Seth,

I would agree that "making" is a nominal, but that doesn't address the question of voice.  Is it a passive nominal or an active nominal.  By 1860, even for a linguistically conservative writer like Eliot, -ing forms had long since been used both as participles and as gerunds.  The older -end/-ing distinction was disappearing already in Middle English in the Southeast and was long gone in the 19th c.  

Your paraphrase, interestingly, still suggests a passive sense.

On a side issue, some historians of English believe that the -in/-ing variation in PDE is a reflex of the -end/-ing distinction.  The variation is, of course, not a matter of "g-dropping"--a strictly orthographic term.  English doesn't substitute /t/ for /k/ or /d/ for /g/ as we would expect of -in/-ing were a phonetic alternation.  They're all alveolar/velar variations.  But loss of a final voice stop (b, d, g} after a nasal is a very common process in English, and MidE -end became -in in Early Modern English, and that's the source of the -in forms of the participle and gerund.  The -ing forms are reflexes of the MidE analogical verbal nouns in -ing.

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Katz, Seth
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2012 1:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: progressive passive

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

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