Jose Carillo on the English Language

The grammar for avoiding blame for awful or disastrous outcomes

2012-01-02T01:03:00.000-08:00

Almost always, the end of the year is review time for what the individual or the institution has done or has been unable to do during the year in question. Since human nature makes it so difficult to admit failure and culpability, such annual reviews often also become occasions for passing the blame for awful or disastrous outcomes. For instance, in the case of the horrendous disaster wrought by Typhoon Sendong in southern Philippines recently, the finger-pointing for why it resulted in the loss of almost 2,000 lives continues without letup to this day. We all know the routine, and as always, the finger-pointing language used is both familiar and disheartening.

In the English language, in particular, there’s a special verb form that allows people to avoid acknowledging responsibility for things that go sour or tragic. That verb form is the causative verb, and in an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in early 2006, I discussed how this verb lends itself very nicely to the pass-the-blame routine. I have decided to post that essay here to help us see through the smokescreen of words coming from the usual finger-pointers. Who knows, a good grasp of the grammar of the causative verbs could make us figure out intelligently rather than superstitiously who’s really to blame for the grave misfortunes that have hounded our country these past many months. (January 1, 2012)

Using causative and factitive verbs

When an awful act or serious mistake is made, particularly one that leads to a disastrous or tragic outcome, rare indeed is the soul that comes out in the open to take the blame for it. The usual response of the culpable is to ascribe the deed to somebody else or something else:

“They had me scoop the money from the vault at gunpoint.” (The perpetrator of an inside job is trying to extricate himself from the crime.)

“An earthquake made the mountain unleash the deadly mudslide.” (Actually, loggers had ruthlessly stripped the mountain of every inch of its forest cover.)

“The steel gate’s collapse caused the people to stampede.” (The crowd-control measures simply were too puny for so large a mass of humanity aiming to get rich quick.)

The English language has, in fact, evolved a special verb form to make people avoid acknowledging responsibility—if only for the moment—when caught in such situations. That verb form is the causative verb, which carries out an action that causes another action to happen. In the three sentences given as examples above, in particular, “have” is the causative verb in the first, causing the action “scoop” to happen; “make” is the causative verb in the second, causing the action “unleash” to happen; and “cause” is the causative verb in the third, causing the action “stampede” to happen. In each case, the crime or calamitous outcome is acknowledged but no one is accepting responsibility for it.

Causative verbs are, of course, not only meant to make people avoid taking responsibility for things that have gone sour or disastrous. In general, they are used to indicate the sort of actions that people don’t do themselves but allow, ask, or force other people to do: “Emily’s supervisor permitted her to leave early today.” “Our landlady reminded us to pay our overdue rent.” “The thieves forced the tourists to hand over their jewelry.” Note that in a causative construction, the subject doesn’t actually do the action of the operative verb but only causes the object to do that action. In the last example above, for instance, the subject is “the thieves” and the object is “the tourists,” and the causative verb “force” makes this object do the action of handing over the jewelry.

The other most commonly used causative verbs are “allow,” “assist,” “convince,” “employ,” “help,” “hire,” “let,” “motivate,” “remind,” “require,” and “urge.” When used in a sentence, practically all of these causative verbs are followed by an object (a noun or pronoun) followed by an infinitive: “We allowed foreigners to invest in the local mining industry.” “The recruiter convinced me to leave for Jeddah at once.” “The desperate applicant employed deceit to get the plum job.”

The only notable exceptions to this pattern are the causative verbs “have,” “make,” and “let.” They are followed by a noun or pronoun serving as an object, but this time what follows the object is not an infinitive but the base form of the verb (meaning its infinitive form without the “to”):

“I had my fellow investors sign the incorporation papers yesterday.”

“They made him finish writing the book in only five weeks.” “We let the students pick the class schedules they want.”

Like the causative verb, another type of verb that exhibits peculiar behavior is the so-called factitive verb. While the usual transitive verb can take only one direct object, a factitive verb actually needs two of them. There are only a few of its kind, however, among them “choose,” “elect,” “judge,” “adjudge,” “make,” “name,” and “select.”

Here’s how a factitive verb works: “The prestigious finance magazine last night chose our company “Best at Consumer Goods” in its annual poll.” Here, “choose” is the factitive verb, “our company” is the direct object, and “‘Best at Consumer Goods’” is the objective complement—all three in tight, uninterrupted interlock. (February 20, 2006)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 20, 2006 issue © 2006 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

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Chiasmus is arousing rhetoric that can weaken our judgment

2011-12-24T03:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the moderating influence of the Christmas Season, we are enjoying a much-welcome respite from the vicious propaganda war over the forthcoming impeachment trial of the Philippine Supreme Court justice. After the holidays, however, we can be sure that the protagonists will be revving up their rhetoric to the hilt, so it’s very important for us to be able to sift truth, half-truth, and outright falsehood from their pronouncements. We need to be keenly aware how language is being manipulated to prove a point, and mustn’t allow vaulting or inflammatory rhetoric to put blinders over our eyes and stampede us into making wrong judgments.

A figure of speech that we should particularly watch out for in our overheating political atmosphere is the chiasmus, which is language configured to strongly arouse our emotions and diminish our logical thinking. Whether the chiasmus is a great truth or an outrageous fallacy masquerading as one, it certainly won’t be in short supply in our midst after New Year’s Day of 2012; it will worm itself into public forums and debates, media editorials and opinion columns, and rallies and demonstrations on the impeachment issue. For this reason, I thought of posting here an essay on chiasmus that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times way back in 2003. By having a clear understanding of what chiasmus is and how it works, we can better take delight and satisfaction in the truthful ones that come our way and dismiss the outright falsehoods lurking among them. (December 25, 2011)

A powerful figure of speech that we should watch out for

Ever wondered how some people have moved us or inspired us to do great things their way, or mesmerized us, put blinders on our eyes, then made us do irrational things that we would never have dreamed of doing had we not been under their spell?

If so, then the speakers—unless they had recited great poetry—must have been using chiasmus. This figure of speech towers above all the other rhetorical devices in its ability to lower our built-in defenses and arouse our emotions. We could very well call chiasmus the linguistic incarnation of charisma—that rare and elusive power of certain people to inspire fierce loyalty and devotion among their followers.

The use of chiasmus dates back to antiquity. In the 6th century B.C., the extremely wealthy Lydian king Croesus went on record using it: “In peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.” Such wisdom in only 13 words! Is it possible that he became fabulously wealthy because he was so adept at chiasmus and—by implication—at compelling people’s obedience? Or did he become so good at coining chiasmus because his wealth had allowed him the leisure to craft it?

Now take a look at this familiar line from U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, on which so many English-language elocution students had labored investing their own vocal energies over the years: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Just 17 words, but they give us the feeling of an immensely satisfying four-hour lecture on good citizenship. Then see chiasmus at work in this charming line by the English physician and author Havelock Ellis: “Charm is a woman’s strength; strength is a man’s charm.” And, one more time, hark to this timeless sage advice from Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.”

By now you must have already discovered for yourself the fundamental structure and mechanism of chiasmus: it reverses the order of words in two parallel phrases. Take this chiasmus by the legendary Hollywood actress Mae West: “I’d rather be looked over than overlooked.” “Looked over” is “overlooked” in reverse, making the speaker wickedly but deliciously imply that she enjoys being ogled at. Or take this arresting, old advertising slogan of a Philippine insurance company: “If someone depends on you, you can depend on Insular Life.” By some linguistic alchemy, the parallel word reversals arouse our senses, disarming us so we readily accept their claim as true. Chiasmus has this power because it heightens the sense of drama in language by surprise. It is no wonder that it holds the distinction of being mankind’s all-time vehicle for expressing great truths and, conversely, also great untruths.

Most types of chiasmus reverse the words of familiar sayings in a felicitously parallel way, as in the French proverb, “Love makes time pass, time makes love pass.” For chiasmus to succeed, however, the two insights offered by the word reversals should both be true and survive subsequent scrutiny. (They could also be untrue, and therein lies the danger in chiasmus in the hands of demagogues and charlatans.) But chiasmus need not be an exact reversal of a familiar saying. Take what the English writer Richard Brinksley said on beholding for the first time the woman whom he was to later marry: “Why don’t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.” This implied chiasmus cleverly reverses this usual invitation of proud homemakers: “I’d like you to see my roses.” And chiasmus also nicely takes the form of questions, as in this line from Antigone by the 5th century Greek dramatist Sophocles: “What greater ornament to a son than a father’s glory, or to a father than a son’s honorable conduct?”

If chiasmus is this pleasurable, does it mean that we should spend a lot of time composing it ourselves to impress people? Not at all! Chiasmus is meant to be used very sparingly, to be reserved only for those very special moments when saying them can truly spell a make-or-break difference in our lives, like preparing for battle, wooing the hearts and minds of people, ruing abject failure, or celebrating great success. In our everyday lives, it is enough for us to spot a good chiasmus so we can savor its wisdom, and to have the wisdom to know when we are simply being conned with fallacy or propaganda masquerading as great truth. (October 16, 2003)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 16, 2003 issue © 2003 by The Manila Times. All rights reserved.

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The need for rational thinking in the battle for the public mind

2011-12-19T03:20:00.000-08:00

There’s now a ferocious battle for the public mind among three major independent branches of the Philippine government, namely the Executive and the Lower House on one hand, and the Supreme Court, on the other, with the Senate as sole judge of which side is in the right or in the wrong. The issue to be resolved is the recent impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Renato C. Corona. The bones of contention here are without doubt highly political and complex, but I believe that as enunciated by a 20th century American jurist, “Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.” But that dictum is perhaps too one-dimensional in this particular case, so it might be advisable to add to the equation the possible elements of patriotism, vainglory, hatred, anger, or ambition in whatever measure they might come—elements that inevitably breed partisanship and biased thinking.

So, in the heat of this ongoing political battle, how do we figure out which side is rational, correct, and just? Which side is propping up its position with a forked tongue or with the sword of truth? Which side, indeed, is worthy of public acceptance and support?

To help us discern truth and falsehood in the vicious war of words that’s now engulfing the public sphere, I thought of posting in this week’s edition of the Forum an essay on language and logic I wrote in 2003 for my English-usage column in The Manila Times. I have updated the original essay by replacing references to topical examples during that time with more current and more relevant ones. I trust that you’ll find the essay helpful in arriving at an intelligent and informed perspective about this raging political conflict. (December 18, 2011)

Using words and labels as tools for persuasion

Most of us will be in familiar territory when we talk about using vocabulary as a tool for persuasion. To begin with, hardly ever are we neutral in our choice of words. Parents slant their words in particular ways to reinforce their parenting. Children do the same things to get what they want or get away with things. Our enemies do it to denigrate us in the eyes of others. Religious fanatics do it to make the faithful suspend their disbelief despite overwhelming evidence that they shouldn’t. Advertisers do it to make us part with our money gladly or without guilt. Ideologues and seekers of public office do it to prime us up for their political agenda. With no exception, all of us subtly stamp our words with a personal bias to persuade others to believe what we believe and to do what we want them to do.

First on our language agenda is, of course, to label people, places, and things. Depending on our intent, biases, or predispositions, for instance, a medical doctor becomes a “health professional,” a “lifesaver,” a “cutup artist,” or a “quack,” and a public relations man becomes a “corporate communicator,” a “spin master,” a “hack writer,” or a “flack.” We do this not necessarily to denigrate people per se, but only to quickly indicate our attitude and feelings toward the subject. This is because if we don’t label our subjects, it often takes us an unduly long time to put them in context for our audiences. Rightly or wrongly then, the idea behind labeling in suasive diction (“Giving a touch of authority to our prose,” December 3, 2011) is primarily to achieve economy in language. We label things because time is short and we don’t have all the time in the world to explain ourselves.

Using labels is only the beginning of how we slant our language. Even without meaning to or often without knowing it, we take recourse to idiomatic expressions, clichés, slogans and metaphors to drive home our point more efficiently. Most of us know, for instance, that “it’s water under the bridge,” “as sure as the sun sets in the west,” and “at the end of the day” are horribly timeworn clichés, but we still compulsively use them to emphasize our point. We have no qualms of running clichés to exhaustion, unless we happen to be professional speakers or writers who must come up with new ways of saying things as a matter of honor. In fact, the only time we are much more circumspect about using them is when we write something for the public record or for publication under our names. Like most everybody else, we don’t want to have any evidence of lack of originality or of shameless copycatting to be taken against us.

However, there are two major disciplines that methodically and ruthlessly use clichés, slogans, and metaphors for mind-bending purposes: advertising and politics. Here, we enter that region of language where hardly anything said is exactly what it means literally. We come face-to-face with “double-speak” or rhetoric exploited to the hilt, language that often teeters at the very outer edges of the truth and carried out by incessant repetition. It is suasive diction that, for good or ill, seeks to build niches in our minds for all sorts of marketing or political agenda. We can see, of course, that the mass media is chockfull of advertising that uses this kind of slanted language; as to particular specimens of political propaganda, we need go to specifics here since we are in the midst of a propaganda war that’s being viciously fought among three supposedly independent branches of a democratic government.¹ It is enough that we are forewarned against taking their tirades against one another at their face value, and that we forearm ourselves by learning how to appreciate their messages critically and intelligently. As they say in Latin, caveat emptor, a warning that what we are dealing with here is language that’s barbed all over inside.

These thoughts about advertising and politics bring us to the use of grammatical ambiguity as a tool for suasive diction. Remember our lessons for using “it”-cleft sentences to achieve emphasis? (“When Even the Passive Voice Isn’t Enough,” June 26, 2009) By definition, we defined the cleft as one that “cleaves” or splits a single-clause sentence into two clauses for semantic emphasis, and the “it-cleft” is that variety that uses the function word “it” to highlight an object of special focus or theme, as in this statement: “It appears that our camp will triumph in this fight.”² In advertising and political propaganda, this sentence construction is often designed to artfully hide the source of the statement of the “experiencer” to make it appear as a fact rather than a conjecture. That sleigh of language gives the semblance of certainty—a deliberate distortion of language to create what we all know as the “bandwagon” effect.

In suasive diction, therefore, it behooves us not only to watch our own language, but also the language of those who would deliberately subvert it to promote their agenda at our expense. (March 18, 2004)

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¹I have taken the liberty of revising this particular sentence to make the context of its reference to particular forms of political propaganda more current and relevant. In the original essay, the reference was to the fact that the country was “in the midst of a viciously fought national election season.”

²For the same reason stated in the first footnote above, this sample quote replaces this quote in the original essay: “It appears that our candidate will score a landslide victory.”

The great strides made by English toward nondiscriminatory grammar

2011-12-11T16:35:00.000-08:00

For centuries, English had been intrinsically a sexist and discrimatory language, its lexicon and grammar not only explicitly treating men as superior to women but also emphasizing the dependence of women to men. This, of course, is evident in the strong male bias in such age-old idioms as “the best man for the job” and “one-man show” and in such occupational nouns and jobs as “craftsman” and “postman,” along with the use of the masculine “his” as default pronoun for the indefinite pronouns “everybody” and “everyone.” Thanks to the impetus provided by the feminist and civil libertarian movements in the major English-speaking countries, however, the English language has been seeing a welcome shift toward nondiscriminatory grammar, structure, and form these past several decades.

In a two-part essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times way back in 2004, “Using nondiscrimimatory language,” I took a look at these revolutionary changes in the English language and focused on the four major sexist tendencies and biases that it had most successfully curbed or at least attenuated. I have decided to post that essay here to clarify matters for those who, despite their best efforts, still find their written and spoken English hamstrung by its built-in sexist or discriminatory grammar and semantics. (December 11, 2011)

Using nondiscriminatory language

Part I:

During the past several decades, a sometimes raucous but generally silent revolution has been taking place within the English language. This revolution—call it an induced evolution, if you may—is the much welcome shift of English toward nondiscriminatory grammar, structure, and form. Fanned by the civil libertarian and feminist movements in the major English-speaking countries, this movement has substantially freed the inherently sexist, chauvinist language of Chaucer and Shakespeare from some of its most vexing linguistic biases. For the first time in its 1,500-year history, and well in keeping with its role as today’s global language, English is now consciously nondiscriminatory in its more formal forms. Informally, of course, it still has to find ways of cleaning up some more intractable semantic vestiges that prevent it from expressing total equality and respect for all individuals.

The language has been most successful in handling four problematic tendencies: (1) discriminating against women in word formation, grammar, and sentence structure; (2) universalizing human attributes in favor of men; (3) treating people asymmetrically based on such aspects as gender, age, and ethnicity; and (4) unfairly focusing on irrelevant, discriminatory characteristics of people when describing them in negative situations. We will examine these areas of success more closely, then look at the hard-core semantic structures for which English still has to find enduring nondiscriminatory alternatives.

Nondiscriminatory word formation, grammar, and sentence structure. For centuries, English had been bedeviled by its linguistic propensity not only to treat men as superior to women but also to emphasize the dependence of women to men. We all know, for instance, how inherently sexist the most common English idioms are, like “the man in the street,” “the best man for the job,” “one-man show,” and “man to man.” Similarly, its generic occupational nouns and job titles have for ages been male-oriented: “laymen,” “policeman,” “businessman,” “craftsman,” “fireman,” “postman,” and “salesman.”

Due to pressure from the feminist movement, however, major inroads have been achieved against this blatant sexism in the English vocabulary, making those phrases politically incorrect in educated circles. As nondiscriminatory equivalents for “the man in the street,” for instance, we now have “the average citizen,” “the average person,” or “an ordinary person.” For “the best man for the job,” we now have “the best candidate [applicant, person] for the job”; and for “one-man show,” we now have “solo show” or “one-person show.” In the occupational areas, of course, the following nondiscriminatory equivalents are now routine in formal circles: for “layman,” we have “laypeople,” “non-specialist,” or “non-professional”; for “policeman,” we have “police officer”; for “businessman,” we have “business executive”; and for “fireman,” we have “firefighter.”

English is also successfully veering away from the traditionally sexist way of adding the suffixes –ess, –ette, and –trix to feminize male words, as in “seamstress” for “seamster” and “poetess” for “poet,” “usherette” for “usher” and “bachelorette” for “bachelor,” and “administratrix” for “administrator” and “mediatrix” for “mediator.” Self-respecting women rightly saw this word formation as trivializing and discriminatory, in much the same way as labeling a female professional as, say, a “woman doctor,” a “lady lawyer,” a “woman reporter,” or a “female accountant.” Such expressions are now scrupulously avoided, particularly in contexts where gender-specific reference is irrelevant.

Avoiding the tendency to universalize human attributes in favor of men. Because of its inherent male chauvinism, the English language has historically treated men as the universal stereotype for humanity in general, glossing over women to the point of their total invisibility or exclusion. Thus, even the usually politically correct American president Abraham Lincoln could not help but be male chauvinistic in his “Gettysburg Address”: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth to this continent a new nation…” What happened, the feminists correctly asked, to the mothers and grandmothers and sisters and aunts on board the Mayflower when it docked at Portsmouth? Today, of course, a politically astute editor or adviser would have easily convinced Lincoln to change “our forefathers” to “our forebears” or, even more semantically precise, to “our grandparents.” We are well advised to do the same in our spoken and written English in the interest of gender equality and political correctness.

Avoiding the asymmetrical treatment of people on such aspects as gender, age, and ethnicity. Another glaring discriminatory aspect of English usage that we must consciously avoid is focusing on the attributes or background of females in negative or unflattering contexts involving males, as in this statement: “Five suspected drug addicts, four of them teenage male students and the fifth a pretty coed, were arrested in a predawn raid on a drug joint in Taguig, Parañaque City.” Such discriminatory language is now becoming rare in the more enlightened English-speaking countries, but it is still endemic in Philippine journalism, particularly in the English-language tabloids. We still have miles to go before we can finally exorcise such patently discriminatory goblins from our macho culture. (March 19, 2004)

Part II:

We resume our discussion of the use of nondiscriminatory language in English, this time focusing on its success in avoiding asymmetrical treatment of people on account of their age, ethnicity and social standing. To begin with, it is no longer socially and politically correct to label people past middle age as “the old,” “the aged,” or “septuagenarians”; they are more properly referred to now as “older people,” “seniors,” or “senior citizens.” In the same token, to call people in the lower age bracket as “youths,” “juveniles,” “adolescents,” “greenhorns,” or “neophytes” would be insensitive; the socially acceptable generic terms today are “young persons” and “young people.” Then, when referring to ethnic group members in negative situations, it is now unthinkable for the mainstream mass media to run a discriminatory headline like this: “Lithuanian [Polynesian, Armenian, Dane, Filipino, etc.] nabbed in Miami multinational drug bust.” The era of gratuitously stereotyping ethnic people for shock effect is long over.

Here in the Philippines, however, we are still prone to using dangerously unfair English-language stereotypes, particularly when referring to the disadvantaged sectors of our society. Take this recent headline of a leading national newspaper: “Old building collapses; 10 looters feared dead.” The story reported: “Nasipit Mayor Enrico Corvera said most of the victims were scavengers looking for metals inside the dilapidated and concrete-walled building...when it collapsed at around 2 p.m. yesterday.” The headline categorically labels those who died in the accident as “looters,” while the mayor simply identifies them as “scavengers.” A “looter,” by definition, is someone who “plunders or sacks in war,” or who “robs especially on a large scale and usually by violence or corruption”; a “scavenger,” on the other hand, is plainly “a garbage collector” or “a junk collector.” “Looting” is a criminal offense while “scavenging” is not, however lowly the occupation may appear, and no amount of headline-letter-count constraints can justify glossing over that difference in meaning. Because of the writer’s semantic ignorance, the victims have not only been killed owing to their poverty but were slandered even in death.

Avoiding unfairly focusing on irrelevant or discriminatory characteristics of people when describing them in negative situations. It is obviously difficult for people to forego or curb the tendency to use derogatory language privately against their opponents or pet-peeves. Human nature seems to be permanently wired for that. But to use blatantly discriminatory language in polite society or in the mass media is an altogether different matter. We have to avoid it not only in the interest of good taste and political correctness but also to avoid committing slander or libel.

Take this discriminatory reporting still prevalent in Philippine journalism: “Singer X was adjudged the ‘Female Vocalist of the Year’ award despite her diminutive size, being only 54 cm. on bare feet.” (What does her height got to do with her singing voice?) Or this spiel by a TV sports commentator: “The two runners performed in the 20K marathon like geriatrics just out of the hospital.” (This discriminatory remark slanders the runners and ailing aged people in general in one fell swoop.) And then this recent diatribe by a magazine columnist: “And when [Politician X], ever so slowly (and perhaps painfully), raised his arthritic right arm to emphasize a point, as we were taught to do in Ateneo elocution class, it was obvious to me that his target audience was the Living Dead.” (Deliciously wicked, that dig at “the Living Dead,” but the terribly unkind reference to Politician X’s pain in raising his supposedly arthritic right arm borders on the libelous, I think.)

Having taken a quick look at the progress English has made so far in fighting discriminatory language, we will now examine its hard-core grammar limitation that we already know so well, but which we must take pains learning how to handle better: English has no gender-neutral pronoun for the third person singular, a quirk that forces it to use the generic masculine forms “he,” “him,” and “his” to refer to both men and women. We thus usually end up with discriminatory language that makes women invisible, like this: “The typical Filipino voter is a laborer who works in a factory, or a farmer who subsists in marginal farming. He has a wife who usually augments the family income with piecework or retail selling. Sometimes these roles are simply reversed.” For gender equality, and also considering the fact that Filipino women slightly outnumber the men, it would be prudent to refer to the Filipino in the generic plural: “Majority of Filipinos are laborers who work in a factory, or farmers who subsist in marginal farming. They have spouses who usually augment the family income through piecework or retail selling.”

By being more discerning in our choice of words, we can make ourselves confidently and pleasantly nondiscriminatory in our larger uses of the English language. (March 22, 2004)

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The serious lack of civility that afflicts public discourse

2011-12-04T23:19:00.000-08:00

At this time in our country when civility appears to be vanishing from the public sphere, when many traditional seats of power in our society seem to be going out of control or under assault or both, and when every threatened vested interest or emboldened rabble-rouser is now viciously aiming for the enemy’s jugular, it should be of great public interest to closely examine the kind of language being used by the protagonists and antagonists. Are they speaking and acting in keeping with who they think, presume, or pretend they are? Are they using language that conveys their thoughts and desires in ways that validate and support their own self-concept or projection of ourselves? Or is their language going out of bounds, eroding instead of giving a touch of authority to their public pronouncements?

I recall that towards the end of 2005, the country was being buffeted by the same lack of civility, a situation that prompted me to write an essay about suasive diction—the deft use of language to persuasively convey facts and the speaker’s feelings toward those facts—for my English-usage column in The Manila Times. I think that essay, “Giving a touch of authority to our prose,” has become even more relevant today so I thought of posting here today. (December 4, 2011)

Giving a touch of authority to our prose

“Oh what a pair we make,” whispered the Prince of Wales to the pilloried presumptive royal knight William in the riotously charming film A Knight’s Tale, “both trying hard to hide who we really are, and both miserably failing to do so.” For those who have not seen the movie, the prince was constrained to shed off his disguise as a monk among the lynching mob to save the disgraced knight, who a few days earlier had spared him from the ignominy of certain defeat by refusing to joust with him in a tournament. The knight, through the machinations of a villainous duke, was thereafter unmasked as a lowly thatcher’s son masquerading as a member of royalty, thus leading to his arrest and humiliation on the pillory.

This medieval morality tale gives a powerful insight into the crucial need to speak and act in keeping with who we think, presume, or pretend we are. When we write, in particular, we must use language that conveys our thoughts in ways that validate and support our own self-concept or projection of ourselves. The wife of the Caesar must not only be chaste but must look and sound chaste. The professor must really look and sound professorial. The presidentiable must really look and sound presidentiable. To fail to do this in both civilized and uncivilized society—or not to have the wisdom or guile to at least sustain the charade—is to invite catastrophe, which is precisely what brought the presumptive knight to the pillory for public lynching.

