Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Almost every English verb, in context, expresses either a state or an action, and the difference between them may be defined by empirical texts that combine syntax and semantics. Applied to passages from Congreve (1700) and Ben Jonson (1609), these tests give strong if not extensive evidence that eighteenth-century prose is more nominal than early seventeenth-century prose: eighteenth-century authors choose to express meaning in terms of stative relations between nouns, rather than in terms of actions or events. This preference may be considered as a matter of literary style, and perhaps also as an episode in the history of the evolution of modern English.
1 In Table 1 the numbers of dynamic and stative predicates have been rounded off to the nearest 10, “Uncertain” to the nearest 5, to avoid the appearance of being more accurate than a generalized summation like this can be. “Uncertain” predicates may have either two possible interpretations, one clearly stative and the other clearly dynamic, or one meaning that places them, obscurely, somewhere between true action and true state.
The total number of words involved, 16,000, is large enough so that I felt I could ignore irregularities that arise from differences in what is taken as a word in the different texts: e.g.. the old-spelling edition of The Scornful Lady has “a skin full of lust” not a “skinful,” and “a Nation of new found fooles” not “new-found,” “by it selfe” not “itself.” I count contractions as two words (he's, they'd).
It will very soon appear that I use the words “dynamic,” “stative,” and “nominal” in special senses. For “dynamic,” “action” could have been used, but the idea of action has become controversial among philosophers; “nonstative” is also a possible term, except that “nonstative” makes no reference to change, process, action, or event, some trace of which can almost always be found in predicates that aren't stative. A dynamic predicate is not necessarily full of energy and power; the change it denotes may be gradual, like growing old. and the process it describes may be unenergetic and passive, like lying on a bed. Stative predicates, on the other hand, always express a state of some kind; theirs is the semantics not of action and change but of abstract relationships and static conditions.
If we define “nominal” prose as prose dominated in some way by nouns not verbs, and assuming (1) that nouns are in some important sense the opposite of verbs. (2) that the nounverb polarity is fundamental in English, and (3) that “it is normal for verbs [in English] to be dynamic,” then the form of predication that is least verblike. i.e.. stative predication, may be taken as characteristic of nominal prose. For verbs as in their natural state dynamic, see Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech. Jan Svartvik, A Grammar of Contemporary English (London: Longman, 1972), p. 39.
2 Quantitative studies include: Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. 1957), pp. 215–30; J. Miles, Style and Proportion: The Language of Prose and Poetry (Boston: Little, 1967), pp. 153–63; Louis T. Milic, A Quantitative Approach to the Style of Jonathan Swift (The Hague: Mouton. 1967), pp. 175–82, 195 204, 224–25. Judgmental studies: Donald Davie, Articulate Energy (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), esp. Ch. v; Rulon Wells, “Nominal and Verbal Style,” Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960). pp. 213–20.
3 For a review of references (beginning in the 1920's and extending into the 1960's) to verbs that don't ordinarily take the progressive, see Robert Livingston Allen, The Verb System of Present-Day American English (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), p. 39 (Kruisinga), pp. 52–54 (Hornby, Jespersen, Garey, Bull), pp. 68–69 (Hill), pp. 74–75 (Twaddell), pp. 7879. Fuller and more recent discussions of stativity include: Martin Joos, The English Verb (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1964), pp. 113–20; George Lakoff, Irregularity in Syntax (New York: Holt, 1970), pp. 115–33; Anthony Kenny. Action, Emotion and Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), Ch. viii; Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, Svartvik, pp. 39–41, 47–48, 57, 265–69; David Lee, “Stative and Case Grammar,” Foundations of Language, 10 (1973), 545–68.
