| 词组 | finished |
| 释义 | finished In 1985 an American woman living in Germany wrote to us about two sentences containing finished that had been marked wrong by a German instructor on an English examination taken by her son (who had attended elementary school in the United States). The sentences were "I'm not finished yet" and "you aren't finished yet." The instructor was looking for haven't in each case. The woman had written to a British publisher on the same question and had been told that am not and are not with finished were not standard British usage, although they were "popular" in the U.S. and might occur in "informal" British speech. The question, then, was one of British English as taught from a textbook and British and American usage as it actually is. That the school text is based on an artificial standard is fairly obvious from Strang 1970, who says that the construction be finished with arose in the 19th century, and from Otto Jespersen 1909-49 (volume 4) who found the construction in English literature as far back as Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield ( 1766). Jespersen also found examples from Jane Austen, Hall Caine, Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Hugh Walpole, Frank Swinnerton, and W. Somerset Maugham. To this list we can add James Joyce: • Are you not finished with him yet ... ? —Ulysses, 1922 Since a good many of the examples appear to have been spoken by characters in these books, it seems reasonable to suppose that the construction is chiefly found in ordinary speech. We cannot be sure whether the construction is better established in American speech than in British speech since most of our evidence is from discursive prose. It seems apparent that finished began to become common in this construction during the 19th century, at the same time that the participial adjective (which had also arisen earlier) was becoming established. It also seems clear that the dispute over the propriety of the construction centers upon its use with a personal subject. With an inanimate subject, the construction can be understood as passive (rather than intransitive). We have several examples of this usage, which has not been a matter of dispute: • ... the strife was finished; the vision was closed — Thomas DeQuincey, "The Vision of Sudden Death," 1849 • At three o'clock his business was finished —Sherwood Anderson, Poor White, 1920 • If the finished sketch was really finished —Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 1933 • ... the character I don't forget, and when the book is finished, that character is not done —William Faulkner, 13 Apr. 1957, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 • ... a complete clean-up by the contractor's crew when work is finished —Sylvia Porter, Ladies' Home Jour., August 1971 The somewhat later use of finished to mean "done for" seems not to have been disputed either, even though it takes a personal subject. • ... it may mean I am finished—an old fogey no longer able to keep the pace —Oliver Wendell Holmes d. 1935, letter, 1 Aug. 1925 See also done 1; through. |
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