Noncompositional

Over the last few years, I’ve had many occasions to test my linguistic intuitions against the intuitions of the internet-as-indexed-by-Google. In particular, internet searches (and corpus searches in general) are very useful whenever confronted with a syntax (or semantics, or maybe even morphology) article that proclaims some bit of language to be ungrammatical. I suggest everyone do it at least once per article.

Now, sometimes you’ll look at a structure marked with a * and wonder, “could anyone ever say (write) something like that?” So you search in (say) Google, and you find about two dozen hits, most of them irrelevant. But a couple are good, and so you either hang your head in dismay or shout a cheer of, “ha! take that, false giver of *s!” And I’ve noticed something that may or may not actually be true overall, but somehow it seems right: more often than any other genres, science-fiction, fantasy, and fanfiction in general contain the aberrant innovative structures.

Unfortunately, I haven’t kept a record of these observations, but I can give one example. A search several months ago for “as have s/he done” revealed, as it does now, only a few dozen hits. The structure “as AUX SUBJ VERB” is claimed to be illicit according to at least one linguist (and I basically concur). An actually occurring instance is this sentence:

He speaks little to the folk on the road, as has he done to his companions.

I found it here, in a document that seems to be part of a larger fantasy work of fiction. A similar structure involving should instead of have again yielded few results (many irrelevant), but one happened to be from an Elf:

Bow before me and then will I answer to you, as should you do with respect of all the Kings of old.

Now, I will grant that these examples are plagued with a confounding factor: namely, the sort of archaic-sounding flavor that goes along with now-degraded subject-auxiliary inversion. I don’t recall if this exact structure was actually licit at some point in time, or if it is a sort of neo-archaism. (However, subj-aux-inv is historically very common following as in many other contexts (e.g., Unmov’d, as had He seen a Ghost, He gaz’d,). But regardless if the source is from various (pseudo-)historical documents or simply by being well-read or even of a certain fantasy/scifi disposition, the result seems to be the same: non-conventional authors on the internet hate syntacticians. At least, that’s my story for now.