As I wrote to Dr. Liberman, I consider most of those examples grammatical, although perhaps I am tainted by my obsession with Latin.
I seem to analyze these differently from him and you. Here's how I see it:
"Both of whom (being influenced by Ellington, Rowles and Brown) choose one Ellington tune for each of the two albums that comprise this two-CD set..." "Ireland and Denmark, both of whom (being heavily reliant on British trade) decided they would go wherever Britain went..."
Of course under this analysis, the third sentence of that set is questionable at best, because there is no main clause for the participial clause to be parenthetical to:
*"At present, personal injury cases are heard by many different Judges, some of whom (having no experience in this field)."Posted by Justin at May 26, 2004 03:45 PM
It seems like sometimes the present participle, pronoun and partitive structure are totally unnecessary: "Both influenced by Ellington, Rowles and Brown etc," or "...different judges, some having no experience etc,". Sometimes one, sometimes all three. I see it as a good example of meaningless, puffed-up verbiage intended to convey the impression of eloquence or significance; but perhaps it is also an example of a kind of belabored delicacy: it's as if the author is saying "there is a group which certain people of interest belong to, but I will preserve them by claiming an indeterminate quantity for censure". I dunno. I could be way off the mark.
Posted by clockzero at May 26, 2004 04:08 PMUgly to my eye, because of or despite seeing it so often in student papers, both as a writing tutor in New Orleans working with struggling kids, and as an instructor in Indiana in a special topics course with mostly A/B students. I'd always grouped it in with the various constructions students reach for when they're trying to sound formal but don't have an ear yet for academic style.
Posted by Bill at May 26, 2004 04:31 PMI don't know about ungrammatical, but definitely very bad style. For me this kind of thing pops up during the writing process, when I'm not yet sure how I'm going to make my point, and then disappears when I edit. Which means, alas, that now and then I might end up carelessly publishing one of these constructions.
It sounds like bureaucratese, from someone who has learned on the job to do the opposite of anything E.B. White or Orwell said.
"Being" is a convenient sort of syntactical cheater for careless writers, I think.
I used to know a pretentious HS student who frequently began sentences with "Being that....", meaning "Since....".
They sound horrible to me. Ungrammatical and ugly.
I correct them this way:
Both (*being) heavily reliant on . . .
Both (*being) influenced by . . .
Some *(having) no experience . . .
(The correlation is with verb, not subject.)
Justin: your analysis makes a kind of sense of these strings, but it doesn't really work for these sentences. In the first example, Ellington, Rowles and Brown isn't a list - Rowles and Brown is the subject.
Your analysis of the second is possible, but I'm not sure it's acceptable as a complete sentence - it's just one modified noun phrase.
(I really need a better grasp of syntactic terminology to express myself here, but I think I'm making sense.)
Posted by Tim May at May 26, 2004 04:56 PMCorrect, but repellent.
Just because I can construe it doesn't mean I have to like it. And I don't like it.
Posted by stephen at May 26, 2004 05:55 PMSpot the missing "it".
Posted by stephen at May 26, 2004 05:56 PMUgly; ugly as sin. And not nearly so delightful.
Looks like a tarting up of what I think is a common enough conversational gambit: "At present, personal injury cases are heard by many different judges, some of them having no experience in this field" sounds perfectly fine to my ear--and, upon reading Liberman's post more closely, I discover it's perfectly fine to his, too. --But it's a bit tumbly for "fine" writin', so said writer attempts to dandy it up by inexplicably swapping "whom" for "them," resulting in something so lip-pursingly stiff it must be correct. Right?
Posted by Kip Manley at May 26, 2004 08:10 PM*
Posted by The Tensor at May 26, 2004 09:04 PMIt would never occur to me to use it, and I'd edit it without a second thought in someone else's writing.
Posted by Lin B at May 26, 2004 09:38 PMTim- good point about the first sentence. This was what Liberman was getting at, I guess, when he mentioned the quibus cognitis construction. But even in Latin, these relatives need some sort of antecedent, and our example, (at least as presented; I'm too lazy to google it up and find what originally preceded it) places the referent later in the sentence, so that would make it ungrammatical to me.
As for the second one, I don't see how it isn't a sentence. The predicate is the phrase beginning with "decided." Or am I missing something here?
Posted by Justin at May 26, 2004 10:37 PMWhat's the second sentence in full? If it's something like "Ireland and Denmark, both of whom (being heavily reliant on British trade) decided they would go wherever Britain went, nevertheless made it clear that they would rather go their own way" I don't see what's wrong with it, aside from wordiness (why would you ever need to say "both of whom"?). But the way it's punctuated in the example makes it seem that "decided" goes with "Ireland and Denmark", leaving "both of whom" out in the cold for some verb-lovin'.
The first and third are unambiguously ungrammatical, and horribly ugly moreover. Not one bolded word from the first sentence is necessary.
Posted by ben wolfson at May 27, 2004 02:16 AMDoesn't sound like something I'd use, but it also doesn't sound ungrammatical.
If I were writing, it'd be the sort of thing I'd probably neaten up and simplify in editing, because it does strike me as more verbose than strictly necessary.
