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/