"That being..."

Mon Jul 3 18:35:41 UTC 2006

On Jun 30, 2006, at 12:28 PM, i wrote:

> On Jun 29, 2006, at 8:04 PM, Alison Murie wrote:
>
>> ... A little like the incomplete "as far as."
>
> Rickford, John R.; Thomas A. Wasow; Norma Mendoza-Denton; & Juli
> Espinoza.  1995.  Syntactic variation and change in progress: Loss of
> the verbal coda in topic-restricting _as far as_ constructions.  Lg
> 71.1.102-31.
>
> one of the authors of this paper thinks they had quotes back to the
> 19th century.  the bibliography hounds are on the trail...

indeed, they had (p. 123) three 19th-century occurrences of verbless
topic-restricting "so far as", two from jane austen, one from herman
melville (all with very heavy NPs following "so far as").  then five
more examples from the 20th century, before 1959.  and then things
really pick up, and lots of critics started complaining.

arnold

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