You say, “These prescriptions go on making people distrust their own language. . . . Rather than improving writing, I think they have the effect of shutting it down.”

 

 

Kathryn,
   You make some delightful points.  My full phrasing was "When in doubt, trust your ear," which was intended to be pretty close to what you are saying.  The ear contributes but sure ain't the only judge.  We buy too many hamburgers because "What you want is what you get"  seduces us much more than "You get what you want".  (The whole campaign rums counter to our prime objection about McDonald's, that it's cheap and quick, but you can't get what you want there.) Beware of advertisers and politicians, those silver tongued devils.  By all means.  
    I'm not sure of prescriptivists who insist words stick to one part of speech, but school grammar does tend to imply that the lines are clearer than they are.  Processes become nominalized.  Happenings and events are spoken/written of as though they are things. The semantically leaning definitions for noun and verb don't prepare us for that.
    We shouldn't fault speech for being different from writing or disparage speech for being occassionally inane.   It would be easy to quote constructions common to writing as a way to disparage it.  Both are capable of great and terrible things.  It seems to me that too many school teachers go on insisiting that ALL writing has to conform to some sort of formal register that rarely exists in the real world. Writing can enlist many of the virtues of speech (I'm paraphrasing Peter Elbow here) while doing the work of writing. Writing that strives to be clear, thoughtful, interesting, and meaningful will pull an appropriate language into its orbit
    Is our insistence on case endings still a throwback to overvaluing latin? These prescriptions go on making people distrust their own language.  Rather than improving writing, I think they have the effect of shutting it down.  People don't need a new language, just practice in the genres of writing.
    We don't have to be prescriptivists to have strong values and high standards.

Craig


Rogers, Kathryn (HRW-ATX) wrote:

FWIW, the original sentence (“The Smiths received their invitation before us / we did”), which is not naturally trochaic or otherwise regularly rhythmic (unlike the examples by the politicians and poet), does sound better to me with “we did” than with “before us.” I don’t know whether this is because my ear is tinny or whether my brain wants the additional emphasis on the final information, which seems somehow to be semantically important to the speaker, perhaps even the point of the sentence.

 

Also, the examples “before lunch,” “before midnight,” and “before our arrival” are all phrases having to do with time or events in time, so they don’t seem in any way illogical to me. Maybe the more poetic “those who came before us” sounds OK because “us” isn’t entirely literal: “Us” has the larger resonance of our time, our era, our advent as a group.

 

 

Kathryn,
    I think your post, giving the most formal view of the issue, is very helpful.  And it is very thoughtfully expressed.  It may just be that we see the role of the grammarian in different ways; I would like to see the "formal rules" as aids to human contact, not as constraints that get in the way of it.  "Before us" sounds better, gives us a better sense of emphasis, and seems to bring with it no potential for misunderstanding.  Why not use it, regardless of the formality of the context?    
    This brings up the whole issue of "rules" in language, how they are "derived", and who determines what is appropriate in whatever register. My own sense is that we should try to work in close harmony with the natural rules of the language as we put them to work in achieving various purposes.  "Trying to tap the heart of the common reader" (a great turn of phrase, by the way) requires us to act in harmony with "rules" your logicians haven't understood and seem unlikely to acknowledge. Because their rule would put us at odds with the common reader (and there is a common reader in all of us), we should discard it.  
    It seems to me that "before" shifts from preposition to conjunction very readily and commonly, so we are very alert to the possibility.  (Before lunch or Before we eat lunch. Before midnight or Before the clock strikes midnight. Before our arrival or Before we arrive.)  The prepositional phrase gives us a shortened version of what we often understand as action or process, even in nominalized form. Another rule here might be something like "whatever is concise, rich in meaning, and clear is pleasing to the ear." Perhaps the "common heart" has a viable aesthetic as well.  
    Or, when in doubt, trust the ear.
     But I am very happy to agree to disagree. People look for very different things in "grammar". I think we load the issue a bit, though, when one way is thought of as "logical" and the other as "breaking a rule."  When something works, we can try to understand why.  Language is rule driven, with or without the handbooks.

Craig
Rogers, Kathryn (HRW-ATX) wrote:

Ah—well, yes, the construction is commonly used as a prepositional phrase. I was assuming that your questioner wanted to know what would be considered correct and/or logically desirable by people in the habit of following formal rules (because he asked a professor, who then asked a grammar listerv).

 

I think that the speakers you quote wish to project an image of familiarity (even to the point of folksiness) and not necessarily of formal correctness. The construction “before us” is certainly comprehensible and common. It’s only when you pause to think about it that the illogic becomes apparent. (And, FWIW, “Let’s Thank Those Who Came Before We Did” doesn’t scan prettily.)

