Picking up on Dick's comment, I hear "making" in the quoted passage as a nominal, as naming the process of making as a thing (probably because of its location following the preposition "of"), so that I might write it in PDE as "the articles he had seen under her fingers in the process of their making"  or "the making."
 
Herb: does that make any sense with the history of the usage?
 
Dr. Seth Katz 
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Bradley University
 

________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Dick Veit
Sent: Sun 5/20/2012 8:58 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: progressive passive


Herb,

The old form of the progressive passive ("My house is painting") survives in expressions following "need," as in "My house needs painting <http://www.zillow.com/advice-thread/looks-like-the-house-needs-painting-but-is-fixable-couldn%27t-tell-what-is-on-the-door-in-bedrooms/285143/> " and "My bed needs making <http://www.myspace.com/bny800/photos/843542> ." There are even some regional US dialects where one hears "My house needs painted <http://blog.sharperimpressionspainting.com/?p=359> ."

Let me respond to your inquiry about "the articles he had seen under her fingers in the process of making." Before reading your analysis, I would have read "making" as active: the process of her making them, rather than the process of them being made. This may reflect my present-day perspective, however, and Eliot could well have intended the passive.

Dick




On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Stahlke, Herbert <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


	It's well known that the Present Day English progressive passive as in

	 

	My house is being painted

	 

	did not come into wide use till the mid-19th c.   Until then, one would have said-or written

	 

	My house is painting.  

	 

	The progressive was probably the last form of the passive construction to develop in English.  Here is an example of the older construction from George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860, Penguin Classics 1979), p. 549:

	 

	"It is true, she was looking very charming herself, and Stephen was paying her the utmost attention on this public occasion - jealously buying up the articles he had seen under her fingers in the process of making, and gaily helping her to cajole the male customers into the purchase of the most effeminate futilities."

	 

	The phrase "the articles he had seen under her fingers in the process of making" is the construction in question, where "making" in PDE would be "being made."  Parsing the phrase as a late instance of the Early Modern English -ing form as a progressive passive makes sense in its historical context and Eliot's linguistic conservatism.  What sparked my curiosity was how my fellow grammarians might parse the construction, not treating it as a slightly archaic form for 1860s English.  The analysis must account for both meaning and grammatical form.

	 

	Herb 

	 

	 

	 

	Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.

	Emeritus Professor of English

	Ball State University

	Muncie, IN  47306

	[log in to unmask]

	 

	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/ 


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/ 


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/