How far from the madding gerund? (100kG)
In
Far
from the Madding Gerund, Mark Liberman noted Edward Skidelsky
writing:
Unfortunately, Lessons of the Masters
far from
fulfils the promise of its
subject.
Mark says this is syntactically odd, since the highlighted part has "no plausible
syntactic analysis." He goes on to observe a clever way in which it may
be right after all, or at least may become so. He notes that Skidelsky's sentence probably involves
the first stages of a language change, specifically a reanalysis of
far
from as an adverb. I've got news for Mark: you're right. Except
the reanalysis has already happened.
The question is whether
far
from is already an adverb for many speakers (a use in which its
spatial connotation has been completely superceded by a function as a modal degree modifier, following a common path of
grammaticalization.) Let's let Google weigh in, with searches "
far from fulfills", "
far from fulfils" and
"they far from". Here are some of
the hits:
Democracy far
from fulfills the illusions that drive it, yet, in Winston
Churchill's immortal turn of the phrase, it's the worst political
system save
the alternatives.
The role of this type
far from fulfils the required role
of such a division.
While they far from guarantee a successful and
stress free implementation, they at least put the developer on the
right path.
A name and a color scheme are essentials of an army, but they far from complete an army.
The Reds
had the start they far from wanted, with Mick Godber
having to leave the field for treatment after just 40 seconds after a
Vauxhall defender had followed through. But he was back on within three
minutes.
They far from fail him when he translates his
feelings into images of nature.
|
So just how common is
"far from" +
finite verb? Well, "
they
far from" gives 481 hits, and a quick scan indicates that very
roughly 50% of these are of the right sort, say about 200 Googles. We
can compare this to another low frequency adverb: "they ungraciously"
gives 23 Googles. Now "
ungraciously"
itself returns about 10 kiloGoogles, most of which come from "
ungraciously" +
finite verb. Ignoring multiple
occurrences of a pattern in the same document, we can make a very rough
and ready estimate of the web frequency of
"far from" + finite verb: +/- 100kG
(i.e. 200G * 10kG / 23G).
How many kG should convince me that some pattern is grammatical? The
answer must be complicated, presumably depending on pattern length and
abstractness.
Then again, I'm surrounded by heretics who suggest grammaticality may
be
gradient. If
grammaticality is a function of frequency, then the one question
becomes two: what are the units of grammaticality, and what is the
function? Well, heck, these are tricky questions, but let's just
suppose the function is identity, and measure grammaticality directly
in Google hits. Then we know just how grammatical "
far from" + finite verb is. Yup,
that's 100kG of grammaticality. I'll be darned if it ain't 30kG more
grammatical than
madding. An
easier question is: why did Mark get all uppity about
far from? Why hadn't he already
reanalyzed
far from as an
adverb?
From what I know of Mark, I'm guessing Google's corpus gives a pretty
representative sample of the language he encounters. Google scans about
3 billion documents, including a lot of non text and non-English. I'll
call it a nice round billion. Let's say the documents have an average
of 1000 words. (I've no idea if this is right.) Then the Google corpus
is about a trillion words of English text, and contains about a
trillion trigrams. 100,000 of these trigrams are
"far from" + finite verb, so this
pattern has a frequency of about 1 per 10 million. Now I'm guessing
that 10 million is within an order of magnitude of the number of trigrams Mark has
ever encountered. So it doesn't surprise me that he just
encountered the
"far from" + finite verb pattern, but it also wouldn't surprise me if it's his
first time.
Congratulations Mark! And don't worry - it's much less painful the
second time around.
Posted by David Beaver at December 5, 2003 11:59 PM