This morning my attention was caught by a Comcast Business tv commercial offering virtual walk-throughing — the PRP of the verb + particle idiom walk though, as in You can walk through the sample office, here in its gerundive use. The standard form (virtual) walking through has the PRP inflection on the head of the verb + particle combination, the verb, which is the first element in the combination, so is internal to it.
It’s been a while since I noted a general tendency for idiomatic verb + particle (V+Prt) to get its inflection on the second element, at the end — to externalize the inflection, as here. I’ll go back to an earlier posting of mine, then add some notes on things that might facilitate externalization of inflection in V+Prt Vs.
My 2011 posting. My 10/5/11 posting “Externalization of verbal inflection”, on externalization in verb + particle idioms, considers the examples
PST double downed (double down ‘strengthen one’s commitment’); PRS jack offs (jack off ‘masturbate’); PSP tick / piss offed (tick / piss off ‘annoy’); PST and PSP man upped, PRP man upping (man up ‘make an effort to deal with something (such as an obligation or a challenge) in a way that is considered strong or manly’ (Merriam-Webster online))
(sometimes spelled separated, sometimes hyphenated; I’ll treat these as equivalent, though hyphenation would suggest a tight unit and encourage externalization).
Other examples were suggested in the comments, and in later postings.
Why externalize? The first factor facilitating externalization is the one suggested above: that these combinations are idioms would encourage seeing then as tightly bound V+Prt, in which case inflection would come at the end of the whole business, hence actually realized phonologically on the last element, the Prt.
And in fact there is another inflection in English that’s realized phonologically on the last word of the constituent it’s associated with semantically: the POSS(essive) nominal suffix, which is known for glomming on the last word of the constituent it’s associated with, no matter what that is:
everyone who went there’s reactions ‘the reactions of everyone who went there’
that idiot I just met’s crazy ideas ‘the crazy ideas of that idiot I just met’
the friend I looked up’s address ‘the address of the friend I looked up’
that guy you warned me about’s attitude ‘the attitude of that guy you warned me about’
That’s the second factor.
Finally — third factor — there’s the plural (PL) nominal suffix in compound nouns W1 + W2, located on W2 no matter what kind of compound you’re looking at. Well, obviously for N1 + N2 compounds like boy toy (PL boy toys), since N2 is the head element (as well as the last one). But also for N + Prt compounds like look out ‘a place from which to view a landscape, a place where you can look out’ (We stopped at three look outs); jack off ‘a stupid or irritating person, a man who jacks off instead of doing useful things’ (a gang of jack offs); and, yes, walk through ‘a tour or demonstration of an area or task’ (We did dozens of walk throughs for the clients). (And similarly for several other senses of the noun walk through).
So the itch to externalize inflections for the verb walk through: standard PRP walking through, but externalized PRP walk throughing is mighty tempting.
April 8, 2025 at 4:54 am |
From Mike Pope on Facebook, with my response:
— MP: Is it externalization when someone pluralizes a compound like mother-in-law as mother-in-laws? I ask in part because this seems quite common. Of course, it’s one of those editorial shibboleths (it’s motherS-in-law) whose logic seems a little shaky, since there’s no question that the possessive is externalized? (mother-in-law’s)
— AZ > MP: It’s a kind of externalization, yes, of nominal PL. The standard scheme is inflection on the head of a word, and almost all nominal *words* are head-final (though nominal *phrases* often have internal heads), so the ones with internal heads are truly unusual, hence subject to reshaping.
HOWEVER: the verbal walk through is not a word but a phrase, and in phrases inflection really does go on the head, which quite often is internal, even if the phrase is an idiom (the PST of idiomatic jump the shark really is, always, jumped the shark, not, ever, jump the sharked).
[added 4/8:] Nominal POSS isn’t “externalized”; it is, straightforwardly, *external*: it’s a phrase-final inflection.
April 8, 2025 at 6:10 am |
If walk-through-ing is due to a mental re-analyasis of walk through as a one-word, morphologically complex verb, then a comparable reanalysis must have occurred in phrases like a [strong enough] man, because in English and a number of other languages, a prenominal AdjPhrase must end with an Adj ; this restriction is brought by deviant data like an interesting (*in many ways) proposal, and was called the Head Final Filter (a characterization that is not entirely right; see my 2003 paper in NLLT, pp. 313-4).
An example that resembles yours more closely is found in German, where the constraint is stronger, in the sense that the AP-final (complex) Adjective must bear morphological agreement with the modified noun. As a result, the exact counterpart of the above English example is not *ein starker genug Mann, but rather the semi-grammatical ein stark genuger Mann, which I am told is often used in everyday speech.
April 8, 2025 at 6:16 am |
My brother came up with one of those phrasal possessives when he was in high school, when he responded to a parent’s observation that his handwriting could be better by saying “If you think my handwriting is bad, you should see Tom Strauss who sits next to me’s handwriting”, which amused our parents (who were both editors by profession), and we then collectively spent some minutes trying to figure out if there was a more felicitous way to express the idea. (In my recollection, we didn’t succeed.)
April 9, 2025 at 7:42 pm |
I saw a somewhat similar construction recently: ‘So, he approached Minogue, who has famously said she knew little about Cave. She sped-read a biography about him to gain some insight.’
April 10, 2025 at 5:00 am |
Ah, these one is complex. First, there is the synthetic compound speed-read (/spid rid/), which is a N+V compound verb ‘read with speed’. Its PST form would then be speed-read (/spid rɛd/).
Well, then, unfortunately, there’s a *verb* speed as well as a noun, so the compound speed read looks like it could be a V+V compound verb meaning something like ‘speed and read simultaneously’. Its PST would still be speed-read (/spid rɛd/), with inflection realized on the second element, because that’s the head. (The PST of an invented V+V compound bite-eat ‘bite and then eat’ would be bite-ate.)
The way is then open for you to get *double inflection* instead of the standard head inflection: you got two verbs, inflect both of those bears: bit-ate for the compound bite-eat, sped-read for the compound speed-read. (I’ve posted in the past on double inflection of several sorts; it’s non-standard, but not irrational.)
April 9, 2025 at 7:51 pm |
Perhaps: ‘If you think my handwriting is bad, you should see the handwriting of Tom Strauss who sits next to me.’ I would change the original to this version, unless I needed to preserve exact speech for some reason.