"of which...of"

[Arnold Zwicky]

On May 17, 2012, at 4:18 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> Unless I miss my guess, this truly nonstandard construction is usually
> associated with latter-day neophyte writers.

i wrote on this list on 7/13/08, in response to examples from Jon:

 >back in 2007, we had a series of postings on Language Log on examples with both both a fronted and a stranded preposition.  these go back to Old English, and are attested throughout the history of the language.

 >... in most of these examples both prepositions were compatible with the rest of the clause.  in fact, most of the examples have the same preposition fronted and stranded -- a kind of preposition doubling.<

one point of the Language Log discussions was that the examples were emphatically not mostly from student writing.  another point was that the examples were so common that it was hard to dismiss them as inadvertent errors; Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum eventually suggested that the combination of fronting and stranding was simply becoming a new construction of English.

still another point was that there were several different types of "double Ps", including a type illustrated by an example Jon gave in 2008, in which the apparently fronted P serves as a marker of relativization, while the stranded P is the one appropriate within the relative clause.  but Jon's example below is a routine "P doubling" case (indeed, with the most common doubled P, _of_).
>
> However, here's a 1928 ex. from an academic writer that sailed through
> copy-editing. I assume it was a slip of the pen:
>
> 1928 Angelo S. Rappoport _Superstitions of Sailors_ (London: S. Paul) vii:
> It may be attributed to three sources, viz.: Firstly, the interpretation
> and explanation of numerous phenomena actually observed, but the cause of
> which the early mariner was still ignorant of.

as i said above, examples like this occur with some frequency from OE on.  the impression that they are a relatively recent ("latter-day") phenomenon might simply be a result of our having access to so much recent writing and speech.  (in any case, it's hard to search for them, other than by hand-scanning large amounts of text.)

arnold

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