| 词组 | if |
| 释义 | if 1.If whether. Evans 1957 says that the notion that if may not introduce a noun clause, as whether may, is a recent one. Actually, it is not quite as recent as Evans thought. Leonard 1929 traces the notion back to an obscure 18th-century dictionary editor, J. Johnson. This Johnson—not to be confused with Samuel Johnson— prefixed a 20-page grammar to his New Royal and Universal English Dictionary of 1762 and in it he attacked a number of Scotticisms that he had extracted from the writings of David Hume. Among these he listed question if for question whether; apparently Hume had used if to introduce a noun clause as object of the verb question. The if that J. Johnson disparaged as a Scotticism is almost always used to introduce a noun clause that is the object of a verb such as doubt, see, ask, wonder, decide, and know. If Johnson had read his Bible more attentively, he would have learned that it was not a Scotticism: • Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground —Genesis 8:8 (AV), 1611 And if he had looked in the greater Johnson's dictionary, he would have found the sense listed, with quotations from Dryden and Prior. We know of no other comments on if "whether" after J. Johnson until the issue turns up a century later in Alford 1866. Alford clearly had the question raised by a correspondent who thought that if should not be so used. Alford says, "I cannot see that there is anything to complain of in it" and duly notes its use in the Book of Genesis and in Dryden and Prior. But Ayres 1881 condemns it, and so do Vizetelly 1906, Krapp 1927, Jensen 1935, Partridge 1942, and a great many other commentators of the 1920s and 1930s. More recent American commentators, however, tend to take Alford's attitude. Evans, Copperud 1964, 1970, 1980, Bernstein 1965, 1971, Perrin & Ebbitt 1972, Watt 1967, Irmscher 1976, Bryant 1962, and others find the usage standard. A number of these as well as Janis 1984 and Shaw 1987 also add that whether is the word more often used in formal contexts. Our evidence supports this observation fairly well. Holdouts for Ayres's position include Harper 1975, 1985 and Edwin Newman as one of their panelists, as well as a few British sources— Sellers 1975, Phythian 1979, and Chambers 1985. The OED and Jespersen 1909-49 (vol. 3) trace the construction back to Old English. Jespersen finds it in Shakespeare: • How shall I know if I do choose the right? —The Merchant of Venice, 1597 As Evans points out, this use of if has never actually been restricted; the whole question of its propriety is factitious. Yet the notion that whether and not if should be used to introduce such a clause is still at large; Mary Vaiana Taylor in College English, April 1974, found 20 percent of the teaching assistants she polled marking if wrong in such stentences. It may be the persistence of this notion that makes whether predominate in formal contexts. Here are some other examples of this use of if: • ... I asked her if she was engaged to Sam Fiske — Emily Dickinson, letter, 19 Mar. 1854 • I don't know if that Etiquette thing is spelled right, or not —Will Rogers, The Illiterate Digest, 1924 • Dr. Crowther fingered his tie to feel if it were straight —Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, 1928 • We've been having days I doubt if you could beat in Colorado —Robert Frost, letter, 1 Nov. 1927 • I cannot cross the gap yet. I do not know if I ever shall —Agnes Newton Keith, Atlantic, February 1946 • ... I doubt if one writer ever has a satisfactory conversation with another writer —William Faulkner, 16 May 1957, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 • Someone inquired if that wasn't a pretty expensive way to educate a single student —Harry S. Ashmore, Center Mag., May 1968 • And keep an eye on the temperature gauge to see if the engine runs too hot —Consumer Reports, April 1980 • If there's a swindler in the bookkeeping department at the bank, I doubt if he's going to pick my account to steal from —And More by Andy Rooney, 1982 We can use the example by Andy Rooney to illustrate a point made by Otto Jespersen: the "whether" sense of if is not used at the beginning of a sentence. Initial if (the first word in the example) is understood as the ordinary conditional use. The "whether" sense is rarely found except after a verb, although it is sometimes used after adjectives: • It is extremely doubtful if it could be used with any success —Raymond W. Bliss, Atlantic, November 1952 We should also point out that other fine points are brought into the argument by a few commentators to buttress the original objection. The most common of these is the insistence on whether when an alternative is specified, as in the example above from Will Rogers. Copperud dismisses this view as "a superstition." It appears to have no more basis in fact than J. Johnson's finding the construction to be a Scotticism. 2. Copperud 1970, 1980 cites Flesch 1964 and Fowler 1965 as being opposed to if in the sense of "though"; Harper 1985 and Heritage 1982 also object. These seem to be examples of the construction questioned: • ... sets out to make a fairly routine, if exhaustive, search of the caves —John S. Bowman, Saturday Rev., 23 Oct. 1971 • ... a man possessed of such satanic, if controlled, fury on a football field —George Plimpton, Harper's, May 1971 • ... the excellence of its traditional, if routine, services —Nicholas Pileggi, New York, 24 July 1972 • ... but they are unwilling, if not unable, to make close personal contacts —Stephanie Dudek, Psychology Today, May 1971 And they seem unlikely to cause confusion. We conclude that the construction is standard—and it is quite common. 3. From Fowler 1907 to Bryson 1984, there are a few commentators who express concern over the use or non-use of the subjunctive after if The Fowler brothers were expecting the imminent demise of the subjunctive—in a generation, they thought—and they were mainly concerned with the avoidance of sentences in which the subjunctive might be used. However, the subjunctive has not died, and Bernstein 1971 and Bryson 1984 try to distinguish between uses of if where the subjunctive is called for and uses where it is to be avoided. Both allow the subjunctive after if when the clause contains a condition that is hypothetical or contrary to fact, but neither gives a satisfactory rule of thumb for identifying such clauses. The problem is that the dividing line between what is or could well be true and what is hypothetical or not true is not consistently clear—in fact it can often be an entirely subjective judgment made by the writer. The indicative is called for in the first example below; the subjunctive is proper in the second; the third and fourth seem to be in that gray area of subjective judgment. • But if the CIA was not responsible ..., who was? — Norman Cousins, Saturday Rev., 28 Apr. 1979 • If there were a single word ..., it might be "modest" —Carolyn Balducci, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 3 June 1973 • If Japan was threatened, the situation could well be different —Keyes Beech, Saturday Rev., 23 Aug. 1975 • ... the inevitable graduate student preparing for another long night in the lab might hear ... if he weren't too absorbed to notice —Johns Hopkins Mag., Fall 1971 See subjunctive. |
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