Be that as it may, our most potent tool for becoming credible is what the linguists call suasive diction. This is using language to persuasively convey facts and the speaker’s feelings toward those facts. No instrument is more potent for doing that, of course, than the writer’s or speaker’s vocabulary. Our words define us. Whether armed with excellent research or dubious information, whether motivated by good or bad intentions, we can turn off the audience with awkward or leaden words, or hold it in thrall with engaging words and well-turned phrases. It is largely through word choice, in fact, that we establish our credibility and rapport with our audience. Short of coercion or the force of arms, rarely can persuasive communication take place without this credibility and rapport.

The most basic technique for suasive diction is the proper use of the pronouns of power, namely “we,” “us,” “our,” “they,” and “them.” These innocent-looking pronouns can confer a sense of authority—the illusion of authority, if you may—to our written or spoken statements far beyond what the first-person singular can give. The first-person “I” and “me” speak only for the solitary communicator; the collective “we” and “us” speak for an entire group or institution, which people normally take for granted as less fallible and less prone to vainglory than the individual—hence more credible, more authoritative.

This is why, for instance, newspaper editorials routinely use the institutional “we” although they are usually crafted by a solitary writer not so high on the paper’s editorial totem pole; it’s also why tyrants and despots of every stripe and persuasion always invoke “the right vested in me by God/ law/ the sovereign people” to seize power or hold on to it, and why candidates of paltry qualification and virtue invariably invoke “the people’s great desire for change” or “divine signs in the sky” as their passport to public office.

Of course, “we,” “us,” “our,” “they,” and “them” work just as well as pronouns of solidarity. They foster a stronger sense of closeness and intimacy with the audience, and can more easily put audiences at ease with what the speaker has to say. In contrast, the first person “I” often comes across as too one-sided and self-serving, particularly in writing, while the second person “you” can sound too pedantic and intimidating. We stand a much greater chance of getting a fair hearing from those antagonistic to our position by making them think that we are actually on their side.

Even if we are good at using the pronouns of power and solidarity, however, we must not for a minute believe that they are all we need to achieve suasive diction. The facts supporting our contention must be substantial and accurate. Our opinions must be truly informed, not half-baked. Our logic must be sound and beyond reproach. Our delivery must me convincing. If not, we might just end up like that otherwise seemingly enlightened prince in A Knight’s Tale, lying to the lynching mob that William the thatcher’s son was actually descended from an ancient line of kings, then justifying that claim by nonchalantly invoking royal infallibility: “I say so by the authority of my father the King, and that’s beyond any contestation.”

Royally said indeed, but utterly illogical and absurd. (November 14, 2005)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, November 14, 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click this link to visit Jose Carillo's English Forum

The problem with words without sound semantic underpinnings

2011-11-28T23:23:00.000-08:00

Recently, in My Media English Watch in Jose Carillo’s English Forum, I made a passing comment about “coopetation,” a strange-sounding new word proudly coined by Mr. Andre Kahn, chair of the Advertising Board of the Philippines, during the recent Philippine Advertising Congress held in the recently renamed province of CamSur (it used to be “Camarines Sur”) in the Bicol Region. According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer news story that even used “coopetation” in its headline, Mr. Kahn was inspired to coin that word to describe the spirit that should prevail among rival advertising agencies. “Coopetition means that even though we compete within the industry we can cooperate for the common good of our members like what we have done here,” Mr. Kahn said. In short, he meant “coopetation” to be a happy fusion of the words “cooperation” and “competition.”

Today, I finally found the time to check “coopetation” with Google and found that it’s not new coinage at all. From what I can gather, that neologism and it variants “coopertition” or “co-opertition” have actually been recoined several times since 1913 to yield the sense of “cooperative competition.” But it looks like it didn’t get much traction outside business circles, even if it finally made it to the Oxford Dictionary after the 1980s as a mass noun denoting “collaboration between business competitors, in the hope of mutually beneficial results.” Surprisingly, though, my Merriam-Webster’s 11^th Collegiate Dictionary hasn’t officially recognized “coopetation” yet as a legitimate English word. Indeed, despite being recoined in earnest several times, “coopetition” definitely had not captured the public imagination over the years in the same way as, say, Sarah Palin’s misshapen “refudiate.” That shoddy neologism of hers has already been cited 284,000 times in Google since she inadvertently coined it on Twitter sometime in July 2010; in fact, “refudiate” even made it to the New Oxford American Dictionary less than four months later.

So, the question now is: Will Mr. Kahn’s purposively coined “coopetation” do better than its predecessor neologisms and fare as well in usage as “refudiate”? We really can’t tell. But way back in 2006, in an essay about the noun “racket” that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times, I had tossed around some thoughts about word creation and the unilateral changing of word meanings. It floored me then that the noun “racket” was suddenly being used in the positive sense as an “an easy and lucrative—but legitimate—means of livelihood,” in contrast to its widely accepted negative sense as “a fraudulent scheme, enterprise, or activity” or “a usually illegitimate enterprise made workable by bribery or intimidation.” I’m now posting that essay in this week’s edition of the Forum as a cautionary tale against word misuse in general and, well, against coinage of English words without sound semantic underpinnings. (November 27, 2011)

When wordplay goes overboard

Going by its dictionary definition, the noun “racket” means “a fraudulent scheme, enterprise, or activity” or “a usually illegitimate enterprise made workable by bribery or intimidation.” More loosely, it means “an easy and lucrative means of livelihood” and is slang for “occupation or business” (Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary). In whatever sense, though, I have always thought of the word as denoting something socially abhorrent—perhaps even illegal or criminal.

Sometime in September, however, a fellow English-language editor sent me e-mail that disquietingly turned the word “racket” on its head, so to speak. “May bago po akong raket (I have a new racket),” he said, then proceeded to describe the new enterprise he was engaged in. What he really meant was a new “sideline” that was not even remotely illegal or illegitimate, so I found it disturbing that he should use a normally distasteful word for it. Perhaps such loose usage would be acceptable in informal, face-to-face conversations, but it was very unbecoming to be put in writing by someone who should have more respect for language and its nuances.

I had already forgotten that incident but recently, during lunch with a former associate in the English-language editing business, the peculiar usage popped out again when she asked me this question: “Ano ho ba ang raket ninyo ngayon? (What is your racket at present?).” I almost choked on my drink hearing that nasty word again! How could such a serious distortion of meaning gain wide currency in our language? What is it that makes even intelligent, discerning people view illicit, aberrant things as perfectly acceptable?

It didn’t take long for me to find possible answers to these questions. Driving through a main thoroughfare to meet a client sometime later, I came across scores of product streamers that posed the following question (or words to this effect) in big, bold letters: “Ano ba ang raket ninyo ngayong summer? (What’s your racket this summer?).” It appears that the use of “raket” with a positive spin had been legitimized by mass advertising. For shock value and recall, the word had been appropriated to mean “any business” or “gimik” (gimmick)—one that’s easy and pleasurable to do. In the process, of course, the fraudulent and illegitimate aspects of the word had been glossed over (or shall we say even glamorized?)

In this sense, “racket” joins the word “salvage” in having been corrupted in Philippine usage to mean its opposite. The first is from a grim, derogatory word into a respectable, fun word; and the other from a respectable, positive word into an unpleasant, derogatory word. Some of us will probably recall that the verb “salvage” means “to rescue or save [something] especially from wreckage or ruin,” but in the Philippine context, it has become a euphemism for “to kill or assassinate” or “to execute or dispose of a person summarily and secretly.” This usage grew out from a government task force report that inadvertently used the word to describe the extra-legal executions of thousands of Filipinos between 1975 and 1983 during martial law.

(The Filipino writer Jose F. Lacaba, in a note to the Double-Tongued Word Wrester, a website that records old and new words from the fringes of English, makes this observation about this inversion of “salvage”: “It began as an anglicization or Englishing of the Tagalog word ‘salbahe,’ whose meaning ranges from mischievous or abusive (adj.) and a notoriously abusive person (noun). ‘Salbahe,’ in turn, is derived from the Spanish word ‘salvaje,’ wild, undomesticated, savage.”)

It is normal for a society to do all sorts of wordplay, of course, but I think the Philippine use of “racket” and “salvage” to denote their opposite sense has gone dangerously overboard. We must draw the line somewhere to safeguard language and our value systems. As the slogan of my favorite English-language website, Vocabula.com, sagely warns, “A society is generally as lax as its language.” (April 24, 2006)

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Two options when plain indicative sentences are not forceful enough

2011-11-20T16:31:00.000-08:00

Most of the day-to-day writing that we do consists of simple, plainspoken indicative sentences that make use of the normal subject-verb-predicate construction pattern, as in “We wrote the refrigerator manufacturer about its poor customer service.” Sometimes, out of impatience or anger, we make such indicative sentences more forceful by ending them with an exclamation mark: “We wrote the refrigerator manufacturer about its poor customer service!” Then, in the event that the veracity of that declaration of ours is challenged or denied, we realize the need for an even more forceful way of presenting our case or making our point. This is when we take recourse to the emphatic tenses, as in “We did write that refrigerator manufacturer about its poor customer service!” or, to give even more emotional force to our statement, perhaps express it in the form of an inverted sentence, as in “The poor customer service of that refrigerator manufacturer is what we complained about!”

In an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2003, I discussed the grammatical structure and workings of the emphatic tenses and inverted sentences. That essay later formed part of the “Usage and Style” prescriptions of my book English Plain and Simple. I am now posting that essay here to show how we can convey our thoughts and ideas more forcefully without taking recourse to more complicated—and more semantically demanding—rhetorical devices. (November 20, 2011)

The emphatic forms and inverted sentences

Every language develops modes not just to share information but to convey thoughts and ideas more forcefully. In English, verbs evolved two special forms—the emphatic tenses—to provide emphasis to the actions they describe. The present emphatic emphasizes actions or conditions happening in the present, and the past emphatic emphasizes those that occurred in the past. More commonly, however, the emphatic forms are used in two types of sentence constructions where emphasis is not intended: to work with the adverb “not” in negative sentences, and to form questions or the interrogative mode, in which the normal sentence construction is inverted. We must understand this distinction clearly to avoid mistakes in using the emphatic tenses.

The present emphatic tense of verbs is formed by putting the present-tense verb “do” or “does” ahead of their basic present form. Here are examples of the present emphatic tense used for emphasis: “I do like apples.” “She does think fast.” “They do act slowly.” The intent is to express the action or state more forcefully. In contrast, here are examples when emphasis is not intended: “The group does not agree.” (forming a negative sentence) “Does the jury have a verdict?” (forming a question).

The past emphatic tense of verbs is formed by putting the past-tense “did” ahead of their basic present form. Examples of the past emphatic tense used for emphasis: “I did write that letter.” “She did come as expected.” “They did pay on schedule.” Examples when emphasis is not intended: “He did not deliver as promised.” “Didn’t you finish the work last night?”

Sentences that use the emphatic tense for emphasis are either affirmative or negative responses to an apparently persistent question, whether stated or only implied. See what happens when this question is asked: “Did you really write that letter?” The emphatic answer would either be “I did write that letter” or “No, I didn’t write that letter.” This is the situational context for using the emphatic forms. It conveys the sense of the speaker either explicitly owning or denying an act, or claiming to be correct in his or her belief regarding the action of others.

Another device for emphasis in the English language, one that is often misunderstood and much maligned, is the inverted sentence. This grammatical form, in which the verb comes ahead the subject, does present agreement problems and possible confusion when used too often. Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “Away from light steals home my heavy son /And private in his chamber pens himself...”

Note that it is the verb “away” that starts the sentence, with the subject “son” far removed from it. The normal-order sentence would go as follows: “My heavy son steals home away from light...” A heightened emotional state can be felt in the first, a dry forthrightness in the second. That difference comes from the change in the form, order, and rhythm of the language itself.

It is, of course, not only in poetry where inverted sentences find excellent use. They can give prose much-welcome variety and punch when used judiciously in a sea of normal-order sentences. Feel the emotional difference between the following normal-order sentences and their corresponding inverted sentences: (1) “Her behavior could be explained in no other way.” “In no other way could her behavior be explained.” (2) “I saw only then the possibilities of the new business.” “Only then did I see the possibilities of the new business.” (3) “She didn’t realize that he had deceived her till she got the letter from a total stranger.” “Not until she got the letter from a total stranger did she realize that he had deceived her.”

When using inverted sentences, however, we must make an extra effort to double-check agreement of the verb with the subject. This subject always follows the number of the verb and not of the nouns or pronouns that come before it: “In the grassy plains lives the last antelope.” It would seem that the singular verb “lives” should be the plural “live” instead to agree with “grassy plains,” but this proves to be not the case; the true subject is not “the grassy plains” but the singular “the last antelope.” See also what happens if the sentence were written another way: “In the grassy plain live the last antelopes.” In this case, the subject “the last antelopes” is plural, so the verb must also take the plural form “live” to agree with it.

Take note, too, that sentences beginning with “there” or “here” are actually in the inverted form: “There is a can of corned beef in the cupboard.” “Here comes the parade.” “There” and “here” are, of course, not the subjects. It is “corned beef” in the first, and “parade” in the second. The two sentences are actually emphatic forms of the normal-order “A can of corned beef is in the cupboard” and “The parade comes.”

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How the appositive can give life and texture to writing

2011-11-14T17:47:00.000-08:00

In a recent posting, a member of Jose Carillo's English Forum asked if there should be a limit to the length of appositives. She posed the question regarding the sentence below, the lead of a recent sports news story, that has an extremely long and structurally convoluted appositive phrase (italics hers):

“Joe Frazier, the son of a South Carolina sharecropper who punched meat in a Philadelphia slaughterhouse before Rocky, won Olympic gold, and beat an undefeated Muhammad Ali to become one of the all-time heavyweight greats, died on Monday, his family said in a statement.

In my reply, I explained that that for clarity’s sake, there should indeed be a limit to the length and grammatical complexity of appositives. Going over that explanation of mine afterwards, however, I realized that I dwelt on appositives without first defining what they are and what their grammatical function is to begin with. I also checked my previous Forum postings over the past two years and discovered that I had hardly touched on appositives in a substantial way; also, in my recollection, hardly anybody had asked a question about them in the Forum during all that time.

Considering the importance of appositives to good writing, this is a major oversight that I now would like to correct. I am therefore posting in this week’s edition of the Forum an essay that I wrote about the subject for my English-usage column in The Manila Times way back in 2003. That essay, “Using appositives for texture and depth,” later formed part of Part II – “English Grammar Revisited” of my book English Plain and Simple. I’m sure that the discussions in that essay will adequately explain and clarify the role of appositives for everyone. (November 13, 2011)

Using appositives for texture and depth

The problem with most bad writing is that it is often so general and lacking in texture and depth. The people, places, or things used as subjects seem to exist only in two-dimensional space, as in a crude cartoon movie, and the actions described all seem to crowd themselves in just a single timeframe. Hardly are there any telling details to give meat and substance to the bare-boned prose, making the writing invariably dry, bland, uninviting—and unreadable.

An efficient way of giving life and vitality to writing is to use appositives and appositive phrases. An appositive is simply a noun or pronoun that often comes directly after another word in a sentence, putting that word in better context by explaining it or by giving more information about it. An appositive phrase, on the other hand, consists of an appositive and all its modifiers, which maybe single words, phrases, or clauses. Both are powerful tools that allow the writer to identify or explain the nouns or pronouns he uses without having to come up with a new sentence or string of sentences to give the added information. This makes the buildup of ideas smoother, and frees the writing from digressions or asides that can impede its natural flow.

Here are some examples of sentences using appositives, which are indicated in italics: “My office assistant Joanna took the day off yesterday.” “Her husband, the jealous type, took her on an extended out-of-town trip.” “They rode on my friend’s car, a battered 1995 sedan, to a hillside farm in Batangas.” “The popular duo Batman and Robin were my favorite cartoon characters during my teens.” “The two provincial girls, adventurers with only a few hundred pesos between them, took the bus to Manila last night.” “Eduardo, the computer enthusiast and high school junior, helped fix the laptop of his teacher, Mrs. Alicia Santos.” “A positively enchanting singer, Elvira had many admirers at the club where she works.” Note that appositives may also come before the noun or pronoun they refer to; what is important is not to detach and set them apart from the noun or pronoun they modify.

An appositive phrase, of course, is simply an appositive joined by whatever modifiers come with it, as in this example: “Mayon Volcano, a major Philippine tourist attraction because of its majestic near-perfect cone, is found in Albay, a southeastern province in Luzon about 500 kilometers from Manila by land transport.” The first appositive in the sentence is the noun “attraction,” which is modified by the phrases “a major Philippine tourist” and “because of its majestic near-perfect cone.” The second appositive is the word “province,” modified by the phrases “southeastern,” “in Luzon,” and “about 500 kilometers from Manila by land transport.” Appositive phrases, by supplying much more information about the nouns or pronouns they modify, are even more effective than simple appositives in giving texture and depth to writing.

From the examples given above, it should be clear by now that an appositive or appositive phrase may either be essential or nonessential to a sentence. An essential or restrictive appositive narrows the meaning of the word it modifies and is necessary to maintain the meaning of the sentence. It is usually a single word or a set of words closely related to the preceding word, and does not require commas to set it off from the rest of the sentence. See the following examples: “The American actress Meryl Streep has been hailed for her consistently fine acting in a string of memorable films.” (Without “Meryl Streep” as appositive, we will never know the identity of the actress being talked about.) “The extremely popular Philippine president Ramon Magsaysay died in a tragic plane crash in the early 50s.” (Without “Ramon Magsaysay” as appositive, we may never know—unless we do some hard research—who that president was.)

A nonessential or nonrestrictive appositive, on the other hand, is not absolutely necessary to the meaning of a sentence; it may be omitted without altering the basic meaning. (It must be set off from the rest of the sentence by one or two commas, depending on its position in the sentence). Examples: “Alicia’s sister, a Philippine-born doctor, works as a senior anesthesiologist in a large hospital in the U.S. Midwest.” “The ‘Santacruzan,’ a colorful religious festival, is regularly held in many Philippine towns during the month of May.” (We still would know who the doctor is and what the event is even without the appositives “a Philippine doctor” and “a colorful religious festival.”)

Non-essential appositive phrases have the same optional role in sentences, as in this example: “December, usually the coldest month in tropical Philippines, is becoming more popular than June as the wedding month of choice.” We can take out the appositive “usually the coldest month in tropical Philippines” and still get a clear idea of what month it is that more and more Filipinos now prefer to get married.

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The six ways that English reckons with the future

2011-11-06T20:27:00.000-08:00

Many of us might find it strange that despite the overwhelming richness and diversity of English as a language, its verbs can’t inflect or change in form for the future tense. By some quirk in the development of the English grammar structures, its verbs can inflect only for the past, present, and perfect tenses. To compensate for this grammatical handicap, however, English came up with no less than six ways of reckoning with the future. These six forms evoke the future by appending to the main verb particular combinations of auxiliary verbs in different tenses, and the choice among these future-tense forms primarily depends on which part of the future is important to us or to those telling us about it. This obviously makes it manyfold more complicated for learners to master the English future tense.

To clarify the differences between these six future-tense forms, I wrote an essay on the subject for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004. That essay subsequently became the introduction to Section 7 – “Mastering the English Tenses” of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, http://josecarilloforum.com/bookshop.html which devotes nine chapters to an intensive discussion of the various future-tense forms and the adverbs of time. I am now posting that essay here for the benefit of Forum members and guests who’d like to make themselves much more precise and expressive in evoking the future in their written and spoken English. (November 5, 2011)

Though very rich and diverse, English can’t inflect for the future tense

Despite the overwhelming richness of the English language, its verbs have the handicap of not being able to morph by themselves into the future tense. As we all know, they inflect only for the past, present, and perfect tenses. For instance, “give” turns to “gave” in the past tense, “gives” in the present tense, and “given” in the perfect tense; in most cases, in fact, English verbs inflect themselves for the perfect tense in the same way as they do for the past tense, as in “wanted” for both the past and perfect tenses of “want.” Yet when they turn to the future, all of the English verbs can’t do anything to themselves; they simply don’t have the ability to inflect for it.

English verbs never got to internally work out an inflection for the future tense, unlike, say, Tagalog with its future-tense “pupunta” (“will go”) for the infinitive “pagpunta” (“to go”). It’s as if the Angles (the ancient forebears of the English people), too preoccupied perhaps with settling in what is now England after crossing the channel from the European mainland, never found the need or the time to work out the future tense into their verbs.

To compensate for this structural oversight in its verb-building efforts, however, the English language came up with no less than six ways of reckoning with the future. The first two, of course, we already know by heart. They are the simple future tense, which puts the auxiliary verb “will” ahead of the verb stem, as in “will give,” and the future perfect tense, which uses the so-called temporal indicators to situate actions and events in various times in the future, as in the use of the future perfect “will have given” in the following sentence: “By this time tomorrow, she will have given me her answer to my marriage proposal.” In both cases, instead of inflecting itself, the verb “give” took the expedient of harnessing one and two auxiliary verbs, respectively, to make its two visions of the future work.

English then dealt with the future tense even more purposively by coming up with four more grammatical stratagems to express it, in the process making its future tense more complicated than that of some other languages with elaborate future-tense inflections built into their verbs. These future-tense forms and the grammatical structures English developed for them are as follows: the arranged future, also known as the present continuous; the predicted future; the timetable future, also known as the present simple; and the described futures, also known as the future continuous.

All of these forms evoke the future by appending to the main verb particular combinations of auxiliary verbs in different tenses. The choice among these forms depends on which part of the future is important to us or to those telling us about it, and their semantic value lies in the fact that they enable us to make fine distinctions as to whether what will happen is a regular event; as to whether something is unavoidable or prearranged or something we or other people want or wish to happen; as to how long the wait will be until something happens; and as to the degree of certainty that something will happen.

We all know that the future is extremely flexible; in contrast, there’s really nothing we can do to change the past and there’s not really much we can do to alter the evolving present. Unless we are a dyed-in-the-wool believers in determinism and predetermination—both aver that all acts of will or natural occurrences are causally predetermined by preceding events, natural laws, or the divine—we will find many occasions to use the arranged future in our spoken or written prose. The uniquely human ability to plan and shape future events comes into play here.

The arranged future or present continuous means that we have decided what to do but have not yet executed that decision: “We are doing overtime work this coming weekend; client wants the marketing plan first thing on Monday.” “The charming rogue begged on bended knees so I’m pardoning him next month for that act of humility.” “She is leaving with me for my scheduled sabbatical in Rome; all the bookings have already been arranged.”

Note that the arranged future uses the present-tense form of the auxiliary “to be” in tandem with the present participle (“-ing” form) of the verb: “are doing,” “am pardoning,” and “is leaving.” This is the so-called continuous future, which indicates that the future action started when the decision was made and will continue until the moment that the action is finished. To make sure that it doesn’t wrongly convey the idea that the future is happening right now, the arranged future must often use clear temporal indicators, like “this coming weekend,” “next month,” and “my scheduled sabbatical in Rome” in the sentences given as examples in the preceding paragraph.

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Common pitfalls when a pronoun and noun form a compound subject

2011-11-01T02:01:00.000-07:00

We will recall that a basic rule in English grammar is that for a combination of a noun or pronoun to properly perform the action of a verb, or for them to jointly act as the compound subject of a sentence, they should both be in the same case, whether subjective or nominative, objective, or possessive. In short, we shouldn’t mix nouns and pronouns in different cases when we want them do a particular grammar function. In practice, however, this is easier said than done. A lot of inadvertent case mixing happens in both spoken and written English due to a lack of familiarity with both pronoun usage and case usage.*

In the essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in October 2007, I explain the proper way to form compound subjects with nouns and pronouns, with particular emphasis on tricky situations—a few of them actually debatable—that often trip even professional writers. Keeping the prescriptions of this essay in mind should give you much greater confidence in handling those tricky situations. (October 30, 2011)

The proper way to form compound subjects with nouns and pronouns

A very common pronoun misuse problem occurs when a personal pronoun is joined with a noun or another pronoun by the conjunction “and” or “or” to form a compound subject. Many people, particularly in colloquial speech, tend to use the objective form of the personal pronoun in such constructions: “The president and him are now politically estranged.” “Both the competition and us will suffer because of this trade mess.” “Alicia and me have been close friends since kindergarten.” “You or me need to stay behind.”

No matter how correct-sounding they may seem, such constructions are grammatically incorrect and are likely to incur disapproval from English teachers and discerning employers. The grammar rule to remember here is to always use the subjective or nominative form of the personal pronoun: “The president and he are now politically estranged.” “Both the competition and we will suffer because of this trade mess.” “Alicia and I have been close friends since kindergarten.” “You or I need to stay behind.”

When the personal pronoun is the last element in the compound subject, people will have a stronger tendency to wrongly use its objective form. This is because the construction obscures the grammatical error and makes it sound aboveboard, as in this example given earlier: “The president and him are now politically estranged.” A good preemptive stylistic habit is to make the personal pronoun the first element instead: “He and the president are now politically estranged.” “Both we and the competition will suffer because of this trade mess.” This way, it becomes unmistakably clear that the personal pronoun should be in the subjective form.

In the spirit of modesty, however, we should always make the personal pronoun “I” an exception to this prescription. As we learned early in English grammar, it is good form to make “I” always the last element of the compound subject: “Alicia and I have been close friends since kindergarten.” “You or I need to stay behind.” (It sounds self-serving to use “I” ahead: “I and Alicia have been close friends since kindergarten.” “I or you need to stay behind.”

We’ll look into just three more contentious case usage problems before we close:

(1) Many people will catch themselves saying “This is just between you and I,” “According to you and they, the money was lost in transit,” and “Hardworking people like you and I need a break sometimes.” Some will invoke that even Shakespeare also had done so during his time, but the fact is that a grammar rule outlawing such usage became the English standard in the 1860s onwards. In your formal writing, therefore, you’ll always be grammatically in the right by using the objective form of the personal pronoun instead: “This is just between you and me.” “According to you and them, the money was lost in transit,” and “Hardworking people like you and me need a break sometimes.”

(2) You still can get into a heated grammar debate on whether to say “No one but I saw that controversial movie” or “No one but me saw that controversial movie,” or to say “No one except I came for the meeting” or “No one except me came for the meeting.” But in such constructions, good grammar will be on your side when you use the objective form of the personal pronoun: “No one but me saw that controversial movie.” “No one except me came for the meeting.”

