"So big a house"

Sun Jun 10 16:30:08 UTC 2007

Yes, that's part of what makes this interesting.  For lots of kinds
of linguistic variation, speakers have a relatively clear shared
sense of the parameters of variability whether we use a given form or
not: what's 'formal' vs. 'informal' or 'new' vs. 'old-fashioned' or
'how people around here talk' vs. 'how people in that other region
talk'. This phenomenon doesn't seem to have that.

Joe

On Jun 10, 2007, at 8:08 AM, Laurence Urdang wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Urdang <urdang at SBCGLOBAL.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "So big a house"
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> "Still, 'many a linguist' sounds bookish."
>   That's odd.  There is a song in Oklahoma! that contains the lyric,
>   "Many a new love will find me" (among other "many a new") and it
> has never seemed anything but common usage to me.
>   Also, "'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" is
> curious, for both seem completely normal.  As I do not ordinarily
> write dialogue, I am unlikely to be writing them out, either; but
> they are entirely "normal."
>   L. Urdang
>
>
>
> Joseph Salmons <jsalmons at WISC.EDU> wrote:
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> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Joseph Salmons
> Subject: Re: "So big a house"
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> 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
>> Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
>> Subject: Re: "So big a house"
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>> -
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>> 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 " (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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