Re: To waffle, ‘to waver, to vacillate, to equivocate, to dither’

Antonio Marques wrote:

jerryfriedman <jerry.friedman99@gmail.com> wrote:

Aidan Kehoe wrote:
 

Ar an ceathrú lá de mí Bealtaine, scríobh jerryfriedman:

 

Aidan Kehoe wrote:
 

Ar an chéad lá de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Antonio Marques:

 

Never mind that in the bit that Steve quoted to flippantly

inquire

on what 'that' meant, it was quite explicitly said

'dither'.

 

 

The "it" there isn't idiomatic

 

The sentence sounded wrong to me, but even now I'm not sure

why. As

to 'it', maybe it's not idiomatic, but is it ungrammatical?

I
don't

quite see it.

"It" refers to "dither",

No, it's an impersonal passive, and I've just found out that

for the

last 30/40 years I may have been using a construct that

english

doesn't have.

 

English does have an impersonal passive, and and what you wrote is
grammatical, but again, not idiomatic. No one would have noticed

or

commented except that the sentence was posted to

alt.usage.english.

 I disagree wth both sentences. What's an example of an impersonal

passive in

English that anyone would say? And if Antonio tries posting

sentences
like

that on the Internet as, say, Anthony Marks, I'll bet it wouldn't be

long

till someone asked him what his native language is.

 

https://books.google.com/books?q="it+was+said"

 

Now, a lot of those results are from court reports and so don’t qualify
as
“anyone would say,” but that register of English is still English.

 I think "It was said that" isn't what Antonio meant by "impersonal
passive".  In "It was said that", the "It" refers to the thing that was
said,

I don't think it does, just like my 'it' doesn't either:

It was said (that ...)
It was said (quote)
It is often said (that ...)
It is often said a picture is worth a thousand words

In all cases, 'it' doesn't refer to anything. It's there because the
syntax
requires a subject. The thing you think it refers to is the object, not
the subject.

Sorry, I did misunderstand you.  I'm not going to argue about this
analysis.

but Antonio said his "It" did not refer to "dither".
 I don't object to calling "It was said that..." an impersonal passive,
though, and I may have misunderstood Antonio.
 

Is the British Council wrong?

 

https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/c1-grammar/advanced-passives-review#:~:text=The%20impersonal%20passive%20has%20two,from%20the%20third%20century%20BCE.

 They're right, because they rule out Antonio's sentence; they say
what follows the past participle must be either a "that" clause or
an infinitive (with "to").

No, they go to the trouble of parenthesising 'that'.

We're just disagreeing about terminology, right?  Others use "'that'
clause" (well, actually "that-clause") the way I did.
"You can omit 'that' in that-clauses which serve as a direct object
without causing any ambiguity. This omission is more common in
informal speech and writing. However, 'that' _cannot_ be removed
after verbs like 'reply' and 'shout'."
https://langeek.co/en/grammar/course/1281/that-clauses
Or for something more professional:
"Elsness (1984) considers _that_-clauses which follow verbs.  He
reports a higher proportion of zero _that_ when the subject in the
_that_-clause is realised by a personal pronoun."
https://books.google.com/books?id=vcdxAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA155
However, I'm not attached to the term.  We can call it whatever
you like.  The point is that, as the British Council says, the
impersonal "It is said" can only be followed by "to" and an
infinitive or by a... relative clause with either "that" or a zero
relative pronoun?
--
Jerry Friedman