(3) When using personal pronouns after forms of the verb “be,” do we say “That must be her on the escalator” (objective “her”) or “That must be she on the escalator” (nominative “she”)? Using the objective case may sound more natural than the nominative case, but you’re well advised to limit it to conversational use. Although the nominative case may sound pedantic, it is the grammatically acceptable choice in formal writing: “That must be she on the escalator.” (October 20, 2007)

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*When combining pronouns with nouns, it’s very important to remember that it’s not only pronouns that have case. As we learn early in English grammar, pronouns in general inflect or change form in the nominative or subjective case, objective case, and possessive. Nouns also have case like pronouns, but the big difference between them is that nouns remain in the same form—they don’t inflect at all—in the subjective, nominative, and objective cases. Only in the possessive case do nouns inflect by adding the apostrophe-s at their tail ends; for example, “That laptop is Alicia’s.”

So, when forming a compound subject with a noun and pronoun, keep in mind that they should both be in the same case, except that the noun doesn’t inflect at all and remains as is except in the possessive form. When compounding a pronoun and another pronoun, of course, we must make sure that both are in the same case, based on their correct inflected forms for that case.

For a comprehensive review of case usage and the English Pronoun Chart, click this link to “Lesson #3 – The Matter of Case in English” in the Forum.

A good measure of spoken English is saying one’s tag questions correctly

2011-10-25T06:08:00.000-07:00

Some people become very proficient in their written English, even to the point of winning major literary or journalistic awards for their well-crafted competition pieces. But such proficiency in writing unfortunately doesn’t always translate into a corresponding proficiency in spoken English. Not infrequently, in fact, we see and hear highly accomplished writers fumbling with their English or even totally at a loss for words when they socialize with strangers or when they need to formally address an audience of more than just a few people. Clearly, so many factors other than just excellent grammar and wide vocabulary are at work to cause such disparity in the quality of one’s written and spoken English, but from a practical standpoint, I think one very crucial ingredient of excellent spoken English is mastery of saying the tag questions right.

In the two-part essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004, I show how the purposive use of grammatically correct tag questions can make people better and more effective conversationalists, able to confidently and gracefully connect with other people and seamlessly elicit desired responses from them. Internalizing the various kinds of tag questions will take some doing, of course, but by memorizing the rules for making them and by assiduously practicing their use, it shouldn’t take very long for one to become a much better if not a sparkling English speaker. (October 24, 2011)

Saying our tag questions right

Part 1:

A good indicator of one’s English proficiency is the ability to use tag questions properly. But wait—we all know what “tag questions” are, don’t we all? Well, if some of us don’t or have already forgotten, the mini-question “don’t we all?” in the preceding sentence is what’s called a “tag question.” Some grammarians prefer to call it a “question tag,” and the whole statement inclusive of that mini-question the “tag question.”

For our purposes, however, we will refer to the mini-question as the tag question itself, or “tag” for short; we will not quibble over the terminology. The important thing is for us to fully appreciate and understand how native English speakers purposively use tag questions to get a quick confirmation or reaction from their listeners. With that, we should be able to form English tag questions ourselves with greater confidence, using them flawlessly to emphasize our thoughts and ideas and to elicit the desired response from our listeners.

Most of us will probably recall that tag questions generally follow a definite pattern: a positive statement is followed by a negative tag question, and a negative statement is followed by a positive tag question. Since tags are meant to be spoken, of course, it’s normal to use contractions of the negative forms of verbs either in the tag question or in the main statement itself.

Here’s a quick drill to jog our rusty memories about the grammar of tags. From the positive standpoint: “She is, isn’t she?” “They do, don’t they?” “We can, can’t we?” “You are Filipino, aren’t you?” And from the negative standpoint: “She doesn’t, does she?” “They don’t, do they?” “We can’t, can we?” “You aren’t Filipino, are you?”

We can see that the tag questions above are all of opposite polarity to that of the main statement. Also, we must keep in mind that without exception, the verb in a tag question always has the same tense as the verb in the main statement. (In speech, we must note here, there should always be a brief pause between the main statement and the tag question; in writing, this brief pause must always be indicated by a comma between the main statement and the tag question.)

Some of us will probably also recall that there are actually three ways of forming tag questions depending on the kind of verb used in the main statement.

First, if that verb is a form of the auxiliary verb “be,” the same form of that verb must be used in the tag question: “He is from Manila, isn’t he?” “We aren’t that bad, are we?” “They were of foreign origin, weren’t they?”

Second, if a main statement uses a modal such as “can,” “could,” or “should,” the same modal must be used in tag question: “She can dance, can’t she?” “They couldn’t do that, could they?” “We shouldn’t interfere in their affairs, should we?”

And third, if the main statement uses an active verb (instead of only an auxiliary verb), the appropriate form of the auxiliary verb “do” takes the place of that active verb in the tag question: “She loves you, doesn’t she?” “You take me for granted, don’t you?” “They played the part, didn’t they?”

We will recall, too, that when a main statement has a proper name as subject, the tag question must use its pronoun instead: “Jennifer is doing well in Singapore, isn’t she?” “Manila isn’t the tourist capital in Asia these days, is it?” “Some Australians eat kangaroo meat, don’t they?” “Nestle is the biggest food company in the world, isn’t it?”

We must be aware, however, that some special cases of English-language tag questions don’t strictly follow the norms that we have just discussed. Here are two such tags that seemingly look and sound askew: “Let’s go out, shall we?” “Let’s not go out, shall we?”

Are those tags proper or not? Yes, they are. Even if those tags often raise the hackles of grammar purists, native English speakers accept and use both of them. The strictly grammatical to say “Let’s go out, shall we?” is, of course, “We’ll go out, shan’t we?”, but it sounds stiff and unnatural. Here are two natural-sounding alternatives that should sit in well among Filipinos: “Let’s go out, all right?” “Let’s go out, okay?”

Another notable special case involving tags is the whole range of statements that use “nothing,” “nobody,” and “no one” as their subject. In such cases, the statements should be considered of negative polarity, and their tag questions should be given a positive polarity: “Nothing came in the mail, was there?” “Nobody bothered you last night, was there?” “No one wants this, is there?”

We will take up other special cases and other fine aspects of tag questions in the next essay. (May 24, 2004)

Part 2:

We will continue our discussion of some notable departures from the usual positive-negative and negative-positive rule for forming tags, or those mini-questions purposively added by speakers at the end of their statements to get a quick confirmation or denial from their listeners. That general rule, we recalled, is that a positive statement should be followed by a negative tag, and a negative statement should be followed by a positive tag: “She’s winning, isn’t she?” “They’re not conceding, are they?” “We’ll not get into trouble for this, would we?”

Now, here are a few more tags that don’t scrupulously follow that polarity rule: “I’m correct, aren’t I?” (Not “I’m correct, amn’t I?” The awkward tag “amn’t I” is “am I not?” in contracted form, which is unacceptable grammar). “She’d better take it, hadn’t she?” (Not “She’d better take it, wouldn’t she?” The tag “hadn’t she?” is actually “had she better not?” in contracted form. That tag is the logical polar negative of the full statement “She had better take it,” where the operative verb form is “had better,” not “take.”). “This will do, won’t it?” (Not “This will do, willen’t it?”—which uses a tag that doesn’t exist in English. Conversely, the reverse-polarity statement will be “This won’t do, will it?”)

Another exception about tags that bewilders many nonnative English speakers is this: the opposite polarity rule can actually be pointedly ignored when people want to strongly express sarcasm, disbelief, surprise, concern, shock, or anger. Take the following examples: “You think you’re indispensable, do you?” “Oh, you will really do that, will you?” “Oh, she really left him, did she?” “So you’re finally getting married, are you? That’s great!” (Or the contrary sentiment: “So she’s finally getting married, is she? The nerve!”) “And you think that’s amusing, do you?”

And then, as a mark of politeness, positive tags can also be routinely attached to positive requests: “Come here, will you?” “Do that, will you?” “Please hand me that screw driver, will you?”

When people use negative statements with negative tag questions, on the other hand, it is not necessarily bad grammar but a sure sign of the breakdown of civility or of downright hostility and combativeness: “So you don’t love me at all, don’t you?” “You really didn’t like the idea, didn’t you?” “So you don’t think my school is good enough, don’t you?” “So you didn’t want peace after all, didn’t you?” The negative tags emphasize the negativeness of the main statement to deliberately rile people or to make them feel guilty. They give vent to feelings of meanness.

Now, from experience, we all know that using negative statements with positive tag questions in the standard manner is the polite, socially acceptable way of asking for information or help. Such statements are particularly useful if we don’t know the people being addressed.

It is rude, for instance, to simply approach or accost on the mall someone we don’t know and ask, pointblank, “Where’s the women’s room?” The civilized way, of course, is to restate that question to the needed degree of politeness, depending on who is being addressed.

Here’s that same question said a little bit more politely, addressed to people of about the same age or social station as the speaker: “Do you know where the women’s room is?” (A tag question is not used in such cases.)

Now here it is in a polite, nonaggressive form, this time addressed to people older or of a higher social station than us: “You wouldn’t know where the women’s room is, would you?” (This time, the question form “Do you know...?” and the tag question that follows make the statement sufficiently deferential.)

Here are a few more patterns of negative statements with positive tag questions, the use of which should make us more pleasant, convivial people to deal with: “You don’t know of any job openings in your company at this time, do you?” “You don’t happen to know where the stock exchange building is, do you?” “You wouldn’t be willing to lose all that money in gambling, would you?” “You haven’t got anything to do with what happened, do you?” “You can’t spare me a thousand for my son’s tuition, can you?” “You can’t believe it that the woman’s leading the race, can you?”

The beauty of negative statements with positive tag questions is that they subtly prime up the listener’s mind either to accept the given idea or to decline it quickly and gracefully; in fact, refusing to answer the positive tag questions at all actually will make the person being addressed look rude and impolite. In this classic communication gambit of appealing to the other’s goodness of heart and of cushioning a possible blow to one’s self-esteem before that blow is even inflicted, nobody should lose face whatever the answer might be. (May 31, 2004)

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Choosing between “like” and “such as” when comparing or giving examples

2011-10-16T04:56:00.000-07:00

Some grammar elements with similar or overlapping functions just seem to remain slippery no matter how hard we try to get a good grip of them. This is obviously the case with “like” and “such as.” Although we learn early enough that “like” is for saying that something resembles something else, and that “such as” is for giving a specific example of something, the distinction between them often gets so thin and fuzzy in actual usage that we tend to mistake one for the other.

To clarify the usage of “such as” and “like,” I wrote the essay below for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in September of 2005. I am now posting it here to give English learners a much better handle in dealing with this nasty pair of grammar trippers. (October 16, 2011)

Two slippery grammar trippers in English

Surely one of the most slippery grammar trippers we’ll encounter in English is choosing between “like” and “such as” to form comparative statements or give examples. Which of them, for instance, is correctly used in the following two sentences?

(1) “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures like a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.”

(2) “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures such as a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.”

If you still haven’t figured out the correct usage, you may take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone in the predicament. The use of “like” and “such as” is actually considered correct in both sentences, but the choice between them has remained debatable all these years. We therefore need to carefully study both sides of the debate so we can put ourselves on more solid semantic footing regarding the usage.

Some grammarians insist that “such as,” which means “for example,” is the only correct usage in such constructions: “Exemption from flight pre-boarding procedures such as a thorough body search is usually granted to diplomats.” They maintain that “like” should never be used as a substitute for “such as,” arguing that “like” doesn’t convey the idea of giving an example at all. Instead, they say, “like” in this usage can only imply similarity, resemblance, or comparison, as in “Her pillow lips look like Angelina Jolie’s.”

Other grammarians are not as restrictive in their prescription for using “like” and “such as,” but they do recommend the following more precise usage for them:

(1) Use “such as” to introduce one or more examples that represent a larger subject, as in “Eduardo has a collection of vintage cars such as the 1955 BMW 507 and the 1915 Vauxhall”; and

(2) Use “like” to convey the idea that two subjects are comparable, as in “Alberto wants to be a vintage car collector like Ramon.”

Take note, though, that those same grammarians consider “like” to be a close semantic equivalent of “such as.” They are therefore not averse to substituting “like” for “such as” in the sentence given in Item 1: “Eduardo has a collection of vintage cars like the 1955 BMW 507 and the 1915 Vauxhall.”

On the other hand, they would find it unthinkable for anyone to substitute “such as” for “like” in the sentence given in Item 2 above. To them, the resulting sentence is unacceptable because it isn’t natural sounding or idiomatic: “Eduardo wants to be a vintage car collector such as Ramon.”

At any rate, “like” in modern spoken English has practically taken over the role of “such as” in comparative statements. The forms “such as” and “such...as” are now largely confined to formal writing. “Like,” in contrast, is now the preferred form for informal usage in which the example being given is offered not simply as an example but as the topic of the sentence itself, as in this case: "We are delighted to have a generous benefactor like Bill Gates." Using “such as” instead of “like” in such sentences must be firmly avoided, for it gives the sentence a false ring: “We are delighted to have a generous benefactor such as Bill Gates.”

In formal writing, we are well advised to distinguish carefully between “like” comparisons and “such as” comparisons. In a “like” comparison, only one person or object from the class is usually named, and that person or object is understood to be excluded from the group being discussed.

Take this example: “If you are a student taught by a brilliant mathematics teacher like Prof. Alberto Reyes, you would learn differential calculus in no time at all.” This comparison is about the possibility of students being taught by mathematics teachers whose brilliance is comparable to Prof. Alberto Reyes’s, with Prof. Reyes himself specifically excluded from the comparison.

On the other hand, in a “such as” or “such...as” comparison, one or several persons or objects can be named in the comparison, and all of those persons or objects are understood to be included in the group being discussed.

Take these two sentences:

“With highly capable mathematics professors such as Prof. Alberto Reyes and Prof. Eduardo Cariño handling the differential calculus classes, we can expect a much higher percentage of passing among the students.”

“With such highly capable mathematics professors as Prof. Alberto Reyes and Prof. Eduardo Cariño handling the differential calculus classes, we can expect a much high percentage of passing among the students.”

In both sentences, the comparison this time is about brilliant mathematics teachers as a class whose members include both Prof. Reyes and Prof. Cariño.

Now that we know how to clearly distinguish the semantic difference between “like” and “such as,” we should be able to use them from now on without fear of tripping in our grammar. (September 26, 2005)

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Using parallelism to achieve structural balance in writing

2011-10-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

Last week, I posted here Parts I and II of “Presenting ideas in parallel,” a four-part essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2006 to create greater awareness of the importance of parallelism in writing. Part I took up this basic rule for parallel construction: never mix grammatical forms when presenting similar or related ideas, meaning that all of those ideas should stick to the same grammatical pattern all throughout—all noun forms, all gerund forms, all infinitive forms, or all verb forms as the case may be. Then Part II discussed another very important parallel construction rule: a parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way.

This week, I am posting Parts III and IV of that essay. Part III discusses specific applications of the two parallelism rules taken up in Parts I and II, while Part IV discusses how to achieve structural balance for sentences by using parallel structure for adjectives and adverbs as well as for two or more grammatical elements serving as complements.

I am sure that by following the prescriptions for parallelism taken up in the four-part essay, you will see a dramatic improvement in both your written and spoken English. (October 9, 2011)

Presenting ideas in parallel

Part III:

We have already taken up the two basic rules for parallel construction, namely that a sentence that presents two or more serial elements should stick to the same pattern all throughout, and that a parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way. We saw that we can build much clearer and more forceful sentences by consistently observing these rules.

Now we need to refamiliarize ourselves with four specific applications of these two parallelism rules: (1) that all of the elements being enumerated in a list should take the same grammatical form, (2) that elements being compared should take the same grammatical form, (3) that elements joined by a linking verb or a verb of being should take the same grammatical form, and (4) that elements joined by a correlative conjunction should take the same grammatical form.

All elements in a list should have a parallel structure. We can make our written compositions better organized and more readable by using the same grammatical form for all the elements we are enumerating in a list. The elements should all be noun forms, verb forms, infinitive phrases, gerund phrases, or participial phrases, whichever is most appropriate. When we allow any of the elements to take a different form, the rhythm of the enumeration is broken and the reader’s train of thought is needlessly disrupted.

Consider the following not-so-well-thought-out list:

“At present, our club has: (1) no formal charter, (2) subsisting without a long-term organizational goal, (3) a seriously declining membership, (4) a large budgetary deficit, and (5) to collect a large amount of past-due membership fees.”

The list looks awfully craggy and reads very badly for an obvious reason: its elements don’t follow a consistent grammatical form. Items 1, 3, and 4 are noun phrases, but Item 2 is a verb phrase in the progressive form and Item 5 is an infinitive phrase.

Now see how smoothly and cohesively the list reads when its elements all take the same grammatical form, in this case as verb phrases:

“At present, our club: (1) lacks a formal charter, (2) subsists without a long-term organizational goal, (3) suffers from a seriously declining membership, (4) carries a large budgetary deficit, and (5) needs to collect a large amount of past-due membership fees.”

Elements being compared should use a parallel structure. In constructions that use the form “X is better than/more than Y,” we have to make sure that the elements being compared have the same grammatical structure. Unparallel (gerund/infinitive): “She enjoys jogging better than to run.” Parallel (gerund/gerund): “She enjoys jogging better than running.”

Elements joined by a linking verb or a verb of being should use a parallel structure. When we use “is” as a verb of being that links two elements, we have to make sure that the elements have the same grammatical structure. Unparallel (infinitive/gerund): “To make that impossible demand is declaring open hostilities.” Parallel (infinitive/infinitive): “To make that impossible demand is to declare open hostilities.”

Elements joined by a correlative conjunction should use a parallel structure. When we use the correlative conjunctions “either . . . or,” “neither . . . nor,” “not only . . . but also,” “both . . . and . . .”, and “whether . . . or,” we have to make sure that the elements being correlated have the same grammatical structure.

Unparallel (gerund/infinitive): “For you to get to Manila on time, we suggest either taking the morning flight tomorrow or to drive overnight right now.” Parallel (gerund/gerund): “For you to get to Manila on time, we suggest either taking the morning flight tomorrow or driving overnight right now.”

Unparallel: “They not only demand very short installment periods but also huge down payments.” Parallel: “They demand not only very short installment periods but also huge down payments.” Also parallel: “They not only demand very short installment periods but also demand huge down payments.”

We will take up some more fine points about parallelism in Part IV of this essay. (June 12, 2006)

Part IV:

We saw in the first three parts of this essay that the consistent use of parallel structures is the key to more readable, more forceful, and more polished sentences. We also learned that for clearer and more cohesive sentences, we should always use parallel structures when presenting various elements in a list, when comparing elements, when joining elements with a linking verb or a verb or being, and when joining elements with correlative conjunctions.

Before winding up our discussions on parallel construction, we will take up two more techniques for harnessing parallelism to give structural balance and better rhythm to our sentences. We will discover that these techniques can dramatically improve our writing and give it a distinctive sense of style.

Use parallel structure for adjectives and adverbs. We should also aim for parallel patterns when using adjectives and adverbs in our sentences, seeking structural balance for them in much the same way as we do for noun forms, verb forms, infinitives, and gerunds.

Unparallel construction: “She danced gracefully, with confidence and as if exerting no effort at all.” Here, we have a stilted sentence because the modifiers of the verb “danced” have taken different grammatical forms: “gracefully” (adverb), “with confidence” (adjective introduced by a preposition), and “as if exerting no effort at all” (adverbial phrase).

Parallel construction: “She danced gracefully, confidently, effortlessly.” The consistent adverb/adverb/adverb pattern gives the sentence a strong sense of unity and drama.

Unparallel construction: “The gang attempted an audacious bank robbery that was marked by lightning speed and done in a commando manner.” The sentence reads badly because the three modifiers of “bank robbery” are grammatically different: “audacious” (adjective), “marked by lightning speed” (participial phrase), and “done in a commando manner” (another participial phrase).

Parallel construction: “The gang attempted an audacious, lightning-swift, commando-type bank robbery.” The sentence reads much more forcefully because of its consistent adjective-adjective-adjective pattern for all of the modifiers of “bank robbery.”

Use parallel structure for several elements serving as complements of a sentence. For more cohesive and forceful sentences, we should always look for a suitable common pattern for their complements. Recall that a complement is an added word or expression that completes the predicate of a sentence. For instance, in the sentence “They included Albert in their soccer lineup,” the phrase “in their soccer lineup” is the complement.

Unparallel construction: “We basked in the kindness of our gracious hosts, walking leisurely in the benign morning sunshine, and the palm trees would rustle pleasantly when we napped in the lazy afternoons.” Here, we have a confusing construction because the three elements serving as complements don’t have a common grammatical pattern: “the kindness of our hosts” (noun phrase), “walking leisurely in the benign morning sunshine” (progressive verb form), and “the palm trees would rustle pleasantly when we napped in the lazy afternoons” (clause).

Parallel construction: “We basked in the kindness of our gracious hosts, in the benign sunshine during our early morning walks, and in the pleasant rustle of the palm trees when we napped in the lazy afternoons.” The sentence reads much, much better this time because the three complements are now all noun phrases in parallel—“in the kindness of our gracious hosts,” “in the benign morning sunshine during our early morning walks,” and “in the pleasant rustle of the palm trees when we napped in the lazy afternoons.” Note that all three have been made to work as adverbial phrase modifiers of the verb “basked.”

In actual writing, of course, the need to use parallel structures in our sentences will not always be apparent at first. As we develop our compositions, however, we should always look for opportunities for parallel construction, choose the most suitable grammatical pattern for them, then pursue that pattern consistently. Together with good grammar, this is actually the great secret to good writing that many of us have been looking for all along. (June 19, 2011)

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Good writing needs scrupulously parallel organization of ideas

2011-10-03T06:54:00.000-07:00

In My Media English Watch on Jose Carillo’s English Forum last September 18, I called attention to the remarkably unparallel structure of this lead paragraph from a recent newspaper story: “They started with highly paid doctors and lawyers but even taxi drivers and small business owners will not be spared. And the consumption patterns of upward striving politicians make particularly delicious targets.” As I pointed out in my grammar critique (“The need for parallelism and voice consistency when writing the news”), these two sentences flagrantly violate the parallelism rule three times over. They are a highly instructive example of the fact that in English, good writing isn’t just a matter of error-free grammar and usage but of scrupulously parallel organization and presentation of ideas.

To foster greater awareness and appreciation of the importance of parallelism in writing, I wrote a four-part essay, “Presenting ideas in parallel,” for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2006. I am now posting here all four parts of that essay in full—Parts I and II this week, and Parts III and IV next week. (October 3, 2011)

Presenting ideas in parallel

Part I:

Parallel construction is one of our most powerful tools for organizing and presenting ideas. It cannot be overemphasized that making our sentences grammatically and semantically correct is simply not enough. We should also ensure that each of their grammatical structures that are alike in function follows the same pattern. In fact, observance of this basic stylistic rule very often spells the difference between good and bad writing.

To give us a better idea of the power of parallel construction, let us first examine the following simple sentence: “Alberto likes reading, jogging, and to play computer games.”

We will find that it’s structurally disjointed and doesn’t read well because not all of its serial elements follow the same pattern. Although the first two elements, “reading” and “jogging,” are in parallel because both are gerunds (“-ing” noun forms), the third, “to play computer games,” ruins the parallelism because it is in the infinitive form (“to” + the verb stem).

One quick way to fix this structural problem is to put the third element also in gerund form, “playing computer games,” so that the sentence reads as follows: “Alberto likes reading, jogging, and playing computer games.” It is now grammatical balanced and no longer sounds stilted.

Another way for the original sentence to achieve parallelism is to make all three of its serial elements take the infinitive form: “Alberto likes to read, to jog, and to play computer games.” This sentence, of course, can be streamlined even further by using “to” only once right before the first of the all-infinitive parallel elements: “Alberto likes to read, jog, and play computer games.”

In actual practice, we have to put in parallel not only single words or short phrases but much more complicated grammatical structures such as extended phrases and clauses as well as long serial lists. However, the basic rule for parallel construction remains the same: never mix grammatical forms. We have to choose the most appropriate form for the similar or related ideas, then stick to the same pattern all the way.

Consider the following sentence with three extended elements that are not all in parallel: “The chief executive decided to terminate the advertising manager because he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time, approved the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors, and his relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies were very bad.”

The first subordinate clause, “he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time,” is in parallel with the second subordinate clause, “[he] approved the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors,” because both are active verb forms using “he” (the advertising manager) as the subject. However, the third subordinate clause, “his human relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies were very poor,” disrupts the parallelism because it takes the passive verb form and takes for its subject not “he” but another noun form, “his relations with both his staff and the advertising agencies.”

See how much better the sentence reads when the third element is modified so it becomes parallel with the first two: “The chief executive decided to terminate the advertising manager because he rarely managed to come up with the company’s TV commercials on time, allowed the publication of several major print advertising with serious grammar errors, and related very badly with both his staff and the advertising agencies.”

Note that the three elements are now all active-voice verb phrases, thus perfectly parallel in form.

We will go deeper into the various ways of achieving parallelism in the next essay. (May 29, 2006)

Part II:

As emphasized in Part I of this essay, the basic rule for parallel construction is to never mix grammatical forms when presenting similar or related ideas. A sentence that presents two or more serial elements should stick to the same pattern all throughout—all noun forms, all gerund forms, all infinitive forms, or all verb forms as the case may be. When serial elements all take the same form, ideas come across much more clearly and cohesively.

We will discuss another very important parallel construction rule this time: A parallel structure that begins with a clause should sustain that pattern all the way. Recall now that a clause is a group of words that contains a subject and a predicate (and can thus function as a sentence in its own right, as in “we should obey the law”), as opposed to a phrase, which is a group of words that doesn’t have them (and thus can’t function as a sentence by itself, as in “to obey the law” or “obeying the law”). When the sentence doesn’t sustain the clause pattern, or when any of the clauses shifts from the active to the passive voice or the other way around, the parallelism falls apart. The result is a disjointed sentence that doesn’t read well.

