Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: lilandbr@scn.org (Leland Bryant Ross)
Subject: Re: Sum: 'I take these books'
Message-ID: <DuI4oJ.9FJ@scn.org>
Sender: news@scn.org
Reply-To: lilandbr@scn.org (Leland Bryant Ross)
Organization: Seattle Community Network
References: <ant1300390b0Q4vE@ccsware.demon.co.uk> <fmart-1207960056030001@news.ua.pt>
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 21:50:42 GMT
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Dear Fernando:

Okay, I've read the summary and have some more comments.

1)
Changing the tense of the responses from

>> I take these books

to

>> I'll take these books  (or I9ll..., as my reader puts it)

only makes things worse unless you also change the tense of the question to

>> Which books will you take?    or in my dialect more probably

>> Which books are you going to take?

2)
No one inculcated with standard English school grammar in the last couple 
of centuries would accept

>> I don't think none of those invalidate the data

as grammatical.  This sort of double negation is incompatible with 
scholarly prose style.  You must write either

>> I don't think any...   or   >> I think none...

Pedants might further insist on (a) expanding the contraction (>> I do 
not...) and (b) adding -s to "invalidate" on the grounds that "any" and 
"none" are both singular subjects at least in construction.

3) 
It seems to me, with respect to Sentences 1 and 2, that *all other 
factors being undefined* the two sentences are synonymous and equally 
usable *but* that Sentence 2 is relatively more likely to occur in a 
relatively informal register or style.  It may be that some of your 
respondents (hopefully not trained linguists!) are here confusing 
colloquialism with ungrammaticalness.  Or it may be that there's a 
dialectal issue here with which I am unacquainted.  I just this morning, 
for example, learned that using "bath" as a verb is acceptable in British 
English; in my dialect this is inadmissible, "bathe" is mandatory, as for 
most if not all Americans.

However, it seems to me (this is where the definition of other factors 
alluded to above comes in) that if someone presented a shelf full of 
books for my inspection and said "You can have any of them you'd like.  
Which books will you take?"  I might pull out the ones whose titles 
interested me and say "I'll take these," whereas if I were shown three 
piles of books, one consisting of titles I'd been wishing for years I 
could afford, a second of battered Agatha Christie paperbacks (some 
without covers), and a third of what appeared to be Harlequin romances in 
Japanese, I might hesitate a moment, say "They're *free*?", then grab the 
pile I really wanted and say "I'll take these ones."  I'm not sure how 
reliable my intuition about this distinction is.

4)
I still think the objection to Sentence 3 lies not in its 
(un)grammaticalness but in its suitability specifically as a response to 
the question posed.  Ask the respondent who objected to it if his 
objection would still obtain if the question were "How many books will 
you take?"  If he says it *would*, then I say his is a rather odd brand 
of English.  If he says it *would not*, then I would say his objection 
has no bearing on the ellipsis in question, which is after all what you 
are studying.

5)
As far as the alternatives "What book/Which books", it seems to me that 
if a friend tells me she is going to catch up on her reading this summer 
I might aske her,

What books are you planning on reading?

but if she is showing me her actual personal library and I remark that I 
had never read any of them, I might go on to ask

Which ones (or, less likely, Which books) would you *really recommend* 
that I read?

May be more later!

Leland


--
Liland Brajant ROS'       "I don't care if my wheels are comin' off,
P O Box 30091                 long as I got my plastic Zamenhof...."
Seattle, WA 98103 Usono      USONA ANTOLOGIO Baptista Esperantistaro
Tel. (206) 633-2434                 English, especially under duress
