"So big a house"

Sat Jun 9 23:37:32 UTC 2007

In what context would such a phrase occur?

"I don't know the address, but it's so big a house that you can't miss it."

"it's so big a house that it dwarfs every other house around it for blocks."

Something along those lines?

I'm not (consciously?) aware of the existence of this sort of expression. Weird.

-Wilson

On 6/9/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "So big a house"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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