The Future-future perfect

While listening to a podcast the other day it’s suddenly struck me that now that we have the internet and podcasts and the like, we can play around with language more than ever before.

The host of the podcast said, with no sense that this was unusual, “I have a book coming out and by the time you hear this, it will have been published tomorrow.”  I love the idea that nowadays an action can have been completed in the future. I’m not sure what we should call this tense – the future-future perfect perhaps?

How English lost the double negative (and French gained it)

double negativesDouble negatives are considered bad grammar in English. Try telling an English teacher that you “haven’t got no pencils” or that you “didn’t see no-one” and he or she will pounce and say “Aha…. A double negative cancels out to become a positive, so you do have some pencils and you did see somebody.”

It hasn’t always been like this though. There was a time in English when using a double negative was an acceptable way of emphasising something. Shakespeare is littered with double, and even triple, negatives!

In As You Like It, Celia says: You know my father hath no child but I, nor none is like to have…

In Richard III, Stanley says: “I never was nor never will be”

And in Twelfth Night, Viola says: I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth.
And that no woman has, nor never none
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.”

Other languages still have a double negative. For example in Spanish to say I see nothing you would say “No veo nada.”

Well, if it was good enough for Shakespeare, and it’s still good enough for other European languages, what went wrong in English? To paraphrase Baldric in Blackadder goes forth, “ There must have been a moment when double negatives being acceptable went away, and double negatives not being acceptable came along. So, how did we get from the one case of affairs to the other case of affairs?”

Well, what happened is that the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason came along. Mathematics became more socially important and scholars tried to impose the same mathematical rules to language. In the mid 1700s Robert Lowth wrote a book about English grammar, proclaiming that two negatives must make a positive, and so it has been ever since.

Interestingly – French made the opposite change. As anyone who has tried to learn French will probably remember, to say something in the negative you have to make a ne pas sandwich. I don’t want is “je ne veux pas, I don’t know is “je ne sais pas” and so on. If you’ve ever wondered why you had to use two bits, and why the second word was the same as the word for a step, well… there is a reason!

It wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time I don’t want was “je ne veux, I don’t know was “je ne sais” and so on. But then there came a great fashion for exaggeration for emphasis: I couldn’t eat another mouthful….I couldn’t drink another drop……I couldn’t walk another step. Over time this manner of speaking became the norm, but then gradually most of the expressions disappeared, just leaving “pas” which tacked itself onto all of the negatives and has stayed there ever since.

And that’s the story of how English lost the double negative, and French gained it.

The Subject Complement

There was a debate among some teachers on Facebook last night about the sentence “I am too tired.” The initial question was why is ‘too’ considered an adverb? But this quickly turned into a debate about the word ‘tired’.

Usually if I disagree with what others are saying I’ll offer my opinion and then step back. Life is too short to spend it arguing with people I have never met when I could be spending the time with people I love. This time I can’t do that because I’m worried by the number of people teaching their classes that ‘tired’ is a verb in this sentence. It isn’t. It’s an adjective.

There seems to be two main reasons for the misconception. One is that people were confusing the adjective ‘tired’ with the past participle of the verb ‘to tire’, which is also ‘tired’. The other is that many people believe that adverbs only modify verbs.

The second is easy to sort out. Check out any English grammar book, or just Google ‘adverb’, and you will discover it’s a word which can modify a verb, an adjective or another adverb. And the first? Well, as languages are my passion, let’s look at some foreign languages first, and then let me take you on to a journey into the unknown.

If you want to say ‘I am tired’ in French, as a man you would say, “je suis fatigué” and as a woman you would say, “je suis fatiguée”. The extra ‘e’ is because the word for tired is an adjective and in French adjectives have to agree with the gender of the noun. It’s the same in Spanish with estoy cansado / estoy cansada, where the final letter changes depending on whether you are a man or a woman – because it’s an adjective, and adjectives have to agree with the gender of the noun. If I want to use ‘fatigué’ as a past participle, eg I tired my dog (by walking him too far) I don’t even use ‘suis’ (am) as the auxiliary verb, I used ‘ai’ (have): ‘j’ai fatigue mon chien…..’

Ok, French and Spanish are romance languages and English is Germanic, so let’s look at German too.
I am tired: “Ich bin müde.”
I tired him out: “Ich habe ihn ermüdet.”
They use ‘habe’ (have) not ‘bin’ (am) as the auxiliary verb and adjective ‘müde’ and past participle ‘ermüdet’ don’t even have the same form. Hopefully this helps to explain that even though in English ‘tired’ can be both an adjective and the past participle of ‘to tire’, context is everything!

If you’re still not convinced, then come on that journey I promised you – a journey to the land of the subject complement.

A subject complement is the noun, adjective, pronoun or preposition that follows a ‘linking verb’, ie the verb that links two things together. Examples of linking verbs are ‘to be’, ‘to seem’, ‘to become’ and ‘to feel’.

In the sentence “I am tired”, ‘I’ is the subject, ‘am’ is the linking verb and ‘tired’ is the subject complement – in this case an adjective. If the example sentence had been ‘I am here’ or ‘I am a girl’, I doubt that anyone would be arguing that ‘here’ or ‘a girl’ were verbs. Imagine the example had used a different adjective, eg “He is angry.” “She is sweet.” I would be surprised if people had argued that ‘angry’ or ‘sweet’ were verbs.

Let’s try putting that ‘too’ back into the sentence as that seems to be the word that caused the confusion. “I am too angry to listen to you.” “She is too sweet for her own good.” “That shade of red is too gaudy for my taste.” It’s quite clear in these sentences that ‘angry’, ‘sweet’ and ‘gaudy’ are not verbs.

“I am too tired to continue this argument.”
‘I’ is the subject,
‘am’ is the linking verb,
‘too tired to continue this argument’ is the subject complement, which is also an adjectival phrase
Since ‘too’ tells us more about the adjective ‘tired’ it’s an adverb.

I hope this has helped and that you now feel more confident to teach your classes. Oh and be happy that ‘subject complement’ isn’t (yet) a grammatical term that Year 6 need to know 🙂