auxiliary verbs in an uninflected form, e.g., have re the English perfect tenses.

So with that, today I have only 11 hours left for my usual writing encoding work.

Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:24, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic It is just dawning on me that there is a slightly idiosyncratic doctoral thesis to be written on BEAR infinitives.

You're definitely right that in those sentences with "come oblige" and "go see", an "and" is assumed.

One construction I never know what to do with is "Try and get here early." Obviously, it would be more logical to say "Try to get here early." But this is so much a fixed part of colloquial English that we can't call it a mistake. So what exactly is it? Have fun with that one! Doric Loon (talk) 17:39, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

I recently read somewhere that there's data purporting how the "Try and get here early" phenomenon occurs primarily when a to- particle precedes the try verb: "You have to try and get there early" versus "You have to try to get there early." I suppose I trust the frequency of occurence determined via the big data analysis, but who knows whether what's at work is merely (1) a kind of elegant variation or (2) something of semantic significance? Do people somehow intend, "Don't merely attempt in your effort at an early arrival, instead engage in considerable effort (regarding something) followed by a subsequent early arrival"? Beats me.

I always say "want/need/ought (etc.) to try to (do XYZ)." For those who say it the other way, let's ask how they'd phrase, "I'd like you to try not to be late." Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:15, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

P.S. Oops, I lied. I don't always say "want/need/ought (etc.) to try to (do XYZ)." Last night, I was acutely aware of my saying to someone during a lucid dream, "you ought to try being reasonable" rather than "try to be..." or "try and be..."? --Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:21, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic Interesting. I personally find myself doing it in the imperative, so it is not just that the first "to" is applying to both verbs. Doric Loon (talk) 19:41, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Infinitives

Here's another boast: I've yet to meet anyove who's nerdier, twerpier, or finickier about grammatical precision than I claim to be. That's not to say I think I'm always right in exercising that quirk. Accordingly, please have a look at my flurry of edits re the infinitive article and right any ridiculous wrongs that you find. One possible complaint: the article now seems a bit text-bookish. Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:48, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Stative verb; dynamic verb

The stative verb and dynamic verb articles give me the heebie-jeebies. According to the stative verb article's lede:

A stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are static, or unchanging throughout their entire duration, whereas dynamic verbs describe processes that entail change over time.

I reject the article's consistent contrast of stative verb and dynamic verb regardless of whatever Dowdy is alleged to have said about it.

In my lexicon, stative is an adjective "constituting or complementing an intransitive verb form that expresses a state of existence or state of being without its own expression of action" whether as a static, progressive, or existential state. Its contrast is simply non-stative, i.e., "relating to an action rather than a state". Consider my lexicon's stative verb in the manner traditionally associated with a copula despite how my numerous issues with the term's characterization dissuades me from using it myself. In my lexicon, "He is president is a stative object and "He seems weird" is a stative adjective rather than both being construed as a subject complement, which is a term that also gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Those mentions of action (grammar) mean the representation of:

• (3a) an act or deed as expressed by a transitive verb form: "I drove the car; "I'm driving the car"
• (3b) a non-stative act or deed as expressed by an intransitive verb form: "I ran yesterday;" I like to run"

Also in my lexicon, dynamic (grammar) is an adjective that means "relating to a verb form contextually expressive of an audible, visible, or otherwise physically discernible action." E.g., "I dropped the book."

By contrast, non-dynamic (grammar) is an adjective that means relating to a verb form contextually expressive of a static existence (wherein static is hypertexted as constant, inert, or unchanging and hyperlinked to the glossary definition of "relating to a person or thing that performs no audible, visible, or otherwise discernible act, behavior, or movement associated with change"). Example: "I own the book;" "I think my work here is done"; "Do you agree?"