Take this sentence that contains three serial grammatical elements: “The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, that they should always do their assigned homework, and to submit their term papers on time.” The parallelism of this sentence breaks down because while the first two elements—“they should aim for perfect attendance” and “they should always do their assigned homework”—are both clauses, the third element—“to submit their term papers on time”—is not a clause but an infinitive phrase.

We need to make this third element also a clause—“they should submit their term papers on time”—so the sentence can become perfectly parallel and more readable: “The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, that they should do their assigned homework regularly, and that they should submit their term papers on time.” Of course, a more concise but less emphatic way to construct this serial-clause sentence is to use the imperative “that they should” only once before the first clause: “The English professor told the students that they should aim for perfect attendance, do their assigned homework regularly, and submit their term papers on time.” (Be forewarned, though, that such streamlining can obscure the meaning in more complicated constructions.)

The parallel structure of a sentence with serial clauses can also be ruined when any of the clauses takes a different voice, say the passive from active: “The president anticipated that majority of the lower house would welcome the planned Charter change, that most of the senators would fiercely oppose it, and that a vicious demolition job would be mounted against it by her political detractors.” Here, the first two clauses—“majority of the lower house would welcome the planned charter change” and “most of the senators would fiercely oppose it”—are in the active voice, but the third clause—“a vicious demolition job would be mounted against it by her political detractors”—is in the passive voice, thus disrupting the pattern.

To make the construction parallel all throughout, we should make the third clause also take the active voice—“her political detractors would mount a vicious demolition job against it.” This results in a more forceful sentence: “The president anticipated that majority of the lower house would welcome the planned charter change, that most of the senators would fiercely oppose it, and that her political detractors would mount a vicious demolition job against it.” (June 5, 2006)

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Next week, Part III and Part IV will take up more ways of using parallelism to enhance the clarity and readability of our writing.

Debunking the widespread canard that adverbs are bad for writing

2011-09-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

Some writers and teachers of English ruthlessly denigrate adverbs in the same way as adjectives, with one of them even declaring that “most of the work of effective writing is that of selecting verbs and nouns which make adverbs and adjectives unnecessary.” As I observed in my long-ago essay in defense of adverbs (English Plain and Simple, Section 3, Chapter 17), they say such things as if English prose could, in fact, survive solely on a diet of verbs and nouns with absolutely no adverbs and adjectives. This isn’t the case at all. There are bad adverbs as there are bad adjectives, of course, and overusing them—particularly lazy adverbs ending in “-ly” such as “quickly” and “fantastically”—could indeed induce a bad case of reading nausea. But there are good, functional adverbs that we can’t afford to write totally without, and chief among them are the adverbs of time and the adverbs of frequency.

In an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times and that now forms part of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, I explained that the adverbs of time and the adverbs of frequency are the defining elements of the tenses. Our verbs need them for context in the time continuum, and only by putting them to work can we clearly convey to our readers or listeners the time frame, sequence, and frequency of the actions—grammatically, the verbs we use—in our narratives. I am now posting that essay here to counteract the widespread canard that adverbs as a whole are bad for our written and spoken English. (September 26, 2011)

Using the adverbs of time to clarify tense

When an action or event has taken place and how often it has taken place are abstractions that reside solely in our memory or in some recording medium like newspapers, books, and film. They no longer have a physical existence of their own. In contrast, we can easily put the “who,” “what,” “where,” and “how” of things in concrete terms. For instance, we can identify ourselves with nameplates or hang shingles to identify the occupants of doctor’s clinics, law offices, legislatures, and zoos (nouns); we can label certain faces, books, movies, or political maneuverings as disgusting, compelling, or noble (adjectives); or we can mark certain places and behaviors as uncommonly decent, unbelievably tawdry, or ignominiously warped (adverbs that modify adjectives).

It’s not as easy, however, to put our fingers on events in time. Making sense of the unfolding present and of the future is difficult enough, but understanding past events is even more so. This is because the latter have already passed through the time continuum to become abstractions, and our usual conceptual tools for dealing with them—the tenses acting on verbs—are inadequate to communicate them in context. Thus, whether reckoning with the past, present, or future, we need the adverbs of time and of frequency to convey them intelligibly to other people and to keep our thoughts of them alive.

Examine this simple sentence: “Look for the money.” The simple imperative of this sentence sounds clear enough. But on closer scrutiny, we discover that its call for action is inadequate and imprecise: How soon should we look for the money? Precisely when should we do it? How long should we do? Now see what happens when we clarify the sentence with adverbs of time: “Look for the money now.” “Look for the money tonight after office hours.” “Look for the money during the next three hours.” The adverbs of time have given the sentences precise, actionable meanings.

Not let’s examine another sentence: “He paints landscapes.” With no antecedent statement to establish context, it borders on the trivial. But see how it springs to life and relevance with the use adverbs of frequency: “He rarely paints landscapes.” “He regularly paints landscapes.” “He paints landscapes twice a month.” In each case the statement has become more real and palpable to us.

Indeed, the tenses by themselves can only give us a general sense of something occurring. By making the adverbs of time work with them, however, we can pinpoint the precise moment or period of their occurrence. The adverbs of time are, in fact, the defining elements of the tenses. Using the adverb “currently,” for instance, leaves us no choice but to use the present or present progressive tense: “She currently works with the United Nations secretariat.” “She is currently working with the United Nations secretariat.”

In contrast, when we use “recently,” we are forced to use the past tense or past progressive tense: “She recently worked with the United Nations secretariat.” “She was recently working with the United Nations secretariat.”

The adverbs of time are particularly crucial in establishing the perfect tenses—when an action has to be related to other actions happening before or after it. Take this example: “The woman had [already, just, barely, scarcely] dressed up when her lover knocked at the front door.” The adverbs of time create immediacy and tension in juxtaposed actions, and they do so in ways that the tenses alone can never achieve. Along with the adverbs of frequency, the adverbs of time heighten our awareness of our own actions in relation to the unfolding reality around us: “I knocked at her bedroom door once, twice, three times, then finally without letup, but there was no response; it was then, only then, that I realized that she had left me for good.”

The need to clearly mark in our minds the sequence and frequency of occurrences is so crucial that the English language has evolved scores of adverbs of time and of frequency. Take a look at the following short list:

Past adverbs of time: “ago,” “after,” “already,” “once,” “before,” “beforehand,” “when,” “recently,” “then,” “since,” “since then,” “yesterday,” “last week.” “last month,” “last quarter,” and “last year.”

Present adverbs of time: “now,” “nowadays,” “lately,” “of late,” “while,” “at this moment,” “at last,” “today,” and “tonight.”

Future adverbs of time: “when,” “presently,” “soon,” “tomorrow,” “yet,” “as soon as possible” (ASAP), “later,” “after,” “immediately,” “heretofore,” “hereafter,” “henceforth,” “next day,” “next week,” “next month,” and “next year.”

Adverbs for continuous or repeated actions: “by and by,” “again,” “occasionally,” “until,” “till,” “while,” “forever,” “always,” “off and on,” “continually,” “continuously,” “often,” “at length,” and “perpetually.”

Adverbs of frequency: “rarely,” “seldom,” “frequently,” “sometimes,” “oftentimes,” “now and then,” “never,” “once,” “twice,” “thrice,” “daily,” “nightly,” “weekly,” “monthly,” “quarterly,” “annually,” and “seasonally.”

These adverbs of time and adverbs of frequency are, of course, not the only ones we can find in the language. We can actually create hundreds more by using them as basic building blocks, and the more effectively we can make them work with the tenses, the better we can understand the things that happen in our lives and the clearer we can communicate them to others.

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When media permits a grammatically flawed official statement to see print

2011-09-19T06:18:00.000-07:00

If you are a reporter for an English-language media outlet, what’s the proper way to report the official statements of people who speak in less than impeccable English? Do you quote them verbatim—grammar errors and all—for total and uncompromising journalistic objectivity? Or do you correct their statements for grammar and usage errors so as not to embarrass them and avoid foisting bad English on your readers or listeners?

Of course, English-savvy reporters and editors faced with this dilemma routinely do the right thing—quote statements verbatim when they are truly quotable and free of grammar errors, or else paraphrase those statements when they aren’t really quote-worthy and are grammatically faulty as well. But sometimes, when reporters or editors lower their guard or are themselves not very proficient in English, they let pass quoted statements that reflect very badly not only on those who gave or uttered them but also on those who reported or edited them.

This is what happened in the case of the quoted statement I dissected in the essay below, which I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times way back in 2006. I am posting it here as a practical lesson in grammar and usage as well as an exercise in basic copyediting. (September 18, 2011)

An exercise in reporting a grammatically flawed statement

Assume that you are a reporter of a major daily newspaper and that you have just covered a media conference of an international foreign-aid organization. During the conference, the organization’s highest-ranking official in the country said these exact words in English: “The best time to prevent bird flu is now. Until the cases are low, let us stay ahead of the epidemic.”

Something is terribly wrong with that statement’s English, of course, and you’re sure that the speaker wasn’t misquoted because you had taped the interview. But your deadline is only two hours away, so you must decide right now how to deal with that statement in your story.

What will you do with its bad English?

(A) Quote the exact words of the speaker. It’s true that its English is faulty, but since the statement came from a well-educated medical professional, you feel that every word of it should be respected and retained. They are not your own words, after all, and you’re secure in your belief that people who talk to media should be held responsible for their bad English. If it gets printed verbatim and embarrasses them, that’s just too bad. Your job is to report the news accurately and clearly, not to correct other people’s poor English.

(B) Analyze the grammar and semantics of the statement carefully to see how best to report it. You believe that no respectable paper should give room for bad English, whether attributed or unattributed. You know that when reporters habitually allow bad English to creep into their stories, they can seriously jeopardize not only their reputation but also the integrity of their information sources and of their respective newspapers.

Some newspaper reporters and magazine writers are sometimes tempted to take the line of least resistance by choosing option A, but for any self-respecting journalist, Option B is actually the only prudent course of action. We will therefore assume that most of us have chosen Option B and are now ready to find better ways of expressing the problematic direct quotation presented earlier.

The English of the first sentence, “The best time to prevent bird flu is now,” is arguably good enough so we’ll let it stand as is. That of the second sentence, however, is seriously flawed and confusing: “Until the cases are low, let us stay ahead of the epidemic.” The speaker has wrongly used the conjunction “until” to mean “up to the time that,” in the sense that a particular state is not yet achieved. But she acknowledges that the particular state being referred to (“low”) already subsists or persists, so the correct conjunction to use is “while,” which means “during the time that.” “Until” is an illogical, semantically wrong substitute for “while” in this particular sentence.

Next, the speaker commits another serious gaffe when she inappropriately describes the noun “cases” using the adjective “low,” which is intended to mean “of lesser degree, size, or amount than average or ordinary.” In English grammar, such usage doesn’t make semantic sense. We can’t describe “cases” of a particular noun, such as bird flu, as either “low” or “high”; there can be no “low cases” and “high cases.” It is the incidence of “cases” that can be described as such. To give an idea of their relative numbers, the adjectives “few” and “many” (or “numerous”) should be used instead.

The speaker’s use of the phrase “stay ahead” in her second sentence, although not strictly wrong grammatically, is also questionable semantically. The verb “stay” denotes “pausing,” “ceasing,” and “remaining,” thus giving a strong sense of a stationary state rather than a forward movement, which is obviously what the speaker wanted to convey. Since the verb “keep” more appropriately conveys the active effort needed to maintain the condition of being ahead, “keep ahead” would be a much more suitable phrase.

When we take all these clarifications into account, what emerges as the grammatically and semantically correct way of saying what the speaker actually said is this: “The best time to prevent bird flu is now. While its incidence is still low, let us keep ourselves ahead of the epidemic.” Another correct construction is this: “The best time to prevent bird flu is now. While the cases are still few, let us keep ourselves ahead of the epidemic.”

Of course, we must remember that we can’t present these two improved versions as the exact words of the speaker herself. It’s a time-honored convention in journalism that once we make substantive changes in the speaker’s exact words, we can no longer treat them as directly quoted material. They become a paraphrased statement, which does away with the quotation marks that set off verbatim statements from their attribution. (January 4, 2006)

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The construction of comparative sentences involving possessives

2011-09-11T21:53:00.000-07:00

In English, it’s quite a simple thing to compare two entities directly, as in “Eve was perhaps older than Adam by a few days,” but the grammar gets somewhat more complicated when what’s to be compared is an attribute, a possession, or a part of those entities. Indeed, how do we correctly construct a sentence comparing the heights of the Great Pyramid of Giza and of the Eiffel Tower in Paris? We can’t say “The height of the Eiffel Tower is 77.5 meters greater than the Great Pyramid of Giza”—not because the given figure is wrong but because the grammar of the comparative isn’t right. So then, how do we construct the comparison correctly?

In my essay below that came out in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in October of 2010, I explained to a Forum member precisely how to make such a comparative sentence grammatically aboveboard in every respect. (September 11, 2011)

Differentiating the use of “than” and “than that of”

In making comparisons, when should “than that of” be used instead of “than”?

I was asked this question several days ago by a student-member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum whose username is Forces20. She said she wanted to understand the logic behind the choice between the two comparative forms.

She wrote: “Let’s consider this sentence as an example: ‘As a teacher, his salary is even less than that of a driver.’ Why shouldn’t this sentence be written instead as ‘As a teacher, his salary is even less than a driver’?

“Also this sentence: ‘The new library is undoubtedly well-stocked and functional but no one can say that its atmosphere is like the old one.’ Why should it be revised to this: ‘The new library is undoubtedly well-stocked and functional but no one can say that its atmosphere is like that of the old one’?”

I explained to Forces20 that the fundamental difference between the comparatives “than” and “than that of” is in the nature of the elements being compared. We use “than” when we compare two objects or things directly with each other, as in “Your laptop is more powerful than my laptop” or, more succinctly, “Your laptop is more powerful than mine.”

On the other hand, we use “than that of” when we compare not the two objects or things themselves but an attribute, possession, or part of theirs, as in “The processor of your laptop is more powerful than that of mine.” This particular comparative construction is, of course, an elliptical, more succinct version of this sentence: “The processor of your laptop is more powerful than the processor of your laptop.” The pointing pronoun “that” replaces the name of the thing whose attribute, possession, or part is being compared with that of the other, and the pronoun “mine” replaces the name of the other thing involved in the comparison.

If we simply use “than” instead of “than that of” when comparing the attribute, possession, or part of the elements being compared, a semantic problem or ambiguity in meaning might result, as in this sentence: “The processor of your laptop is more powerful than mine.” Here, it’s not clear if the pronoun “mine” refers to the processor of the other person’s laptop or to the laptop itself. The form “than that of” clarifies that ambiguity: “The processor of your laptop is more powerful than that of mine.”

Now, in the examples Forces20 presented, the sentence “As a teacher, his salary is even less than a driver” is grammatically flawed because it is illogically comparing the teacher’s salary to the driver, not to the driver’s salary. The comparative form “less than that of” fixes the problem: “As a teacher, his salary is even less than that of a driver.”

The other sentence she presented, “The new library is undoubtedly well-stocked and functional but no one can say that its atmosphere is like the old one,” has the same problem. It wrongly compares the atmosphere of the new library with the old library itself, when the real comparison should be between their respective atmospheres. The use of the comparative form “like that of” corrects and clarifies that comparison: “The new library is undoubtedly well-stocked and functional but no one can say that its atmosphere is like that of the old one.”

But the form “than that of” may not be necessary in some comparative constructions involving possessives. Take a look at these two examples: “Albert’s grade in science is higher than Bert’s.” Its version that uses “than that of” for the comparison is also correct but less straightforward: “Albert’s grade in science is higher than that of Bert.” On the other hand, this sentence, “Our basketball team’s record is more impressive than our competitor’s,” is more concise and better-sounding than “Our basketball team’s record is more impressive than that of our competitor.” (October 23, 2010)

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P.S. For those who’d like to know precisely how I got the figure “77.5 meters,” here’s the bit of arithmetic that I did: The Eiffel Tower is 324 meters high, and the Great Pyramid of Giza is 146.5 meters high, so the former is higher than the latter by 324 meters minus 146.5 meters = 77.5 meters. Following the grammar prescription in the above essay, therefore, the correct and concise sentence construction for that comparative is this: “The height of the Eiffel Tower is 77.5 meters greater than that of the Great Pyramid of Giza.”

The wisdom of routinely avoiding anticipatory “there is/there are” clauses

2011-09-05T04:21:00.000-07:00

Let’s face it. A lot of people—native or nonnative English speakers alike—get into the habit of using the so-called anticipatory “there is/there are” clause when talking off the cuff, as in “There’s something fishy happening but I just can’t figure it out.” It does sound and feel as the easiest and most natural thing to begin talking, even if many teachers of English pointedly advise that it’s better and more concise to knock off that anticipatory clause and simply say “Something’s fishy but I just can’t figure it out.” As many of us will probably remember, their chief but seemingly counterintuitive argument against “there is/there are” clauses is that it just fosters lazy thinking among its users.

In an essay I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in April of 2010, I discussed an even stronger reason for routinely avoiding anticipatory “there is/there are” clauses—the fact that the usage is fraught with subject-verb disagreement pitfalls when used indiscriminately. I am now posting that essay here to serve as a continuing reminder of the wisdom of that cautionary advice. (September 4, 2011)

The pitfalls in using “there is”/“there are” clauses

A few days ago, I received through e-mail the following very interesting grammar question from Dantreys, a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum:

“Hi, Joe! An opinion writer in one of the major broadsheets wrote an article yesterday that contained this sentence:

“‘There was once a time when there was more than one exchange existing all at the same time.’

“I feel a bit queasy about the sentence because something tells me the correct verb right before ‘more’ should be ‘were’ since it refers to ‘more than one exchange,’ which, notionally, is a plural subject. What do you think?”

Here’s my reply to Dantreys:

The sentence in question is an example of a construction that uses the so-called “anticipatory ‘there’ clause” twice. The pronoun “there,” of course, is the anticipatory subject in each case. In such constructions, “there” carries little or no independent meaning but simply points forward to the notional subject that’s placed later in the sentence for reasons of end weight or emphasis. That notional subject is the noun phrase “once a time” for the first anticipatory “there,” and “more than one exchange” for the second anticipatory “there.”

Now, your question is: Since the operative verb “was” refers to “more than one exchange,” which is a plural subject, shouldn’t that verb take the plural form “were” instead to ensure subject-verb agreement?

The correct usage in this case remains debatable today, but my personal preference is to use the singular “was” instead of “were”; in effect, I’m saying that the use of “was” by that broadsheet’s opinion writer is grammatically correct. This usage preference is the so-called descriptivist position, which maintains that since the “there is” combination is mostly followed by a singular subject, it has become a standard way of introducing a subject, whether singular or plural.

In American English, in particular, when a compound subject follows the verb in a “there is” construction, the verb very often takes the singular form, as in this sentence: “There is shame and dishonor in being found to be unfit for public office.” See and feel how badly that sentence sounds when “there are” is used instead: “There are shame and dishonor in being found to be unfit for public office.”

The prescriptivist position, on the other hand, recommends that after the expletive “there,” the verb is singular or plural depending on whether the subject that follows is singular or plural. This is actually the usage that you said you’re more comfortable with: “There was once a time when there were more than one exchange existing all at the same time.” It looks and sounds a little bit awkward to me, but I’m not saying that it’s grammatically wrong. So long as you are consistent with the usage and you can explain your position, I don’t think there should be any problem.

Having said that, however, let me add that English teachers of the traditional bent discourage the use of the expletives “there is” (and “it is”) by students, arguing that this usage fosters lazy thinking. My own position is that expletives are tolerable when used sparingly and judiciously—perhaps no more than once or twice every one or two pages of the standard manuscript page. But when the anticipatory “there” is used twice in a row in the same sentence, which is the case in that opinion writer’s sentence, the resulting construction is decidedly awkward and convoluted.

As an editor, in fact, I always suggest routinely avoiding “there is” constructions because of their needless, oftentimes confusing complexity. It’s better to simplify the sentence in question by eliminating the second of its anticipatory “there” clauses: “There was once a time when more than one exchange existed all at the same time.” Better still, by eliminating the first anticipatory “there” clause as well: “One time, more than one exchange existed all at the same time.” (April 10, 2010)

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Deconstructing and understanding those puzzling elliptical sentences

2011-08-28T08:51:00.000-07:00

During the past three weeks, several members of Jose Carillo's English Forum made postings that expressed puzzlement over certain sentences that seemed to make sense grammatically even if they were clearly faulty in structure, with some words—sometimes even the obligatory verb—conspicuously missing. In practically every case, those sentences turned out to be elliptical sentences—sentences that surprisingly read right and sound right even if they appear to violate grammatical and structural rules with impunity.

To help learners of English deconstruct and understand such sentences, I wrote “The virtue of elliptical constructions,” a two-part essay for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2005. I am now posting that essay here not only to amplify and substantiate the quick explanations I have given to inquiring Forum members but also to give solid grounding on the subject to all those seeking to further enhance their English. (August 28, 2011)

The virtue of elliptical constructions

Part I:

Often in our English-language readings, we come across sentences that have certain words evidently missing yet surprisingly read right and sound right as well: “Those who wish to [...] can very well join me.” “The youngest staff in the office is as competent as the eldest [...].” “If she wants more of those 1905 coins, my brother can give her plenty [...].” In each instance, although a noun and a verb have been shed off somewhere, the sentences prove to be grammatically and semantically correct. They are, in fact, none the worse for the grammatical holes in them.

As suggested by the three periods enclosed by brackets, each of those grammatical holes is an ellipsis, and the sentences where they occur are called elliptical sentences. We can say that elliptical sentences reflect the natural aversion of humans to unnecessarily repeat themselves. The elliptical sentences shown above, for instance, are simply more concise constructions of these sentences: “Those who wish to join me can very well join me.” “The youngest staff in the office is as competent as the eldest staff in the office.” “If she wants more of those 1905-issue coins, my brother can give her plenty of those 1905-issue coins.”

By now the pattern and logic of elliptical constructions should be clear: they gracefully knock off repetitive words and phrases. The ellipsis takes it for granted that the reader would just mentally fill in the gaps with the missing grammatical elements.

As a rule, elliptical sentences consist of two independent clauses, one containing the grammar elements the other has left out. The independent clause with the missing elements is the elliptical clause—an abbreviated adverb clause stripped of its subject and verb.

Consider this sentence: “Although she is known for her ravishing beauty, Cornelia has an uncommonly vile temper.” Its adverb clause is “she is known for her ravishing beauty,” with “although” as subordinating marker; the independent clause is “Cornelia has an uncommonly vile temper.” Now see what happens when we make the adverb clause elliptical: “Although […] known for her ravishing beauty, Cornelia has an uncommonly vile temper.” Even after shedding “she is,” the sentence works just fine—more concise and emphatic, in fact, than the scrupulously complete one.

Ellipses can streamline sentences in many ways. Here are some of the common elliptical forms we’ll usually encounter in our English-language readings:

(1) The routine omission of “that” in modifying clauses, particularly in spoken English. This is the most familiar use of the ellipsis. Example: “They knew […] two years would be the shortest time […] they would need to subdue the enemy forces.” (Normal form: “They knew that two years would be the shortest time that they would need to subdue the enemy forces.”) Tongues are normally averse to wagging too many “that’s.”

(2) Elliptical noun phrases. Example: “Jennifer asked for the pink blouse but the salesclerk gave her the red […].” (Normal form: “Jennifer asked for the pink blouse but the salesclerk gave her the red blouse.”) Quite naturally, the disciplined mind resists the need to belabor the obvious.

(3) Ellipsis of the verb and its objects or complements. Example: “The beleaguered Supreme Court chief justice would fight it to the very end if he could […].” (Normal form: “The beleaguered Supreme Court chief justice would fight it to the very end if he could fight it to the very end.”)

(4) Medial (middle) ellipsis. Example: “Arlene will take care of the girls and Eduardo […], the boys.” (Normal form: “Arlene will take care of the girls and Eduardo will take care of the boys.”) This fine ellipsis separates sophisticated English-language users from rank beginners.

(5) Ellipsis of clause. Examples: “They can leave now if they want […].” (Normal form: “They can leave now if they want to leave now.”) Certain elliptical clauses, however, need a comma to indicate that some words have been intentionally left out; otherwise, confusion might arise. Properly elliptical: “My tour group chose Paris; theirs, Rome.” Improperly elliptical: “My tour group chose Paris; theirs Rome.” (Normal form: “My tour group chose Paris; their group chose Rome.”)

(6) Ellipsis when words are left out in comparisons using “that” or “as.” This is the trickiest ellipsis of all because we need to first establish the correct pronoun by filling in the missing words in the elliptical clause. Consider these two sentences: “Helen loves you more than I.” “Helen loves you more than me.” Gut feel tells us that only one of them is grammatically correct, but both actually are. For each of the sentences, in fact, we can fill in the missing words in a different way. The first turns out to be the elliptical construction of “Helen loves you more than I love you”; the second, of “Helen loves you more than she loves me.” Each is as grammatically and semantically airtight as the other.

Isn’t it nice that with the ellipsis, we can have it short and sweet both ways? (April 25, 2005)

Part II:

We continue our discussion of the ellipsis, which we defined in the preceding essay as a streamlining device that deliberately knocks off words and phrases from sentences and does not bother to replace them, depending instead on the reader or listener to mentally fill in the missing words based on context. We already took up the noun ellipsis, a gap in prose that takes the place of the noun phrase referred to in a previous clause or sentence. This time we will look more closely into the two other major types of ellipsis: the verb ellipsis and the clause ellipsis.

Verb ellipsis. This type of ellipsis comes in two kinds. The first is the verb ellipsis that knocks off the verb and the modifying phrase that follows that verb, as in this statement: “He is a magnanimous yet strict boss, generous almost to a fault but never hesitant to dismiss incompetent people from their jobs when he has to […].” Here, the ellipsis dropped the second mention of the verb “dismiss” and the words “incompetent people from their jobs” to avoid needless repetition. The result is a more compact and elegant sentence than this one that doesn’t use ellipsis: “He is a magnanimous yet strict boss, generous almost to a fault but never hesitant to dismiss incompetent people from their jobs when he has to dismiss incompetent people from their jobs.”

