Little editing/grammar mistakes that drive you up the wall

[distractedSofty]

Spoiler:

Like most such emphatic Trussesque rules, this is wrong: "It's been done", "It's got one".

[yurell]

Yeah, 'it's' is also a contraction for 'it has'. Not sure if it also does 'it was', though. I'd presume so, but it sounds awkward.

[Derek]

I don't think you can contract "was" to "-'s", because "is" already uses that contraction, and the two would be ambiguous (I don't think "has" is ever ambiguous with "is").

[Eugo]

I'm still not clear on how you're determining which noun is the subject without using word order/syntax.

Also to gmalivuk, about agent/subject: this is 6th grade stuff, but I remember it quite clearly. The verbs denote action, state or happening. The agent is, therefore, absent when there is no action, as in "It rains." or "Smilies are on".

The process of determination is always the same: find the main verb (main as in "not belonging to a dependent part of a sentence"), then find who does that verb. In the previous sentence, it's "process", because "find" and "find" are in a dependent part, and the verb in the independent part is "is". What is? The process.

As a demonstration of possible orderings of words (which still keep the meaning, just slightly shift the emphasis):

The agent is, therefore, absent. (Agent je, dakle, odsutan)
Therefore, the agent is absent. (Dakle, agent je odsutan).
Therefore, absent is the agent. (Dakle, odsutan je agent)
Absent is, therefore, the agent. (Odsutan je, dakle, agent)
Absent, therefore, is the agent. (Odsutan, dakle, je agent)

And this is an example which miraculously looks almost right in English. Anything that's based on order of words is unusable in a language where all of the above are normal, so we were taught a simple rule. And it still works.

Back to my question: am I right when I think that the rule would work in English too, or is there a good case which would show that it just doesn't apply?

[gmalivuk]

about agent/subject

Stop saying things like this. Agent and subject are not the same thing, which we've been pointing out to you repeatedly, so please refrain from treating them interchangeably, as it only confuses things.

[Iulus Cofield]

Back to my question: am I right when I think that the rule would work in English too, or is there a good case which would show that it just doesn't apply?

Um. Listen, in English you can only determine the grammatical meaning of a noun by syntax. There are languages where you do not need syntax thanks to morphology, but English does not have that option, except maybe when the moons Tau Ceti Alpha and the stars of Alpha Centauri align.

Just...go with that, okay? I think there's a communication breakdown happening somewhere, so just go with that.

[eSOANEM]

The agent is, therefore, absent. (Agent je, dakle, odsutan)
Therefore, the agent is absent. (Dakle, agent je odsutan).
Therefore, absent is the agent. (Dakle, odsutan je agent)
Absent is, therefore, the agent. (Odsutan je, dakle, agent)
Absent, therefore, is the agent. (Odsutan, dakle, je agent)

All of these are grammatical, but all but the first two sound very, very strange. This has nothing to do with determining the subject though.

The key difference between subject and agent is that one is syntactic (the subject is the noun which the verb in the main clause is conjugated for) whilst the other is semantic (the agent is the noun which is the one performing the action).

The process of determination is always the same: find the main verb (main as in "not belonging to a dependent part of a sentence"), then find who does that verb. In the previous sentence, it's "process", because "find" and "find" are in a dependent part, and the verb in the independent part is "is". What is? The process.

This rule determines the agent, but not the subject. By this method, the subject in "the pyramids were built by the Egyptians" is determined by how you choose to analyse "were built". If you choose to analyse the sentence as {the pyramids were {built by the Egyptians}} (braces used to indicate clauses) then pyramids would come out as the subject however, if we analyse it as {the pyramids {were built by} the Egyptians} and saying that "were built by" is the past, passive 2nd person or plural form of the verb "to build" (which is far more founded than assuming "built by the Egyptians" is a grammatical clause) then "the Egyptians" comes out as the subject, because they are the ones doing the building (the agents).

Any method which depends on your choice of analysis is flawed. The process which will work no matter the choice of analysis is to define the agent as the one performing the action (the Egyptians) and the subject as the noun the verb is conjugated for (the pyramids in this passive construction, but the Egyptians in the active construction).

Anything that's based on order of words is unusable in a language where all of the above are normal, so we were taught a simple rule. And it still works.

No it doesn't. Your method depends on the choice of analysis whereas the process I outlined above depends on nothing other than the conjugation of the verb and not on word order or choice of analysis.

Back to my question: am I right when I think that the rule would work in English too, or is there a good case which would show that it just doesn't apply?

tl;dr: no, you're not right. The rule doesn't work (and, I suspect doesn't quite work in your native language either and is more of a lie told to children because it's easier to understand and works in most simple active constructions than the actual process). The good case which shows that it doesn't apply is "the pyramids were built by the Egyptians" because, whilst your process avoids dependency on word order, it introduces a dependency on choice of analysis which is just as bad.



Edit: looking up "odsutan" and "dakle" on wiktionary, I found out they are serbo-croatian words so I'll assume that's your native language in which case, it seems that the confusion may be arising because (so it seems from a quick skim of the grammar on wikipedia) there is no passive voice and there is explicit case marking. This would seem to explain why you brought up word order which can play a slightly similar role to the passive voice in languages without such a voice but with free word order with the crucial difference from a true passive voice in that it doesn't swap the agent and patient's roles as subject and object.

tl;dr mkII: yeah, English is different, our passive constructions really do have the patient as the subject and the agent as the object (as can be seen in he hits her -> she was hit by him where the change in case should show that the subject/object-ness really has swapped) which, from my very quick skim of the grammar on wikipedia, appears not to be the case in your native language.

[Eugo]

about agent/subject

Stop saying things like this. Agent and subject are not the same thing, which we've been pointing out to you repeatedly, so please refrain from treating them interchangeably, as it only confuses things.

