| 词组 | infer, imply |
| 释义 | infer, imply We have in our collection more than fifty writers on usage, from 1917 to 1988, who insist that a certain distinction between infer and imply be observed and preserved. Rather than explain, let us illustrate: • Given some utterance, a person may infer from it all sorts of things which neither the utterance nor the utterer implied —I. A. Richards, Confluence, March 1954 Richards' usages are exactly those approved and recommended by our more than fifty commentators. They are not, however, the only usages of these words. And there's the rub. Real life is not as simple as commentators would like it to be. A glance at any good dictionary would suggest the same to you: Webster's Ninth New Collegiate, for instance, lists four transitive senses of imply (one is obsolete) and five of infer. We will not confuse you by discussing all of these, but there are three distinct uses of infer we must deal with, and a couple of imply. We will start with imply, which is simpler and less controversial. For simplicity we lump together the two chief uses of imply, noting only that the first involves no human agent and that the second may or may not. Examples of each, in order: • Amnesty, like pardon, implied crime, and he admitted none —Robert Penn Warren, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, 1980 • And further, an utterer may imply things which his hearers cannot reasonably infer from what he says — I. A. Richards, Confluence, March 1954 There once was minor controversy about a sense of imply meaning "hint" used with a personal subject. A note in the Merriam-Webster files written in 1935 said: • Of course "imply" in the sense of "hint" is careless or vulgar English. A similar opinion had also appeared in print: • Imply carries with it a tinge of offensi veness when we say, "What do you mean to imply?" —Literary Digest, 4 Apr. 1931 We seldom find this use in edited prose except in fictional speech: • "Don't imply you inherit your flibbertigibbet ways from me " —American Girl, December 1951 But keep this imply in mind. It is used in exactly the same way as a disputed sense of infer, though not so often. Now, for infer, which is the real bone of contention. We are going to identify only three main uses of infer, and for the sake of convenience we label them historically. The first is the use of infer that everybody approves. We will call it "More 1528," because Sir Thomas More introduced it to English in that year: • Wherupon is inferred ... that the messenger wold have fled fro by force —A Dyaloge ... of the Veneration and Worshyp ofYmagys, 1528 (OED, sense 3) The second use we will call "More 1533," for Sir Thomas gave it to English in that year (in fact he had introduced the usual use of imply, too, in 1528). It means the same as imply: • The fyrste parte is not the proofe of the second, but rather contrary wyse, the seconde inferreth well y* fyrst — Answer to Frith, 1533 (OED, sense 4) A distinguishing characteristic of More 1533 is that it does not occur with a human subject. Now More 1528 and More 1533 coexisted in literary writing for 400 years or so, and no one was confused, so far as the record shows. Here are some examples of More 1528: • ... and Sir J. Minnes would needs infer the temper of the people from their joy at the doing of this — Samuel Pepys, diary, 14 Dec. 1663 • I found that he inferred from thence ... that I either had the more money, or the more judgment —Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, 1722 • ... he ... would hardly answer me the most common question without asking first: What do you intend to infer from that? —Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 1771 • ... nor can any thing be more fairly inferred from the Preface, than that Johnson ... was pleased — James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791 • She seldom saw him—never alone; he probably avoided being alone with her. What was to be inferred? —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814 • Mr. Anderson did not say this, but I infer it —Henry Adams, letter, 17 Jan. 1861 • ... I infer that Swinburne found an adequate outlet for the creative impulse in his poetry —T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 1920 More 1533, the OED shows, was used continuously up to the time the book was edited; Milton and James Mill are among those quoted. Here are some examples not in the OED: • He used Metcalf as an agent in all proceedings which did concern that foundation; which will infer him to be both a wise and an honest man —Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State, 1642 • For the principles we lay down, if narrowly looked into, do not infer that —Jonathan Edwards, "Notes on the Mind," 1716-1720 • However, as I have often heard Dr. Johnson observe as to the Universities, bad practice does not infer that the constitution is bad —James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791 • Lucy ... reseated herself with an alacrity and cheerfulness which seemed to infer that she could taste no greater delight —Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 1811 This use still occurs in the 20th century: • ... but the levels of restricted syntactic relationships infer an individual complication of language — Joshua Whatmough, in New World Writing, 1954 • ... to be a literary man infers a certain amount of— well, even formal education —William Faulkner, 25 Feb. 1957, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 More 1533 is not itself really the subject of much controversy, but it is recognized in dictionaries, and that recognition leads the commentators not to trust the dictionaries. We may call the real disputed sense "personal infer" because—in distinct contrast with More 1533—it usually has a personal subject. And contrary to all those fifty or more commentators, it does not really equal imply in the latter's full range of meanings—it means "hint, suggest," in other words, imply only in the sense considered a bit less than acceptable in the 1930s. The personal infer is relatively recent. We have found no examples earlier than this one: • I should think you did miss my letters. I know it! but ... you missed them in another way than you infer, you little minx! —Ellen Terry, letter, 3 Oct. 1896 Our earliest American example comes from a list of Kansas words submitted to Dialect Notes in 1914 by Judge J. C. Ruppenthal of Russell, Kansas. His example of the use reads this way: • He infers by his remarks that things are not going right. This sense is clearly an oral use at the beginning—we have no examples of it in print, except in usage books, until the middle of this century. But it is obscure in origin—was it a theater usage? Or possibly an Americanism Ellen Terry picked up on one of her American tours? The development of infer-imply as a usage issue is curious, too. The earliest mention of the subject is in MacCracken & Sandison 1917, an English handbook apparently originally intended for use at Vassar College. Here is what it says: • A speaker or his statement implies (suggests, expresses, though not explicitly) something which a hearer infers (draws or deduces) from