The teacher has to explain to them that the English don’t usually use the present tense for things that are happening in the present. Think how daunting this is for people learning English. But then you’d happily say “I realised I’d been being watched” without breaking sweat or blinking. The pluperfect progressive passive for an extended state of action that happened to you prior to another action in the past is, when you put it like that, rather daunting. It depends how you count them, but there are about 20 that you deploy faultlessly. There are so many tenses you can use without even thinking about it, and almost certainly without being able to name them. It’s astonishing quite how expert you are at the English language. And the law is so important that you just can’t have a Bad Big Wolf.
It’s the law, and, as with the adjectives, you knew it even if you didn’t know you knew it. Why this should be is a subject of endless debate among linguists, it might be to do with the movement of your tongue or an ancient language of the Caucasus. Mish-mash, chit-chat, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, tip top, hip-hop, flip-flop, tic tac, sing song, ding dong, King Kong, ping pong. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O. If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. Reduplication in linguistics is when you repeat a word, sometimes with an altered consonant (lovey-dovey, fuddy-duddy, nitty-gritty), and sometimes with an altered vowel: bish-bash-bosh, ding-dang-dong. The bells in Frère Jaques will forever chime ‘ding dang dong’. Every second your watch (or the grandfather clock in the hall makes the same sound) but we say tick-tock, never tock-tick. But we always, always say clip-clop, never clop-clip. You just wouldn’t know which one.Īll four of a horse’s feet make exactly the same sound. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication.
And it’s the same reason that you’ve never listened to hop-hip music. Well, in fact, the Big Bad Wolf is just obeying another great linguistic law that every native English speaker knows, but doesn’t know that they know. Why does Bad Big Wolf sound so very, very wrong? What happened to the rules? Little Red Riding Hood may be perfectly ordered, but the Big Bad Wolf seems to be breaking all the laws of linguistics. Second, you can spend the next hour of your life trying to think of exceptions, which is useful as it keeps you from doing something foolish like working.Īctually, there are a couple of small exceptions. And there’s the shock of realising that there’s a reason there may be little green men on Mars, but there certainly aren’t green little men. We’re all quite a lot cleverer than we think we are. That’s rather peculiar, and rather exciting. First, it astonishes us that there are rules that we didn’t know that we knew. English speakers love to learn this sort of thing for two reasons.
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