Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 February 11

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February 11

English grammar question

In the sentence

The balloon burst into a hundred pieces.

what kind of grammatical construct is the phrase "into a hundred pieces"? An adverb complement? (Is the phrase a complement?) An adverbial prepositional phrase? Something else? --173.49.16.103 (talk) 03:37, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

An adverb isn't a preposition, a preposition isn't an adverb. This can't be an "adverbial prepositional phrase" because nothing can be (unless perhaps you have a very idiosyncratic definition of "adverbial"). It's no less a prepositional phrase than is "into the bottle" within "He pushed the cork into the bottle"; into merely has a different and less common meaning. -- Hoary (talk) 03:43, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I think this qualifies as an adpositional object, but I'm not 100% on it. --Ludwigs2 03:48, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I would certainly describe it as an "adverbial prepositional phrase" -- that is, it's a prepositional phrase that's functioning as an adverb. Likewise "into the bottle" in Hoary's example. I can't imagine why Hoary thinks there is something odd about that. Perhaps his or her definition of "adverbial" is different than mine. (And Merriam-Webster's and Oxford's and Encarta's.) --Anonymous, 06:45 UTC, February 11, 2010.

well, grant that 'into the bottle' (a shift of location) is a bit more concrete than 'into a thousand pieces' (since that really means it became a thousand pieces; it didn't move 'into' them), so that might be part of the confusion. --Ludwigs2 07:07, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

It can correctly be described as a prepositional phrase used as though it were an adverbial phrase. English 'prepositions' are not always the heads of preposition phrases, they can have various grammatical roles. So, it could also be that 'burst into' is a phrasal verb, and 'a thousand pieces' its object.Synchronism (talk) 07:23, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Remove the phrase headed by "into" and the meaning remains the same, although of course less specific. So it's odd to say that it's a phrasal verb. Consider this pair: "The car ran over the boy", "The boy was run over by the car". The incident was unfortunate, but the English is unproblematic. Now this one: "The balloon burst into a hundred pieces", "A hundred pieces were burst into by the balloon". Uh, I don't think so. -- Hoary (talk) 07:38, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

True and true, but the problematic example is mostly so because it breaks a common construction ('break into a thousand pieces', 'ran over the boy' is thankfully not such a frequent construction. The semantic roles of your contrastive example are different than those of the example in question, '(Agent) ran over (Patient)' and '(Patient) burst into (Manner)', so while passive voice movement is possible with most (A)(P) type sentences, it is not the case with other examples, the one in question included, where the patient is already the grammatical subject. Furthermore, the entire construction 'burst/break into a (number) pieces' could be said to have been grammaticalized due to its frequency and use as an idiom i.e. 'When I saw her face for the first time in years, I burst into a thousand pieces'.Synchronism (talk) 08:18, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Patsy Kline certainly thought so. +Angr 12:37, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

So did Patsy Cline.  :) -- 202.142.129.66 (talk) 02:11, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

First, "functioning like an adverb" is very odd, in that adverbs and adverbial phrases are a kind of miscellaneous category: "functioning like an adverb" would mean something like "functioning like miscellanea". Secondly, dictionary definitions of grammatical terms are near worthless (a point made more or less vocally and politely by actual grammarians). At least one Merriam-Webster dictionary straightfacedly calls "my" etc a species of "adjectives", a notion (politely) dismissed as bollocks by actual grammarians (Jespersen etc) for over a century but (groan) faithfully regurgitated by this encyclopedia. -- Hoary (talk) 07:38, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know why you think "functioning like an adverb" is odd. Adverbials modify a verb or the sentence as a whole. Being "a kind of miscellaneous category" is a description but not the defining characteristic of adverbs. --173.49.16.103 (talk) 12:40, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

