The preposition with which you are filling it in

I am currently mired in marking. As you know, I keep note of which mistakes are currently popular. One that I spotted recently was a sort of preposition doubling but with two different prepositions. Let me explain.

So, there are two things English can do. You can either move your preposition (in, in this example) along with your wh-word:

It depends on the newspapers in which you are reading them.

or you can leave it where it is:

It depends on the newspapers which you are reading them in.

It's a stylistic choice nowadays (used to be frowned upon, not so much now, and the first sounds a bit stuffy in casual conversation). Ignore the fact that which probably ought to be that in the second example (incidentally, that's evidence that this which/that rule is a bit daft). English is unusual in allowing this choice: most languages can't 'strand' the preposition and have to move it, as in the first example.

Sometimes, people get halfway through the sentence and forget they moved the preposition, and stick it in at the end as well:

It depends on the newspapers in which you are reading them in. 

Oh well - no problem. Speech error. It happens. Paul McCartney is sometimes said to have sung 'this ever-changing world in which we live in' (though he thinks maybe it was actually 'in which we're living').

But today I read sentences like this from two different students:

It depends on the newspapers with which you are reading them in. 

How exciting! So I think here, the student has left the preposition at the end on purpose, because that's fine, but also felt like there really ought to be something in that space before the which, so stuck in another preposition (with) that sounds OK there. Add it to the list of 'more words = better' mistakes.

Most tastiest

This story recently appeared in the Guardian newspaper, about a schoolboy who bullied Tesco into changing some 'ungrammatical' wording on its juice cartons. As you can probably tell, I'm (unusually) on Tesco's side here, or rather I would have been if they hadn't caved in instantly and completely.

Here's what happened: this 15-year-old boy noticed that his orange juice was described as being made with the 'most tastiest' oranges, and he felt that it should be either 'tastiest' or 'most tasty'. He felt this so strongly that he wrote first to Tesco customer services, and then to the Daily Mail when he didn't get a reply. And he wrote a real letter, with a stamp, not an email, which is how you know he was incandescent.

To clarify: yes, it 'should' be one of the two options he provided. The superlative doubling that he objects to is a very common feature of everyday speech, and I hear it approximately once a day (I listen out for it because I like it). In writing or formal speech it is considered wrong, and any piece of writing such as an essay should not include this construction. I'm very pleased that the standard of education in our schools is such that this child not only knows this, but cares about it. He sounds utterly insufferable, but I'm sure I was also insufferable at his age, so I'll let him off with that.

I do, however, want to suggest a better way for Tesco to have responded (rather than sending a grovelling letter promising to change the wording). The wording was probably carefully selected by a copy writer who knew exactly what they were doing, picking a construction that's frequent but not prescriptively correct, in order to come across as informal, friendly and possibly more eye-catching. Innocent, for example, while not using any 'ungrammatical' constructions that I can see, do their utmost to make their blurb informal, using no capital letters, lots of contractions ('we're', etc) and words like 'stuff', none of which would be acceptable in formal writing.

It's OK to use non-standard language if you know what you're doing and it's for a particular effect. As the saying goes, you have to know the rules before you know how to break them. Had Tesco been a linguist (and perhaps their copywriter is - lots of our students go on to do jobs like that) they might have responded to this young pedant with some facts about the frequency of use and the contexts in which superlative doubling is found, to demonstrate that it is not in fact ungrammatical, but merely register-specific. Then they could have explained to the young man that this wording was intentionally chosen to give the impression of a nice, friendly orange juice seller that you can trust, to mitigate the fact that you're buying concentrated orange juice from a huge corporation that probably pays its orange growers virtually nothing (I don't know this - just guessing).

Actually, the text from which this doubled superlative is taken is not specially informal, so it probably was an oversight. But there we go. I do think it's important not to always uphold the 'rules' of grammar, as being prissy about it is what causes people to dislike grammar when really it's such an interesting and fun thing, if you just look at it in the right way. I'm much more concerned about the genuinely ungrammatical things people (=students) write. If they'd never say it, why do they write it? But that's another rant for another day.

Double modal or double fluff?

Those of us who are interested in dialect syntax but don't make it their business to conduct experiments into it are always on the listen-out for interesting examples. You can't help it, after a while. On the Antiques Roadshow back in April, I heard one of the experts say this:

What date would that might have been?

He didn't stumble over it, it was very fluent production, so he either meant to say it or didn't notice what he'd said. But we seem to have a double modal construction here, something which is not found in Standard English and is attested but not common in certain dialects.

The modals are would and might, and if we put the sentence into a declarative form, you can see what the issue is:

That would might have been what date.

Either modal on its own is fine, but both together is not permitted in Standard English. As this is not part of my dialect I can't be sure that this particular combination is allowed in any dialect, but certainly two modal verbs can co-occur in many people's speech.

Not, however, in the antiques expert's speech, I'll bet. I would put money on this being a performance error, which went unnoticed because the fronting of the first modal would means that it's not adjacent to the second modal might. I would guess that he started out asking what date it would have been, and switched halfway through to asking what date it might have been, and the two met in the middle in a sticky mess. Perhaps the much higher frequency of would-questions than might-questions had some influence too (frequency estimation not based on any data or actual facts at all).

This kind of thing makes it so much harder to do dialect syntax through data collection. You might only have a few instances of double modal questions in hours of data, if you're working from interviews, and if a couple of them might be performance errors, how can you be sure of anything? This is why dialect syntacticians have to be cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford, and devise data collection methods that they think will cause people to use more double modals, but without telling them that they want them to use double modals. And getting people to say something in a certain way is really bloody hard. Normal people seem to have this quaint idea that what you say is more important than the way you say it.

Do you even know what you're saying?

We are surprisingly unaware of what we're saying. The actual words, I mean - we're astonishingly good at remembering the content or the general gist of a conversation, but very bad at remembering precisely what words were used. Many an argument has been built on just such a memory failing.

Linguists are more inclined than most to notice the way people say things, as well as what they actually say (or instead of what they say, sometimes). We're familiar with the informants who, presented with a questionnaire, claim never to use construction X, and then go on to do so in the next sentence, and what's more we know that we do this ourselves. But even we are not always aware of the way we speak.

This is one of the things I teach my students, in passing. In an early dialectology seminar we discuss a list of non-standard grammatical constructions that they are supposed to have surveyed their friends' use of. One of them is the doubling of comparatives and superlatives, such as most biggest or more uglier. Every year, without fail, the students look at me in utter disbelief when I suggest that people do this a heck of a lot. I do it, all the time. I know that it's a shibboleth (a linguistic thing that marks you out as different. Or a moron, if you read the insane rantings on the Tumblr #grammar tag) but I like it. But they really don't think that anyone ever says that sort of thing. I tell them that if they listen out for it, they'll hear it, and generally I've already done it once by the time we get to that point anyway.

There was a lovely example of just this at the PG conference held at my university last week. My friend gave a talk on sentence-final like (it was canny good like). In the question period (during which I asked a question that inadvertently included a sentence-final like), she mentioned that there is also reported to be a sentence-final but. Then she said, I've never heard it but. Brilliant. Within the very sentence in which she doubted that it was common, she uttered it herself.*

*(It was an intermediate version of final but, actually, one of the ones that Jean Mulder describes as not a true sentence-final particle, but equally not simply ellipsis with a missing but-clause. But this is all for another day, another post.)