Does any of this inspire you to help me [to] do some heavy lifting re the stative verb and dynamic verb articles? Of course, I don't advocate using any of the terms as I've coined them. Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:46, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Kent Dominic, this is terminology that has its origins in EFL the classroom, as a way of explaining why some verbs don't normally take progressive forms, or don't take them in certain senses. I find it rather disingenuous that the Stative Verb article starts by saying these verbs exist in English and then give the possibility of a progressive use as a diagnostic test for them. The opposite is true: progressive forms are not always possible and the concept of a stative verb was posited to explain this. I find the terminology "stative verb" perfectly good to indicate a verb which describes a state of affairs that does not change. I also don't mind "dynamic verb", since "dynamic" means changing. But you are right that if this category has no other function than to be a pendant to "stative", it would be simpler to call it "non-stative".

I have had arguments with people on this page before. Somewhere in the talk-page history there must be an ancient discussion about the claim that stative verbs without exception can never take a progressive form. Being Scottish, I know we often use progressive forms where the English wouldn't, in phrases like "I'm wanting to know more about this," so we're talking about a tendency rather than an absolute truth. (When does language ever have absolutes?) But some zealot insisted there could be no exceptions, and said any counter-example was, by definition, not stative. That seemed to me like defining a dog as a four-legged animal, and then when introduced to a three-legged dog, preferring to say it's not a dog than to modify your definition.

However I notice that since I last looked at it, this article has drawn in other languages that I don't know, so maybe the concept now has wider valency in linguistics and really can't be treated as just an EFL topic. I would prefer to see more sources for that. I am sure you could comment on the Korean. I'm slightly concerned by the claim that this applies in "many" languages, as the examples given are way short of "many", but I haven't checked the cited literature.

I find the example from German to be a bit of a stretch - some Indo-European prepositions (like "in") take the ablative (rendered into Germanic as a dative) when position is implied (in a place) and the accusative when the context involves movement (into a place), and that is reflected in modern German, Latin and others. But that is a feature of the preposition, not of the verb that goes before it. I would delete that whole section, especially as it is completely unsourced.

The section on categories doesn't make much sense - what are they trying to prove with these examples?

Meanwhile, the article on Dynamic Verb would be better merged, to make a single article on stative and non-stative. The only meaningful thing in that article at the moment is the information on Mayrinax Atayal, which I can't judge, but it would fit equally well in either article.

So I agree, some improvements could be made. Depending on what you are wanting to do with it, I might jump in and give you support. Do you have a specific plan here? Doric Loon (talk) 21:21, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the insightful comments. Yeah, it made me cringe when ESL materials gave the spiel about stative verbs usually not *ahem* taking the progressive form. And those were the good materials. The bad ones said copulas usually don't take the progrssive form. I wrote to two of the publishers, "I am growing tired of how you are being obtuse in such statements that are getting my students frustrated." Nah, I didn't write to them, but I shoulda.

Right now I don't have a specific plan for editing this post's topical articles. I've been hoping someone else would make the first move – someone who cares enough to find published sources to cite items in a way that I no longer pursue. Locating rational publications on this stuff is kinda like looking for a needle in a haystack full of hay pretending to be needles. Oh, if you're bored, try finding a cite that supports this heretical bit of original research that contradicts the lede on Transitivity (grammar).

Every so often, when my own work requires my looking up published commentary for inspiration on how to word an obscure point of grammar or etymology, I stumble across something I can cite to help edit the articles here. Because the material I find tends to provide a minority view, I'm afraid the Undue Police would drag me to the Fringe Theory Penitentiary if I tried sneaking in stuff that makes sense to everyone but hardcore traditionalists.

Case in point: I don't recall where I first read and adopted the characterization that a transitive verb expresses action that entails a transitive object rather than what the articles here on Transitivity (grammar) and transitive verb characterize, per traditional jargon, as taking an object or accepting an object. Can you hear the rumbling of an edit war between other editors and me when I get reverted via an edit summary that says, "Everyone knows what it means to describe a verb as taking or accepting an object!"

