Re: Story - TCOAIW

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>En réponse à Adrian Morgan <morg0072@...>:
>
>>I'm not sure what you mean. A search shows eight instances of words
>>ending in apostrophe-d, including five in the first scene, which is
>>not surprising as this scene describes events that occur before the
>>story begins which naturally incurs the use of the past perfect. This
>>proportion is by no means unusual for fictional or other types of
>>non-formal prose. I'm surprised that you find it awkward; expanding
>>it to "he had", etc would look inappropriately formal, IMO.
>>
>Well, I'm only a L2 English speaker, but I agree with Teoh that this 'd looks
>awkward. First, it's an ambiguous abbreviation
>
Only in isolation; when in context you can understand it.

>(it can be "had" or "would", and
>somehow I consider it is more often "would" than "had", so I tend to translate
>it as "would", and only when I see the next word I realise my mistake, so it
>tends to break my reading pace).
>
Why expand 'he'd' into either 'he had' or 'he would', anyway? (In fact,
when reading something that says 'he had', I *contract* it into 'he'd'.)
If you say 'he'd left before you came', I don't bother turning that into
'he had left before you came'; the word is 'he'd'. And anyway, I think
I'm more likely to use 'd=had than 'd=would; I can't contrive a natural
sounding sentence with it. But perhaps that's just because I'm trying
too hard to contrive one...

> Then, it's an abbreviation used in a
>narrative, and whether it's a formal narrative or not, it just looks plain
>wrong to me.
>
To me it's not an abbreviation. That implies that putting it in its full
form would be at least as correct, if not more so, as the abbreviated
version. But it isn't. Even in my essays at school, there are a number
of contractions that I would never expand; it just sounds ungrammatical.
(Or so I thought. Having just checked an essay, I've proved myself
wrong, writing 'you are' where good spoken grammar would require
'you're'. Because 'you are' in that place would be pronounced /ju@/ and
we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and 'you were'. At
any rate, when it's actually being read, there's no doubt that it would
be contracted.)

> To me, this kind of abbreviation is fit for transcribing spoken
>language, or for informal written communication like letters or e-mail to
>friends or acquaintances. For a narrative organised in chapters (thus a "book",
>whether it's on paper or not), it just doesn't fit. It's just way too informal.
>
To me it's not; it's more neutral.

>And having "had" itself doesn't sound formal to me at all. It just sounds
>neutral.
>
It sounds *way* too formal to me.

>It's all equivalent to the use of 'ne' (the first part of any negation in
>standard French) in French. In spoken French, it's just never used. And in
>informal letters or email, it's not used either, because those things tend to
>imitate spoken language. But a narrative is not supposed to imitate spoken
>language (unless it's made on purpose, to give us the impression that the
>narrator is actually telling us the story), but rather to use a standard
>written language, and in French this written language includes using "ne". In
>the same way, I feel the use of those abbreviations in English just doesn't fit
>in a narrative, and it seems Teoh had the same impression.
>
No it isn't [equivalent]. From earlier discussions on French, I
understand Standard Written French is practically a different language
from Spoken French, that's how different the two are. SWE and SpPDE may
be divergent in the writing/pronunciation of the words, but in grammar,
SWE keeps updating itself against the speech.

>What do you find formal in just writing "had" instead of 'd? I personally never
>abbreviate 'had' in my speech either (although I do abbreviate "would" to 'd
>very often) and yet no native speaker of English has ever said I was too formal.
>
I doubt anyone would complain of non-contraction. It's just one of those
many things that highlight you as someone who hasn't learnt English
natively.

Tristan

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