One will get you four more
On Monday Alison Murie asked on the American Dialect Society mailing
list about prepositions in clock time expressions --
a quarter to/till/until/before/of ten
(to which we can add
past/after,
though I've been concentrating on the other set) -- and people began
expressing an assortment of preferences. Since I've been laboring
on factors that favor the choice of one lexical variant over another,
and in fact am teaching a course on the topic at the LSA's Linguistic
Institute this month (course materials available
here),
the question looked looked right up my alley, so I went to see what
people have said about these prepositions. Damn little, as it
turns out.
But my searches through dictionaries, reference grammars, style
manuals, and advice books of all sorts led me to four phenomena that I
hadn't thought about before, all involving the preposition
of. This happens to me a lot:
I look for one thing and stumble on others. (I will, apparently,
never lack for things to think about.)
First, the time prepositions. Geography plays a role. The
OED notes that temporal
of is "N.Amer., Sc., and Irish
English (north.)", and that accords pretty well with my experience in
England: I quickly learned to replace my Yank
of with another preposition; in the
U.S., my usual alternative is
to,
but in England I tended to favor
before,
because it's semantically transparent (not any sort of idiom) and
therefore entirely safe. Within the U.S., it looks like
to is especially common in the
Northern dialect area, and Joan Houston Hall writes to say that the
Dictionary of American Regional English will label
till as "widespread except
Northeast, Great Lakes". Given its distribution in the British
Isles, I'd expect
of to
appear especially in areas with early Scots-Irish influence (which
would include the Midland areas of the U.S. and parts of eastern
Canada, but not the rest of that country, and probably would include
Australia as well), and not to be used in AAVE;
DARE has it as widespread, but
especially Northeast and central Midland.
Whatever the geographical and social distribution of the variants, the
fact remains that a great many people use two or more of them, and the
question that really interests me here is what influences their
choices. Since the advice literature on grammar, style, and usage
tends to adhere to the principle that there is Only One Right Way, I'd
have expected this literature to be directive. But so far I
haven't found a prescription anywhere. The
Chicago Manual of Style (15th) has
at least one example (
He left the
office at quarter of four, p. 391) with temporal
of (showing that
CMS is indeed an American style
manual), but it illustrates a point other than preposition choice (and,
incidentally, also illustrates a choice between
a quarter and plain
quarter).
There are lots of possible factors, stylistic and structural and maybe
even semantic, that might be relevant. Maybe, for instance, some
people's preferences are different for
ten minutes P T (where P is the
preposition and T is the "goal" time),
ten P T, (
a)
quarter P T, and elliptical
variants (
Let's meet at ten to,
Let's meet at a quarter of).
Maybe it makes a difference if T is just a number (
ten minutes to five), or has
o'clock expressed (
ten minutes to five o'clock), or is
noon/midnight.
I don't at the moment know a thing about these questions, though I do
know that just asking people about their (or other people's)
preferences or practices is not likely to produce accurate data.
Such reports are notoriously unreliable. I don't trust my own
reports, in fact. We have to study what people actually do, in
what circumstances, and that's not an easy task.
Putting these questions aside, I turn to the advice literature on
of, which I explored in the hope
that there would be something about temporal
of there. Now, I have been a
visitor to the entries on
of
in this literature for many years, but for other purposes. I can
tell you that for about a hundred years, usage advisers have been
railing at the "intrusive"
of
in
off of,
out of,
outside of,
inside of, and
alongside of -- the Wordy Five --
especially
off of. (I
intend to post on the subject eventually, but for the moment you can
look at some course notes
here.)
And for twenty or thirty years, they've been railing about the
"intrusive"
of in
exceptional
degree marking:
too/that/so/how
big of a dog,
etc.; it's spreading fast, especially among the young, so it's become
many people's pet pet peeve about English. (I intend to post on
this one too.) Recent manuals are pretty much guaranteed to have
complaints about these two.
I was, then, not at all surprised at the first sentence in Rob Colter's
entry for
of in
Grammar To Go (3rd ed., 2005:59):
If you accept "It fell off of the
table," then you should accept "It fell on of the table," since using of is as meaningless in the first
example as in the second.
(though the reasoning by analogy is entertaining, since usagists
uniformly reject analogical defenses of non-standard usages). But
the second (and last) sentence had something in it that was news to me:
The same can be said for "inside of,"
"underneath of," and "outside of."
Whoa!
Underneath of?
No one else seems to have complained about this one. But it's out
there, in respectable numbers. A sampling:
The greatest accumulation of this
potentially harmful debris is underneath of the vehicle, around the
frame, undercarriage and wheel wells, etc. (
link)
To delete an existing photo and not replace it with another one, click
on the word Delete that is underneath of the photo to permanently
delete if from our ... (
link)
The battery access is underneath of the color LCD ... (
link)
I want the line that is underneath of them to be one continuous line. (
link)
It actually magnifies what is underneath of it, it's very cool. (
link)
Apparently, these writers are treating
underneath as parallel to
ahead and
instead and the opposite of
underneath,
on top, all of which require
of. Non-standard, but not
crazy.
