Ed,
Interesting sentence. It's worth noting that the passive progressive,
with "being" has been acceptable in English only since the mid to late
19th c. Up until that time, Standard English would have required
The train must have been repairing.
This older usage is preserved in the Northern construction
The train needs repairing.
which has been replaced in a lot of dialects, including, to some degree,
Northern by
The train needs to be repaired.
or the Lower North and Southern
The train needs repaired.
Your point on grammaticality, though, is well taken. The double "be" is
uncomfortable for a lot of speakers for the same reason that doubling of
other function words feels awkward and is usually resolved by haplology.
But grammaticality is a multi-dimensional concept, one that we tend to
dumb down. I use the following sentences at the beginning of my grammar
classes to get students thinking about what we mean when we say that a
sentence is grammatical-or ungrammatical. The first one throws them
consistently, especially when I tell them that it is grammatically
unexceptionable.
1. The policeman the boy the dog bit called came.
2. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."1
3. Me and Bill went fishing last weekend.
4. The Sears Tower was a building higher than which no other had
ever been built.
5. That ain't no house I'd want to live in.
6. The guard couldn't have been not sleeping.
7. Upon were a there time three once bears.
8. "Then I pray all them that shall read in this little treatise to
hold me for excused for the translating of hit."2
1Chomsky, Noam A. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
2Caxton, William. 1490. Prologue to his translation of Eneydos.
Reprinted in W. F. Bolton, ed, The English Language: Essays by English
and American Men of Letters 1490-1839, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1966. (Spelling modernized.)
Herb
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edgar Schuster
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 10:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On innate knowledge of language
I think I understand Johanna's point quite well, but perhaps I did not
make my own point clear. I was not trying to say that some students
have greater CONSCIOUS knowledge of grammar than their teachers, but
rather greater unconscious knowledge. Let me try an example. Is the
following sentence grammatical or not:
The train must have been being repaired.
I know from asking students and teachers that their answers may differ.
But even on simpler matters, such as what modifies what in a sentence or
how a given word functions, the intuitions of some people are stronger
than others, in my experience.
This is not to deny that EVERY native speaker has an enormous
intuitive knowledge of her or his native language.
Ed S.
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