Edward Skidelsky's review of George Steiner's Lessons of the Masters contains this sentence:
Unfortunately, Lessons of the Masters far from fulfils the promise of its subject.
It's clear what this means, and the rest of Skidelsky's text makes a good case that it's true. But it's syntactically odd in an interesting way.
The origin must be the construction "to be far from fulfulling [something]", which is syntactically normal. "Far" is an adjective, and "from fulfulling" is a prepositional phrase. The whole thing is structurally just an adjective with a PP complement, like "full of promise", "equal to the challenge", "hot to the touch", "ready for use", and plenty of others. Like the other examples that I've given, "far from fulfulling" happens to be a cliché or at least a fixed expression, but of course the same construction can just as easily be used in novel ways: "full of cold tapioca", for example, which has not occurred within the ken of google.
What's odd about Skidelsky's sentence is that "far from" has no plausible syntactic analysis. It seems intended to function more or less like an adverb, as in "scarcely fulfils" or "never fulfils". I suppose that the writer got there by transforming "is far from fulfilling the promise" to "far from fulfils the promise", on the model of "is scarcely fulfilling the promise" transformed to "scarcely fulfils the promise". But you can't do that! at least not in general.
What's interesting is that he almost gets away with it. Skidelsky is obviously a good writer, and he missed it. I imagine that the New Statesman, where the review appeared, has editors and even copy editors, and they missed it. I myself read right past it, and got halfway through the next paragraph before an obscure sense of oddness brought me back.
This is a good example of two processes, one a general fact about language change and the other a specific fact about the recent history of the English language or more properly the culture of those who write formal English.
In general terms, this is just structural re-analysis, of the kind that frequently results from the forces created by clichés and fixed expressions of various sorts. When people start using "is far from VERB-ing" as a common way to say "definitely doesn't VERB", the rhetorical effect inevitably creates a sort of shadow analysis in parallel with the original syntax, and it's only a matter of time before the shadow takes over and licenses examples like "far from VERBs". This usually just creates a new lexical item, in this case an adverb "far from", like the vernacular pseudo-adverb sort of in "he sort of fulfils the promise", or the regionalism near to in "I near to died" (google finds 8 instances of "near to died"). In some cases, the result can be the leading edge of a new morphological or syntactic pattern, so perhaps at some point we'll see enough English adverbs of the form adjective+preposition or noun+preposition to trigger a general "rule" for such formations.
This kind of change is common and inevitable. It's one of several forces that tend to create complexity and irregularity in natural language form-meaning relationships, in opposition to other forces that tend to regularize those relationships. I conjecture that explicit instruction in grammatical analysis tends to damp (in formal writing) the effect of these "forces of disorder", limiting them to gradual leakage from patterns that have become well established in the vernacular (where formal instruction is irrelevant). Now that grammatical instruction has been abandoned for several generations, at least in the American educational system, we are likely to see a new era of change within the culture of formal writing. "X far from fulfils the promise of Y" is not a vernacular construction -- nobody talks like that. It's a written-language "mistake" -- or let's say "change" -- characteristic of someone who is very well read and who writes a lot, and who hasn't been trained to parse.
In case the reader is one of those whose education has not provided them with this essential skill, here's a quick lesson:
Q. Please explain how to diagram a sentence.
A. First spread the sentence out on a clean, flat surface, such as an ironing board. Then, using a sharp pencil or X-Acto knife, locate the "predicate," which indicates where the action has taken place and is usually located directly behind the gills. For example, in the sentence: "LaMont never would of bit a forest ranger," the action probably took place in a forest. Thus your diagram would be shaped like a little tree with branches sticking out of it to indicate the locations of the various particles of speech, such as your gerunds, proverbs, adjutants, etc. [Dave Barry, a.k.a Mr. Language Person]
Update: I've asked a few people for their judgments about "far from" and similar sequences as pseudo-adverbs. My provisional conclusion is that there is on-going lexicalization of some particular adjective+preposition sequences, especially those associated with degree modification of scalar predicates. It is also pretty clear that this lexicalization is not stigmatized or marked as vernacular by those who exhibit it. The judgments in the table below should not be taken too seriously, as they represent only my memory of the answers given by perhaps half a dozen informants, all of whom were American students or faculty.
| Sentence |
Younger speakers |
Older speakers |
| This book far from fulfils its promise. | fine even on reflection, "nothing wrong with it" |
bad, especially on reflection |
| This book close to fulfills its promise. | fine even on reflection, "nothing wrong with it" |
bad, especially on reflection |
| This book distant from fulfills its promise. | obviously bad | obviously bad |
| This book near to fulfills its promise. | bad, maybe regional dialect |
bad, maybe regional dialect |
| This book sort of fulfills its promise. | OK but informal only. |
OK but informal only. |
| This book kind of fulfills its promise. | OK but informal only. |
OK but informal only. |