A bigger, more substantive row will occur if I try plying the concept of a stative object into one of those articles to advance the reasoning that "Here is my strategy" (1) includes "strategy" as an object, (2) has no transitive verb in the vicinity, (3) includes "is" as a stative verb in the set of intransitive verbs, (4) is a bit disingenuous to call "plan" a subject complement when (4a) "here" functions not as a subject but as an adverb, and (4b) it's bad manners to call an object (i.e., one that complements a stative verb) a subject complement in a way that rudely pretends the verb is doesn't exist or significantly bear on the syntax.

Where's my linguistic posse – the one that insists on parsing every word in a given example? Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:15, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic So, you have motivated me - I have deleted that rubbish about German prepositions, and put an explanation in the talk page. I can't imagine there will be any complaints.

The next thing that I would want to question is whether this distinction really has anything to do with transitivity. Consider:

• I smell sweaty. (intransitive, stative)
• I know a thing or two about verbs. (transitive, stative)
• I dance. (intransitive, dynamic)
• I dance the tango. (transitive, dynamic)

I would suggest those are two separate phenomena. This is not a section to be deleted, but rather, something that is implied in several places, so it would need more careful editing, but I think that needs to go. Do you agree?

I am not terribly sure that it makes sense to call the coupla stative, since it doesn't really have a meaning at all. But to be is certainly non-stative in a phrase like You are being very silly. The question is whether to be is always a copula. Doric Loon (talk) 12:08, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Well done! 👏

I agree that the phenomena you laid out needs editing. I've addressed it thoroughly in my own lexicon's terminology, which is entirely original research since, as mentioned, I've soured on trying to find published sources that sensibly deal with the matter.

Would you clarify the second "it" referent in, "I am not terribly sure that it makes sense to call the copla stative, since it doesn't really have a meaning at all"?

Lastly, to my mind, the use of "to be" (i.e., in standard, Modern English usage including only "to be" but not its cognates, am, is, are, was and were, thereby excluding instances like "This be true" or passives such as "I am tired") is always a copula. I nonetheless long ago decided against using the term in my own lexicon except in this one entry:

copula

grammar – a 17th century taxon intended to classify a verb that predicates a stative complement.

Cf. stative verb.

How I'd LOVE to edit the Wikipedia article accordingly. While at it, I'd edit the stative complement article along the conceptual lines evident in this paradigm:

subject complement

grammar –

1. any lexical item that complements a subject; for example:

a. an appositive noun; Example: My friend Sharon texted me.

b. a postpositive adjective*; Example: What more do I need?

c. an adjectival clause*; Example: "Is it that this inchoate idea to run for president has suddenly got you crawling back and needing me to play the candidate’s wife role?" Deborah fussed.

d. a postpositive adjectival phrase –

• marked by a preposition; Example: Deborah, still damp in her sweaty running gear, used her visitor’s access card to open the sliding double doors.
• marked by a postpositive continuative participle; Example: "Let's make sure any proceedings involving my mother occur in the most dignified manner possible," said T.S.
• marked by a postpositive perfective participle; Example:Example: Towering iron gates seen three blocks down the road marked the main entrance to the St. Edward Catholic Church Cemetery.

2. an outmoded taxon (invented in 1923) intended to classify:

a. a nominal word, nominal phrase, or nominal clause that complements a stative verb. (Cf. stative complement¹ et seq.)

b. an adjective or adjectival phrase that complements a stative verb. (Cf. stative complement⁴ .)

See generally subject and complement (noun)².

*NOTE:

1. The Wikipedia article on postpositive adjective isn't horrible, but it needs a tweak or two (incl. deletion of the "those well-baked example comprising an adjectival participle rather than an adjective).

2. Unlike Wikipedia's definition of adjectival clause, which links to the nightmare-inducing relative clause article, my lexicon's definition is simple: "an adjunctive clause that functions as an adjective", with four hyponyms:

• asyndetic adjectival clause < "A movie [that] I saw last night was pretty good.
• incipital adjectival clause < Although she was miffed, she held back her comments.
• parenthetic adjectival clause < "My book, which is nearly complete, is geared primarily at ESL students, high school students preparing for college entrance exams, and post-secondary students interested in linguistics and creative writing strategies.
• syndetic adjectival clause< Joe Pierre’s wife and two teenage daughters bellyached about the Highland Waters mosquitoes that they’d most likely have to battle.

