Just hanging around

While trawling through today's news pages for interesting material for the blog, this editorial article jumped out at me. Now, if the sentence that I've just typed fills you with horror because of its sheer grammatical ineptitude, then you will probably be in agreement with David Mackie's views on the hanging participle (AKA the dangling participle). And if you didn't see anything wrong with my first sentence then it would be worth your reading Mackie's article to find out what it is about this construction - and others like it - that many people find so abhorrent.

The problem (as far as the strictest rules of grammar are concerned) is as follows: the first clause's present participle verb form 'trawling' appears in that clause without an agent (the 'do-er' of the verb), so it is assumed (again, by the strictest rules of grammar) that the agent of the verb in the second clause (the 'editorial article' that 'jumped') is also the agent of the particple verb in the first clause - there being no other agent mentioned (in this example, at least). The 'while' in the first clause supports this, implying as it does that one action ('to trawl') takes place alongside another action ('to jump'). Now, because these two verbs actually have different agents ('me' and the 'editorial article' respectively), the construction is, strictly speaking, ungrammatical. With me so far?

Now, those of you that are still awake and still reading at this point in the argument might well be thinking 'What does it matter? It's obvious from the context that it wasn't the 'editorial article' that was doing the 'trawling' - and not just because it is an inanimate object'. That might be what some of you are thinking... others of you might be thinking 'Shut up Jones, I'm bored now - and anyway, haven't you got anything better to be doing during your summer holidays than sitting at your computer writing dreary blog entries about grammar?'. Well, in the interest of preserving self-esteem I won't address the latter of these hypothetical comments (and no, it's not because the answer is 'no'), but in answer to the first comment I would say that I agree... to an extent. Certainly editorial articles don't do much at all in the way of physical action (although by means of personification we have seen them 'jumping out', but we'll leave that to one side for now), but what if the agent of the second verb had been a person - for example 'While trawling through today's news pages for interesting material for the blog, the missus brought me a cup of tea'. Now it's not clear who was doing the trawling - me or my long-suffering other half. See the confusion... and the source of the prescriptivists' consternation?

Grammatical pedantry or reasonable cause for linguistic outrage? Admittedly this is a debate with a very narrow focus, but it's the kind of thing that comes up all the time when considering language attitudes, as we will be in unit ENA5. It's up to you to decide where you stand.

Early signs of language

It is a widely-made observation among language acquisition specialists that babies who are deaf and/or whose parents are deaf frequently sign their first word at a much earlier age than hearing children speak theirs. The average age at which hearing children say their first word is about 12 months, whilst deaf children have been known to make their first meaningful sign as young as 3 months old. According to this article published in today's Sun newspaper that 'record' has now been broken by a two-month-old baby who reportedly makes the sign for 'milk' when she is hungry.

It is not entirely clear why deaf babies generally sign earlier than hearing babies speak, but for my money one of the most plausible arguments centres on issues to do with basic articulation: as a baby having to learn how to control the various parts of your own body, it is arguably far easier to co-ordinate your hands and make meaningful signs than it is to position all of the 'precision apparatus' that makes up your vocal tract (tongue, teeth, lips etc.) and make accurate, meaningful speech sounds.