In an earlier post, I quoted the final paragraph of a newspaper essay: "Once it would have seemed unnecessary to point out that <dubious piece of conventional wisdom>. Today, perhaps it bears reminding". I observed that the phrase "it bears reminding" deserves a post of its own. So here goes.
I associate the frame "it bears X-ing" with X = repeat or mention, and remind struck me as very odd in that context. Counts on the web confirm my intuition (these are from Yahoo):
| __ | bear __ | bears __ | Total | Ratio (Xing to bear(s) Xing) |
|
| mentioning | 6.7M |
14.2K |
54.3K |
68.5K |
98 to 1 |
| repeating | 10.1M |
30.8K |
207K |
247.8K |
41 to 1 |
| reminding | 4.95M |
75 |
513 |
588 |
8,418 to 1 |
The phrase "bear(s) reminding" is 421 times less common than "bear(s) repeating", and 205 times less common relative to the frequency of the -ing form in question. Furthermore, some of the "bear(s) reminding" phrases turned up by the web search are spurious:
Hi, I'm Bubba the Bear reminding you to play in the Spring Battle 2002 Bubbashoes tournament May 4th @ 1pm.
"Beary Bitty Ballerina" is an adorbale vignette featuring a Marie sculpted doll and an exclusive Annette Funicello plush bear, reminding us that dancing with a friend can be beary fun!
Those who violate the NetEtiquette will receive a communication from the Oregon Bears reminding you of the BearZone rules of respect for others.
The route passed through homelands of indigenous people as well as pristine habitat for Caribou, Mountain Goats and… Grizzly Bears, reminding Steve that he was not at the top of the food chain.
On the other hand, there are certainly a few genuine "bear(s) reminding":
Does it bear reminding that Rambo films are the stuff of Hollywood fiction?
Another thing I think that does bear reminding for adult students is to wear the proper undergarments.
Secularism [...] has turned into such a bad word that it bears reminding what it really denotes.
This is probably known to all of you already, but if not, it bears reminding of: Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia.
That last example brings out what I thought was going wrong with "bears reminding". Repeating and mentioning are things that people do to questions, observations, facts and so forth, whereas reminding is something that people (or things or events) do to other people. All of these verbs (can) deal with two people and some information that passes between them, but the phrasal schemata are quite different:
<person1> repeats <information> (to <person2>)
<person1> mentions <information> (to <person2>)
<person1> reminds <person2> of <information>
<person1> reminds <person2> [that S]NOT <person1> repeats <person2> of <information>
NOT <person1> repeats <person2> [that S]
NOT <person1> mentions <person2> of <information>
NOT <person1> mentions <person2> of <information>
NOT <person1> reminds <information> (to <person2>)
We can make an analogy to structures like "It's worth X-ing that <sentence>". Again, these work well with X as mention or repeat, and badly with remind. Counts from Yahoo again:
| __ | worth __ that | Ratio (Xing to worth Xing that) |
|
mentioning |
6.7M |
243K |
26 to 1 |
repeating |
10.1M |
16.1K |
627 to 1 |
reminding |
4.95M |
833 |
5,942 to 1 |
So "worth reminding that" is 292 times less common than "worth mentioning that".
However, my intuition that the differences in common usage are due to the differences in verbal argument structure is not entirely supported by the evidence. Other verbs like say, explain and discuss, whose argument structure is similar to that of mention and repeat, are even less likely to occur in frames like "bear(s) X-ing" than remind is:
| __ | bear __ | bears __ | total | ratio | |
| mentioning | 6.7M |
14.2K |
54.3K |
68.5K |
98 to 1 |
| repeating | 10.1M |
30.8K |
207K |
247.8K |
41 to 1 |
| reminding | 4.95M |
75 |
513 |
588 |
8,418 to 1 |
| saying | 108M | 1,310 | 1,410 | 2,720 | 39,706 to 1 |
| explaining | 27.7M | 220 | 190 | 410 | 67,561 to 1 |
| discussing | 24.2M | 211 | 202 | 413 | 58,596 to 1 |
Although "it bears reminding" took me aback in the NYT essay quoted above, I don't have any problem with "bear(s) explaining" in web examples like these:
The title bears explaining: According to Celtic lore, the oak king is born at Beltane, during the rule of the holly king.
For those readers who are not "journos," it bears explaining that Romenesko's Media Watch page is the clearing house for professional news, gossip, etc.
Does it bear explaining that acoustic means no electric guitars and no electronica?
Frankly, this is simple enough that it doesn't bear explaining much beyond the example code.
However, I can't point to any simple frequentistic explanation for my judgments. It looks like "bear(s) repeating" and "bear(s) reminding" are common fixed expressions, and other instances of "bear(s) X-ing" are rare, independent of the argument structure of X.
[Update: Lance Nathan emailed:
I was poking idly at the "bears X-ing" construction, to see what would fall out. One result that strikingly illustrates your conclusion that this is independent of the argument structure of X is "bears disclosing":
disclosing: 3,670,000 Ghits
bear(s) disclosing: 5 Ghits (and three of those five are the same document at different URLs)But "disclose" has, as far as I can tell, exactly the same argument structure as "repeat" and "mention".
Actually, "bear(s) investigating" gets a decent number of hits--a casual scan suggests that some of them are about bears who investigate, but not all of them. It makes sense, insofar as you have:
This bears repeating -> we should repeat thiseven though "investigate" doesn't have the structure "investigate that X (to Y)". (I tried "bear(s) wondering", but there are too many hits with clause breaks and too many typos for "bears wandering".)
This bears mentioning -> we should mention this
This bears reminding -> *we should remind this
This bears investigating -> we should investigate thisOne also gets a large number of hits for nominalized forms: "bear(s) mention", "bear(s) repetition", "bear(s) investigation". (There are a few non-irrelevant hits for "bear(s) reminder".)
I'd think more about what this all means, but I have this dissertation that bears writing.
]
[Update #2: Russell Lee-Goldman emailed:
I was reminded of something while reading your post on "it bears x-ing." There is another syntactic frame for 'bear,' namely "NP bear VP-ing," where the NP is a semantic argument ("object," if you will) of the head of the VP rather than the expletive 'it.' Thus,
It's just a guess, but other complements of the verb (like the addressee) may prefer to live in the inner VP when the subject of 'bear' is contentful, though of course "it bears x-ing to... that..." is not uncommon.this bears mentioning to the AIC membership
some clever remark which I thought bore repeating to someone back at the office.However, as far as I can tell, the "person2" argement of 'remind,' which is at least in the same syntactic position as "information" is with verbs like 'repeat' and 'mention,' seems very awkward in the "NP bear VP-ing" frame:
(unattested) contemporary readers bear reminding {that... / of...}
I haven't been able to find any examples like this. In fact, the number of "it bears reminding NP that..." is quite small on google. This seems like some sort of blend, where speakers want to talk about the worthiness of saying some piece of information, but the construction available "deprofiles" the addressee, so other means of squeezing in info about the addressee have to be found.
It bears observing that both Nathan and Russell used the "Subject:" heading "This bears emailing". (Well, Russell spelled it "e-mailing".)]
Posted by Mark Liberman at June 12, 2005 07:25 AM