Against the grain
Geoff Pullum at Language Log skewers Bryan Garner and his grammar section in the latest Chicago Manual of Style.
posted by Nicole @ 11:16 PM
7 comments
A Capital Idea
A copy-editing blog covering grammar and newspapers like they're going out of style.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
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- Nicole Stockdale is a copy editor at The Dallas Morning News, but the opinions here are her own. Please leave comments and send e-mail; she never copy-edits correspondence.
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7 Comments:
See, this is why I try to steer clear of the terminology trap. I care whether something means what the writer thinks it means; I don't care whether it's a glucosamine adductor or a chondroitin abductor.
Moreover, if “with reference to” isn’t a phrasal preposition, what is it? Apparently, the only people privy to the “correct” terminology are those who plunk down $160 for the 1,800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. I can’t vouch for Garner's “inflected form” tallying skills, but his work is well researched, highly respected and most appreciated by those of us who actually work with the actual language for a living. He strikes a reasonable balance between the prescriptive and descriptive. And he writes in a civil tone.
(Almost everyone, of course, actually works with the actual language. Many of us just have conflicting notions about what the actual language is, or about what it should be.)
Nicole points out that Mr. Pullum has graciously elaborated on his objection to the term “phrasal prepositions." I thank the professor. His knowledge in these matters is worthy of our highest esteem.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001871.html
Still, for the purposes of my own work, I find that it makes sense to follow the definition of “preposition” that's listed in the American Heritage Dictionary:
Preposition
abbr. prep. A word or phrase placed typically before a substantive and indicating the relation of that substantive to a verb, an adjective, or another substantive, as English "at," "by," "with," "from," and "in regard to."
http://www.bartleby.com/61/7/P0530700.html
To Peter:
The trouble with the dictionary entry for "preposition" is that... well, it's ALL trouble, really. None of it's right. But all that's relevant here is whether sequences like "in consideration of" are PHRASES in any sense that has relevance in syntax. They are not, as I try to explain on Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001871.html).
Think of pages 143 to the end of one book plus pages 1-29 of another. It's a sequence of pages, but it's not a book. That's analogous to what I'm saying about how not every sequence of words is a phrase.
--Geoff Pullum,
posting as Anonymous because if he has one more password to remember his brain will implode.
The Latin-borrowed "per" is synonymous for "according to".
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