By now you surely see that crux of my grammatical analyses is based on terminology consistent with top-down parsing of syntax, not on any Generative grammar theory that presumes how we native speakers (in this case, English) universally know that "the man who I spoke to" equates to "the man to whom I spoke." To my feeble mind, that instance of who – whether construed as a conjunction or pronoun – is a lexical item that's quite grammatically distinct from whom. Linguistically speaking, I draw crisp distinction between semantically functional equivalence and the chimera of grammatically functional equivalence.

Questions for any adherents to traditional grammar:

1. Does "the man who I spoke to" involve "who" as (A) a subject pronoun, or (B) an object pronoun?

2. Is the (A) interrogative subject pronoun who or (B) the interrogative object pronoun whom implicit in what I admit are semantically functional equivalents: "Who did you see?" versus "Whom did you see?"

Traditionalists, please explain your answers and make sure to avoid proffering any logical inconsistencies. (Ha!) And, please don't be offended that my answer is no to (1) as I see both instances of who and whom as adjectival conjunctions; my answer to (2) is that an interrogative object pronoun is implicit whether in colloquial utterances with who or in formal utterances with whom. Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:22, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic The copula is the verb "to be" used as a purely functional word to link up a sentence. i.e. it doesn't actually mean anything, and many other languages would miss it out. Hebrew ata ha-ish ('you the man') translates as 'you are the man' because English, like most Indo-European languages, puts in an entirely meaningless verb to join it up. I have noticed some writers also calling other verbs couplae if they seem to link something, like "smell" in you smell nice, but I don't see any advantage in that and it just causes confusion.

"To be" is usually a copula, though I wouldn't call it that if it is being used as an auxiliary verb (I am given, I am giving), where it is part of another verb. I also wouldn't call it a copula if it expresses existence (I think, therefore I am).

In the Celtic languages, an important distinction is made between the copula, which links a subject to an adjective, and the substantive verb, where the verb has a noun complement. I'm not sure there is any advantage in making that distinction in English, and it is just confusing when some writers use "substantive verb" and "copula" as vague synonyms. Doric Loon (talk) 19:27, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

That's it! Time's up. I'm taking a break from your talk page to rat you out as a menace to the members of the Puerile Society of Grammar and Linguistic Traditionalists. But, seriously...

I'm glad I've limited lexicon's application to grammatical analyses of the syntaxes within the corpus of the primary text containing a mere 19,000 words. Nothing in that primary text occurs as, e.g., "Doric Loon seems a nice person." Otherwise, I'd be be conflicted over analyzing it as:

• (A) An elliptical construction, "Doric Loon seems^{[intransitive]} [to be] a nice person" (with "[to be] a nice person]" constituting a stative object), versus
• (B) A protologistic sense of seems as a nondynamic transitive verb, "Doric Loon seems (i.e.,"gives the impression of/looks the part of) a nice person.

I admit how the analysis per (B) is kinda hanging by a thin grammatical thread, but for anyone who cares to do a deep dive into grammatical case analysis, theres's a well-reasoned argument that both "DL seemed a nice person" and "DL seemed to be a nice person" entail "a nice person" as an accusative object whether as a complement of a weirdly transitive seems or as a complement of either an intransitive seems or an elliptical "[to be]". (I'm led to believe that Ancient Greek, in contrast to Modern Greek, inflected each object with a case marking that identified whether it was accused by a verb for which transitivity was moot as in "I ran into a teacher^[VP+AO]" versus by a preposition as in "I ran into a teacher^[Prep+AO].)

The problem: I've never, ever, even once had a real-life had a conversation with anyone regarding accusative case nor do I know of anyone who might be willing to suffer it. Sorry, that's a bit of hyperbole. There had been an article here titled Nominative-accusative language that I ranted about long enough starting here to rally sufficient support for reasonable edits and a name change to Nominative-accusative alignment.