Posted by Erika at May 27, 2004 02:58 AMWhere does this atrocity originate, and can we stop it crossing the Atlantic?
Posted by chris at May 27, 2004 04:41 AMUngrammatical for me. I can see where they're coming from, but I'd read it as a confusion in composition, almost an anacoluthon.
The relative 'who(m)' requires case, so when it's the complementizer on its own it requires a finite verb after it. When however the case is assigned by 'of', the result reads like an absolute subject of a non-finite verb: 'both being...', so 'both of whom being...'.
But for me the 'whom' has to have an antecedent that it's relativizing, not just a prior antecedent (as 'of them' allows), so the whole relative pronominal 'both of whom' has to be the subject, and has to therefore have a finite verb. I'm struggling to explain why exactly it differs from the correct versions, but my intuition about it is clear.
If it was actually grammatical it would be an elegant and neat turn of phrase, just as much as any of the three alternatives Mark Liberman proposes. But for me as for him, it is only they that are sayable.
Posted by entangledbank at May 27, 2004 06:49 AMThis usage seems completely ungrammatical to me and, as someone who spends much of his time correcting other people's writings, I would edit it out without a second thought, and even with a wince at what the intolerant half of my brain would consider to be a sign of poor education or slovenly thinking. If it spreads, I will no doubt adapt, but since the usage has no obvious advantage over other ways of saying the same thing, I continue to hope that it will remain a marginal phenomenon.
Posted by Jonathan Wright at May 27, 2004 09:44 AMMe too, but the range of comments here isn't promising -- too many people find it grammatical, even if ugly or verbose. I wish I had an easier time dealing with language change when it's happening around me; I used to be so blithe about it in my historical-linguist phase.
Posted by language hat at May 27, 2004 11:12 AMNo. Oh no. I would edit this out without even stopping to think whether it is correct or incorrect gramatically, just because it's as horrible as a Kool-Aid stain on my heirloom quilt. It doesn't matter a bit that some quilters dye fabric with Kool-Aid, and it doesn't matter that some people find this horror to be acceptable. I won't accept it. I can't be made to accept it. So there.
Posted by speedwell at May 27, 2004 11:49 AMBesides being abominable, it seems incorrect in the way that a non-parallel construction is incorrect. Something doesn't match; a variety of antecedent problem, as discussed above by entangledbank.
Posted by Margaret S. at May 27, 2004 02:45 PMThe second sentence in full (I did find and link to these things when I wrote my post above) is:
Ireland and Denmark, both of whom being heavily reliant on British trade, decided they would go wherever Britain went, and hence also applied to join the Community.
Ireland and Denmark, (both of whom (being heavily reliant on British trade) decided they would go wherever Britain went),...
ben wolfson above is of course correct that there could be a predicate after this, and this would be grammatical, albeit stylistically inadvisable. But it turns out there isn't, and the punctuation doesn't support such an interpretation anyway. If it isn't simply an error, the author must have intended both of whom being heavily reliant on British trade to constitute a single parenthetical element. Which is ungrammatical, for me.
Curses, foiled again!
Posted by Justin at May 27, 2004 09:43 PMLate comment. Just to be repulsive, I'll try a concocted example. "The pair of eunuchs, both of whom who had no penises, said their sex change had been a good career move". To me (UK English speaker, 48) there's nothing wrong with it grammatically ... yet there's something indefinably cumbersome about the construction.
Posted by Ray at May 27, 2004 10:05 PMthough this one's propagation seems just another case of a barbarian meme smashing through the gates, it does have classical antecedents (if anyone cares). as a lifelong Latinist, no amount of reader-cavillings has been able to dissuade me from the introductory clause of a gerund appositional to the entire sentence(the "nominative absolute construction", to borrow its Roman title), or as some sort of prepositional clause not linked to the subject ("ablative absolute"). Fowler did rail against "fused participles", though many writers in the 17c.-Ciceronian prose tradition have favored them; adding a forward-referring pronoun no native speaker has any trouble parsing (in Lojban we have a special set of words for this, avoiding all possible confusion) may be a tad provocative further, but that's all.
I don't even care if the ancient Greeks and Romans dyed THEIR quilts with Kool-Aid. Ick.
Posted by speedwell at May 28, 2004 11:57 AMRay--
Notice that in your concocted example, you made a typo: "whom who." I had the same problem when I tried to emulate it: unconscious errors kept creeping in. That suggests to me that it violates something, and that something probably ought to be called grammar.
Here's my attempt at using it: "I am of two minds about this, both of which being negatively inclined." See? I don't think that's right (or not wrong in the right way).
Posted by HP at May 28, 2004 01:15 PMLeaving aside the "whom who" typo, when Ray tried to concoct an example, he inadvertently fixed the verb, and so his sentence didn't fit this construction. The incorrect version should be "The pair of eunuchs, both of whom having no penises, said their sex change had been a good career move". You see? This construction is so contrary to good writing that we can't even produce one when we are trying hard.
Posted by Margaret S. at May 28, 2004 02:36 PM