"So big a house"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 9, 2007, at 6:52 AM, Joe Salmons wrote:

> I've been corresponding with someone who's working on the history of
> the construction illustrated in the subject line, as it evolved
> across a couple of West Germanic languages. It's not central to what
> he's working on, but a question has come up about its current status:
> The construction has been described as obsolescent, but it seems to
> be common enough. (A quick search of ads-l and Language Log doesn't
> turn up any discussions, and DARE hasn't quite gotten to the relevant
> part of the alphabet, but it is a little awkward to look for and I
> could easily have missed something.)

we had some discussion here in 2004 under the heading "as ADJ of a N
as" (originally treating the variant with "of").  the general
phenomenon is what i've called "exceptional [or extraordinary] degree
marking": Deg Adj a N (vs. ordinary: a Deg Adj N).  "so" and "as" are
among the degree modifiers involved in X (rather than O) modification.

my original paper on the subject (with reference to some earlier
work) was

   Zwicky, Arnold M.  1995. Exceptional degree markers: A puzzle in
external and internal syntax. OSU WPL 47.111-23.

this is now available on-line as:

   http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/exceptional-degree-markers.pdf

there is also a handout for a 2002 talk "Just how interesting a
construction is this? Explorations in the matching of internal and
external syntax", available at:

   http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~zwicky/deghead.hnd.pdf

there's also the following article, which has a pretty extensive
bibliography:

   Seppa"nen, Aimo;  Solveig Granath; & Lars Danielsson. 2002. The
construction ‘AdjP — a(n) — Noun’ in present-day English syntax.
Leuvense Bijdragen 91.97-136.

the construction has been around in standard english for some time.
i don't know anything about its history, but that's an interesting
question, because the construction is definitely a peculiar (or, as
we say in technical-talk, marked) one in modern english: the
adjective-before-article order is extraordinary (though it does occur
with the modifiers "such", exclamative "what", and "many": Such an
outcome is unlikely. What a beautiful dog! Many a linguist had cause
for complaint.)

for quite some time, speakers have sought to fix the anomaly of
exceptional degree modification by altering the construction to fit
widespread patterns of quantity modification in english, in
particular those with "of".  as DARE says under "of" (section B,
subsection g):

   >probably a remodeling of the order adj + indef art + noun by
analogy with the common pattern noun + "of" + indef art + noun (as in
"a whale of a deal" or "not much of a bargain").<

back in 2004, joanne despres noted another possible model, the use of
"a function word to indicate apposition <that fool of a husband>" (as
the Collegiate puts it).  and MWDEU suggests "kind/sort of a" as yet
another possible model.

in any case, speakers have become somewhat uncomfortable with the
peculiar syntax of (of-less, or -of) exceptional degree
modification.  even if they don't reshape the construction to fit the
pattern of other prenominal modifiers, many of them find the
construction formal in style, even archaic-sounding, so they tend to
avoid it.  as i said in a 2005 Language Log piece on avoidance:

   >Another example/anecdote:  one of my graduate students innocently
asked her mother whether she preferred _How big a dog did you see?_
or _How big of a dog did you see?_  -- asking about the two variants
of "exceptional degree modification"...   Her mother said: neither
was acceptable.  One was too fancy, the other too nonstandard.  What
you say is: _You saw a dog; how big was it?_ or _How big was the dog
you saw?_ or _You saw a dog that was how big?_ or whatever.

   I doubt that in real life she avoids all variants of EDM.  But we
can't ask her; we have to listen.<

   (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002292.html)

for this speaker, one version (-of) sounds hopelessly old-fashioned
and formal, but the other (+of) is just not grammatically acceptable.

the +of version is definitely the wave of the future.  back in 2004,
joan houston hall noted, "It's pretty well scattered, but somewhat
more common in the South."  that was a description of the DARE
findings, but by now i'd say that the +of version is simply the norm
for younger speakers in all parts of the u.s.; most of my students
don't use the -of version in their writing at all.  (they
*understand* the -of version, but when asked about it, they describe
it as british or 18th-century or something like that.)  for these
people, the ship of change has not only sailed, it's reached the
other shore.

as i said back in 2004:

  > there's variation as to which degree words are exceptional and in
what contexts.  for many american speakers, the nonstandard "of"
variant of the exceptional markers seems to be essentially
categorical, but i think there are speakers who have the "of" variant
as informal and spoken, with the standard variant as formal and
written.  (undoubtedly variation within individuals would be good
topic for research.  if someone has pursued this topic, i'd like to
hear about it.)<

joe salmons notes similar attitudes:

> Everybody I've asked says it's grammatical, but some people seem to
> think it's how other people talk: One man wondered if it was more
> likely to be female than male speech,

that would probably be a reflection of the belief that women in
general talk more formally, more "correctly", than men.

> but no woman I've asked shares
> that view. A Canadian said it sounded American, and so on. One
> Wisconsinite did say that she was corrected when she used it in
> California -- to 'so big OF a house'.

wonderful.  a correction of the once-standard form to the innovative
variant.

> For me, it's distinctly spoken
> usage -- in any writing beyond informal email I'd probably use
> 'such a'.

this judgment on the -of version is a new one for me.  joe, what about
   how/that/too/as Adj a N
and other -of cases?  is it just the "so" case that sounds so
informal to you?

in any case, the +of version has been the target of condemnation (as
non-standard and erroneous) for at least 25 years.  it's one of the
darlings of the complaint literature on english usage; it shows up
nowadays on almost everyone's list of pet peeves, where it's
attributed to the carelessness of the young and viewed as a
corruption of the language.  in many handbooks of usage, it finds its
place in a section on pleonasm: the "of" is labeled as an unnecessary
word the writer should omit.

(the passion with which the +of version is condemned has always
puzzled me.  it's not like anyone could have trouble understanding
what +of users are trying to say, and the saving of one putatively
needless little word, "of", is scarcely a great economy. i guess it's
just become another grammatical shibboleth, like speaker-oriented
"hopefully"; there are fashions in usage disdain as in other things.)

the MWDEU entry on "of a" covers a good bit of this territory.  back
in 1989 MWDEU said that "our evidence shows the [+of] idiom to be
almost entirely oral; it is rare in print except in reported speech",
concluding that "the only stricture on its use is that it is a spoken
idiom: you will not want to use it much in writing except of the
personal kind."  that's no longer an accurate description, though the
-of version still seems to predominate heavily in print (excluding
quoted speech).  i suspect that looking at younger writers would show
much higher frequencies of the +of version, even in "serious"
contexts; it's so common in the papers my students write, in the
Stanford Daily, etc. that i haven't tried collecting the examples
that go past me.

(i am, by the way, a consistent -of user.  but i see no reason to be
making moral judgments on +of users.)

the +of version is widespread in the u.s. (though studies might show
some regional preferences) and can be found (via google searches) in
canada.  as far as i know, it's virtually unknown elsewhere in the
english-speaking world.  i wonder how long that will last.

arnold

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