In fact,
DARE has
of after prepositions other than
the five that the manuals complain about:
aboard of,
above of,
around of,
aside of,
behind of,
beside of,
on board of,
over of,
underneath of; these are labeled as
chiefly Southern, South Midlands, and Northeast. Having already
searched on {"is underneath of"}, I went on to check out
under of,
over of, and, yes,
on of. Modest number of hits
for
under of, e.g.:
A child who is under of the care of
some one else; Most children who are eligible to receive child support
must be a dependent. (
link)
... shall allow any alcoholic beverages to be sold, given or otherwise
supplied upon the licensed premises to any person who is under of 21
years of age, ... (
link)
The directorate is under of the Norwegian Ministry of the Environment.
The directorate's mission is to "preserve biological diversity and
strengthen the ... (
link)
There is a lot of benefits to taking this if a person is under of
stress whether mental or physical. L-glutamine is a free-form amino
acid (protein) that is ... (
link)
Some of the hits might be typos, but there are enough to suggest that
under of is a live option for some
people. Fewer hits for
over of,
but here are two that are probably not typos:
No wonder Tom feels "an abounding sense
of relief and security", as he stands over of his dead body. (
link)
But I would never use it over of an iPod for music. And since Apple
does such a great job with music and they know video better than the
rest, ... (
link)
For
on of, I got few hits,
and most of them were probably typos of one sort or another. But
there is a little island of
on of,
in writings by and about people who practice healing by "the laying on
of hands" (or "the laying-on of hands"), as in:
I want a church where they lay on of
hands and heal people but that you don't have to give your address
because it's that followup that I hate. (
link)
There are a fair number of such examples. You can see where this
usage probably came from. People in these communities seem to
refer to the practice by the action nominal
the laying(-)
on of hands (rather than the
gerundive nominalization
laying on
hands). The
of
can then be interpreted as a marker of the object of a complex verb
lay on.
Next, I took a look at Rudolf Flesch's 1964 volume
The ABC of Style, which I hadn't
consulted for some time. The entry for
of was a complete surprise: no
mention of
off of and its
brethren, but instead three complaints that were new to me.
Flesch (p. 210) begins sternly:
of
is a weed that should be pulled out of all sentences where it doesn't
belong
and goes on by giving six examples where
of is to be extirpated. There
is no commentary, explanation, or characterization of the offending
constructions; readers are entirely on their own. The examples
aren't even grouped into types; I've added identifying letters and
brief characterizations.
A: Repeated partitive
Of the 15 millionaires who used this charity provision to avoid playing
taxes, eight (of them) made
their charitable contributions to their own private foundations.
Of all the objections everybody had to giving me the part, not one (of them) was because I was too
pretty.
B: With superlative
The process of being born is one of the most hazardous (of) medical episodes in America
today.
C: WH-clause complement of abstract N
He emphasized his belief in the right of self-expression, leaving
ambiguous the issue (of)
whether spitting, pushing and placard-throwing were covered by his call
for the articulation of deep convictions.
The only remarkable thing about Goldwater's explanation (of) how he and Senator Javits
might find a way of living with each other is the fact that he made it.
There is no earthly explanation (of)
why.
For types A and B, I agree that
of
COULD be omitted, but deny that it
MUST
be; in each case, there are two somewhat different constructions, with
subtly different uses. For type C, I find the first two of
Flesch's "corrections" awkward, though examples without the
of are certainly well attested;
again, there are two different constructions. I'll start my
discussion with type C and work backwards.
Some background... Complements of nouns get two different
treatments, depending on their category. NP complements of Ns are
marked with
of:
the issue of the extent of his problem,
Goldwater's explanation of their
rapprochement.
That-clause
complements of Ns are unmarked (in general, a
that-clause is not eligible to be
the object of a preposition):
your
explanation that you had to leave early to catch a plane.
What then of
WH-clause complements (in
whether,
how,
why, etc.)?
Such complements might be treated like other finite clauses, in
particular like
that-clauses;
they would then be unmarked, as Flesch recommends. Or since they
are eligible to be the object of (certain) prepositions -- as in
I know nothing about whether they did
that, They said nothing about how they did that -- they might be
treated as the equivalent of a NP; they would then be marked with
of, as I recommend. Clearly,
many people (probably most) allow either treatment, and I would expect
there to be a subtle difference in meaning or discourse status for the
two treatments, or at least a stylistic difference.
