It end ups being a word

[Please note that this is a schedule post and I am currently observing my union (UCU)'s industrial action over pensions, pay, workloads, and equality.]

English has a group of verbs that you might know as 'phrasal verbs'. It's things like cheer up, find out, turn off. They include what looks like a preposition (up, out, off) so can be hard to distinguish from normal verbs with a preposition following them. To add to the complication, verbs that are not really phrasal but might have a preposition after them come in two types: they have to have a particular preposition, or they can have any old one optionally. Here's a classic Linguistics 101 example to clarify: 

Look can occur with no preposition at all: 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look. 

Or it can be followed by one of several prepositions: 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look at a map. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look up the address. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look in the atlas. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look to the stars as my guide. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look with my soul. 

OK, I'll stop there before it gets silly. But one of these is different from the others. Compare these two sentences: 

*I'm not sure where it is, I'll look a map at. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look the address up. 

In the second one, we can put the preposition at the end, whereas we can't do that in the first one. That's because look up is (in this case) a phrasal verb, and up isn't really a preposition. It's sometimes known as a verbal particle and it's doing something other than signifying direction. Compare it to the same phrase when it's not a phrasal verb. As we just saw, phrasal verbs like this one can move the 'preposition' to the end: 

I looked up the address.

I looked the address up. 

They can't have any other preposition than the one they go with, though:  

*I looked down the address. 

But if look up is not a phrasal verb, but instead just a normal verb that happens to be followed by a preposition, the opposite is true. You can't move the preposition to the end, but you can change it for another one. (I've added in a bit of context here to make the meaning clear.) 

I looked up the street and saw my friend arriving. 

*I looked the street up and saw my friend arriving. 

I looked down the street and saw my friend arriving. 

Anyway, this is all stuff that's in grammar books, so on to the observational content that you know and love. Someone I follow on twitter used the phrasal verb end up, but treated it as a single unit, putting the verbal ending on the particle, like this: 

...because it end ups reproducing the same situation they want to avoid. 

Normally, you'd expect to see ends up, not end ups. But this does make sense if you consider a phrasal verb to be a single unit. End up is a bit different from look up in that we can't move up anywhere else. It really always does have to be end up, with nothing in between them, and no other preposition than up. The parts don't really mean the same on their own (end could be used in the same way, but it's not). So it's really functioning as a single word in any meaningful sense, and therefore it makes sense to stick the word ending (the 'inflection') on the end of the whole unit, as this person did. 

If/had I needed to express a counterfactual

[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.]

In a recent tweet, which I won't quote because the subject was too serious and grim for this light and fluffy discussion of linguistics, I saw the construction had/if. Like this: 

This is who I'd have spoken to had/if I needed help. 

It's like when you use and/or, to be clear that it's inclusive. If I write You'll enjoy this if you like fantasy and/or thrillers, then you'll like it if you like just one of those things or both of them. In other words, fantasy and thrillers, or fantasy, or thrillers. It just makes explicit the 'inclusive disjunction' (one or both are ok). 

But with had/if, there's no equivalent thing to make explicit. We can indeed use either of them in this sentence: This is who I'd have spoken to if I needed help and This is who I'd have spoken to had I needed help. But although had is a bit more formal, the meaning is the same, unlike with and/or. They both give a conditional interpretation. This made me wonder about the difference between them and after some struggle with finding out what the 'had' construnction was called (honestly it's hard to google linguistic things sometimes), I found Iatridou and Embick's 1994 article 'Conditional inversion'. 

It's called conditional inversion because it's used in conditionals, and the verb had is inverted with the subject: I had needed help vs Had I needed help. We use inversion a lot, including in questions (Had I needed help? Who can say.). 

So, if and inversion both indicate a conditional: 

If Sabine had eaten the calamari, she might be better by now.

Had Sabine eaten the calamari, she might be better by now. 

(Examples are all taken from Iatridou and Embick 1994, but with the name 'John' changed to 'Sabine' because John is in way too many linguistics example sentences.) 

Here's one difference between them, though. If can be used in situations where the thing might be true, and we just don't know the facts: 

If Sabine has eaten the calamari, there'll be none left for us. 