As for your implict point about how a stative participle plays into the equations...

ESL students often learn how to grammatically distinguish (1) "This is interesting" versus "This is interesting me" versus "This is interesting to me", and (2) "They tired themselves" versus "They themselves tired" versus "They themselves are tired", but whether they can semantically distinguish the items is a different story altogether.

Compounding the matter is how we native English speakers don't need to know the smallest bit of grammar terminology to distinguish "Solutions to the problems were given" from "Solutions to the problem were a given," but ESL students who rely on a dictionary source are likely to find "given" is tagged solely as an adjective or a noun. Then they ask why "The solutions to the problems were given" constitutes passive voice since "is given" is a copula + adjective, not a copula + past participle. When I explained it as a stative verb* + perfective participle, things clicked.

If traditionalists scoff at such crazy new terminology, I'll feel I've done something right. Kent Dominic·(talk) 23:22, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@Kent Dominic, yes, but I think things would have clicked equally quickly if you had explained it as an auxiliary verb + perfective participle. Basic idea, the English passive is a two-word verb. It's not really that hard, but obviously you have to internalize it before you can see the difference between "was given" and "was a given".

You want a discussion of accusative case? In which language? Doric Loon (talk) 13:55, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Because I give the strictest interpretations to grammatical terminology – whether to traditional terms or those of my own creation – my definition of auxiliary verb is "a category of verbs that comprise a verb catena". That hypernym includes four hyponyms:

• finite auxiliary verb
• modal verb
• nonfinite auxiliary verb (incl. only "have" re, e.g. "will have been", and "be" re, e.g. "can be done", as well as the second modal in double modals, a term I had to define since one of my novel's characters is a U.S. southerner who says, "Christian Tolbert might could show you to Wallace.") I'd heard neither the term double modal nor an instance of it until 2010, when an fellow ESL instructor, one from Louisiana, casually said "might could" in a way that caught my attention. I initially thought the usage was substandard but came to believe that it's ideolectically nonstandard.
• nonmodal auxiliary verb

Also, my definition for verb catena is limited to verbs, not participles. In that paradigm, it can't be said that the passive voice entails an auxilary verb since there's no verb catena. Also, a stative verb like "appear" isn't traditionally construed as an auxiliary verb, yet I think it predicates the passive voice in a construction like "He seemed satisfied." Dang helping verbs copulas auxiliary verbs stative verbs as I madly construe them.

Why did I create a definition of auxiliary verb that's more limited than the traditional one? At the time, the relavant linguistic literature I'd read was consistent with what was purported in the Wikipedia article on auxiliary verb until I took a hatchet to it in this an apoplectic fit of an edit] which – suprisingly to me – wasn't summarily reverted or substantially changed.

I'll politely decline any discussion of accusative verb, thank you. I'm not yet fully recovered from being shell shocked during the edit war that took place re the article on Nominative-accusative languages alignment. Last week I needed some aspirin to appease my PTSD when I found accusative case was still included as an entry defined (but not linked to anything) in my lexicon's glossary. A rapid deletion worked better than the aspirin. Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:35, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Email

I got faked me out looking under "tools" in the left-hand margin. It took me a while to find it on the opposite side. Let me know if I should check the junk mail folder of my email for a reply re the 77-mile distance. Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:58, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Is it not in the left-hand margin? It is for me, but Wikipedia has a number of different layouts to choose from. And if you're working from a mobile, then it's all different again. Anyway, I got and answered your mail. According to Google Maps it's 119 km (73.9432 miles). Doric Loon (talk) 19:10, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

(Right-hand margin).