Here’s another example: “It’s a pity that the new marketing assistant has to go. Our personnel manager was convinced that she didn’t perform well in her job, but on the whole, I really think she did […].” Here, the ellipsis dropped the second mention of the verb “perform” and the words “well in her job” to streamline the statement. See how repetitive the statement becomes when it doesn’t use ellipsis: “It’s a pity that the new secretary has to go. Our personnel manager was convinced that she didn’t perform well in her job, but on the whole, I really think she did perform well in her job.”

The second type of the verb ellipsis, on the other hand, knocks off the subject and the finite verb of a sentence. In the following statement, for example, the second, third and fourth sentences are elliptically constructed: “Can you imagine what we should be doing now had we joined the company outing? […] Swimming at the beach. […] Playing billiards at the clubhouse. Or […] singing at the karaoke bar at one of the beach cottages.” See how tedious and weird-sounding that passage becomes if, instead of using ellipses, it repeatedly uses the subject “what we should be doing now” and the finite verb “is” in all of the three succeeding sentences: “Can you imagine what we should be doing now had we joined the company outing? What we should be doing now is swimming at the beach. What we should be doing now is playing billiards at the clubhouse. Or what we should be doing now is singing at the karaoke bar at one of the beach cottages.”

Clause ellipsis. This type of ellipsis drops most of the words of the clause referred to in a previous sentence, simply retaining the question word “why,” “what,” “where,” or “how” to announce the missing parts of the clause.

A clause ellipsis that uses the question word “why”: “Most people go through life without examining their fiercely held religious and political beliefs. They blindly run their affairs based on these beliefs not knowing why […].” See how repetitious this statement becomes without the ellipsis: “Most people go through life without examining their fiercely held religious and political beliefs. They blindly run their affairs based on these beliefs not knowing why they blindly run their affairs based on these beliefs.”

A clause ellipsis that uses the question word “what”: “You’ve been asking me what I have been doing all these years. Trying to live a good life, that’s what […].” Gracelessly repetitive without the ellipsis: “You’ve been asking me what I have been doing all these years. Trying to live a good life, that’s what I have been doing all these years.”

A clause ellipsis that uses the question word “where”: “We should be able to find a place to cool off from this terrible heat. The only problem is where […].” Terribly wordy without the ellipsis: “We should be able find a place to cool off from this terrible heat. The only problem is where to find a place to cool off from this terrible heat.”

These, then, are some of the many ways that the ellipsis can make our writing and speech more cohesive, compact, and forceful. We should use them at every opportunity to give not only greater convincing power but also a touch of elegance to our prose. (May 2, 2005)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 25 and May 2, 2005 © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. The essay in Part I later appeared as Chapter 70 in the book Giving Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo.

When there are compelling reasons for using the passive voice

2011-08-21T06:44:00.000-07:00

Last week, I posted here an essay arguing that good writing isn’t the all-active-voice affair that our English teachers had most likely made us believe, and that there is, in fact, a perfectly valid place and role for passive-voice sentences in both our written and spoken English. That 2004 essay in my English-usage column in The Manila Times was actually followed in quick succession by two more essays enjoining writers to reexamine their acquired aversion to the passive voice. The second of those essays, “When even the passive voice is not enough,” already appeared here in a posting several months back. This time, to complete the trilogy, I am posting the third essay, “Crafting our sentences to their context,” where I recommend the use of the passive voice when there are compelling grammatical and semantic reasons to do so. (August 21, 2011)

Crafting our sentences to their context

We will further pursue my thesis in two previous essays (“In defense of the passive voice” and “When even the passive voice is not enough”) that we should not totally rely on the active voice, and that the passive voice is in itself a powerful form for precisely crafting our sentences to their context. Although the active voice is a handy default vehicle for expressing ourselves clearly, the passive voice is the only semantically correct choice if we want to call attention to the receiver of the action, to the instrument used in the action, or to the action itself.

One major virtue of the English language is, in fact, the many options it offers for constructing sentences to yield more or less the same meaning. We must keep in mind, though, that these sentences are rarely the same semantically; their shades of meaning and focus differ by appreciable degrees. To understand these differences, let’s take a look at the basic English clause pattern: “Alicia [subject, as actor] gave [verb, as the action] Roberto [indirect object, as the beneficiary] a tender hug [direct object, as the goal].”

We already took up three ways by which the passive voice can change this basic clause pattern: (1) make the indirect object the subject of the sentence: “Roberto was given a tender hug by Alicia.”; (2) make the direct object the subject: “A tender hug was given by Alicia to Roberto.”; and (3) make the act itself the subject: “Alicia’s hugging of Roberto was tender.” The passive voice purposively diminishes the importance of the subject or actor so it can draw greater attention to the indirect or direct receivers of the action, or to the action itself.

The passive voice becomes even more useful when it is not necessary or desirable to mention the subject or doer of the action at all. In science and technical writing, for instance, the passive voice is the conventional choice because the doer of the action is often obvious, unimportant, or unknown: “An intensive search for an antidote to the raging avian flu virus is underway.” The active voice, in contrast, gives unwarranted importance to the unknown doer of the action at the expense of what’s being done, which in this case is more important. For that reason, this active-voice sentence is rabidly cockeyed indeed: “Veterinary-disease researchers intensively seek an antidote to the raging avian flu virus.”

And the passive voice, of course, is not all that rare even in journalism, the ultimate redoubt of the active voice. Take this horrible this active-voice news lead: “This reporter found out today that the complainants in the Manila electioneering case had falsified evidence.” More sensible, more logical is this passive voice construction: “The evidence in the Manila electioneering case was falsified by the complainants.”

An even more compelling reason for using the passive voice has little to do with grammar but more with the art of communication itself. It is the need for restraint, prudence, tact and diplomacy in the workplace and in our day-to-day personal interactions. The active voice is particularly unsuitable for situations where it directly and unequivocally attributes an error, mistake, or failing to someone, thus squarely putting the blame on him or her. With the passive voice, we can be scrupulously correct without pointing an accusing finger at anybody, and can deliberately keep certain things vague to let others save face.

Assume, for instance, that your advertising agency has bungled its bid for a large consumer products account, and that the reason was that, at the last minute, your immediate superior doubled the budget you had recommended. This was mainly why the prospective client chose the other agency, whose proposed budget happened to be, well, about the same as your original figures. How deliciously tempting it would be to report the fiasco straightforwardly and invoke the active-voice rule for doing so! “We lost the account because my boss insisted on doubling the proposed budget that I had strongly recommended, which of course the prospective client found excessively high. Its winning bid turned out to be only half as ours.”

The active voice here, of course, tells one painful truth that will not set you free—it is one, in fact, that’s guaranteed to instantly kill off careers and relationships. How much more politic to use the passive voice for that truth: “Our proposed budget for the advertising campaign was doubled shortly before our presentation to client, thus making it twice the bid of the agency that won the account.” Everybody in your agency would know what really happened anyway, so there’s no need to rub it in by using the active voice flagrantly.

The choice between the active voice and the passive voice, then, is not just a matter of grammar. It is at the heart of the matter of our use of the language itself. (February 10, 2004)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 10, 2004 © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. This essay later appeared as Chapter 68 in the book Giving Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo.

Shedding off the active-voice straitjacket from our English

2011-08-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

In school, teachers of English furiously drill into the heads of their students the idea that they should always write sentences in the active voice. This creates such a strong bias—I would call it an aversion—that practically eliminates the passive voice in the English of those students even after they graduate and pursue their respective careers.

I must admit that I was one those who had acquired this bias against the passive voice, pursuing that bias like a zealot in my early writing and editing career. This was further abetted by my exposure to campus journalism and newspaper journalism, both of which demand the active voice even more relentlessly for immediacy’s sake. Later on, however, I began to sense that my predilection to writing all-active-voice sentences tended to give my narratives and expositions a mechanical, almost rubberstamp character. Then it fully dawned on me that good writing isn’t the all-active-voice affair that our English teachers had made us believe, and that there is, in fact, a perfectly valid place and role for passive-voice sentences in both our written and spoken English.

I gave vent to this realization of mine in “In Defense of the Passive Voice,” an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004. I am now posting it here in the hope of making more people realize as I did many years ago that although a good thing, the active voice need not be a straitjacket to our natural instinct for clear, relevant, and forceful expression. (August 14, 2011)

In defense of the passive voice

The active voice has a cult following in English grammar. This is because from grade school onwards, most everybody is taught that sentences in the subject-verb-predicate form are the be-all and end-all of English, and that the passive voice is such a weak, fuzzy, and undesirable construction to even bother using. Grammar teachers furiously drill into every student’s head that the active-voice sentence “Emilio hit Andres violently with a bat” is superior to the passive “Andres was hit violently by Emilio with a bat” or to the similarly passive “A bat was used by Emilio to violently hit Andres.” The active-voice sentence in time achieves icon status, never to be resisted or questioned. No wonder, then, that many English language users—particularly those who learn it as a second or third language—write English-language essays almost entirely in clumsy, rubberstamp active-voice sentences, and speak English like the perpetually active-voice talking robots that inhabit science-fiction movies.

The truth is that when we get down to the dynamics of language, it is difficult not to conclude that a totally active-voice essay, prose narrative, or speech is neither a practical nor a desirable goal. English that uses an unbroken train of active-voice sentences, with no passive-voice ones whatsoever, is in many ways the equivalent of speaking stridently all the time or of singing a song on a high note from start to finish. We all know how exhausting that is both to the performer and the audience. Indeed, one virtue of the passive voice is that it works to leaven such verbal performances, providing low-energy counterpoints to the high-energy semantic field created by active-voice sentences: “We danced. We sang. We caroused. But soon we were put to sleep by fatigue.”

An even more compelling reason for using passive sentences, however, is that they are the most natural and oftentimes the only logical choice for communicating certain ideas. To see how true this is, let’s go back to the active-voice sentence we used as an example above: “Emilio hit Andres violently with a bat.” Assume now that right after you have said this, someone asks for a clarification. If that person is more interested in Andres’s well-being than in Emilio’s motive for assaulting him, his question will most probably take this form: “What did you say happened to Andres?” Your answer, of course, will not be the active-voice “Emilio hit Andres violently with a bat,” which highlights what Emilio did to him. That answer will be ridiculously out of context. The only logical answer is the passive-voice “Andres was hit violently by Emilio with a bat,” which rightly highlights what happened to Andres.

Then, if your interlocutor further asks, “What instrument did you say was used?”, it definitely wouldn’t be sensible to use the same active-voice answer, “Emilio hit Andres violently with a bat.” That would be very obtuse and strange indeed! The sensible answer will be another passive-voice sentence, perhaps “A bat was used by Emilio to violently hit Andres.” Finally, your interlocutor may dun you with this question, “How would you describe the act done by Emilio against Andres?” Your answer will perhaps be more ponderous and measured this time—the way we give such replies in real life—but it will definitely be in the passive voice: “Emilio’s act of hitting Andres with a bat was done violently.”

So what does this tell us about how we should fashion our sentences? Well, it is that we should write them or say them in the most logical and natural way possible—using the active voice whenever called for, but never hesitating to use the passive when logic and good sense demands it. So, unless your English teacher forces you to stick to the active voice on pain of failing in the subject, or your editors give you a standing order never to use the passive voice or be forever assigned to doing obituaries, the active voice should only be a secondary consideration. Much more important is to emphasize the sentence elements that you want to emphasize and need to emphasize. If it is the doer of the action that needs emphasis, then by all means use the active voice. But if is the receiver of the action, the instrument used in the action, or the action itself that needs it, you really have no choice but to use the passive voice.

The active voice certainly has its virtues, chiefly that it reflects how things really happen in real life—“Someone or something does something this way or that”—but it need not be a straitjacket to our natural instinct for clear, relevant, and forceful expression. The passive voice gives us both the opportunity and the latitude to focus on what we really need to focus on, to say exactly what we mean. Our prose and our speech will be squandering that opportunity and latitude by inflexibly deferring to the cult of the active voice. (February 9, 2004)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 9, 2004 © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. This essay later appeared as Chapter 66 in the book Giving Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo.

Doing battle with the tendency to misplace participial phrases

2011-08-08T04:38:00.000-07:00

Based on my experience as a copyeditor, I can say that easily the most serious weakness of nonnative English speakers writing in English is the tendency to misplace modifying phrases. This is true whether the writer I’m editing is an above-average student, a respected academic, an acclaimed or award-winning litterateur, or an experienced professional journalist. By the time I’m done editing their work, their digital manuscripts would often be literally bleeding with red lines or red text where I had crossed out misplaced, dangling, or squinting modifying phrases and had reconstructed entire sentences to get rid of them. Sadly, as can be seen in my weekly media English watch in this Forum, this grammar weakness is also shared in no small measure by some writers and editors of the major Philippine mass media outlets. And I would say that in most cases, the offending phrase in their narratives or expositions would be a participial phrase (definitely much more often than offending infinitive phrases and gerund phrases), thus giving me the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that the participial phrase is perhaps the least understood and most misused form of modifier in the English language.

This was what I had mind when I wrote the two-part essay below, “Dealing better with participial phrases,” in my weekly English-usage column in The Manila Times way back in 2006. I am now posting it here to help the current generation of nonprofessional and professional writers understand why participial phrases are such slippery grammar elements to handle and how they can be effectively tamed and harnessed to produce more readable and persuasive English prose. (August 7, 2011)

Dealing better with participial phrases

Part I:

We already know that the participle is a verbal—a verb form that functions as another part of speech—that ends either in “–ing” or “–ed,” and that a participle that ends in “–ing” is a present participle (“dancing,” “remaining,” “piercing”) and one that typically ends in “–ed” is a past participle (“stalled,” “walled,” “detested”).

In both cases, the participle functions as an adjective modifying a noun, as in the following sentences: “The dancing partners impressed the audience.” “The stalled car created a monumental traffic jam.” In the first sentence, the present participle “dancing” modifies the noun “partners”; in the second, the past participle “stalled” modifies the noun “car.”

Now, a participial phrase is simply a participle together with any words or phrases that modify it. These words or phrases can be in the form of a direct object or an indirect object of the participle, a prepositional phrase, or any complement of the action or state expressed in the participle. We have to keep in mind that a participial phrase, although functioning as an adjective, retains the intrinsic properties of its basic verb.

Here, for instance, is a participial phrase consisting of a present participle and the direct object of the action expressed in it: “Throwing all caution, the legislators attempted to turn themselves into a constituent assembly.” The participial phrase in that sentence, “throwing all caution,” consists of the participle “throwing” and its direct object “all caution.” Together, they serve as an adjective modifying the clause “the legislators attempted to turn themselves into a constituent assembly.”

Now here’s a participial phrase consisting of a present participle modified by a prepositional phrase: “The traffic officer caught the motorist speeding through a red light.” The participial phrase in that sentence, “speeding through a red light,” consists of the participle “speeding” and the prepositional phrase “through a red light.” Together, they serve as an adjective modifying the noun “motorist.”

And here’s a participial phrase consisting of a past participle and a prepositional phrase that modifies it: “Soldiers confined in the barracks too long become ineffective in war.” The participial phrase in that sentence, “confined in the barracks too long,” consists of the participle “confined” and the prepositional phrase “in the barracks too long.” Together, they serve as an adjective modifying the noun “soldiers.”

Because participial phrases are, in effect, many-worded adjectives serving as modifiers, we need to exercise caution when using them in sentences. There’s always the danger of misplacing them during construction, in which case they can end up modifying a wrong word, a wrong phrase, or a wrong clause or lead to a really bad dangle or tangle.

One handy rule for dealing with a participial phrase is to make sure that the noun or pronoun it is meant to modify is clearly stated, then to place that noun or pronoun as close as possible to it. When this rule is not observed, a dangling participial phrase is the result: “Parrying the blows of his opponent, his left leg got entangled on the ropes.” This is a logically problematic construction, for a leg doing the parrying of the blows is obviously an absurd idea!

To establish the doer of the action in such situations, we have to rely on context and logic. In this particular case, it is evident that the doer of the action is the noun “boxer.” We then have to specify that noun in the sentence and position it as close as possible to the participial phrase. One construction that meets this requirement—and thus prevents the participial phrase from dangling—is this: “Parrying the blows of his opponent, the boxer got his leg entangled on the ropes.” (Another dangle-free construction, of course, is this: “The boxer, parrying the blows of his opponent, got his leg entangled on the ropes.”) (December 11, 2006)

Part II:

In their role as many-worded modifiers, participial phrases enjoy some flexibility in positioning themselves in a sentence. They do their job best when placed as close as possible to the noun or pronoun they are meant to modify: “Tired after a long day’s work, the mechanic fell asleep in the bus.” They work equally well as interrupters in a sentence: “The mechanic, tired after a long day’s work, fell asleep in the bus.” Either way, the sentence functions without a hitch because “tired after a long day’s work” is positioned right beside the noun “mechanic.”

But the third possible position for that participial phrase—at the end of the sentence—doesn’t work: “The mechanic fell asleep in the bus, tired after a long day’s work.” This time, “tired after a long day’s work” is a dangler, absurdly modifying the noun “bus.”

In certain cases, though, a participial phrase can take an end-sentence position without dangling: “The policemen found the suspect shopping at the mall.” (Here, “shopping at the mall” modifies the noun “suspect,” not “policemen.”) “The lawyers glared at the witness, shocked by her self-incriminating testimony.” (Here, “shocked by her self-incriminating testimony” modifies “lawyers,” not “witness.”)

Such end-sentence placements should be approached with caution, however. In the second construction above, in particular, the participial phrase “shocked by his self-incriminating testimony” would have dangled without the pronoun “her”: “The lawyers glared at the witness, shocked by the self-incriminating testimony.” Now we can’t tell whether it was the witness or the lawyers who were shocked by the testimony! This is because semantically, the pronoun “her” is crucial to establishing “lawyers” as the subject being modified by that participial phrase.

At any rate, from a structural standpoint, we need to observe three general rules as to when we should set off a participial phrase with commas:

(1) when it’s positioned at the beginning of a sentence,

(2) when it interrupts a sentence as a nonessential modifier, and

(3) when it’s positioned at the end of a sentence and is separated from the word it modifies.

To correctly apply Rules 2 and 3, we need to clearly distinguish between nonessential modifiers and essential modifiers. Remember now that nonessential modifiers are those whose removal won’t profoundly alter the meaning of a sentence, while essential modifiers are those whose removal will do so.

In the following sentences, the participial phrases need to be set off by commas for the statements to make sense: “The cause-oriented groups, spoiling for a showdown with the government, held a massive protest rally.” “Alicia threw a tantrum, angered by the late arrival of her date.” As proof that the participial phrase in each of the two sentences above is not essential to the statement, we can safely drop it without seriously altering the meaning of the sentence: “The cause-oriented groups held a massive protest rally.” “Alicia threw a tantrum.”

In contrast, no commas are needed for the essential participial phrases in the following sentences: “A motorist driving with an expired driver’s license faces a heavy fine.” “The necklace bought by the society matron from a respectable jeweler turned out to have fake diamonds.” Dropping the participial phrase profoundly changes the meaning of each of the statements: “A motorist faces a heavy fine.” “The necklace turned out to have fake diamonds.”

Before bringing this discussion of participial phrases to a close, we need to be aware that certain expressions derived from such participles as “considering,” “concerning,” “granting,” “speaking,” and “judging” can validly modify a clause even if that clause doesn’t have a doer of the action conveyed by the participial phrase.

Just two examples: “Considering the bad weather, the open-air concert needs to be canceled.” “Judging by first appearances, she shouldn’t even be considered in cosmetics sales.”

Because they have evolved into prepositions through long usage, such actor-less participial phrases can do their modifying job without dangling. (December 18, 2006)

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Some multifunction English words that we learn to use only by gut feel

2011-07-31T05:08:00.000-07:00

There are some multifunction words in English that we learn to use simply by gut feel. Hardly anyone of us bothers to check out precisely how these multifunction words work. Cases in point are the function words “either” and “any,” “either…is/either…are,” and “either…or.” We just think we know when they are functioning properly in our sentences and when they are not, and we often get away scot-free even when we misuse them because very often, most of our listeners or readers don’t know any better. Perhaps the only time we’ll find out that we have done badly with them is when our English teacher gives back our essay or term paper to us with not a few harsh grammar corrections, or when we submit something for publication, in which case a professional editor does a really brutal and unapologetic copyediting job on our work. Only then do we feel the need to really brush up on our English grammar to spare ourselves from the humiliation of again being shown to be less than savvy in our English.

In “A few English-language conundrums,” a series of essays that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2005, I discussed several perplexing aspects of English grammar for which many people have only conjectural ideas, among them the proper usage of “either” and “any,” “either…is/either…are,” and “either…or.” I now would like to share that essay with Forum members by posting it here under the title “Four very common grammar puzzlers in English.” (July 31, 2011)

Four very common grammar puzzlers in English

Let’s take up four very common grammar puzzlers: “either” and “any,” “either…is/either…are,” and “either…or.”

Even after using the word for many years, some of us may not have figured out yet that “either” actually functions in four ways:

(1) As a pronoun to mean “the one or the other” (“We decided to use either of the two computers.”);

(2) As an adjective to mean “being the one and the other of two” (“There were spikes on either side of the fence.”) or “being the one or the other of two” (“Arlene uses either hand to write.”);

(3) As an adverb to mean “likewise” or “moreover” when used to emphasize a negative statement (“He was not smart or handsome either.”); and

(4) As a conjunction in “either…or” constructions, a form that gives rise to some grammar conundrums that we will try to unravel in a little while.

When “either” functions as a pronoun or adjective, of course, the standard practice is to use it in the singular sense to refer to only one of two items, as in “Either of the two choices is unpalatable to me.” But when more than two items are involved, “either” becomes a semantic misfit, so we use the word “any” instead, as in “Any of these five runners is likely to win” (that’s “any” working as a pronoun) and “A red marking on any face of the cube will suffice” (that’s “any” working as an adjective). Some liberal teachers or editors might let us get away with using “either” in such sentences, but it is prudent to stick to “any” for our own semantic peace of mind.

The word “any,” though, simply won’t work as a conjunction in a form similar to “either…or.” This time, English gives us no choice but to break its rule of two and use “either…or” even if it refers to more than two items. Such is the case in the following “either…or” construction with three coordinate clauses: “Either you go ahead with your candidacy or we will field another candidate or we might as well forget about fielding one altogether.” With “either” right in front, the sentence can theoretically string more and more clauses with “or” and remain grammatically correct. Except for this minor semantic quirk, the behavior of “either” as a pronoun, adjective, and adverb is fairly straightforward and needs no further discussion.

In the case of “either…or” as a conjunction, however, we run smack against two sticky grammar conundrums: what form the verb and pronoun should take when the “either…or” construction mixes singular and plural elements, and how to execute the parallelism rule for grammar elements in “either... or” constructions.

Doing “either…or” constructions is simple when both of the elements referred to are singular or when both are plural. In the first case, the verb invariably takes the singular form, as in “Either my mother or my brother is coming tomorrow.” In the second case, the verb invariably takes the plural form, as in “Either my parents or my brothers are coming tomorrow.” But when we have a sentence that mixes singular and plural elements, should the verb be singular or plural?

In such mixed situations, an accepted practice is to make the verb agree with the number of the noun or noun phrase closest to it: “Either my mother or my brothers are coming tomorrow.” “Either my brothers or my mother is coming tomorrow.” But some grammarians feel that such mixed “either…or” constructions are inconsistent no matter what number the verb takes, so they suggest rewriting the sentence to get rid of the inconsistency. One way is to drop “either” and recast the sentence a little bit: “My mother or my brothers might come tomorrow.” “My brothers or my mother might come tomorrow.” The sense of both sentences is intact even with “either” gone, proof that the word is not functionally necessary in such mixed constructions.

All that remains is for us to make sense of the parallelism rule for “either…or” constructions. The basic principle in parallelism, of course, is matching in both form and structure all equally important ideas or grammatical elements in a sentence. One useful rule of thumb for achieving this in “either…or” constructions is to place the word “either” right before the first of the two elements being compared.

For instance, the following sentence is incorrect (and illogical) because it puts “either” where it shouldn’t be: “They either planned to buy a townhouse or lease an apartment.” Now see what happens when we put “either” right before “buy a townhouse,” which is the first of the elements being compared: “They planned to either buy a townhouse or lease an apartment.”

Now we have a logical statement that not only looks right but also sounds right. (April 11, 2005)

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Twice Over, It’s Our Good Fortune That We Speak English

2011-07-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

This is the introduction to the lecture I delivered as resource person during the “Refresher Course on English Grammar and the Basics of Responsible Journalism” held in Lucena City, Philippines, last July 23, 2011.

From a language standpoint, we Filipinos are such a lucky people. By a fortunate accident in our history, English has been our second language for almost 100 years now, and I think you’ll agree with me that it’s such a good thing.

Let me share with you what I wrote about this good fortune of ours in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2003 or more than eight years ago: “Nearly 50 years of American colonization had deeply Anglicized the way we Filipinos think and run our lives—the way we name ourselves and our institutions, the way we consume, the way we educate ourselves, the way we inform and entertain ourselves, the way we do business, and the way we muddle through with our politics. English is in our soul, in our tongue, in our stomachs, in our scent, in our clothes, in our shoes, in our printed word, in our airwaves and bandwidths, in the very air we inhale and exhale. We can argue to death that this may not be exactly a good thing, but that is precisely what we Filipinos have become—Asian by geography, skin, and temperament but decidedly American by taste, inclination, and aspiration.”

Our other good fortune is that over the past half century or so, English has become the world’s global language. In a very real sense then, our English-language legacy has given us a strong competitive edge over many other nonnative-English-speaking nations in the world. It’s a built-in competitive edge that makes the Philippines the second largest labor exporter in the world today—second only to Mexico—and also today’s world leader in the call-center industry, eclipsing even India in size and growth. And the English language gives us this competitive edge at a time when most of our neighbors in Asia—South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Cambodia, Thailand, and lately China—have just started to appreciate the value of English and are now breaking their necks and spending fortunes just to learn its basics and make themselves more competitive global players.