4 I do not mean to imply that the work of Poutsma and Kruisinga, Nida and Fries is unprofitable, merely that it represents two extremes of notional and “formal” approaches to English predication. “Aspect” as a term in English grammar does not appear before 1800, according to Ian Michael, English Grammatical Categories (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 408. See E[tsko] Kruisinga, A Handbook of Present-Day English. 4th ed. (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1925). Pt. ii, pp. 34–39, 67–90, H[endrik] Poutsma, A Grammar of Late Modern English (Groningen: P. Noordhoff, 1926), Pt. ii, Sec. ii, pp. 287–89. See also, by all means, R[einard] W. Zandvoort, “Is ‘Aspect’ an English Verbal Category?” Gothenburg Studies in English, 14 (1962), 1–20. Zandvoort traces the term “aspect” back to Streitberg's article “Perfektive und Imperfektive Aktionsart im Germanischen” in Paul and Braune, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 15 (1891), 70–177, the thesis of which “had far-reaching consequences” for Germanic grammars ; in particular, it permitted English to break out in “a rash of notional categories whose connection with the structure of the language is far from evident” and often enough tautological. However, syntactic-semantic categories for predication continue to intrigue grammarians. For stative and dynamic predication in South American language that has English in its background, see Derek Bickerton, Dynamics of a Creole System (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 28–39.
5 See Roger Brown. A First Language: The Early Stages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 315–28, et passim. For good if limited evidence that nongrammarians in the adult population habitually make the same distinction, see Akira Ota. Tense and Aspect of Present-Day American English (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1963), pp. 65–74.
6 The two methods I use here to test for stativity (rewriting in the progressive and paraphrase) are both ways of probing for differences between lexical meaning and “grammatical” meaning. The distinct grammatical meanings of stative and dynamic may be exemplified pretty clearly in the two senses of The trout measures twenty inches (see above). Perhaps grammatical meanings evolve, as lexical meanings do; possibly the full grammatical meaning of stativity had not developed by 1722, since the full range of progressive forms did not come into use until the 19th century (see Otto Jespersen, A Modern English Grammar, 1931 ; rpt. London : Allen & Unwin, 1949, Pt. iv. Vol. in, “Syntax,” 164–234). It could also be argued that the grammatical meaning of stativity existed as soon as there were stative verbs and that what was defective until the 19th century was the apparatus for putting the verb of a dynamic predicate into the progressive.
7 Henry Sweet, A New English Grammar (1891 ; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), Pt. I, p. 105, gives seven forms of to see in the progressive as his paradigm for “Definite” tenses! For to see as something of an anomaly among verbs, see Andy Rogers, “Three Kinds of Physical Perception Verbs,” Papers from the 7th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (Chicago, 1971), pp. 206–22.
8 For Countability, see Geoffrey N. Leech, Towards a Semantic Description of English (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. 1969), pp. 137–38; for Purpose and Voluntary tests, see Quirk et al. (as cited in n. 1), p. 94, and Brown (as in n. 5); for the “limited progressive,” the just-in-the-middle-of frame, see the present author's “The Semantics of Stativity,” Journal of Literary Semantics, 4 (1976), 35–12.
9 Jonas Barish's excellent book on Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge. Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1960) compares the effect of irregularity in Jonson's syntax to a Brueghel painting in which the dramatic whole is an aggregate of many small dramas (p. 84); the tremendous energy in Jonson's mature plays (p. 105) he traces to several rhetorical and syntactic sources, not including verbs.
10 “Quantities of Qualities: Nominal Style and the Novel,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, iv (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 1975), 139 53.
11 “No. 37” means that the verb under consideration in this quotation is the 37th word in the sample. Page numbers refer to the following texts: Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, ed. L. A. Beaurline (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966); The Scornful Lady, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970); The Way of the World in Comedies by William Congreve, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, from 1710 text (London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1925) ; Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers, ed. S. S. Kenny (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. 1968).
12 See also John Lyons, “A Note on Possessive, Existential and Locative Sentences,” Foundations of Language, 3 (1967), 390–96; John M. Anderson, An Essay concerning Aspect (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).
13 See Miroslav Rensky, “Nominal Tendencies in English,” Philologica Pragensia, 7 (1964), 135–50; J. F. Staal, “Reification. Quotation and Nominalization,” Contributions to Logic and Methodology in Honor of J. M. Bocheński, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka (Amsterdam : North-Holland, 1965), pp. 151–87.
