| 词组 | scarcely...than |
| 释义 | scarcely...than The sequence scarcely ... when is considered impeccable by all commentators: • Scarcely had Ida May recovered ... when she heard a loud, bumptious knocking at her door —Katherine Anne Porter, Ladies' Home Jour., August 1971 • David had scarcely rung the bell when the door flew open —Agnes Sligh Turnbull, The Gown of Glory, 1951 This sequence means about the same as no sooner ... than. The combining of no sooner... than with scarcely ... when produces the syntactic blend scarcely... than, which has been denounced as an error since at least the 1880s (see syntactic blend). Hodgson 1889 has several examples, including these: • Scarcely had she gone, than Clodius and several of his gay companions broke in upon him —Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, 1834 • But, as it happened, scarcely had Phoebe's eyes rested again on the judge's countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, 1851 If the examples in Hodgson are a reliable guide, scarcely... than was quite common in the 19th century. (It had been noticed as early as Priestley 1798, in which an example from Smollett is given.) The 20th century appears to be another story. Fowler 1926 exhibits one example, and Bryant 1962 has another, taken from a 1940 Reader's Digest. Our files contain nothing further. It may be that a century of disapproval (the subject can be found in Longman 1988 and Trimmer & McCrim-mon 1988) has had a discouraging effect, or it may be that the construction has simply fallen into disuse quite on its own. Whatever the reason, on the basis of our evidence it is hard to say that the sequence has ever really established itself but equally hard to say that it poses a significant problem for writers now. See hardly...than for a similar syntactic blend. |
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