| 词组 | hardly...than |
| 释义 | hardly...than The sequence hardly ... when is considered correct and standard by all commentators. • His studies had hardly begun when he was drafted into a cavalry unit of the Wehrmacht in 1943 —Current Biography, February 1967 This sequence means the same thing as no sooner ... than. The perhaps more familiar no sooner... than sticks in the minds of some writers using hardly, and hardly ... than results: • Hardly have I organized the fancy in my mind than a raucous company of sightseers comes loudly down the quay —Jan Morris, N.Y. Times Mag., 20 July 1975 Hardly... than is a syntactic blend (which see). It seems to be of rather recent origin; the OED has, at the third sense of than, a single instance from 1903 (and a scarcely ... than from 1864). Fowler 1926 was the first to make an issue of this construction. He called it "surprisingly common" and gave three instances, all probably taken from British newspapers. Jespersen 1909-49 (volume 7) has examples from two little-known authors (one of whom used the construction several times in the same book). Bryant 1962 has a 1958 example but cites a study which found the construction rare. Our file of citations shows only the one example given above. It may be that the construction is more prevalent in British English (Jan Morris is British) than in American, or it may simply be infrequent. Most of the commentators in our collection who mention the construction consider it an error; several of them point out that both barely and scarcely can occur with than in the same syntactic blend. Our evidence suggests that neither the approved hardly ... when or the disapproved hardly ... than is a commonly met construction. Use of the syntactic blend is only a minor error. See also scarcely...than. |
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