I meant "about agent/subject confusion"... and got confused halfway through.

OK folks, I think we can close this chapter. I've learned enough of this dark corner of grammar, thanks for shedding some light on it (which obviously isn't the same color as in Serbian et al). As to the absence of passive voice in language(s) here, it's not absent, it's that the "by <someone>" clause sounds really clumsy, so it is used mostly when the someone is absent or only a tool is present. IOW, "he was hit by Peter" brings up a picture of someone using Peter as a bludgeon. To prevent that, the phrase is "he was hit from Peter's side", or "from side of Peter", which is unwieldy and generally avoided, except in legalese.

Now, if I may introduce the mistakes that drives me in fourth gear up the wall: using plural as singular. As in "it is a huge savings" (very frequent, actually I don't remember seeing it in singular at all), "a big winnings can be got" and "Windows is shutting down".

[rhetorical]

"Windows is shutting down".

Windows is singular. It is an operating system, and is only one instance of the operation system. "Windows are shutting down" could be used when several instances are shutting down, or when glass panes in walls are turning off.

"it is a huge savings"

The subject is "it". "It" is singular.

[eSOANEM]

"it is a huge savings"

The subject is "it". "It" is singular.

But "a" still doesn't agree with "savings".

[gmalivuk]

thanks for shedding some light on it (which obviously isn't the same color as in Serbian et al).

But it probably is. As in, one can also talk about subjects and agents in Serbian, it's just that they may find the two almost always coincide perfectly, unlike in English.

The subject is "it". "It" is singular.

Yes, but the problem Eugo has is with the phrase, "a huge savings". I think "savings" has made a plural to noncount to singular transition for some people. This is possibly due to the existence of phrases like "savings bank" and "savings and loan", which have always been singular despite starting with an apparently plural noun.

[Eugo]

Windows is singular. It is an operating system, and is only one instance of the operation system. "Windows are shutting down" could be used when several instances are shutting down, or when glass panes in walls are turning off.

Yes, but it still drives me... to the point that I have started translating it into Serbian literally, where it sounds halfway between illiterate and ridiculous.

"it is a huge savings"

The subject is "it". "It" is singular.

So, you disagree with my proposal to close the "find the subject" theme? I thought we already said everything about it.

BTW, googling "huge saving" (with quotation marks) yields 1.7 million pages; "huge savings" 40 million, "a huge savings" 57.5 million (weird ways of googling, add a word and it returns more results), "a huge saving" 4.9 million.

[raike]

I really hate seeing "you" in place of "your" - e.g., "Please pick up you homework from my office today."

[Monika]

I have never seen that.

[Eugo]

Another one of my pets: "try and verb" instead of "try to verb". Specially nice if a sentence implies a real trial, as in "let's try and hang him".

I propose a little game. Let's pretend (try and pretend) that this is a completely regular construction, which can then be applied anywhere. So, wherever you find it, replace the and with and/or, or just or ("please try and/or sing"). Or change the order of verbs ("I will try and write the article" -> "I will write and try the article"). Or use it in a negation ("I will neither try nor write the article") or in a different tense ("I was trying and writing the article").

Have fun.

[Puppyclaws]

I really hate seeing "you" in place of "your" - e.g., "Please pick up you homework from my office today."

What is funny about this is I have only seen professors make this particular error, so the example is so apt. And very sad.

One professor did this multiple times in written communication. After very little thought on the matter, I decided not to ask her for a letter of recommendation, fearing that her grammar would cancel out any positive effects a letter from a prof who knows me well might have.

[gmalivuk]

Another one of my pets: "try and verb" instead of "try to verb".

I'm curious as to why you think "try and" is a mistake in the first place? There is some reason to believe that it is the older construction, and yet no one seemed to object until fairly recently. And even then, the earliest objections were only to inflected forms, like "he tries and _____", which aren't actually at all common.

[Eugo]

I'm curious as to why you think "try and" is a mistake in the first place?

Mistake or not, it confused me to no end when I was learning English. Actually, the only meaning of "try" which made sense then was "invest some effort"... but then the sentence was "to try and catch some sun" - what effort?

So I kept it as a pet.

[kristenjo]

Ignoring connotation. Synonyms are not completely interchangeable. Did Roget know that useful book would be used to mutilate English as a substitution for learning it?
Incorrect preposition usage. People interchange prepositions as if they were all versions of the same word.
Lack of parallelism. When listing items, consider the words that started the sentence, because some apply to every item until negated, and each item should be the same part of speech.
Using commas incorrectly or not at all. In my experience, this is the cause of more ambiguity than any other grammatical blunder (except the all-caps people who don't even use periods). Commas and semicolons are my favorite punctuation marks besides the em dash and, well, the period.
Redundancy. And repetitiveness.

[Daimon]

Loose is not the same thing as lose, people! I rage so hard whenever I read that "mistake", that I just disregard anything that that person was saying, and their credibility to me is lost.

[gmalivuk]

Incorrect preposition usage. People interchange prepositions as if they were all versions of the same word.

Can you give an example? Apart from actual mistakes by non-native speakers, the only preposition strangeness I can think of is when different dialects use different prepositions consistently. For example, I don't think anyone says "on the weekend" and "at the weekend" interchangeably, but there are definitely some who always say the one while others always say the other. Same with "on" or "in" a particular street, standing "on" or "in" a line, and others, different "from" or "than" or "to", and so on.

[Monika]

For years, I said "in the internet", until a native speaker pointed out that in English it's "on the internet".

English is weird.

[Iulus Cofield]

In my experience, there is no language in which prepositions are not weird.

[Monika]

Agreed.

Except those languages without prepositions.

[gmalivuk]

Which is pretty weird.