Since + [time period]

[Aaron E. Drews]

on 16/4/00 4:48 PM, Tom Kysilko wrote:

> On an NPR news program last week, regarding some new initiate Tony Blair
> may be taking to try to restart the peace process in Northern Ireland, I
> thought I heard a BBC correspondent say something like, "The two
> governments have been working on a joint proposal since three weeks."
> [...]
>
> Indeed, is this locution even common in contemporary British English?  [It
> makes me think of those Jane Austen emulators, who lard their prose with
> "these three weeks".  Yes, they occur in the Austen corpus, but not very
> often.]
>

The construction "since three weeks" strikes me as very odd.  "Since three
weeks ago" might be more acceptable.  Since the BBC has allowed non-RP
standard varieties be used by its newsreaders and reporters, it is possible
that a regionalism slipped through in the correspondent, if s/he were from
Ireland... although I don't know if this construction is acceptable in
Hibernian English, either.

--Aaron

________________________________________________________________________
Aaron E. Drews                               The University of Edinburgh
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron      Departments of English Language and
aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk                    Theoretical & Applied Linguistics

 "MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF"
  --Death