This is why I think the Philippines must aggressively nurture its English-language legacy rather than sideline it ostensively in the name of nationalism. We should vigorously hone our English writing and speaking skills to protect and further strengthen this legacy. In short, we must make ourselves proficient in English not only in reputation but in reality, and I think the country’s leaders, educators, teachers, and civil servants should take the lead in this effort. And on the part of Filipino journalists, you must not be just passive participants in this undertaking. This is because aside from your work as disseminators of news and opinion, and whether you like it or not, you are actually de facto role models for good English grammar and usage in this country. You therefore shouldn’t set a bad example by being slipshod in the English of your news stories, feature stories, and commentary.

This is why I’m delighted that you have invited me to conduct this refresher course on English grammar for journalism. I think it’s a clear indication that you are taking your English seriously and that you are truly desirous of polishing it to a good shine—to an English that’s demonstrably better than the English of our nonnative English-speaking counterparts elsewhere in Asia and in the rest of the world. (July 23, 2011)

Writing well in English no guarantee of speaking well in English

2011-07-17T20:49:00.000-07:00

Over the past nine years that I’ve been pursuing my good-English advocacy, initially through my English-usage column in The Manila Times and now also through my English-usage books and this website, I have received hundreds of e-mail from people commenting on my views or asking for personal advice on how they might be able to improve their English. In terms of English grammar and usage, I’ve always been confident that my advice and prescriptions could demonstrably help learners improve their written English as well as their thinking process. I didn’t have the same level of confidence though in being able to help people speak well in English. Being totally print-based, I just felt that I didn’t have the wherewithal to give useful instruction on such aspects of speech as pronunciation, enunciation, voice projection, and body language. This was why in practically every case, I would suggest to those asking me for advice on improving their spoken English to seek more competent instruction elsewhere.

Looking back now, I couldn’t help but wonder how those who sought advice from me fared after getting nothing from me beyond such general suggestions as developing the ability to think logically, learning from good English speakers as role models, and relentlessly doing practice, practice, practice. With a tinge of guilt, I am particularly keen in knowing what happened to the pseudonymous Euclid Paraiso, about whose desire to be a call-center agent I wrote the essay below—rather harshly and dismissively, I regret to say—in my English-usage column in the Times way back in 2006. (July 17, 2011)

The need to speak well in English

A few days ago, I received this e-mail from a reader of my English-usage column in The Manila Times:

Dear Mr. Carillo,
Please give me some pointers on (1) how to improve my capability to speak fluent English, (2) how to speak with confidence before an audience, and (3) how to speak without gaps in my speech. I’m making this request, sir, because I plan to apply to a call center and I want to prepare myself before I send my application.

Euclid Paraiso*

Here’s my open reply to the letter:

Dear Euclid,

To speak fluent and convincing English, you need at least four major attributes: a good grasp of English (and by this I mean its vocabulary, grammar, semantics, and structure), logical and clear thinking, good pronunciation, and confidence and empathy with your audience.

It takes years to develop all of these attributes, and those still sorely deficient in most of them by the time they finish college don’t stand a chance at all of landing an English-language call center job. A clear, demonstrable command of spoken English is a must for this job, so all things being equal, applicants who don’t meet this criterion can’t hope to compete with the thousands who have already cultivated their spoken English to a high level. They may possess the intelligence and native charm to impress people in their regional tongue, but if their spoken English is way below par, it would be much better for them to pursue occupations that don’t give too much premium to good spoken English.

It’s true that through my English-usage column, I aim to help people improve their written English, but I would like to emphasize that there’s a whole world of difference between being able to write good English and being able to speak like a good native English speaker. Writing and speaking are two different disciplines, and I’m afraid I can only teach the former. Good writers aren’t necessarily good speakers, and good speakers aren’t necessarily good writers. In fact, it’s an open secret that there are many excellent English-language writers and editors who speak dreadful English, as there are many excellent English-language lecturers, public officials, and TV talk-show hosts who can hardly write a coherent English paragraph, much less a cohesive English exposition.

As to logical thinking and clarity of thought, Euclid, I fear that these are such in short supply these days. People allow too much politics, ideology, religious fanaticism, and superstition to bend and twist their thinking into such ludicrous shapes. Scores of people getting crushed to death in a TV show stampede? Blame the current national leadership for the grinding poverty that had desperately made those people want to get rich quick by participating in that TV show. A huge chunk of a denuded mountainside collapsing to bury a whole village and most of its population? Blame the current national leadership, the rain, or the people themselves for perhaps forgetting to pray the night before for the absolution of their sins. I just hope that you aren’t one of the legions of our people who have been rendered largely incapable of rational thinking by their social milieu, because if you are, Euclid, even impeccable English won’t land you a job in a call center or in any other job that needs clear, straight thinking to produce the desired results.

Good English pronunciation is, of course, something you learn from good English speakers as role models and from years of practice, practice, practice. Only these can eliminate the flaws and gaps in your articulation and build your confidence when addressing an audience. But frankly, Euclid, if you still have serious doubts about your pronunciation up to now, forget that call center job. By dint of hard work you may ultimately achieve passable English diction, but by then your regional accent would have already clung to your tongue and vocal chords so tenaciously that there’d be no hope for you to sound like a native English speaker ever. (February 27, 2006)

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*Euclid Paraiso is a pseudonym of the letter writer, who at the time of the writing of this letter lived in San Pedro, Laguna.

The two ways of paraphrasing quoted statements in reportage

2011-07-11T02:54:00.000-07:00

Last week, I posted here a three-part essay, “How to handle reported speech,” that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2009. I discussed in that essay how the operative verb in a reported statement must be rendered to grammatically match the tense of the reporting verb, and what grammatical changes must be made in the reported statement itself to conform to the sense of reported speech.

This time I am posting a two-part companion essay, “Dealing with quotations and attributions,” which I wrote in 2005 to explain how today’s news service agencies as well as newspapers and magazines present paraphrased quoted statements. As we all know, paraphrasing routinely does away with the quotation marks that set off a quoted statement from its attribution, but this question arises: Which tense should control the time framework of the whole sentence—that of the attribution, or that of the quoted paraphrased material?

The prevailing practice in media is to use the sequence of tenses rule, in which the tense in the paraphrased statement is retained when the attribution comes after or within that statement; when the attribution comes ahead of the paraphrased quoted statement, however, the tense of the attribution gains control over the tenses in the rest of the statement. In contrast, some media organizations use the so-called exceptional sequence rule, which generally retains the tense used in the speaker’s exact words no matter where the attribution falls in the paraphrased quoted material.

The two-part essay that follows discusses precisely how these two ways of dealing with paraphrased statements are done. (July 9, 2011)

Dealing with quotations and attributions

Part I:

A reader from India, Jhumur D., has raised a very interesting question by e-mail about the proper use of the tenses in indirectly quoted or paraphrased statements:

“I came across your articles through Google and since then have been its regular reader. We all know that the past tense should be used for indirect narration if the verb [in the attribution] is in the past tense, except for universally true facts. But these days I regularly see the opposite. Can you please explain why this sentence from a reputable news agency doesn’t follow the grammar rule?

State-run Indian Oil Corp. (IOC) is in preliminary talks to acquire Canada’s Niko Resources and French energy firm Maurel and Prom, a spokesman for the Indian refiner said on Friday.

“It should have been ‘was in preliminary talks.’”

Offhand, my answer is that the news agency is correct in using the present tense in the sentence in question. To understand why this is so, however, we first have to review the basics of how written English normally handles quotations and attributions.

We all know that when the exact words of a speaker are quoted, those words should be duly set off by quotation marks. The attribution is then provided either before or after the statement, but depending on the writer’s judgment, it may also be placed within the quoted statement whenever appropriate:

The manager said, “Our president has decided and he’s someone who rarely changes his mind.”
“Our president has decided and he’s someone who rarely changes his mind,” the manager said. “Our president has decided,” the manager said, “and he’s someone who rarely changes his mind.”

No matter where the attribution is placed in such quoted statements, the statement retains the exact words and the tense of the verbs used by the speaker. We are not at liberty to change anything in what was actually said.

The quoted material presented by Jhumur is something different, however. It has been paraphrased; in other words, it doesn’t use the speaker’s exact words. In print journalism, this practice is indicated by doing away with the quotation marks that normally set off quoted material from its attribution.

Now, when quotation marks are dropped in this manner, there could be confusion as to which tense should control the time framework of the whole sentence—that of the attribution, or that of the quoted paraphrased material. This is why when using paraphrased quoted statements, many news service agencies as well as newspapers and magazines follow the so-called sequence of tenses rule.

Under this rule, when the attribution comes after or within that statement, the tenses in the quoted statement are retained. This is why the quoted paraphrased statement presented by Jhumur uses the present-tense “is in preliminary talks” instead of the past-tense “was in preliminary talks.” On the other hand, when the attribution comes ahead of the paraphrased quoted statement, the tense of the attribution acquires control over the tenses in the rest of the statement.

The tenses used in the original verbatim statement will then change as follows:

(1) The present tense becomes past tense (“is”/”are” to “was”/”were”). For instance, if a beauty contest winner tells the news reporter these exact words, “I am overwhelmed,” the reporter would write it as follows: She said [that] she was overwhelmed.

(2) The future tense becomes conditional (“will” to “would”). For instance, if an irate beauty contest loser tells the reporter these exact words, “I will appeal the judges’ decision,” the reporter would write it as follows: She said [that] she would appeal the judges’ decision.

(3) The past tense becomes past perfect (“was”/”were” to “had been”), except when the time element is indicated. For instance, if a beauty contest chair tells the newspaper reporter these exact words, “We were scandalized by the loser’s complaint,” the reporter would write it as follows: She said [that] they had been scandalized by the loser’s complaint. However, the past tense is retained when the time element of the action in the quoted material is given: She said [that] they were scandalized when the loser filed a complaint yesterday.

(4) The future perfect becomes conditional (“will have + past participle” to “would have + past participle”). For instance, if the beauty contest chair tells the newspaper reporter these exact words, “I will have to review the scores first before deciding,” the reporter would write it as follows: She said she would have to evaluate the scores first before deciding.

Some publications don’t follow this rule, however. Instead, they use the so-called “exceptional sequence rule,” which generally retains the tense used in the original quotation no matter where the attribution is placed in the quoted paraphrased material.

We will discuss this other rule in detail in the next column. (December 20, 2005)

Part II:

We saw in the preceding essay that when quoted statements are paraphrased or don’t use the speaker’s exact words, the convention in written English is to drop the quotation marks that set off the quoted material from its attribution, after which the traditional “sequence of tenses” rule determines the tense of the verbs in the paraphrased quoted material.

This rule is easy to apply when the attribution comes after or within the paraphrased quoted statement. For instance, if a political analyst tells a newspaper reporter these exact words, “Some senators are vehemently against changing the Constitution and I think they’ll fight tooth and nail to defeat the proposed amendments,” the reporter might make a quoted paraphrase in either of two ways:

(1) Some senators are strongly opposed to charter change and will fight the proposed amendments in every possible way, the political analyst said.
(2) Some senators are strongly opposed to charter change, the political analyst said, and they will fight the proposed amendments in every possible way. The tenses in the speaker’s exact words are retained.

When the attribution comes ahead of the paraphrased quoted statement, however, the tense of the attribution gains control over the tenses in the paraphrase, and the sequence of tenses rule is then applied as follows: present tense becomes past tense, future tense becomes conditional, past tense becomes past perfect, present perfect becomes past perfect, and future perfect becomes future conditional.

Thus, in the earlier example, the quoted paraphrase will change the tenses in the verbatim quotation this way:

The political analyst said [that] several senators were strongly opposed to charter change and would fight it in every possible way.

As previously pointed out, many news service agencies, newspapers, and magazines use the sequence of tenses rule for paraphrased quoted statements, but others consider this rule confusing and misleading. They prefer to use the “exceptional sequence” rule, which generally retains the tense used in the speaker’s exact words no matter where the attribution falls in the paraphrased quoted material. The example given earlier will thus be rendered in this paraphrased quoted form: The political analyst said [that] several senators are strongly opposed to charter change and will fight it in every possible way.

Proponents of the exceptional sequence rule argue that paraphrased quoted statements formed by using it are clearer and more logical and immediate than those formed by using the traditional sequence of tenses rule. True enough, by not having to change the tenses in paraphrased quoted statements, the exceptional sequence rule eliminates a procedure that can sometimes confuse even the writers themselves and possibly mislead the reader.

We can better appreciate the relative virtues of the two rules by applying each to a statement about a situation that doesn’t change so quickly. Assume, for instance, that a provincial governor told a reporter these exact words yesterday: “I have a green card but I don’t intend to live in the U.S. upon my retirement.” A quoted paraphrase of this verbatim statement using the traditional sequence of tenses rule will change its tense from present to past:

The provincial governor said [that] he had a green card but didn’t intend to live in the U.S. upon retiring.

In contrast, a quoted paraphrase using the exceptional sequence rule will retain the present tense:

The provincial governor said [that] he has a green card but doesn’t intend to live in the U.S. upon retiring. Both versions are grammatically correct, and present no logical problems with their differing use of the tenses.

We must be aware, though, that even under the exceptional sequence rule, some situations arise in which changing the tense of the verbatim quoted material becomes absolutely necessary. For instance, assume that a city mayor told a reporter of a daily newspaper these exact words yesterday: “I am not feeling well so I will not attend the party caucus tonight.”

In a news report for today’s papers, the following paraphrased quoted statement using the exceptional sequence rule will no longer hold logically:

The city mayor said [that] he is not feeling well and will not attend the party caucus last night.

This is because by the time the report is read, the city mayor might have already gotten well and might have even attended the party caucus eventually. Thus, there’s no choice but to use the past tense, as in the case of the sequence of tenses rule:

The city mayor said [that] he was not feeling well and would not attend the party caucus scheduled last night.

Indeed, no matter what rule we use in writing paraphrased quoted statements, we must reflect in a logical way the effect of the passage of time between the utterance of the quoted statement and its being read in the printed form. (December 26, 2005)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, December 20 and 26, 2005 © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Reported speech needs advanced grammar skills and a quick mind

2011-07-04T02:30:00.000-07:00

From a grammar standpoint, writing about the things we have said ourselves is much simpler than reporting to people what we heard or learned somebody else has said. This latter activity is what’s known in English grammar as reported speech or indirect speech, and it requires higher grammar skills and quickness of mind to do properly. As I’m sure many of us have already found out, putting the reported clause—the statement uttered by the person we are talking about—in the proper tense and form isn’t all that simple. Unless we are among the very few people on Earth gifted with total recall, we won’t be able to quote those utterances word for word. We will often need to paraphrase those utterances and apply what’s known as the normal sequence-of-tenses rule for reported speech—a rule that needs thorough mastery before it can be applied with confidence and finesse.

In “How to handle reported speech,” a three-part essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2009, I discuss how the operative verb in the reported statement must be rendered to grammatically match the tense of the reporting verb, and what grammatical changes must be made in the reported statement to conform to the sense of reported speech. I am posting all three essays here for those who need a full-dress review of reported speech to further improve their English. (July 3, 2011)

How to handle reported speech

Part I:

Handling directly quoted statements is quite simple, but it can sometimes go wrong when we mix up the American English and British English styles for using quotation marks and for punctuating quoted statements within quoted statements. It gets just a bit more complicated when we report what someone else has said but don’t use the exact words. We do this, of course, when we can’t remember the exact words or when we just want to summarize, focus on the salient points, or perhaps improve the grammar of what was said. We then enter the realm of what is called in English grammar as reported speech or indirect speech.

The pivotal factor in reported speech is the tense of the reporting verb. When the reporting verb is in the simple present tense, present perfect tense, or future tense, the operative verb in the reported statement remains unchanged; often, only the pronouns in the quoted statement need to be changed.

Consider the following directly quoted statement by American baker Kent Dueitt in an interview with The New York Times: “We keep the dough cooled, to prevent the baking powder from activating, and we don’t beat the dough up. We mix slow.”

In the simple present tense, that statement can be rendered in reported speech as follows:

American baker Kent Dueitt says that they keep the dough cooled to prevent the baking powder from activating and that they don’t beat the dough but mix it slow.

In the present perfect tense:

American baker Kent Dueitt has said that they keep the dough cooled to prevent the baking powder from activating and that they don’t beat the dough but mix it slow.

And in the future tense:

American baker Kent Dueitt will say that they keep the dough cooled to prevent the baking powder from activating and that they don’t beat the dough but mix it slow.

In all three of the reporting tenses above, the only grammatically significant change in the reported statement is the replacement of the pronoun “we” with “they.” Of course, the conjunction “that” is used to introduce the indirectly quoted statement, since it takes the form of a noun clause. In informal writing, however, the conjunction “that” can often be dropped to make the reported speech easier to articulate, as we can see in the following “that”-less construction of the simple present tense rendition:

American baker Kent Dueitt says they keep the dough cooled to prevent the baking powder from activating, and don’t beat the dough but mix it slow.

But things in reported speech become more iffy when the reporting verb is in the past tense. The general rule, as we all know, is for the operative verb in the reported statement to move one tense back, but that rule applies only when the action in the reported statement is a completed or consummated one.

Take this direct quote from a Philippine official about the Somalia ship-piracy issue as reported in The Manila Times: “At the moment, we have not gotten any feedback as to the advisability of issuing an official ban for Filipino seamen going there [Somalia].”

Quite simply, that direct quote can be rendered in reported speech this way:

The Philippine official said that they had not gotten any feedback at the moment as to the advisability of issuing an official ban for Filipino seamen going to Somalia.

When the action is a repeated or habitual one, however, as in the case of the baker’s statement quoted in The New York Times, the operative verb in the reported statement formally should take the modal form “would + verb”:

American baker Kent Dueitt said [that] they would keep the dough cooled to prevent the baking powder from activating and [that they] would not beat the dough but mix it slow. (April 18, 2009)

Part II:

In the previous essay, I observed that while the general rule in reported speech is to move the operative verb in the directly quoted statement one tense back, things are not as predictable when the action in the reported statement is a repeated or habitual one, as in this directly quoted statement by an American baker: “We keep the dough cooled, to prevent the baking powder from activating, and we don’t beat the dough up. We mix slow.” I said that in reported speech, the operative verbs in that reported statement formally take not the simple past tense but the modal form “would + verb”:

American baker Kent Dueitt said [that] they would keep the dough cooled to prevent the baking powder from activating and [that they] would not beat the dough but mix it slow.

The formal use of the modal form “would + verb” for this particular situation is meant to indicate that while the actions described—keeping the dough cooled and not beating it—were being repeatedly or habitually done by the bakers up to the point of Mr. Dueitt’s utterance, it’s possible that they might have stopped doing those actions thereafter. In other words, the use of the modal form recognizes that there’s a zone of uncertainty as to whether the repeated or habitual actions described had continued or persisted up to the time the statement was reported. Of course, without that uncertainty—if we are definitely sure that the bakers continue to do those actions up to now—we can very well use the simple present tense for the operative verbs in the reported speech, as follows:

American baker Kent Dueitt said [that] they keep the dough cooled to prevent the baking powder from activating and [that they] don’t beat the dough but mix it slow.

Now, as I had discussed in an earlier essay, when the reporting verb is in the simple past tense, the operative verb in a directly quoted statement—in whatever tense it might be—generally moves one tense backwards in reported speech.

From past progressive in a directly quoted statement:

We were cooling the dough when the baking powder activated it.

To past perfect progressive in reported speech (taking into account that Mr. Dueitt is male): He said they had been cooling the dough when the baking powder activated it.

From present progressive:

We are finding it difficult to cool the dough.

To past progressive:

He said they were finding it difficult to cool the dough.

From simple present perfect:

We have cooled the dough enough but the baking powder activated it.

To simple past perfect:

He said they had cooled the dough enough but the baking powder activated it.

From present perfect progressive:

We have been cooling the dough but the baking powder still activated it.

To past perfect progressive:

He said they had been cooling the dough but the baking power still activated it.

Keep in mind, though, that when the operative verb of the reported utterance is in the past perfect or past perfect progressive tense, no change is possible for it in reported speech; it stays in that tense.

Utterance in the past perfect:

The dough had cooled by the time we remembered to beat it.

In reported speech:

He said the dough had cooled by the time they remembered to beat it.

Utterance in the past perfect progressive:

We had been cooling that dough without beating it as a matter of procedure.

In reported speech:

He said they had been cooling that dough without beating it as a matter of procedure.

We will conclude this discussion in the next essay. (April 25, 2009)

Part III:

We are now almost done with our review of how directly quoted statements behave when transformed into reported speech, particularly in the way their operative verbs move one tense back in the paraphrased statement. All we need to do now is to tie up a few loose ends to make sure that the transformations we make are grammatically correct every time.

In making the transformations, we also need to always change the time signifiers in the directly quoted statement to conform to the sense of reported speech. These time signifiers, whenever present in the direct quote, must be back-shifted one step in time along with the back-shifting of the operative verb. If we forget to do this, our sentences would be askew both grammatically and logically.

These time signifiers or adverbs of time and their conversion to the form needed in reported speech should now be second nature to us, as we can see in the list below of the most common time-signifier conversions:

From “now” to “then”:

Direct quote: “The public should start taking precautions against the swine flu virus right now,” the health official said last week.

Reported speech: The health official said last week that the public should start taking precautions against the swine flu virus right then.

From “today” to “that day”

Direct quote: “I am giving you only until today to settle your account,” she said.

Reported speech: She said she was giving me only until that day to settle my account.

From “tomorrow” to “the following day”

Direct quote: “See me tomorrow to discuss your monthly sales,” my manager said.

Reported speech: My manager asked me to see him the following day to discuss my monthly sales.

From “yesterday” to “the previous day” or “the day before”

Direct quote: “Please tell me what you were doing at the park yesterday,” the irate wife asked her husband.

Reported speech: The irate wife asked her husband what he was doing at the park the previous day [or the day before].

From “last year” to “the year before”

Direct quote: “We met last year during a heavy downpour,” the bride told us.

Reported speech: The bride told us that they met the year before during a heavy downpour.”

Apart from the time signifiers, we also need to routinely change the place signifiers “here” and “this” in directly quoted statements to conform to the sense of reported speech, as follows:

From “here” to “there”

Direct quote: “I saw you here with another woman this morning,” his fiancée said at the restaurant.

Reported speech: His fiancée said at the restaurant [that] she saw him there with another woman that morning.”

From “this” to “that”

Direct quote: “I warned you about this matter several times,” his supervisor said.

Reported speech: His supervisor said [that] he had warned him about that matter several times.

Finally, when the operative verb in a directly quoted statement is in the modal form, we need to remember to always change the modal auxiliary to its past tense form in reported speech.

From “will” to “would”

Direct quote: “The staff will leave only upon my instructions,” the general manager said.

Reported speech: The general manager said [that] the staff would leave only upon his instructions.

From “can” to “could”

Direct quote: “Alicia can finish her report in three days,” the supervisor said.

Reported speech: The supervisor said [that] Alicia could finish her report in three days.”

From “must” to “had to”

Direct quote: “All projects must be finished by yearend,” the president said.

Reported speech: The president said [that] all projects had to be finished by yearend.

From “may” to “might”

Direct quote: “I may go to New York next month,” my friend said.

Reported speech: My friend said he might go to New York next month.

We are done with our review of reported speech. (May 2, 2009)

“Going back to the basic forms of reported speech”

How to prevent monumental grammar errors from ruining our English

2011-06-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

Some professional writers get so good at their craft that they become complacent with their English grammar and usage. Having navigated the grammar terrain so well and for so long, they begin to overrely on their writerly instinct instead of becoming coldly critical of their written work. Soon they become blind to the individual trees in the forest of their prose, so to speak. As a result, they sometimes come up with monumental grammar bloopers that, when missed out by less-than-eagle-eyed editors before publication, would mark them as far from the English-savvy writers they thought they were.

In the essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2008, retitled here as “Dissecting two grammar curiosities and crudities,” I zero in on two such monumental grammar bloopers, then give a prescription for preventing them from ruining our written English and our hard-earned reputation as professional writers. (June 26, 2011)

Dissecting two grammar curiosities and crudities

To heighten our English-grammar awareness, let’s dissect two grammar curiosities and crudities that I came across in my newspaper readings:

From a foreign news service story: “News photos showed the derailed train laying at the bottom of a ditch, with rescuers removing passengers from a carriage that had fallen onto its side.”

From a newspaper columnist’s essay: “As a young short story fellow at the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio a decade ago, the workshop banner carried our batch’s official theme: Who do you write for?”

Found what’s wrong with the grammar of the sentences above?

The more grammar-savvy among you must have easily figured out what’s wrong with the first sentence. It misuses the progressive form of the transitive verb “lay,” which means “to put or set something down.” The correct verb to use here is the progressive form of the intransitive “lie,” which means “to stay at rest horizontally,” as shown in the corrected sentence below:

“News photos showed the derailed train lying at the bottom of a ditch, with rescuers removing passengers from a carriage that had fallen onto its side.”

But before moving on to the next sentence, let’s ponder this very interesting question: Why are people so prone to mixing up “lay” and “lie”?

Well, to begin with, they are look-alikes, sound-alikes, and mean-alikes. Even worse, they sometimes inflect into a bewildering form in certain tenses; oddly, for instance, the past-tense form of the intransitive “lie” takes exactly the same form as that of the present-tense plural of the transitive “lay”—“lay” in both cases. It’s really no wonder why even seasoned writers and editors often bungle their use.

If you think I’m overstating the case about how notoriously misused this verb-pair is, look at this recent reportage by a foreign news service on the earthquake devastation in China: “An hour after the quake, a half-dozen patients in blue-striped pajamas stood outside the hospital. One was laying on a hospital bed in the parking lot” (italicization mine). The correct verb form here is, of course, “lying,” the progressive form of the intransitive verb “lie.”

In the case of the second problematic sentence, here’s the big problem: Its message has been inadvertently mangled by a terribly misplaced modifier. Because of improper positioning, the prepositional phrase “as a young short story fellow at the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio a decade ago” absurdly modifies the wrong subject, “the workshop banner.” Its proper and logical subject is, of course, the “young short-story fellow” or the author herself.

