Grammar Geek
I encountered this phrase today and it bothered me. Such a trivial thing but it strikes me as wrong:
“The paperwork needs raising.”
One of the first thoughts I had was that it is Anthropomorphic – the paperwork has no needs. In the alternate phrase, “The paperwork needs to be raised”, the need is attributed to a third party – something that the passive form of the particle in the original doesn’t convey so well if at all. On the other hand ‘He needs helping’ cannot be blamed for being Anthropomorphic but still it seems clumsy compared to ‘He needs to be helped’.
Importantly both ‘helping’ and ‘raising’ are definitively forms of verbs. If we replaced those with ‘training’ the construction works fine because some ‘training’ is a noun. In the sense of a person who can have needs it works. ‘He’ can certainly ‘need’ a ‘noun’. That’s the problem with ‘-ing’ words, they’re not all the same!
So in the case of an inanimate subject that we do not wish to give feelings to we would have to consider ‘needs verb-ing’ as the Gerundive form of the verb’s participle. A Gerundive is where something ‘must’ act, e.g. I must eat. English has many ways to express this, ‘I have to eat’, ‘I need to eat’, but the basic translation of a Latin Gerundive we were always taught is ‘I must eat’. The others are an artistic license that, although very useful for making a translation easy to read, are not truly Gerundives. One would be quite willing to say ‘The paperwork must be raised’ but one would never say ‘The paperwork must raising’.
So where one would anthropomorphosise and the proper interpretation as a gerundive doesn’t make sense then the phrase is wrong.
Good:
- The paperwork must be raised
- The picture needs to be raised
- He needs to be helped
- He needs some help
- He needs training
Bad:
- The ceiling needs raising
- The litter needs picking up
- He needs helping
We might all understand what the original phrase means but that can’t stop it being wrong. Of course language evolves but I’m all for slowing down the change!
While trying to work this out I discovered that my grasp on proper grammar is not what it should be. For example, did you know that the ‘of’ in ‘Take your feet off of the chair’ is wrong? ‘Take your feet off the chair’ is correct!
At least Latin simplified things by including all the information about a word’s use inside it. The ending of a word told you whether it was singular or plural, vocative or accusative, gerundive or particle. English and most other languages required multiple words to convey the same sense and in so doing confuses the learner.
Linguistics | PadainFain June 18, 2009
3 Comments to “Grammar Geek”
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By Grammar Teacher, June 30, 2009 @ 11:01 am
I find your article interesting. We so often do not even realise that these types of phrases are grammatically wrong. We think they just sound a bit strange. But on the other hand they free us up to be more creative with the language and less afraid of making ‘mistakes’. It is a fine line to tread.
By Mark, June 30, 2009 @ 11:09 pm
Absolutely. Language evolves. I just wish I knew more about our grammar to be certain I was describing it correctly!!
By Martin, July 9, 2009 @ 9:32 am
Several things come to mind. The most important is to refer you the the mighty Stephen Pinker and in particular his book The Stuff of Thought. He analyses our use of verbs to reveal the intuitive (pre-Newtonian) physics that informs our worldview.
The sort of person who would say the paperwork needs raising is definitely thinking that the paperwork does have needs and has a life of its own. In this sense raising means more than lifting, it means coming into being as does Frankensteins monster. A Form 7QB/1 once Raised, preferably in triplicate or more, has a Destiny. One copy will go to Filing, one to Accounts and one to Despatch. The final place of resting of a Form is to be Closed.
It might be more accurate to say the paperwork needs to be raised, as this also implies that is needs to be raised by someone. However I suspect this is just laziness instead of a different intent.
Finally, doen’t get too hung up on the Latin constructions. There are two extreme forms of grammars – one modifies the words to add grammatical information, the other adds additional words. Latin is an extreme form of the the first and English combines both forms. The old argument was that it was wrong to split an infinitive (to boldly go) because you can’t split an infinitive in Latin, the infinitive being a single word. Also it wrong to end a sentence with a proposition, because Latin doesn’t have prepositions.
As the girl said to her father, who was about to be read a story, which book am I going to be read to out of?