The American Heritage Dictionary gives one definition of "into" as a preposition meaning "To the condition, state, or form of" with one example "dishes breaking into pieces"[1], which is strong evidence that "into a hundred pieces" is a prepositional phrase (compare also "after graduation he went into banking" or "burst into flames", "into life", etc, for other uses of "into" as a preposition not describing literal motion). --Normansmithy (talk) 12:48, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand what the fuss is about. It is clearly an adverbial prepositional phrase. Marco polo (talk) 18:09, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

That sounds redundant to me. Is there a prepositional phrase that isn't adverbial? +Angr 22:33, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

How about "to charity" in "He donated the award money to charity."? Is that considered adverbial? --173.49.16.103 (talk) 23:40, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I'd say that's adverbial. Marco polo (talk) 03:25, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'd say it's the indirect object. "To give" is trivalent. No such user (talk) 10:55, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

"Under the bed is where I found the missing piece of the puzzle". "Under the bed" acts as a noun, "of the puzzle" as an adjective. --Anonymous, 00:55 UTC, February 11, 2010.

There are adjectival prepositional phrases. For example: "The dog across the street barks constantly" or "The rain in Spain..." Marco polo (talk) 03:23, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

"Failure to progress is to regress"

Is there a well-established latin phrase meaning that failure to progress is to regress? ----Seans Potato Business 18:51, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Probably not, since the Romans didn't really have the same concept of progress that we do. I'm sure we can come up with something though. What exactly do you mean to say in English? Adam Bishop (talk) 21:55, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Reminds me of an elegiac distich from an Icelandic poem by Jónas Hallgrímsson: "Það er svo bágt að standa' í stað, og mönnunum munar / annaðhvurt aftur á bak ellegar nokkuð á leið." My translation: "It is so hard to stand in one place and people move / either backwards or a bit further along the road." An English translation of this poem is here: [2] but the meaning of these two lines is sacrificed (the translator maintains the structural alliteration of the original). Haukur (talk) 22:36, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

That he not busy being born

Is busy dying. Bus stop (talk) 22:38, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Well, that's a pithy way to put it. Haukur (talk) 22:58, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

While I am not sure about "well-established", it would be something like "Non progredi est regredi". Intelligentsium 23:05, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Right but that's the problem, those verbs mean "go" and "return", not really the same as what we have turned them into. Adam Bishop (talk) 23:07, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, because "progress" in English has taken on a somewhat nonliteral meaning of "advance" (which suffers from the same problem), as in a society or technology, etc. Literally progress means "moving forward physically", and likewise regress means "moving backward physically". Another possible translation is "non ut amplio est ut peior", but that may not be correct Latin. Intelligentsium 23:20, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

No, it's not...why do machine translations always give "ut" for "to"? They can't even tell an infinitive from a result clause. Anyway, I'm sure some of the moral philosophers said something pithy about personal advancement, and there was advancement in the cursus honorum, so maybe we could do something with that. Adam Bishop (talk) 03:56, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Rhyming free verse

Verse that has meter, but no rhyme is blank verse. Is there a technical term for verse that has rhyme, but no meter, other than Doggerel?:) Or, as a special case, poems that use the same foot, but varying number per line, e.g. first line iambic pentameter, second line (rhyming to first), iambic tertrameter or trimeter, or hexameter? --216.239.45.4 (talk) 21:50, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

The article on free verse has some names of relevant poets (T. S. Eliot et al). No special term is indicated in this article, though. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 22:02, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Dutch and German have a word for it: "Knittelvers". — Sebastian 22:28, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

You might find it in Category:Poetic form. -- Wavelength (talk) 22:59, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Surely doggerel has meter, often of the most clunky and four-square kind. William McGonagall is notable for verse that rhymes but is often toally lacking in meter. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 13:29, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Not a general term, but one verse form that has rhymes but no fixed meter is the clerihew. (My own favorite is "Lord Byron / Once succumbed to a siren. / His flesh was weak; / Hers, Greek.") Deor (talk) 00:36, 13 February 2010 (UTC)