This is a very serious grammatical problem and I’m quite sure that you didn’t find it so easy to fix. Indeed, it took me quite an effort to break that bad interlock between the modifying phrase and its wrong subject. Finally, however, I came up with these three major overhauls that nicely gets rid of that misplaced modifying phrase:

(1) “I recall that when I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow a decade ago, the workshop banner for our batch carried this official theme: ‘Who do you write for?’”

(2) “A decade ago, when I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow, the workshop banner for our batch carried this official theme: ‘Who do you write for?’”

(3) “A decade ago, I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio City as a short-story fellow and I recall that the workshop banner carried this official theme for our batch: “Who do you write for?”

Our best defense against misplaced modifiers is nothing less than eternal vigilance over our language, not just over form or grammar. We must always check for logic. If what we’re saying looks grammatically correct but somehow doesn’t make sense, it’s a telltale sign of a misplaced modifier somewhere. We need to hunt it down to prevent it from doing mischief on our prose. (May 24, 2008)

Ineffectual phrases, repeater phrases, and other enemies of good writing

2011-06-22T21:44:00.000-07:00

They may look so irresistibly apt and handy at first blush, but beware, many stock phrases in English can do more harm than good to your writing! I am referring to those common expressions that, rather than give finesse to your English, can make it sound fluffy, pretentious, or irritatingly redundant. They are (1) the so-called ineffectual phrases, (2) the many wordy phrases formed by habitual nominalization, (3) the repeater phrases, and (4) those mind-numbing verbose expressions that often infest journalistic reporting.

In “A sorry trail of wasted words,” a four-part series of essays that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2005, I discussed how these undesirable stock phrases can make English expositions an unpleasant reading or listening experience. I am posting the fourth essay here to give you a better idea why we need to banish these stock phrases from our written and spoken English. (June 18, 2011)

A sorry trail of wasted words

Some stock phrases in English are inherently undesirable because they are too wordy and only tend to give a false depth and emphasis to what is being said. These expressions, which are called ineffectual phrases, don’t really add value to speech or writing; worse, they make their users sound fluffy or pretentious without meaning to. The best policy is therefore to avoid these phrases altogether and to routinely use their more concise equivalents.

Here are some of the most common of these ineffectual phrases, along with the more concise words for them: “as a matter of fact” (“actually”), “for the purpose of” (“for”), “in the near future” (“soon”), “in the event that” (“if”), “in the eventuality that” (“if”), “with the exception of” (“except”), “in conjunction with” (“and”), “due to the fact that” (“because”), “by virtue of the fact that” (“because”), “on account of the fact that” (“because”), “owing to the fact that” (“because”), “in view of the fact that” (“since,” “because”), “in the absence of” (“without”), “is (was) of the opinion that” (“thinks that,” “thought that”), “as regards” (“about”), “with regard to” (“about”), “with respect to” (“about”), “it is interesting to note that” (just drop it), “needless to say” (just drop it), and “when all is said and done” (just drop it).

Another pitfall we must guard against is getting into the habit of converting verbs into wordy phrases built around a nominalization, in the mistaken belief that this makes a statement look or sound more important and impressive. On the contrary, many phrases built around nominalizations not only make sentences longer and annoyingly obtuse but also obscure the idea being presented.

Here are some common wordy phrases that result from habitual nominalization, along with their simple verb equivalents: “take action on” (“act”), “give consideration to” (“consider”), “engage in the preparation of” (“prepare”), “conduct a discussion” (“discuss”), “make an assumption that” (“assume that”), “make a discovery of” (“discover”), “do (perform) an analysis of” (“analyze”), “result in a reduction” (“reduce”), and “reach a conclusion about” (“conclude”). When “–ion” words like these begin to mushroom in our writing or speech, it’s time to identify all of the needless nominalizations among them and make them revert to their active verb forms. In well-written prose, only a few truly useful nominalizations normally survive this denominalization process.

Wordiness also often results from habitual use of what are called repeater phrases. These are words commonly used together yet actually mean the same thing, forming tautologies. Of course, the problem can be remedied by simply dropping the extraneous words in the repeater phrase, but we need to cultivate a strong sensitivity to the repetition that often hides so well in such phrases.

Here are some common repeater phrases and their concise equivalents: “close proximity” (“close”), “new innovation” (“innovation”), “added bonus” (“bonus”), “exactly the same” (“the same”), “prior experience” (“experience”), “revert back” (“revert”), “minute detail” (“detail”), “close scrutiny” (“scrutiny”), “combine together” (“combine”), “surrounded on all sides” (“surrounded”), “free gift” (“gift”), “temporary reprieve” (“reprieve”), “exact replica” (“replica”), and “future plans” (“plans”).

Finally, we would all be spared from so much aggravation as readers and listeners if newspapers and the broadcast media only took a much more serious effort to rid their news and feature reportage of such numbing journalese as these: “placed under arrest” (“arrested”), “made good their escape” (“escaped”), “escaped injury” (“was not injured”), “kicked off the campaign” (“began the campaign”), “hammered out—or, worse, “forged”—an agreement” (“agreed”), “put in an appearance” (“appeared”), “razed to the ground” (“razed”), “last-ditch attempt” (“final attempt”), and “left in its wake a wide swath of destruction” (“caused so much destruction”). (November 7, 2005)

When words get boxed in for highly specialized usage

2011-06-13T04:56:00.000-07:00

Some English words get stigmatized through consensual misuse. They fall into disfavor because an altogether different denotation sticks to them, and rarely can they return to respectable usage after that. In the Philippines, in particular, one such word is the transitive verb “salvage.” It formally means “to rescue or save especially from wreckage or ruin,” of course, but in recent years, it has come to colloquial use in the exact opposite sense of “to kill or exterminate with impunity.” Considering how local media had seized on that meaning to dramatize their stories of organized murder and mayhem, I strongly doubt if “salvage” could still shed this unsavory denotation.

Then there are also English words that somehow get boxed in for specialized use. Among them is the noun “celebrant,” which has been appropriated in predominantly Christian or Roman Catholic countries to exclusively mean “a priest officiating the Holy Mass.” Woe to those who would dare to use “celebrant” to mean just anyone celebrating a birthday or some other personal milestone! They would often be heckled as deficient in their English, then pointedly told that the correct word for that mere earthly observance is “celebrator.”

In “No need to hold ‘celebrant’ in a straightjacket,” an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in the middle of last year, I argued that there’s really no legitimate and compelling reason why the word “celebrant” should be used solely as a religious term. This week, I am posting that essay in the Forum to see if there are enough people who will agree with me that “celebrant” ought to be democratized to allow for its use in secular contexts. (June 12, 2011)

No need to hold “celebrant” in a straightjacket

The Philippines being predominantly Roman Catholic, there’s a tendency for the supposedly English-savvy among us to scoff at people who describe as a “celebrant” someone celebrating a birthday or some other auspicious occasion. “Oh, no, that isn’t right!” they would often cut off and gleefully heckle the speaker. “The right word is ‘celebrator’; ‘celebrant’ means a priest officiating the Holy Mass!”

But are people who use “celebrator” in that context really wrong? Do they really deserve all that heckling?

Although I don’t usually join the wicked ribbing that often follows, I myself used to think that people who call birthday celebrators “birthday celebrants” are—if not actually unsavvy in their English—at least ill-advised in doing so. Indeed, my Merriam-Webster’s 11^th Collegiate Dictionary defines “celebrant” as “one who celebrates; specifically the priest officiating the Eucharist.” Likewise, the Collins English Dictionary—Complete and Unabridged defines “celebrant” as “a person participating in a religious ceremony” and, in Christianity’s ecclesiastical terms, as “an officiating priest, esp at the Eucharist.”

On the authority of these two dictionaries, I had never really bothered to check the validity of the conventional wisdom that anybody who’s not a priest or cleric should never be called a “celebrant” but only a “celebrator.” By “celebrator,” of course, practically everybody uses it in the context of someone observing or taking part in a notable occasion with festivities.

Recently, though, after witnessing yet another savage if good-natured ribbing of someone who used “celebrant” to describe a birthday celebrator, I decided that perhaps the issue was serious enough to look deeper into. I therefore resolved to check the usage with at least two other lexicographic authorities, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD).

The OED gives two definitions of “celebrant,” first as “a person who performs a rite, especially a priest at the Eucharist,” and, second, citing North American usage, as “a person who celebrates something.” For its part, the AHD primarily defines “celebrant” in essentially the same vein as the first OED definition, as (a) “A person who participates in a religious ceremony or rite”; (b) “A person who officiates at a religious or civil ceremony or rite, especially a wedding”; and (c) “In some Christian churches, the cleric officiating at the celebration of the Eucharist.” Like the OED, the AHD also makes a second definition of “celebrant” as “A participant in a celebration.”

Then the AHD goes one step further and makes the following usage note for “celebrant”: “Although ‘celebrant’ is most often used to describe an official participant in a religious ceremony or rite, a majority of the [AHD] Usage Panel accepted the use of ‘celebrant’ to mean ‘a participant in a celebration’ in an earlier survey. Still, while ‘New Year’s Eve celebrants’ may be an acceptable usage, ‘celebrator’ is an uncontroversial alternative in this more general sense.”

This being the case, I think people who use “celebrants” to describe people celebrating birthdays and other special occasions aren’t really wrong, and they certainly don’t deserve to be cut down and needled when using that word. And there’s no need for anyone to get upset either when called a “celebrant”—whether as principal or guest—during such occasions. I dare say that “celebrant” is as good a word as “celebrator” in such contexts, and except perhaps in the company of hidebound Christian fanatics, we need not hold the word “celebrant” in a straitjacket to describe only the Christian clergy doing their rituals.

In short, we can freely use “celebrators” to describe people celebrating or attending a birthday party or any other happy occasion, and I think the English-savvy among us need to get used to the idea that the usage of “celebrants” is actually par for the course and doesn’t deserve all that bashing as if it were bad English. (July 3, 2010)

How the causatives enable intransitive verbs to overcome their intransitivity

2011-06-06T04:14:00.000-07:00

As we all know, English has three types of verbs: transitive verbs, intransitive verbs, and linking verbs. A verb is transitive when it has the ability to pass on its action to an object or something that can receive that action; intransitive when it can’t pass on its action to anything in the sentence and simply dissipates that action in itself; and linking when it just connects a subject to a complement and makes the sentence flow properly.

We are all familiar with how transitive verbs and linking verbs work, so there should be no need to discuss them any further here. But I think we need to look more closely into how intransitive verbs work considering that they can’t pass on their action to an object. This is precisely what happens in sentences like “The witness disappeared” and “The boat arrived.” The intransitive verbs “disappeared” and “arrived” simply convey the idea that something has taken place; their respective subjects (“witness” and “boat”) don’t do the action, and these verbs can’t have any object either to receive that action. It therefore looks as if their intransitivity is such a big handicap as to make their usage in language marginal compared to transitive verbs.

This isn’t the case, through. As I explain in the essay below that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004, English has a grammatical device for making intransitive verbs surmount their handicap of intransitivity: the causatives. The causatives are a special class of verbs that, in effect, enable the subject to perform the action of an intransitive verb on an object. Causative verbs thus make intransitive verbs of much wider use in language despite the limitation imposed by their intransitivity. (June 4, 2011)

Helping intransitive verbs surmount their handicap

As we learn early about English grammar, intransitive verbs are handicapped by their inability to take a direct object. Another way of saying this is that a subject cannot perform the action of intransitive verbs on a direct object. This is why a sentence construction like the following doesn’t work: “The magician disappeared the rabbit.” Because of its intransitivity, the verb “disappear” simply won’t take “rabbit” or any other object. Only transitive verbs can take objects and act on them, as “feed” in “The magician feeds the rabbit” and “eat” in “The rabbit eats the carrot.”

But this doesn’t mean that when the operative verb is intransitive, the subject cannot ever make an action happen to an object, or make that object perform the action of the verb. We know, for instance, that the verbs “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” enables the intransitive verb “disappear” to cause its action to happen to an object, as in these sentences: “The magician made the rabbit disappear.” “The magician got the rabbit to disappear.” “The magician had the rabbit disappear.” “The magician let the rabbit disappear.” The subject in these sentences is not seen as performing the action itself, but uses some other unstated agency (“magic” or “sleight of hand”?) to perform that action.

We know, too, that “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” can also make objects do the action of intransitive verbs: “She made the dog jump.” “She got the dog to jump.” “She had the dog jump.” “She let the dog jump.” In these three sentences, it’s clear that the “dog” is the object of the verbs “made,” “got,” and “had,” “she” is the agent causing the action, and the action of the intransitive “jump” is what this agent causes the object to perform.

The verbs “make,” “get,” “have,” and “let” belong to a class of verbs called causatives. In sentences that use a causative verb, the subject doesn’t perform the action of the operative verb but causes someone or something else to do it. And as we have seen above, causative verbs do very well in enabling intransitive verbs to surmount their handicap of being unable to act on an object.

We mustn’t think, though, that causative verbs are meant only for intransitive verbs. They work as well with transitive ones: “The mother made her child take the medicine.” “The movie director had the leading lady wear a wig.” The big difference is that transitive verbs—working with causative verbs or not—always need an object somewhere in the sentence for the latter to make sense. Drop the objects “medicine” and “wig” from the two sentences given earlier, for instance, and both sentences will collapse.

The English language actually has many more causative verbs of the enabling kind, and to our small inventory so far we will now add these other common ones: “ask,” “allow,” “command,” “compel,” “convince,” “encourage,” “employ,” “entice,” “force,” “hire,” “induce,” “insist,” “motivate,” “permit,” “persuade,” “require,” “suggest,” and “urge.” Each needs to work on an operative verb for the latter’s action to take place at all.

Let’s now examine the ways we can construct sentences using causative verbs.

The most common, of course, is the construction where the causative verb is immediately followed by an object (noun or pronoun), which is followed in turn by an infinitive (“to” + verb stem): “Some countries require foreign visitors to present a visa.” “We hired temporary workers to handle the seasonal demand.” “Our school encouraged us to learn English.”

The causative construction above has a variant specifically for the causatives “let,” “had,” and “made,” which can only take the so-called “bare infinitive” (the infinitive without “to”): “Amanda let her boyfriend kiss her.” “The mayor had the illegal loggers face the irate townsfolk.” “The manager made her pay for the missing goods.” Force-fitting “to” into such constructions results in disconcerting—and unacceptable—sentences like “Amanda let her boyfriend to kiss her.”

The third type of causative construction is for the causative verbs “insist,” “suggest,” “ask,” “demand,” or “recommend,” which can neither take the infinitive nor the bare infinitive form of the operative verb. These causative verbs can work only in “that”-clause constructions like these: “The tour guide suggested that we leave.” “The judge demanded that the accused appear in court.” “The consultant recommended that we divest.”

The second verbs in these sentences are always in the base form, without tense, which differs from non-causative “that”-clause constructions like, say, “The tour guide proved that we took a longer route,” in which the verb in the “that”-clause takes a tense. (December 6, 2004)

The need to be more thorough in subject-verb agreement knowhow

2011-05-30T05:58:00.000-07:00

As can be gleaned from my weekly grammar critiques in My Media English Watch, the significant incidence of subject-verb disagreement errors in the English of the major Philippine newspapers and news websites is something that should give us pause. Ensuring subject-verb agreement in sentences appears to be a growing weakness among the new crop of news reporters and feature writers, and I’m afraid among the new crop of editors and copyeditors as well. Indeed, whenever I encounter subject-verb disagreement errors in their written English, I get a feeling that although the new breed of journalists appears very well-trained in the mass communication craft, they are not as well-grounded in their English grammar and usage.

Of course, like most of us, the current breed of English-language journalists is capable of routinely making subject and verb agree when the subject is a single-word noun or pronoun in a form other than the third-person singular and when the verb isn’t in the present tense, but often takes a tumble when the subject is compounded or is in the form of a long noun phrase or verbal phrase, and sometimes appears altogether clueless on what to do when notion and grammar disagree in a sentence under construction. In short, the understanding of subject-verb agreement by many of today’s crop of English-language journalists isn’t thorough enough for them to routinely come up with grammar-perfect sentences of whatever form or structure.

Way back in 2005, I wrote for my English-language column in The Manila Times a two-part essay on how to ensure subject-verb agreement when notion and grammar disagree in sentences under construction. I am posting that essay in this week’s edition of the Forum to make the grammar knowhow needed to ensure subject-verb agreement more widely and conveniently available. I hope that not only you but also our friends in the mass media will benefit from reading that essay. (May 29, 2011)

When notion and grammar disagree

Part I:

One of the earliest and most useful grammar rules we learn in English is that a verb should always agree with its subject in both person and number. Stated more simply, singular subjects should take the singular form of the verb and plural subjects should take the plural form of the verb. This is actually an easy rule to follow because in English, in contrast to highly inflected languages such as Spanish and French, verbs in general—with some notable exceptions that include the irregular verb “be”—don’t inflect or change in form to agree with the subject in number.

In fact, it is only in the present tense, third-person singular that English verbs change form to agree with their subject in number. As we all know, this involves adding –s or –es to the tail end of the verb: “He speaks.” “She laughs.” “It flies.” In both the first-person and second-person present tense, however, verbs don’t change form at all regardless of whether the subject is singular or plural: “I speak.” “You speak.” “We speak.” “They laugh.” “They [as a plural of “it”] fly.” Of course, verbs do change in form in the past tense, mostly by adding –ed at their tail ends, but the number of the subject does not influence the change in any way: “I laughed.” “She laughed.” “It laughed.” “You laughed.” “We laughed.” “They laughed.”

The subject-verb agreement rule is no doubt one of the most important and most pervasive frameworks of English usage, but as most of us have discovered, applying this rule is not always that simple. This is because aside from ensuring grammatical agreement between verb and subject, English also takes into account notional agreement—or agreement in meaning—between them. Of course, when there is both grammatical agreement and notional agreement between verb and subject, applying the subject-verb agreement rule is simplicity itself. Such is the case with this sentence: “She dances.” Both subject and verb are singular here, so they are grammatically and notionally in agreement. When grammar and notion are in conflict, however, the subject-verb agreement rule cannot be as easily and as confidently applied.

One such conflict situation arises when the subject is singular form but plural in meaning, such as “team,” “family,” “electorate,” and certain other nouns denoting a group. Take this sentence: “The team are quarreling among themselves.” At first sight, it looks like a badly constructed sentence because “team” is singular in form, so it stands to reason that the verb shouldn’t be in the plural form “are” but in the singular form “is” instead, as in this sentence: “The team is quarreling among itself.” When we examine that sentence closely, however, we find that the word “team” is actually intended to mean its individual members and not the group as a whole, so “team” here definitely has a plural meaning and role. The correct usage is therefore the original plural-verb construction, “The team are quarreling among themselves,” in which there is notional agreement between subject and verb.

In certain other cases, however, grammatical agreement can take precedence over notional agreement in determining the number to be taken by the verb. Consider these sentences: “Everybody has taken lunch.” “Everyone has finished dinner.” Although the subjects “everybody” and “everyone” are both grammatically singular in form, they are actually plural in meaning, being both notionally similar to the plural “all.” Thus, a strong argument can be made that the nouns “everybody” and “everyone” should use a plural verb. What has evolved as the standard usage in English, however, is that verbs in such cases should agree in number with the singular form of “everybody” or “everyone” and not with its plural meaning. This is why “everybody” and “everyone,” despite their being notionally plural, consistently use the singular “has” instead of the plural “have” in such present-tense constructions.

The subject-verb agreement rule becomes even tougher to apply in constructions where there is strong ambiguity in the choice of the number to be taken by the verb. Take this sentence, for instance: “A wide assortment of dishes has been/have been ordered for the party.” The traditional approach is, of course, to make the verb agree with the grammatical subject of the sentence, which in this case is the singular noun “assortment,” so the singular verb “has been” becomes the logical choice. However, it can also be convincingly argued that the noun phrase “a wide assortment of dishes,” which is plural in sense, is the proper subject, so the plural “have been” can also be a logical choice. Using the plural verb for such constructions is actually gaining wider acceptance, but the singular verb remains the favored usage. What this means is that we can have it either way without messing up our grammar.

We will discuss more subject-verb agreement quandaries in Part II of this essay. (August 15, 2005)

Part II:

We saw in the previous essay that although English-language verbs generally don’t inflect or change in form to agree with the subject in number, they do so in the present tense, third-person singular. All of us learn very early in English grammar that in this unique instance, verbs simply add –s or –es to their tail end when the subject is singular: “He hunts.” “She dances gracefully.” “The baby cries.” “The car runs well, but it shakes badly at high speeds.” When the subject is plural, however, verbs drop the –s or –es to make themselves also plural and thus agree with the noun in number: “They hunt.” “Ronald and Alicia dance beautifully.” “Babies normally cry at birth.” “Those cars run well, but they shake badly at high speeds.” (Another way of saying this, of course, is that present-tense verbs become plural by taking their base form, or the verb’s infinitive form without the “to.”)

This subject-verb agreement rule is, as we know very well, very easy to apply when there is both grammatical agreement and notional agreement in the sentence. When grammar and notion are at odds, however, following this rule becomes problematic. We have already taken up three situations in which that conflict usually arises: (1) when the subject is singular in form but plural in meaning, (2) when the subject is plural in form but singular in meaning, and (3) when the sentence is constructed such that the number to be taken by the verb becomes ambiguous. This time, we will take up four other situations that can put us in a quandary when applying the subject-verb agreement rule.

As all of us no doubt have already encountered, the rule actually fails when sentences have two subjects, one singular and the other plural, such that the verb cannot agree in number with both of them. Take a look at this sentence: “Either Eduardo or his parents is/are responsible for this mess.” Which of the subjects should determine the number of the verb—the singular “Eduardo” or the plural “parents”? The subject-verb agreement rule isn’t of much help here, so English takes recourse to the so-called “agreement by proximity” rule. This rule says that in the case of compound subjects in “either…or” constructions, the verb should agree in number with the subject closer to it. Thus, by virtue of the proximity of their subjects to the verb, these sentences are both grammatically correct: “Either Armand or his parents are responsible for this mess.” “Either his parents or Armand (himself) is responsible for this mess.”

Another complication to the subject-verb agreement rule arises when a singular subject is followed by the conjoining prepositional phrases “as well as,” “in addition to,” and “along with,” which all serve to add another subject to a sentence. We therefore would expect that the resulting compound subject is a plural one that needs a plural verb. On the contrary, however, the accepted usage is that the verb in such constructions should be singular in form: “Rowena as well as Ana commutes to work every day.” “The luggage in addition to his laptop is missing.” “The corner lot along with the four-door apartment is being auctioned off.”

We similarly expect—and rightly so—that an “and” between two subjects is a sure sign of a compound subject needing a plural verb, as in the following sentences: “The car and the motorcycle are brand new.” “Celine and Stella work in the same office.” However, there are instances when the notional sense of unity between two subjects can actually prevail over grammatical agreement, such that the compound subject—although plural in form—takes a singular verb: “Her name and telephone number is [instead of “are”] scribbled on the address book.” “My better half and only love is with me today.” “The long and the short of it is that we got married.”

One other grammar situation where the subject-verb agreement rule often proves difficult to apply is when the subject involves expressions that use the word “number,” as in this sentence: “A small number of stockholders is/are unhappy with how we run the company.” Should the verb be singular or plural? The general rule is that when the expression is “a number of…” and its intended sense is “some,” “few,” or “many,” the verb should take the plural: “A small number of stockholders are unhappy with how we run the company.” On the other hand, when the expression is “the number of…”, the verb always takes the singular because here, “number” is being used to express a literal sum, which is singular in sense: “The number of seminar participants is bigger today than last time.” “The number of absentees in your class is very disturbing.” (August 22, 2005)

The delicate art of making affirmative assertions around negative messages

2011-05-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

Last week, I posted here an essay of mine that discussed how the English language deals with the often disagreeable business of negating things. I observed that to attenuate the pain and discomfort of being refused, rebutted, contradicted, denied, denigrated, or lied upon, the language has developed a wide repertory of grammatical and semantic devices for negating without overtly saying a blanket “no,” “not,” or “never.”

This time, in “Excessive Negation and Its Dangers,” a companion essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times and that now also forms part of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, I explore the psychological and practical reasons why the language has come up with so many ways of expressing negation positively. The bottom line is that blunt or excessive negation is a major stumbling block to communication, so those who are keen on getting their ideas across or getting things done need to cultivate the art of using the barest minimum of “no,” “not,” and “never” in their written and spoken English. (May 22, 2011)

Excessive Negation and Its Dangers

We previously explored the various ways of negating a thought or idea. We saw that “no,” “not,” “never,” and the rest of their negative cohort efficiently demolish every declarative or affirmative statement in the English language. We also took a cursory look at affixal negation, or the use of the negative affixes “un-”, “im-”/ “in-”/ “il-”, “dis-”, “de-”, and “-less” to reverse the sense of certain words. Then we ended with the warning that too much negation, being subversive of the natural sense and order of things, could get in the way of good communication.

Before going deeply into the pitfalls of excessive negation, though, let us first recognize its obviously useful aspects. Nobody can argue, of course, against alarmist phrasing to emphasize clear and imminent danger: “Caution! Don’t touch! High voltage!” “Danger! Don’t enter! Highly radioactive area!” We can also forgive lawyers or word-weasels for crafting such bullying statements as these: “All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission of the author.” “No trespassing! Private property! Entry without authorization will subject intruders to criminal prosecution.”

Negative communication of this kind may have short-term shock appeal, but too much of it can be so irritating as to invite open resistance and hostility. In fact, psychological research has conclusively demonstrated that repeated negative messages foster doubt, mistrust, and discouragement in the receiver, making further communication with him or her increasingly difficult. This is why since the beginnings of language, people who needed other people’s cooperation would make every effort to find a more graceful—and fruitful— tact for expressing negation. Call it affirmative communication or diplomacy or public relations, but what it basically does is to use positive phrasing even for intrinsically negative messages.