 

“Before us” is common and easily understood—and if I were a speechwriter for a politician or a poet trying to tap the heart of the common reader, I might very well choose that option.

 

So it’s pretty much a matter of desired register. For most American readers/listeners, most of the time, one can use “before us” as a prepositional phrase without anyone smarting or flinching. But whether the folks writing the dictionary will include “before us” in the examples of “before” as a preposition or whether a grammar book will get behind the construction is another issue.

 

Best,

Kathryn

 

 

Thanks, Kathryn, for taking time to help me think through this issue. This is the kind of question that astute students often pose, too, so I think it is worth considering. You (and Warriner) have addressed the point I find most interesting in terms of teaching: whether other subordinating conjunctions besides “than” and “as” can have an elided/elliptical verb.

 

But I’m still not convinced that “before” cannot be a preposition in such a construction. My colleague sent a follow-up e-mail adding these thoughts to our discussion of the sentence “The Smiths received their invitation before (us) (we [did])”:

 

Here's something else that I've found:  President Clinton and Governor Joe Manchin III both used the phrase "those who came before us" in their inaugural addresses, and Maya Angelou used the title "Let's Thank Those Who Came before Us."  Doesn't the preposition "before" have the same sense in those phrases as in the sentence we're analyzing?

 

Those examples call into question our assertion that the prepositional phrase “before us” is illogical in reference to time. The prescriptivist in me wants to say that even presidents and famous authors can make mistakes, but the descriptivist in me must admit that both constructions seem defensible.

 

I’m surprised we haven’t heard from anyone else on the issue.

 

Best,

Nancy

 

 

Hi, Nancy,

 

Per Warriner’s grammar and the part-of-speech labels for “before” in Webster’s New World Dictionary, your analysis is correct. It is an incomplete construction with an elided verb (as you say, “before us” would be illogical as a prepositional phrase because “us” isn’t really a time or an event in time). So, according to formal rules and logic, the correct pronoun is “we,” though in common speech, people almost never honor the formal rule when first-person pronouns are involved.

 

Warriner states that an incomplete construction occurs “most commonly” after the words _than_ and _as_, but does not rule out other subordinating conjunctions. It may be that the “rule” your colleague found about only “than” and “as” taking elided verbs is an attempt to remedy awkwardnesses like the one in the sentence in question. So it may be a style dictate rather than a rule of traditional grammar.

 

At any rate, as a point of correctness, I would use “we,” and as a point of style (at least), I would include “did” at the end of the sentence to avoid the awkwardness.

 

Best,

Kathryn

 

 

Happy New Year, listers.

 

A retired colleague and friend called and asked me to weigh in on the following grammar question, which someone had posed to him:

 

In the following sentence, is “before” a preposition, in which case the pronoun should be in the objective case?

 

“The Smiths received their invitation before us.”

 

Or, is “before” a subordinating conjunction launching a clause with an elliptical verb, in which case the pronoun should be in the nominative case?

 

“The Smiths received their invitation before we [did].”

 

My first response was to vote for the latter choice, even though I cannot imagine ever using “we” in that sentence without also saying/writing the verb. Unlike the second clause of the sentence “She is three inches taller than I,” the clause starting with “before” sounds really wrong without the verb plainly in sight (or earshot). We concluded that it probably sounds wrong precisely because “before” can be a preposition or a subordinator, whereas “than” can serve only in the latter role.

 

We debated whether we could really say, though, that one choice was right and one wrong—or even that one choice was better than the other.

 

We also considered the notion that “before,” when used as a preposition, isn’t really logical in front of an object referring to people because it is not logical to speak of time (“sooner than”) in relation to people. That is, “before noon,” “before Tuesday,” and “before next week” all make sense because those objects are all time designations. But is it logical to refer to time by saying “before [person/people]”? (Of course, we can use “before” to mean “in front of,” but that is a different sense completely: “She gave the speech before a crowd of six thousand.”)

 

The next day, my colleague called back to tell me that he did some Web surfing and discovered a number of pages arguing that only “than” and “as” can have an elliptical verb. Is that so? I know that we use those two to point out a common pronoun error associated with their use, but are they the only two?

 

I suppose that a little creative avoidance is in order here! Either of these sentences would avoid the problem:

 

            “The Smiths received their invitation sooner than we did.”

            “The Smiths received their invitation before we did.”

 

I told him that I knew JUST the place to go with this issue, and I will forward your insights to him!

 

Thanks for your thoughts,

 

Nancy

 

Nancy L. Tuten, PhD

Professor of English

Director of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Program

Columbia College

Columbia, South Carolina

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803-786-3706

 

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