| 词组 | double subjects |
| 释义 | double subjects In 1672 John Dryden wrote an essay called "Defence of the Epilogue," in which he asserts that the English used by writers of his day is more proper, more correct, than the English used by writers in the age of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson. To illustrate his point, Dryden introduces several passages from Jonson's play Catiline, in which he finds various improprieties of diction. One of the lines criticized reads "Such Men they do not succour more the cause...." Dryden observes: "They redundant." Ben Jonson's they after men is what grammarians refer to as a double subject. The appositive pronoun after the subject of the sentence is an old technique for emphasizing the subject. It goes back to Old English and Middle English; it still survives to a certain extent in poetry (mostly older poetry, now) and in some dialects (it is sometimes mentioned, for example, as a characteristic of Black English), and, to judge from its stigmatized appearance in schoolbooks, it occurs in the speech of children and other unschooled persons. Hall 1917 has an imposing list of poets who have used the double subject. One familiar example will do here: • The eye—it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still—William Wordsworth, "Expostulation and Reply," 1798 The old-fashioned mode of expression is obviously helpful in getting lines of poetry to scan. The double subject is rare in modern prose. Older writers—including Dryden himself—occasionally fall into the old pattern, but it is seldom used today. It can, however, still be heard in casual speech: • But a first-rate scoundrel, like a first-rate artist, he's an individualist —William Faulkner, 7 Mar. 1957, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 • Anyone who sees any illegal dumping on state land, they should get the plate number and we can take it from there —Carroll Holmes, quoted in Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), 6 Dec. 1987 It is noticeable that in both of these examples, the repeated subject comes after an intervening phrase or clause; this contrasts somewhat with the pattern of Black English, in which the repeated subject may follow the subject directly, as well as follow an intervening phrase. From the punctuation of examples in such books as Geneva Smitherman's Talkin and Testify in (1977), it would appear that a pause is normal before the repeated subject. Pauses are similarly indicated in the examples we have of Faulkner's double subjects, too. The double subject seems not to have been treated very exhaustively in the sources available to us—we have depended a good deal on Hall 1917 for historical information. However, the rarity of the construction in prose—and we suppose it is pretty rare in modern poetry, too—would seem to relegate the subject to well-earned obscurity. |
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