So, I got your email response but the sender format looked odd. I can't say whether you'll receive my reply because my email account would let me add you as a contact the way your email address was formatted. If my second email hasn't made its way to your inbox, would you email me again and I'll try to work out any snafu? Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:04, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

The mad, mad world of Kent Dominic

After this talk page lapsed into quiescence on 13 March I found myself engaged with Kent at other talk pages, first at relativizer, then at subject complement. Little did I suspect that this page had, zombie-like, sprung back to life with a vengeance. The indefatigable Kent has returned with a cornucopia of riches that would overwhelm the digestive system of the most determined ruminant.

There is too much to read at one sitting. I will try to go through it when I have time. Suffice it to say that English "prepositions" have always posed curly questions for the grammarian. "Prepositions" encompass far more than the simple locatives found in many other languages. They might have started on their journey to becoming the bane of the grammarian and language learner from being separable Germanic verbs, but they have now developed into a rich and complex system that even English speakers struggle to explain. The problem is only partly (and superficially) resolved by the Gordian knot-cutting act of splitting them into "prepositions" and "adverbs". But I'm running ahead of myself. I really don't know how they are best dealt with in a system of grammar. Bathrobe (talk) 20:59, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

How, Kent, do you handle:

They saw through the scam [perspicaciously realised it was a scam]

and

They saw the scam through [implemented it to the end] Bathrobe (talk) 18:11, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Welcome back @Bathrobe. I think I now identify as a determined ruminant. Good question, I think it is clear how I would handle it, but I shall now sit back and watch the indefatigables. Doric Loon (talk) 18:17, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe: Good questions.

I'd analyze "saw through the scam" as comprising saw through as a transitive phrasal verb whose SUP includes "saw" (transitive) and "through" (adverbial particle²). A definition for see through would definitely include the transitive phrasal verb gloss. Ofhand definitions would include but not be limited to the following senses:

1. to wholly detect a suspicious set of circumstances; Example: See through a scam.

See generally see (transitive verb)¹ and through (adverbial particle)².

2. to envision and fully perform the entirety of a given task; Example: We saw through every element of our phishing scam and reaped thousands of ill-gotten gains; He saw through his intention to become a doctor.

See generally see (transitive verb)⁴ and through (adverbial particle)².

I'd analyze "They saw the scam through" as comprising a transitive verb phrase whose SUP similarly includes "saw" (transitive) and through (adverbial particle)² as characterized above although the syntax differs since saw and through aren't collocated (i.e., "the scam occurs as an interpositive transitive object between "saw" and "through").

That distinction explains why I part ways with @Doric Loon's analysis that deems "see though a scam" as comprising a preposition rather than an adverbial particle. Under that analysis, "see" (intransitive verb) magically changes transitivity when transposed as "see the scam through" thereby entailing "see" (transitive) + "the scam" (transitive object) + "through" (dangling preposition, stranded preposition, postposition or, whatever). A claim that "the scam" can stand as grammatically accused by lexical items from two separate parts of speech doesn't pass my linguistic muster, at least not as applied to English.) 😉

ESL materials characterize a "see the scam through" or "pick it up" example as being a split phrasal verb. I see nothing intrinsically wrong with that characterization, but I've dropped it from my own lexicon because grammarists have long used splitting as a grammatical invective. (See, e.g., split infinitive.) I'm nonethless pleased that the ESL materials on phrasal verbs strive to note how a nominal word – including a noun, gerund, or pronoun – may be used when splitting a phrasal verb (e.g., "Poured water out", "Wind the partying down", "Put it in") but that pronouns may not be used if the phrasal verb isn't split (e.g. "Sort it out" but not "sort out it"; "crank it down" but not "crank down it"; "See them in" but not "See in them".)

That guidance only goes so far since items like "What do you see in them?" is grammatically correct and semantically meaningful despite how "in" becomes a preposition rather than an adverbial particle. Same thing re examples like, "I'll see arround you" versus "I'll see you around."

Cheers. I'll see you around. Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:15, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Lexicography

Among the rare conversations I’ve had with people who have even a mild interest in my work, I doubt they noticed my brief pause – which for me always seemed an eternity – as I’d hesitate before using tag while thinking, “No, no, not tag. What’s the proper word? Whatever. Tag will do.”

