"“Everyone knows each other”, ... The -s suffix on the present-tense verb knows tells us that the subject ... counts as singular for purposes of subject-verb agreement. But each other, famously, requires a semantically plural subject. That is why They know each other is grammatical and *He knows each other is not. From this and nothing else it follows that semantic plurality and morphosyntactic singularity are compatible in English."The rest of the article points out that singular they has a long history.
The second article, Irrational terror over adjunct placement at Harvard, also at Language Log, bears on so-called split infinitives, also making the point of their long history of good English usage. In this case, it's by way of noting bad usage arising from trying to avoid a split infinitive. Picking up a section from a Harvard publication, the issue becomes clear:
David Rockefeller,... has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates through international experiences
What's the issue? Well, read it again and if that doesn't work here's the thing: ""What are “dramatically learning opportunities”, you might ask? We’d normally expect an adjectival rather than adverbial modifier on “learning opportunities”; is it a typo for “dramatic learning opportunities”?
Now here's the analysis:
Standard English in both its American and British varieties permits a manner adjunct (like the adverb dramatically) to occur in various places in a clause, one of them being between to and the plain form verb in an infinitival clause, but it does not normally permit any adjunct to occur between a transitive verb and its direct object. Thus [1] and [3] are grammatical, but [2] is not:
[1] This gift has dramatically improved things. (before verb)
[2] *This gift has improved dramatically things. (before object)
[3] This gift has improved things dramatically. (after object)
A further piece of evidence to show the legitimacy of the split infinitive. Students: use 'em and be happy.
4 comments:
surely it just needs a comma after 'dramatically'?
I normally delete blatant marketing comments (so-called comment spam). That last one I've left because it has oxymoronic qualities which make a nice irony: to advertise a website for learning English, and in doing so to produce a sentence that is not grammatical English. Just so you know; that should be "...good blog for learning English conversation" or "... to learn ...". I guess the advert is self-defeating.
@Jennifer: I see what you're trying to do with that suggestion, but I judge it doesn't work. I think if you added a comma also after 'increase' (to almost parenthesise the adverb) it would work, but it wouldn't be the syntax that the writer had in their head, I suspect. The adverb would really and truly be better placed to 'split the infinitive': it actually sounds better if not best that way.
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