Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Dana Goodyear’s piece “Dept. of Hoopla: Celebromatic” (New Yorker of November 30, p. 25):

The other day, Francesco Vezzoli, an Italian artist known for his meta-spectacles … turned up in the offices of the architect Frank Gehry with a Prada shopping bag. “Hi, kiddo,” Gehry–small, buoyant, gnomish–said. (They go back.)

What Vezzoli had in that shopping bag was an enormous headdress he had fabricated for Lady Gaga to wear in a benefit performance for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. But the headdress, the benefit, or the people involved are not my concerns here; I’m after the expression “they go back”, with a truncated version of the idiom go back a long way ‘have known each other for a long time’ in it.

This is an instance of what I called nonce truncation in an earlier posting, where I noted that

Nonce truncation is very common, especially with fixed expressions, where parts of them can “go without saying” because the expressions are fixed. It’s not hard to find occurrences of above and beyond without the call of duty in contexts where the longer expression is clearly intended, or the whole nine without yards in similar contexts. Proverbs and famous quotations are often truncated in this fashion: Oh, sharper than a serpent’s tooth.

In all these examples, a fixed expression is left incomplete on purpose; the incompletion is strategic. As I noted in my earlier posting, these strategic incompletions can become conventionalized. However, it’s likely that conventionalization proceeds at different rates for different people, so that it can be hard to say when a nonce truncation has become an idiom or construction.

Two cases.

The first is the much-reviled as far as, which I mentioned briefly in my earlier posting. It seems likely to me that nonce truncation played an important role in the development of as/so far as (without a trailing is concerned or goes) as topic-marking idioms, as in these two quotations from John F. Kennedy, taken from MWDEU‘s (1989) substantial article on the subject:

(1960) But as far as whether I could attend this sort of a function in your church … then I could attend

(1964) So far as the next program, it will be developed later

The objections to these usages go back at least as far as Fowler’s 1926 Modern English Usage; in fact, OED2’s (1989) subentry for the usages (in the entry for the adverb far) has Fowler’s admonition not to use them as the first cite for them.

The history of the “short-form” usages is surveyed in some detail in the Rickford et al. article I cited in my earlier posting. There are 19th-century examples of short-form as/so far as X, but they have long and complex X. Instances with short X (as in the second Kennedy quote above) begin to appear in the 20th century and really pick up in the 1950s.

Eventually, as MWDEU notes, the short-form usages are so frequent and unremarkable that they should be treated as established usages (though appearing primarily in speech, and more American than British). And we find advice like this, in Butterfield’s Oxford A-Z of English Usage (2007):

well established in American usage and is a useful shorthand for the older as far as … is/are concerned. Nevertheless, many more conservative British speakers are likely to object to it, so it is best avoided with a British audience. (p. 14)

[A note on objections to the short forms. I know from people’s peeving on the subject that many people think they are inadvertent errors, lapses resulting from inattention (speakers “forget” that a trailing phrase is required). That is, they think that someone who uses a short form is making an error in production. This idea is especially implausible when the X is short, as it is in huge numbers of examples that are easily collected. But the idea is widespread.

If you hold firmly to this belief, and don’t use the short-form variants yourself, then short-form examples will bring you up short; you’re expecting more, and you don’t get it. On the other hand, I’d expect that people would eventually notice the sheer frequency of these variants in speech, especially with a short X. But the power of grammatical egocentrism can be strong.]

That was the first case, where conventionalization has pretty clearly occurred. I’m not so sure about the status of the second case: if-clauses used, on their own, to convey a polite request.

From my own experience at oral examinations: when the examining committee has finished its questions, the chair is likely to say to the student something like: “if you’ll just leave the room for a few minutes”. That functions as a polite request for the student to leave the room for a few minutes. Unlike the previous cases, there are a number of possible continuations (main clauses) that could have been omitted.

The omitted-main-clause strategy can be used in many other situations. You can give someone instructions, for instance, though a series of if-clauses:

If you’ll just make a fist. Then if you’ll press on the bandage …

Strategies like this can be conventionalized as imperative constructions, and might have been for some English speakers in the case of if. In any case, this is one route by which conditional or subjunctive marking (whether via inflectional morphology or special lexical items) can result in an imperative construction, as has happened in many languages.

This entry was posted on December 1, 2009 at 9:42 am and is filed under Peeving, Truncation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.