"So big a house"

Sun Jun 10 12:30:52 UTC 2007

Many thanks  to everybody who replied.  What prompted the query was
the impression that there's no consensus on where this fits in
contemporary American English: it's not just old-fashioned or
informal spoken usage, etc, but all over the map. And it sounds like
this is supported by the comments -- it's easy enough imagine people
figuring it for British, for ex., or even overly formal. It wasn't so
clear to me that it was obsolescent at all, so I'm especially glad to
hear that "the ship of change has reached the other shore" for some
people.

Arnold, yes, your other EDM constructions strike me as very informal:
'it's just too big a box to fit in there',  'she's as smart a kid as
I ever met' are fine in conversation but odd to type out. (Without
context, I might have jumped at seeing your talk/handout title on
this topic.) Still, 'many a linguist' sounds bookish.

I'm a little surprised that DARE only has of-ful forms back to 1914.
Is it really that new?

Thanks again,
Joe

On Jun 9, 2007, at 12:23 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky 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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