preposition - zero variation

[Wilson Gray]

–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: preposition - zero variation
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Feb 16, 2009, at 12:18 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>> arnold, how about:
>>
>> NP1 VP1 _for_ NP2 to VP2
>>
>> as in sentences like:
>>
>> "I would like _for_ you to comment on this insertion of? / failure to
>> delete? _for_."
>>
>> as opposed to:
>>
>> "I' would like _0_  you to comment on this ..."
>
> Jespersen's treatment of cases like "like for" (MEG, vol. 5) is that
> the verb has an infinitive clause as its object and that clause is
> introduced by "for".  there's  a later tradition for labeling "for" in
> such cases as a complementizer; it's certainly not a garden-variety
> preposition, so this construction doesn't fall into the same type as
> the simple cases of P~zero i looked at in my blog posting.
>
> Jespersen listed a number of verbs that occur in this construction,
> but gave only one example of "like for" (from a George Eliot novel,
> where it was probably intended to represent Warwickshire dialect).
>
> MWDEU has an entry on "like for" that suggests it is (or at least was)
> primarily a Southern and Midland expression, and primarily a feature
> of the spoken language.  objections to it -- MWDEU lists seven -- seem
> to favor the Northern, zero, variant. the "for" variant, MWDEU says,
> "is hard to find in edited prose and seemingly always has been, even
> though Bryant traces it back to 1474.
>
> DARE identifies it as chiefly Southern and South Midlands and has
> cites from the 1880s on.
>
> New Fowler's (Burchfield 1998) says it hasn't spread outside America
> and occurs mostly in Southern states but is "not so regionally
> restricted now".
>
> "like for" is an obvious candidate for criticism on the basis of Omit
> Needless Words, but i haven't found anyone who says this straight out.
>
>> That is, is this only a BE and other non-standard usage
>
> well, regional; i suspect that "non-standard" is too strong a judgment.

An excellent point! I wouldn't want for people to think that I'm some
kind of usage snob.

-Wilson
>
>> or has its use
>> among the general population merely escaped my notice?
>
> probably this.  i *think* i use it myself sometimes, in writing as
> well as speech.
>
> arnold
>
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