Inversion, meanwhile, can only be used in what are called counterfactuals, where we know the thing isn't the case, and you're talking about if it had been (but it isn't). In the equivalent example to the one just above, where it may or may not be true, it doesn't sound at all natural:  

*Has Sabine eaten the calamari, there'll be none left for us. 

(Remember the convention that an asterisk means that a sentence is not grammatical for speakers of the language under discussion.) 

And while if can be used with contracted negation (n't), inversion can't: 

If he hadn't seen the car coming, he would have been killed. 

*Hadn't he seen the car coming, he would have been killed.

Had he not seen the car coming, he would have been killed.

So there are some differences. But in the sentence I saw, where we began this, either would have been fine, because it was a counterfactual (she didn't need help), so inversion is ok, and if works in all conditionals so that would have been ok. So there's no reason to include both for covering more bases. It looks like one of those times when it feels like they mean something more than just using one of them, so you include both for the feeling of completeness. 

An ilk of that ilk

[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.]

You should always learn something at a pub quiz, and I did recently: I learnt what ilk means, as in of that ilk. The question asked us about a phrase that is used generically to mean 'of that type' and specifically in Scottish English and Scots to mean 'of the same name or place'. I had no idea and was coming up with all sorts of nonsense like autochthonous. But of that ilk it was, and once we knew, it was so obvious! An example from the OED of it being used in this way is Wemyss of that ilk, meaning Wemyss of Wemyss. 

Reading the OED entry is really interesting because it was used to mean family or class, and you can see how that's related to the meaning above. But its origin is in a pronoun, it seems, which has come down to Modern English as each or which (Scots is descended from the same predecessor as Modern English is) and that meant same or alike. You could use it like that for a while, as in the OED's example from 1648, During this ilk time.... 

It still seems to be pretty widely used in informal contexts today, as a quick twitter search turns up plenty of examples. You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that there's also the occasional sighting of the eggcorn version of that elk. 

Catching criminals and watching them in the act

CW: mention of public indecency behaviour in the tweet linked and below, before we get to the linguistics. 

This reply to a tweet of Derren Brown's delighted me. The response is to a screenshot of a takeaway driver review in which the person says they 'caught the delivery guy playing with himself in his car for ten minutes': 

Ten minutes seems a long time to "catch" someone doing something. I feel like that strays into "watch".

— Alan ‘join a union’ Smith (@mralanjohnsmith) December 19, 2021

As Alan says above, you can't really catch someone doing something for ten minutes. Why not? 

This is what linguists call 'lexical aspect', and it's basically part of the meaning of the verb, but it also interacts with the tense and other features of the way you use it. It's why if you say I'll go for a walk in an hour you mean that an hour from now, you will go for a walk, whereas I finished my homework in an hour means that it took you one hour to do your homework, and I'll do my homework in an hour is ambiguous: you'll do it in one hour's time, or it will take you one hour to finish it. Notice that I'll go for a walk in an hour doesn't have this ambiguity because it's just not the type of verb that you can say how long it takes to complete. You can, however, say I'll go for a walk for an hour, and then you're expressing the duration of your walk. 

There are a few different systems of classifying verbs in this way, but let's go with the classic one: Vendler's system from 1957. On this classification, catch is what he termed an 'achievement': an instantaneous action, a point in time. While you might have a long build-up to the catching, like a year-long investigation and stake-out, the act of catching itself is an instant in time. Watch, on the other hand, is an 'activity', which is an ongoing process without a pre-defined end point. If it doesn't have a pre-defined end point, then you can specify how long it went on, as in this case (ten minutes). 

You can manipulate these classes, and for instance say that It took ten years to catch the criminal, and then although we're using a frame that specifies the length of the process, that length of time is actually the delay before the achievement takes place: ten years of meticulous planning and investigating, or perhaps alternatively bumbling incompetence. This is why, after the ten years is up, you might say We finally caught the criminal on Tuesday, after ten long years!. Compare this with an 'accomplishment' like write a novel: you can say It took ten years to write my novel, but you can't say I finally wrote my novel on Tuesday, after ten long years!. You'd have to say instead that you finished it on Tuesday, because write a novel includes the process leading up to the completion as well as the completion itself, unlike catch, which is just the completion and not the process.