The virtue of emphasizing the positive rather than the negative is easy to see. Compare the messages in these statement-pairs: “Don’t you dare do that!” (“Why not try doing this?”) “I don’t think you know what you’re doing.” (“Are you sure you are doing the right thing?”) “You cannot be relied upon to do anything properly!” (I wish I could rely more on you to do things properly.”) “If you fail our written test, you will not get hired by our company.” (“You must pass our written test to get hired by our company.”) Emphasizing the negative heightens the expectation of failing to get the desired result; emphasizing the positive heightens the expectation of succeeding in getting it. One need not be a behavioral expert to predict which approach is more likely to be the ticket for success.

We can see now that negation in language is no small thing; it is too major a thing to trifle with by inserting a “no” or “not” all too casually into a positive statement. In our writing as in our face-to-face interaction with people, excessive negation could create serious barriers to communication. Indeed, it’s no accident that the English language has evolved so many ways of expressing negation positively. The wealth of words in the language for affixal negation is, in fact, proof that over the centuries, users of the language had gone to great semantic lengths to avoid using an outright “no” or “not” when expressing negation. Thus were born thousands of new words with the negative aspect already built into them, making it so easy for us today to build positive, affirmative statements around negative messages.

Consider these statements that use “no” or “not,” and contrast them with their equivalents using affixal negation or, better yet, deliberately positive semantics: “Have I not told you that it’s not necessary for you to make that trip?” (“I said that trip might be unnecessary.”) “Even if your data are generally favorable, they are not yet sufficient, so you could not yet conclude that your theory is valid.” (“The data to support your theory is still inconclusive.”) “We cannot admit anybody to this club unless he is suitably recommended by a member.” (“We will be happy to admit to this club anyone suitably recommended by a member.”)

Lest we leave the subject of negation thinking that “no” and “not” are totally undesirable, we must now give due recognition to their supremely positive semantic virtue: their power to delicately flavor understatement, irony, euphemism, and other nonliteral forms of expression. Feel the pleasant undertow of this negative statement: “He’s not exactly a saint.” Much better than the positive, straightforward “He’s a sinner,” don’t you think? And take a look at this negative euphemism: “Mr. and Mrs. Smith do not access e-mail.” Isn’t it an exquisitely sociable way of saying that “Mr. and Mrs. Smith are incapable of using the Internet,” or, even more galling, that “Mr. and Mrs. Smith are Internet-illiterate”?

Be that as it may, by using the barest minimum of “no” and “not” in our prose, we definitely can make ourselves much more effective and pleasant communicators in the English language.

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Developing the fine art of negation in English

2011-05-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

In language, affirming something to be true is much easier and more pleasant to do than to declare something to be untrue. This is because to declare something as untrue often involves negating what somebody else holds to be true—a situation that could lead to bad feelings, wounded pride, acrimonious exchange, or even vicious and protracted debate. It is therefore important to develop negation to a fine art, the better to diffuse the pain and unpleasantness of being refused, rebutted, contradicted, denied, lied upon, or denigrated by somebody.

The English language is wonderfully rich in grammatical and semantic devices for doing negation. Apart from “no,” “not,” “never,” and “without” as staple negation adverbs, English has a remarkably wide range of devices for lexical negation (words with negative connotations) and affixal negation (positive words negated by affixes). In “Forming Negative Sentences Correctly,” an essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times and that now forms part of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, I discuss the use of these various devices in forming negative statements effectively. I am now posting that essay here to help English learners do negations with more finesse. (May 15, 2011)

Forming Negative Sentences Correctly

Without any doubt, the adverb “no”—abetted by its semantic cousins “not,” “never,” “without,” and several others with a negative bent—is the most subversive word in the English language. Look how “no” undermines and negates every single thought and idea to which it latches on: “No, I don’t like you.” “No, I have never loved you.” “No, go away; my life will be much better without you.” And if you look back at the adverbial phrase “without any doubt” that begins the first sentence above, you would see how the word “without” totally reverses the sense of “doubt” to “certainty.” Overwhelmingly powerful, “no” and its cohort can quickly and very efficiently demolish every declarative or affirmative statement that we can think up in the English language.

We can see that to negate entire statements, “no” takes a commanding position at the very beginning of sentences. It does so with brutal efficiency: “No swerving.” “No entry.” “No, sir, minors aren’t allowed here.” On the other hand, when “no” has to do the negating within a sentence, it often assigns “not” to take its place, commanders an auxiliary verb, and positions “not” right after it: “The woman drove.” “The woman did not drive.” “The woman will not drive.” Of course, we already know that when “not” does this, the main verb relinquishes the tense to the auxiliary verb. In the example given above, the auxiliary verb “do” takes either the past or future tense, and the main verb takes the verb stem “drive.”

The pattern of negation is slightly different in the perfect tenses. The adverb “not” simply inserts itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, with the main verb remaining in the past participle form even as the negation is consummated: “The woman has driven.” “The woman has not driven.” The important thing to remember is that “not” always positions itself between the helping verb and the main verb; for it to do otherwise would be grammatically fatal: “The woman not has driven.” “The visitors not have eaten.”

In contrast, “never” is a movable negator, certainly much more versatile than “not.” Watch: “The woman never drives.” “Never does the woman drive.” “The woman has never driven.” “Never has the woman driven.” “The woman never has driven.” “Never” is negation in its emphatic form—demolishing an idea to the extreme.

The adverb “no,” of course, can routinely negate any element by denoting absence, contradiction, denial, or refusal: “Under no circumstances will Claudia’s offer be accepted.” “I see no sign of reconciliation.” The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are no more.” “Have you no conscience?” The adverbs “not” and “never” work in much the same way: “Not a single drop of rain fell last summer.” “She will always be a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

But there’s one major caveat on “not”: it’s wrong to use it in sentences that have an “all…not” form (to mean “to the degree expected”). Take this sentence: “All of the women in the district did not vote for the lone female candidate.” This sentence is semantically problematic; it could mean that “some of the women did not vote for the lone female candidate”, or that “none of the women voted for the lone female candidate.” Better to remove the ambiguity by fine-tuning the negation to yield the desired meaning. The first option: “Not all of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.” The second option: “None of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.”

The same caveat should be observed in using “not” with the adjective “every,” as in this ambiguous sentence: “Every candidate did not meet the voters’ expectations.” Better: “None of the candidates met the voters’ expectations.” “All of the candidates failed to meet the voters’ expectations.”

Apart from using “no,” “not,” and “never,” we can also use the lexical semantics of negation and affixal negation to reverse the sense of things. Lexical negation is simply the negative structuring of sentences by using words with negative denotations, such as “neither,” “nor,” “rarely,” “hardly,” and “seldom.” Affixal negation, on the other hand, negates positive words through the use of the affixes “un-”, “im-”/“in-”/“il-”, “dis-”, “de-”, and “-less,” as in “unnecessary,” “imperfect,” “ineffective,” “illegal,” “disregard,” “decamp,” and “useless.”

When using these negative affixes, of course, we must always remember to drop the “no,” “not,” or “never” in the sentence if our true intention is to negate the statement. Failure to do so will result in a grammatically incorrect double negative. “It is not illegal to steal,” for instance, will mean exactly its opposite, “It is legal to steal”—with all its dire consequences to civilized society.

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Going back to the basic forms of reported speech

2011-05-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

This week, in the “You Asked Me This Question” section of Jose Carillo's English Forum, I discuss how third conditional sentences in directly quoted statements behave when presented as reported speech. That rather advanced grammar discussion is the offshoot of a question raised by Forum member Pipes about his doubtful tense usage in a reported-speech sentence. It was a tough question that, in effect, asked: “Do conditional sentences backshift in reported speech?”

As the Forum hasn’t taken up the basics of these aspects of English grammar yet, I realize that the terms “reported speech,” “conditional sentences,” and “backshift” may not ring a bell to some Forum members and guests. By way of backgrounder, therefore, I have posted the essay below, “Dealing Properly with Reported Speech,” in this week’s edition of the Forum. Written for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in September 2008, this essay discusses the mechanisms involved in converting directly quoted utterances in the various simple tenses into reported speech. I trust that you will find it a welcome introduction to this admittedly challenging grammar subject. (May 8, 2011)

Dealing properly with reported speech

One of the trickiest aspects of English grammar is dealing with reported speech, which is also called indirect speech. Basically, we are taught that when the reporting verb is in the past tense, the operative verb of the reported utterance takes one step back from the present into the past. For instance, assume that an officemate by the name of Jennifer told us this yesterday: “I am unhappy with my job.” Today, when we report that remark to somebody else, we need to change the verb in the utterance from simple present to simple past and say: “Yesterday, Jennifer said she was unhappy with her job.”

We must keep in mind, though, that it’s not only the operative verb in the utterance that changes in reported speech. The first-person form of the pronoun in the utterance (“I” in this case) changes to its third-person form (to the pronoun “she” or to the proper name “Jennifer,” depending on the choice of the person reporting the utterance), and the adjective indicating possession in the original utterance (“my”) changes to the third-person form (“her”).

The change from present to past tense in reported speech is only for starters, of course. In the various other tenses, the operative verb of the utterance likewise generally moves one tense backwards in time when the reporting verb is in the past tense, as follows:

From present progressive (assuming that the speaker is male): “I am having a problem with one of my students.” To past progressive: “He said he was having a problem with one of his students.”

From simple present perfect: “I have been bypassed for promotion by my boss.” To simple past perfect: “He said he had been bypassed for promotion by his boss.”

From present perfect progressive: “I have been analyzing the problem but to no avail.” To past perfect progressive: “He said he had been analyzing the problem but to no avail.”

From simple past: “I saw the movie twice.” To past perfect: “He said he had seen the movie twice.” (If the act being reported happened very close or almost simultaneous to the utterance, however, the simple past may also be a logical tense for the operative verb of the reported utterance: “He said he saw the movie twice.”)

From past progressive: “I was taking medication then.” To past perfect progressive: “He said he had been taking medication at the time.”

However, when the operative verb of the reported utterance is in the past perfect or in the past perfect progressive, no change is possible for it in reported speech; it stays in that tense.

Utterance in the past perfect: “The bridge had collapsed by the time I reached the river.” Reported speech: “He said the bridge had collapsed by the time he reached the river.”

Utterance in the past perfect progressive: “I had been depending on that scholarship grant for four years.” Reported speech: “He said he had been depending on that scholarship grant for four years.”

We must also always remember that when the operative verb in the utterance is in the modal form, we need to change the modal auxiliary to its past tense form in reported speech. Thus, “will” changes to “would,” “can” to “could,” “must” to “had to,” and “may” to “might.”

As examples, “I will find her without any difficulty” becomes “He said he would find her without any difficulty” in reported speech; “I can beat her anytime in chess” becomes “He said he could beat her anytime in chess”; “All past due accounts must be settled at once” becomes “He said that all past due accounts had to be settled at once”; and “I may leave anytime” becomes “He said he might leave anytime.”

When some TV journalists exercise their vaunted press freedom too far

2011-05-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

I know only too well that freedom of speech is a hallmark of a robust and vibrant democracy, and we are most fortunate that our country’s mass media currently enjoy the trappings of this freedom to a remarkably high degree. I must say, however, that whether they are conscious of it or not, some of our national TV networks have lately been carrying this freedom of expression too far. A recent case in point is their unbridled use of the online social media facilities of Facebook and Twitter to stream in raw opinions onscreen during TV programs or interviews on controversial topics.

Of course there’s value and virtue in quickly getting the public pulse on matters of great public interest, but I think it’s clear that whether expressed in English or in the lingua franca, many of the opinions drawn in by those TV programs under these circumstances are grossly uninformed, misleading, irresponsible, systematically manipulative, or downright wacky—and oftentimes expressed in grammatically fractured and convoluted language as well. There’s no doubt in my mind that because of the scatterbrain character of many of these online postings or tweets, by no means could they ever be a reliable and accurate measure of public opinion. (I remember that in the early days of TV broadcasting, a sharp mind in the U.S. media—if I remember right, he was Walter Lippmann—sagely observed that one of the serious drawbacks of broadcast TV is its power to widely disseminate and validate uninformed opinion.)

So, in the same way that the print media are able to routinely edit the opinions they print on their pages, couldn’t the TV programs at least find some way of intermediating all that instant feedback to ensure that only the sensible and responsible ones—no matter how contrarian or strongly worded—are streamed onscreen? I think it would greatly raise the quality of public discourse if the broadcast media can do this.

The other matter that I’d like to take up here is the lack of basic courtesy and decorum among some TV investigative journalists when they do face-to-face or telephone interviews in the course of their TV programs. These investigative journalists, live and onscreen, have this tendency to needle and browbeat their respondents to admit culpability in a supposed crime or misdemeanor that they are working to establish within the time frame of the TV program itself. But really now, even if guilty or rotten to the core, who in his right mind would admit culpability on TV for all the world to see? And isn’t it axiomatic that in our democratic society, the accused is entitled to due process and is presumed innocent until proven guilty? I’m afraid that these niceties are sometimes lost to some of these investigative journalists. In one such TV program I watched recently, in fact, the investigative journalist acted and used language that made it unmistakable that he thought himself the arresting police officer, prosecutor, legal counsel, judge, and executioner all rolled into one.

Five years ago, in my English-usage column in The Manila Times, I expressed similar misgivings about the apparent lack of courtesy and decorum among some TV news-and-talk-show hosts when dealing with their respondents or guests. Even with the growing use of the online social media by the national TV networks to buttress their programming, I believe that my thoughts in those pre-Facebook and Twitter days about improper language on TV remain very much relevant today. I am therefore posting that essay of mine, retitled here as “The perils of language misuse during live TV interviews,” in my blog this week. (May 1, 2011)

The perils of language misuse during live TV interviews

I think one of the most dreadful aspects of live electronic journalism is being asked to answer a badly phrased and impertinent question over the telephone for all the broadcast audience to hear.

Such a question was posed by news-and-talk-show host to a national treasury official during a network TV broadcast several days ago. The subject was the headline story in most of the day’s newspapers that the treasury official had certified the availability of funds for a plebiscite on the proposed Charter change. The question asked him was this: “How true is it that you had certified the availability of funds for a referendum on Charter change?”

That question struck me not only as semantically wrong but also insolent, accusing, and offensive from a journalistic standpoint. It’s a question that a self-respecting individual shouldn’t really answer, or perhaps correct and put in better perspective first before dignifying it with an answer. This rarely happens in practice, however. The respondent often ends up muddling through with a silly answer (‘That’s a half truth!”, “Absolutely true!”, “Perfectly true!”) rather than risk being looked upon as uncooperative, evasive, or tricky by the broadcast audience.

We know that a statement is either true or false in the sense of being a “fact” or having “the property of being in accord with fact or reality,” and that the “truth” can’t be measured by an answer to such a qualitative question as “How true is it?” Only in the most informal sense, as in gossip or trivial conversations (which a TV interview on matters of national importance is not), can this frivolous manner of “measuring” the truth be used. From both the usage and journalistic standpoints, therefore, that TV host’s question about the budget official’s reported pronouncement was terribly inappropriate.

The semantically correct way of phrasing that question is, of course, this: “Is it true that you had certified the availability of funds for a referendum on charter change?” This is a question that can be answered truthfully with either a “Yes” or a “No,” and people can answer it without being made to feel that their honesty and integrity are under question.

But what seems to me an even more serious matter is the sense of haughtiness and contempt conveyed by TV broadcast people when they ask questions of this sort. In this particular instance, the TV anchor already knew that the budget official had indeed made that pronouncement. Before asking him the question, in fact, she had just finished a live interview of people who were condemning that pronouncement. So, it can reasonably be asked, how could she all so suddenly backtrack and ask the treasury official how true it was that he had made that statement in the first place?

I submit that a better prepared and more English-savvy TV journalist would have avoided asking that kind of question at all. A much better and non-confrontational opening to that telephone interview would have been a simple statement that could put the subject in perspective for both the respondent and the broadcast audience: “Mr. So-and-So, you were reported as having certified the availability of funds for a plebiscite on the proposed charter change. Can you please tell us precisely where the funds will be coming from? Will be fund releases for that purpose be legal?” This is the sort of thing that clarifies rather than muddles up matters.

I think that since their jobs are deeply imbued with the public interest, TV news-and-talk-show hosts should closely watch their language on camera and avoid being carried away so often by their personal biases and political leanings. The least they can do is to be objective, fair, and civil in treating their respondents. This way, they will be protecting not only their own credibility and integrity as TV journalists but also that of the broadcast media as a whole. (April 10, 2006)

Yielding to the temptation of resurrecting an old essay

2011-04-24T16:59:00.000-07:00

Each year, when Holy Week comes, I’m always tempted to resurrect an essay that I wrote way back on April 15, 2003 for my English-usage column in The Manila Times. Indeed, those who have been regularly following the essays featured in this section will recall that I yielded to that temptation last year by posting that essay in the Forum on Black Saturday (which at that time fell on April 3), prefacing it with an introductory note entitled “Looking back to Easter Sunday’s earthly and celestial foundations.” Today, Easter Sunday of 2011, I yield to that temptation again.

So, once more, here’s that essay, “Matters of faith,” which I wrote eight years ago after doing some research to answer a question of my then eight-year-old son—in the process curing my own abysmal ignorance of the foundations of Holy Week as celebrated by Roman Catholics all over the world. Happy Easter! (April 24, 2011)

Matters of faith

I was making notes for a possible non-English-language topic for my column, thinking that grammar wouldn’t be right for Holy Wednesday, when my nine-year-old tapped my shoulder and asked: “Dad, why is Holy Week from April 13 to 20 this year? Last year, it was from March 24 to 31.* Why not hold it on the same date like that of Christmas Day so it doesn’t get confusing?”

Talk about deja vu! I had wanted to ask my own father that same question when I was about the same age as my son now, but never got to ask. Now I am a father myself—three times over, in fact—and yet could only give a stock answer to veil my continuing ignorance: “It’s because the days of the Holy Week are movable feasts, son. They base it on a religious calendar—you know, that kind where there are names of one or two saints for every day of the year.”

“But why, Dad? They could do the same to every other religious holiday, but they don’t. And another question: Why is Easter Sunday called ‘Easter’? This celebration came from the West, so wouldn’t it make more sense to call it ‘Wester’? And one last thing: Why is the bunny a symbol for Easter? It looks funny and doesn’t seem right.”

Those questions stumped me even more, so I told him: “I really don’t know the answers, son, but tonight I’ll get them for you. Go to sleep now and tomorrow we’ll talk again.”

My little research to answer my son’s questions, I must say, yielded more fascinating answers than I expected. To begin with, it turns out that the movable Holy Week schedules are not totally arbitrary at all. They are always exactly timed in relation to the natural, once-a-year occurrence called the vernal equinox. The equinoxes—there are only two of them—are those times in the year when day is precisely as long as night. The vernal equinox [in the Northern Hemisphere] comes in March, marking the end of winter and the beginning of spring, while the autumnal equinox comes in September, marking the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.

The advent of spring was, of course, always a cause for great celebration in the ancient world. The Anglo-Saxons welcomed it with a rousing spring festival in honor of Eoastre, their goddess of springtime and fertility. The Scandinavians called her Ostra and the Teutons, Ostern, but they honored her in much the same way. The importance of this festival to the early Europeans was not lost on the second-century Christians, who wanted to convert them to Christianity. They therefore made their own observance of Christ’s Resurrection coincide exactly with the festival. Then they gradually made it a Christian celebration, even appropriating the name “Eoastre” for it. Thus, contrary to what my son thought, the later use of the term “Easter” for the high point of the Holy Week had absolutely nothing to do with global geography.

People in those early times, however, celebrated the spring festival on different days, mostly on Sundays but often also on Fridays and Saturdays. This became a thorny issue. To resolve it, the Roman Emperor Constantine—who had by then become a supporter of the Christian faith—convened the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. This council came up with the Easter Rule, decreeing that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday that occurs after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. The “full moon” of this rule, however, does not always occur on the same date as the full moon that we actually see; it is the full moon after the ecclesiastical “vernal equinox,” which always falls on March 21. By this reckoning, Easter will always fall on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25. This rule has withstood the test of time, remaining unchanged exactly 1,678 years later to this day.

As to the Easter Bunny, it may be natural for us to think that it is simply a modern-day contrivance to liven up Easter Sunday. It isn’t. Its provenance is even older than that of Easter itself. The prolific rabbit, whose reappearance in spring unerringly marked the end of the brutal winters of those days, actually was the earthly symbol of the goddess Eoastre. Along with the Easter Egg, itself a symbol of rebirth in many cultures, the Easter Bunny was, in fact, a powerful ancient symbol for activity after inaction, for life after death.

In the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Roman Catholics and the rest of the Christian faithful have similarly found such an enduring symbol. They have thus consecrated the Lenten Season in His Name as their holiest of days, ending it on Easter Sunday in a feast where church tradition and ancient belief find joyful convergence.

These are the things I’ll tell my nine-year-old when he wakes up today and reminds me of what I promised him. (April 15, 2003)
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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 15, 2003 © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

*This year of 2011, of course, we are celebrating Easter on Sunday, April 24—the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the ecclesiastical “vernal equinox,” which in turn always falls on March 21. This really sounds complicated and rather arbitrary, but there it is.

Know the indefinite pronouns well to avoid subject-disagreement errors

2011-04-17T08:35:00.000-07:00

As we all know, there’s a good number of pronouns in the English language that don’t specify the identity of its subject. They are known as the indefinite pronouns, such as “anybody,” “everyone,” ‘some,” and “none.” Since it has no specific referent, we can’t be too sure if a particular indefinite pronoun is singular or plural. And when an indefinite pronoun is the antecedent of a possessive pronoun in a sentence, it’s often a puzzler whether to use the masculine, feminine, or neuter form for that possessive pronoun.

To avoid confusion, English observes certain conventions for the grammar of indefinite pronouns. Under these conventions, indefinite pronouns are classified into three categories: the definitely singular indefinite pronouns, the definitely plural indefinite pronouns, and the indefinite pronouns that can be either singular or plural depending on context. We have no choice but to memorize the indefinite pronouns that belong to each of these categories, for when constructing sentences that involve indefinite pronouns, gut feel is simply not enough for avoiding subject-verb disagreement errors.

To make you more conversant with the indefinite pronouns, I am posting the essay below that that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times way back in 2003. I’m sure that reading it would go a long way towards reducing subject-verb disagreement problems in your English to the barest minimum or, with luck, to none at all. (April 17, 2011)

The grammar of indefinite pronouns

It is a long-established and utterly predictable aspect of English grammar that (1) the verb must always agree with the number—either singular or plural—of the noun or pronoun that does or states the action, and that (2) the pronoun or its possessive form must always agree with the gender—male, female, or neuter—of its antecedent noun. Thus, we routinely make verbs perfectly agree with the number of the noun or pronoun doing or stating them: “Eve loves apples straight from the tree.” “Eve and Adam love apples straight from the tree.” And we also take it for granted that the pronoun and possessive pronoun must perfectly agree with the gender of their respective antecedent nouns: “Eve loves apples; her friend Adam also loves them.” The possessive pronoun “her,” of course, has the female noun “Eve” as antecedent, while the pronoun “them” has the neuter noun “apples” as antecedent.

Problems arise, however, when we start using indefinite pronouns—those words that, without specific antecedent nouns, we use as doers or receivers of the action. It is often obvious whether an indefinite pronoun is singular or plural, but there is often no way of knowing what gender to use for its possessive form. Take, for instance, the indefinite pronouns “all” and “somebody” in this sentence: “All of us [is, are] agreed that the task must be done, but somebody who has [his, her] personal interests foremost in [his, her] mind must inhibit [himself, herself] from doing it.”

That we should use the verb “are” for the pronoun “all” is clear, of course, but whether to use “his” or “her” as the possessive of the pronoun “somebody,” and whether to use “himself” or “herself” as its reflexive pronoun, are very thorny choices indeed! This ambiguity has given rise to certain conventions—some self-evident and some rather arbitrary—to make sure that our grammar of the indefinite pronouns remains beyond reproach.

Before discussing these conventions, though, let us make a quick review of the indefinite pronouns. We have to be doubly sure which of them are notionally singular, plural, or can be either way depending on how they are used.

The definitely singular indefinite pronouns: “another,” “anybody,” “anyone,” “anything,” “each,” “either,” “everybody,” “everyone,” “everything,” “little,” “much,” “neither,” “nobody,” “no one,” “nothing,” “one,” “other,” “somebody,” “someone,” and “something.” As proof that each of them is singular, we can use practically all of them to fill in the blank in the following sentence with no trouble at all: “________ is to blame for what happened.” (The exceptions are “little,” “much,” and “other,” which can be used in more limited ways: “Little is done by people who only talk.” “Much is accomplished through hard work.” “Other than him, who is to blame?”) All also take singular possessive pronouns and singular reflexive pronouns. The only problem is that their gender is indeterminate.

The definitely plural indefinite pronouns: “both,” “few,” “many,” “others,” and “several.” All five, of course, are no-brainers as to their number: they are plural through and through any which way we put them. Each can take the plural possessive pronoun “their” and the reflexive “themselves,” and we don’t even have to think about gender at all when using them.

Indefinite pronouns that are either singular or plural: “all,” “any,” “more,” “most,” “none,” and “some.” They are singular or plural depending on what they refer to. Singular: “All of that book is pure, unmitigated thrash.” Plural: “The singers are at the studio; all are rehearsing their songs.”

Now, let us go back to the dilemma of what gender to use for the singular indefinite possessives. As we all know, the standard practice in English is to use the possessive pronoun “his” when no information is available about the antecedent noun’s gender: “Everybody must give his share to this noble cause.” Only in one instance can we ignore this generic way of putting the indefinite singular possessive pronoun and still be grammatically correct—when the statement refers to a known all-female group, as in: “Everybody in this women’s league must give her share to this noble cause.”

This male bias in the English language obviously has rankled among women for hundreds of years, so users of the indefinite possessive have come up with two effective schemes to avoid the problem altogether. One way is to consistently use the phrase “his or her” when the indefinite possessive is required: “Everybody must give his or her share to this cause.” This becomes very awkward with repeated use, however, so that many writers and speakers would rather rewrite entire sentences so they could use a plural antecedent indefinite pronoun and do away with the need to establish gender: “All must give their share to this noble cause.” “All of us must give our share to this cause.”

By making this the norm, English is actually taking one major step toward establishing equality of the sexes in the language.

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