Bob,


I suspect we *do* encounter a lot of those mixed constructions -- we
just don't encounter them in writing. I know I've heard quite a few on
news broadcasts and the like. They don't follow the rules we apply to
edited writing, and in your view, they're probably performance errors
and quite separate from what might count as evidence for linguistic
competence. If they're recorded verbatim on speech transcripts, they
make the speaker look awful. But...people do say those things.

As for why that kind of mixed construction exists, I will hazard some
guesses (not to be interpreted as mutually exclusive):

1. Backgrounding. The speaker wants to focus on what results from a
cause (rather than what causes the results). Moving things into
prepositional phrases backgrounds them to some extent (according to this
view, "I gave Grandma a book" presents Grandma as more foregrounded than
does "I gave a book to Grandma"). Of course packaging an event as a noun
(the gerund) backgrounds the internal parts of the event as well, but
redundant marking isn't exactly unheard-of in language.

2. Purpose-marking: "By" is frequently used to mark the means of
accomplishing something (if taken broadly, this even works on passives).
Its use here is marking the first part as the means by which the result
(the main clause) is brought about. The speaker is going in to the
sentence aware that s/he wants to talk about purposes and results, and
deploys the "by" in roughly the same way that someone ordering a
hamburger reaches for the ketchup packets. This one might actually be
testable in a sense -- if I'm right, you shouldn't get quite as many of
these mixed constructions with 'by' if the main clause has a word like
"accidentally" in it. 

3. Processing constraints. Starting from this perspective envisions the
construction as something that may have started as a frequent slip of
the tongue that then became routinized for some speakers. These gerund
phrases are "heavy," and by the time a speaker gets to the end of one of
them, s/he may have already lost the first part from short-term memory
(i.e., it's the same phenomenon that causes glitches in long-distance
subject/verb agreement). Again, though, if the same general pattern is
repeated -- regardless of the source -- it can come to be perceived as
stable. The same process that leads some of my students to perceive "for
all intensive purposes" and "would of gone" as a normal expression can
apply to whole schemata.


Of course, the construction prohibited in writing because its parts
don't fit together the way formal grammar requires. Using "by" to mark a
purpose as in #2 doesn't mysteriously cause it to stop acting as a
preposition, and the rules we bring to bear in edited writing treat that
as a point that can't be ignored. When I see such constructions in
print, they certainly annoy me. And probably like you, I have students
who are absolutely baffled about why such a sentence is annoying me. 

We have other constructions which logically *should* be ungrammatical,
but aren't -- "I'm here, aren't I?" "The more, the merrier."  Our
*perception* of what counts as ungrammatical in an utterance is -- at
least in SOME cases -- influenced by whether we're used to hearing
things like it or not. This may be why a number of my students
confidently tell me that "Seldom did we encounter other people" is
ungrammatical -- they don't read formal prose much. Note that you don't
have to agree that all grammaticality judgments are "constructed" to
accept that a subset of the judgments made by ordinary speakers are (my
position would be that the subset is the whole, but that's far from a
neutral stance). 


Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/