On the numbers, marking with
of
wins handily over the unmarked variant, somewhere between 2-to-1 and
10-to-1 (there's a lot of the noise in the data), I would estimate from
searching on {"explanation (of) how"}, {"explanation (of) why"}, and
{"issue (of) whether"}. Some examples:
This is a remarkable
explanation of how the internet
works! (
link)
Attached is the
explanation how
to do it ... (
link)
A Lengthy
Explanation of Why
There's a Picture of Bottles of Water. (
link)
"Is there an innocent
explanation why
my boyfriend feels the need to go to a nightclub with his mates?" (
link)
Summary: This FAQ addresses the
issue
of whether base station transmitter/antennas for mobile phones
(cellular phones, PCS phones), and other types of ... (
link)
On the
issue whether a
non-economic highest and best use can be a proper basis for the
estimate of market value. (
link)
There's clearly more to be said here, but I'll move on to type
B. The model for the version with
of comes from examples like the
Monty Python reference to the intelligent sheep:
that most dangerous of animals
In such superlative examples, the
of
is not omissible; its object is a full NP (plural or mass), which can
contain determiners; the object is interpreted as denoting a type
rather than an individual or individuals; and the construction is normally headless,
with the semantics of the head supplied by the object NP (roughly,
'animal' in the Monty Python example). In any case, in this
construction
of + NP is a partitive
associated with the superlative (and not available for most other sorts
of modifiers):
that/the most dangerous of all/our
animals
cf.: *that most dangerous (all/our) animals [without of]
cf.: *that most dangerous of animal [with count singular object
of of]
cf.: #that most dangerous of these animals [anomalous if these animals denotes individuals]
cf. *that/the very dangerous of (all/our) animals [with a
non-superlative modifier]
There is an alternative construction with a singular (and overt) head,
and without the
of; this is
just garden-variety premodification. Among the available
premodifiers are superlatives like
most
dangerous (though many other modifiers, like
very dangerous, are possible), and
the head N can be understood as referring to an individual or a type:
that/the most dangerous animal
cf.: *that/the most dangerous of animal [with of]
cf: that/the very dangerous animal [with a non-superlative
modifier]
There are simply two different constructions here, with slightly
different meanings. Flesch's example with
of is of the first construction,
his
of-less "correction" the
second. It just happens that the understood head in the
of-full version is plural
(something like 'medical episodes'), as in
those most hazardous of all medical
episodes
so that one construction can be "converted" to the other by removing
the
of. This is
essentially an accident.
You get the feeling that Flesch spent a fair amount of time as an "
of-hunter", reading texts for
instances of
of that could be
removed, without really understanding the syntax of the material he was
looking at.
An antipathy towards
of has a
long history in the advice literature on English, going back at least
to H. W. Fowler and continuing in recent years to Bryan Garner.
The usual complaint is that
of
is too frequent (frequent words in general are deprecated, as being
"over-used") and has too many different uses (words with many uses are
deprecated in general, on the grounds that they are potentially
ambiguous), so it's virtually meaningless (in general, words perceived
as being "vague" are deprecated) and should be avoided whenever
possible. (You can find similar complaints about
very,
it,
and, forms of the verb
BE,
and a number of other items.) Now, it's good advice to avoid
piling up occurrences of
of
and similiar words in a short space, but an antipathy to such words in
general is just silly; they perform crucial roles in indicating
syntactic structure and discourse organization. You can
appreciate this point by looking at the twenty most frequent words in
the Brown Corpus and asking yourself how you would get along if you had
to avoid them whenever possible:
the, of, and, to, a, in, that, is, was,
he, for, it, with, as, his, on, be, at, by, I
(A side point: the "words" on this list are picked out
orthographically. A number of them -- notably
to and
that -- clearly represent two or
more distinct lexical items, while others listed separately belong
together as forms of a single lexical item:
is/was/be and
he/his.)
On to type A. Here we have a fronted partitive,
of + NP, which is interpreted in
combination with a later quantity determiner. Flesch's first
example, simplified here,
Of the 15 millionaires who used this
provision, eight contributed to their own foundations.
is a variant of
Eight of the 15 millionaires who used
this provision contributed to their own foundations.
Why would someone want to repeat the fronted partitive (in a pronominal
version)? To make the connection between the fronted partitive
and the quantity determiner absolutely clear. The
single-partitive version,
Of the 15 millionaires who used this
provision, eight contributed to their own foundations.
takes, I think, a bit more interpretive work than the double-partitive
version,
Of the 15 millionaires who used this
provision, eight of them contributed to their own foundations.
Well, that's just speculation, but it should be possible to test.
In any case, I don't find the double-partitive versions unacceptable,
or even pointlessly redundant (they're just more emphatic).
Flesch clearly did, but then he was a demon for brevity.
In the end, I didn't find much on the temporal prepositions, but I did
unearth
underneath of and its
relatives, plus three constructional choices involving
of. One will get you four
more.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 22, 2007 12:05 PM