After eight continuous years of plying intensive efforts to self-taught lexicography, you’ve enabled me to finally rid myself of the nagging inability to have even once recalled that the proper word for tag is gloss in the sense you used it in your most recent email. Cheers.

Your email further cements you as a member in the group of smartest people I know. As such, your curiosity allows you to say what you don’t know:

I don't know what you mean by glossing a transitive verb with intransitive definitions. In your example, both the headword "impoverish" and the definitions "make poor", "deprive of strength" etc. are transitive. Wahrig would have made that more explicit by putting in the word "someone" into both the head-word collocation and the definition, but I don't see it as a problem that Merriam-Webster take that as read.

You don’t see the omitted “someone” as being problematic, but I sure do. Here’s why…

Graeme, you know and probably care, I know and definitely care but, IMHO, people who read dictionaries in their native language typically don’t care whether a lexicographical entry is glossed as transitive or intransitive, and whether a sense given under that gloss corresponds by way of transitivity. I suspect that people nowadays read dictionaries less frequently than ever. They can easily use a digitally to look up an unfamiliar word if their browser doesn’t have an app that performs the function more readily.

What troubles me is this: ESL students often rely on dictionaries intended for native speakers of a given language. Hallelujah that no one ever learned foreign language proficiency from reading a dictionary. My work is intended to fill that gap.

In my experience, ESL students presume – without even noticing a gloss re transitivity – that an English language dictionary defines a verb via phrasing as it occurs among interlocutors. For instance, I’ve corrected literally thousands of students upon their utterance, “When did you arrive Korea?” That question, phrased exactly that way, happened with a regularity that mystified me until one particular student who took umbrage to my correction showed me the Merriam-Webster dictionary entry for “arrive” in his defense:

arrive 1 of 2 verb

ar·rive ə-ˈrīv

arrived; arriving

intransitive verb

1 a: to reach a destination

| The train arrived late.

  b: to make an appearance : to come upon the scene

| The crowd became silent when the officers arrived.

2: to be near in time : COME

| The moment has arrived.

The student argued that the sense provided in definition 1 is decidedly transitive, so that either “you arrived Korea (i.e., the destination)” is correct, or the dictionary had a semantic shortcoming. I continue to side with the student on the latter. For another example of the Merriam-Webster neglect to distinguish the senses provided under a transitive versus intransitive gloss, look at the first of its definitions for survive.

I’m not without empathy for the editors at Merriam-Webster. I know how hard it can be to compose an intransitive sense of arrive as well as, e.g., approve, bother, camp, etc., to alphabetically list three of the entries where Merriam-Webster editors conflated a gloss and a definition re transitivity. I occasionally find instances where I’ve neglected to remedy similar items in my own lexicon. I won’t explain how hard it is to correct such an error except to say that changing the semantic phrasing of a definition takes but a minute or two; changing the affected links to and from the definition can be a daylong task, depending on the number of words requiring hyperlink coordination.

(Imagine what work would be required if I had mistakenly written “This might take awhile” instead of “This might take a while” and had to re-define that sense of “take” transitively instead of intransitively. Yikes!)

Anyway, I mainly wondered whether German dictionaries manifest the same lexicographical limitations re transitivity that I impose on my work. The silver lining English language dictionaries so often neglect those limitations that when I’m too lazy to compose a verb’s definition from scratch, I’m likely to find a mangled sense of its transitivity at re Merriam-Webster, so I can easily tweak its given sense of the verb and call it my own without worrying about misappropriating any intellectual property. Kent Dominic·(talk) 17:27, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Kent Dominic. I understand. It wasn't clear from your earlier examples, but yes, glossing "arrive" with "reach" is a problem. Wahrig solves that by an intermediate step between the headword and the definition - first he puts the headword into a collocation, and then he defines that. Have you checked what the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary does? I seem to have mislaid my copy, but your students would probably be better served with that or something similar. Doric Loon (talk) 21:39, 4 April 2024 (UTC)