Re: was did

On Sep 18, 11:19 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 18, 2:18 am, John Swindle <jcswin...@xxxxxxx> wrote:



On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:28:52 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 17, 2:39 pm, John Swindle <jcswin...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:32:12 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 17, 1:17 am, John Swindle <jcswin...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
. . .
I grew up in North America and still live in the United States
(although not in North America), and I can tell you how to construct
those, or how I do it anyway.  Write an e-mail message.  Use a "was"
construction.  Go back and change it to a "did" construction, but
forget to delete the "was."  Et voila.  (Ett VOY-la.)  I can't imagine
that those are anything but typos.  -

Did you "grow up in NA" before 1980?

You claim to live in Hawai`i and that the construction is not used
there?

Right on both counts! So far as I know.  

It's hard to say that a construction is not used, but "was did" is
certainly unfamiliar.  I suspect that the examples represent careless
writing or editing and that the writers would not use it in their own
speech.

You have however heard it widely, and if others have heard it too then
I'm obviously mistaken.  

Have others heard it too?

The linguists who wrote the AmSp article that analys... found
certainly have ...

(is is, not was did)

Sure.  But "was did" is something else: a typo.

Of course "was did" could work just fine in a context like "Only when
he looked back and saw who it was did he abandon the idea of singing
'The Internationale' at her wedding."-

Of course it's not a typo, or there wouldn't be so many examples so
easily findable.

I'm not sure I follow this argument. Google mines an enormous corpus,
and you can find numerous examples of all kinds of things that clearly
are errors. I'm not sure I'd use "typo" here, which to me suggests
single-character errors (extra letter, wrong letter, missing letter).
Rather, it's quite similar to self-corrections that happen all the
time in spontaneous speech. You start off framing a question with
"was", then decide that it would work better with "did", and out
comes:

"What was/ did people do for fun in the 1930s?"

Normally these are eliminated in edited versions of spoken text
(except by linguists of course). But maybe people posting to internet
sites are sometimes a bit careless and both auxiliaries get left in.
This is why I am asking whether these are errors or a genuinely novel
syntactic structure. Spoken examples would probably give an
intonational clue. If it's as common as you say on radio, maybe Ron
Hardin could find us one?

And you have no idea how many more examples there are
with any other verb and any other sequence of auxiliaries.

Indeed. I got tired of looking.

And the set of examples included no examples of "who it was did he"
literary-style inversions.

Sure. I was looking for examples where the two would have to be part
of the same clause.

Ross Clark
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: was did
    ... What was did Andrew Johnson?s loyalty oath say? ... Two different times I was did pictures under contract to him, ... I grew up in North America and still live in the United States ... Go back and change it to a "did" construction, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: was did
    ... I grew up in North America and still live in the United States ... construction. ... that those are anything but typos. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: was did
    ... I grew up in North America and still live in the United States ... construction. ... he looked back and saw who it was did he abandon the idea of singing ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: was did
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    (sci.lang)
  • Re: ``whom register and case rules
    ... I think what's bothering Peter is that the construction "to who you ... I suspect that the original was a typo and he's just not owning up to ... la cieurgeourea provoer mal trasfu ...
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