the statement. Infer is constantly used where imply is intended. CORRECT: Do you mean to imply [not infer] that I am deceiving you? You will note that the example shown has a personal subject and that the authors say "infer is constantly used." Since we know of no printed evidence existing in 1917, we infer the usage to be spoken. Our next evidence is from the Lincoln Library, a sort of one-volume encyclopedia for young people published in 1924. It has a section on good usage, in which it was noted that imply and infer were frequently confused. MacCracken, who was president of Vassar, was a grammatical consultant to the Lincoln Library, and he is probably responsible for the notice there. The comment about confusion has been repeated often in the 60 years following. Infer and imply also turned up in Whipple 1924, a handbook on business-letter writing published by the Westinghouse Technical Night School Press. There is no apparent connection between Whipple and MacCracken & Sandison other than the treatment of business letters in the 1917 book. But MacCracken & Sandison is listed as one of the sources of Lurie 1927, the next book to take up the subject. Lurie seems to be the first to have noticed that dictionaries did not support the distinction. And indeed they did not. The OED defined More 1533 without comment, as did Webster 1909 and undoubtedly other dictionaries. But in 1932 a member of the philosophy department at Boston University wrote to the Merriam editorial department questioning the definition of More 1533 in Webster 1909. In his opinion the sense was no longer in current good use. After some preliminaries about logic, he got to the point: • ... no cultured person has in my hearing ever confused the two words. It is, however, the constant practice of the uneducated and the half-educated, to use infer for imply. The logician is, of course, talking not about More 1533 but personal infer. The editors gave serious consideration to the complaint—and by that time they also had collected our first four commentators and a couple of clippings from the Literary Digest that rather preferred infer in this use to imply, because imply seemed a bit offensive (see the quotation in the discussion of imply above). One editor suggested adding a note to the definition of More 1533, but he was overruled by another who observed—as we have here—that the sense in question was not quite the same as More 1533. Instead they added a new definition, "5. Loosely and erroneously, to imply," which appeared in Webster's Second ( 1934). Thus the dispute was established, although most of the usage-book comment came after World War II. What can we conclude from all this? The first obvious point is that all the commentators from the very beginning missed the fact that it was an oral use they were objecting to—no one distinguished book use from spoken use. And the dictionaries did not support the distinction the commentators were trying to make because the dictionaries recorded only book use. The second point is that the words are not and never have been confused. We have seen that the same writer could use both More 1528 and More 1533 without mental distress. And personal infer has never been muddled with anything else, although it may have replaced the similar use of imply that was mildly disparaged in the 1930s. Third, logic is irrelevant to the dispute. Infer and imply are not interchanged by logicians. The personal infer is never used in logic. The objection is social—the personal infer has been associated with uncultured persons. Fourth, no distinctions are being lost. The distinctions between the main uses of infer—More 1528, More 1533, personal infer—and imply have remained the same all along. They are not the same distinction the commentators are talking about, but the commentators' distinction— roughly, that imply always means transmission and infer reception—is wishful and has not existed in usage since 1533. Fifth, it seems likely that the repeated injunction not to use infer for imply has diminished the literary use of More 1533, and if anything is in real danger of being lost, it is that long-standard use. We have no evidence of personal infer in print before the 1950s—setting aside Ellen Terry's letter quoted above, which was published in 1932. Here is a sampling of what we have collected: • I have heard Italians complain of the American accent, inferring that American culture is unworthy of notice —W. Cabell Greet, Word Study, October 1952 • The actor ... may, by using a certain inflection or adopting a certain attitude, give a quite contrary impression, infer a meaning or eliminate one —Cyril Cusack, Irish Digest, January 1953 • ... "fit to be President," the New York Post was digging up evidence to infer that he is not —New Republic, 9 Mar. 1953 • Jake liked to think of himself as a high-rolling bronc-buster, and if somebody inferred that he couldn't ride a particular horse, that was the horse Jake was bound to try —Fred Gipson, Cowhand: The Story of a Working Cowboy, 1953 • May I remark here that although I seem to infer that private communication is an unholy mess of grammatical barbarism, ... such is not my intent —V. Louise Higgins, "Approaching Usage in the Classroom," English Jour., March 1960 One probable effect of the controversy should be noted here. Although our collection of usage books is by no means exhaustive, the ones we have show that the imply-infer issue did not become intensely treated until the very end of the 1950s. The writers just quoted— excepting Gipson, who was consciously using a colloquial expression (probably a direct descendant of our 1914 Kansas use)—probably did not even know there was a usage question here. Later, it became virtually impossible not to know, and our evidence shows a marked decline of occurrence of personal infer in edited prose. It pops up here and there, as in letters to the editor, but it is scarce in edited material. As far as we know, spoken use has not been affected. When you are weighing the importance of the controversy in your mind, consider this example: • Leavis infers that Eliot's whole achievement is compromised by the inadequacies which his criticism reveals —Times Literary Supp., 30 Nov. 1967 If a writer says that a third person infers something, it is not possible without the preceding context (missing from our clipping) to know for certain whether the third person is hinting or suggesting or is deducing or concluding. But even though you cannot be sure about the meaning of infer in the sentence, do you have any trouble understanding what is being said about Eliot? If you have had the fortitude to stick with us this far, you know that the commentators' intense concern over preserving the all-important distinction between infer and imply goes back to a spoken use prevalent among certain less cultured undergraduates at Vassar before 1917. It has been the chiefly oral use of infer with a personal subject that has been under attack all along, and that seems not to pose much of a problem for writers. The dwindling use of the More 1533 sense of infer, however, may well suggest that writers are increasingly following the commentators' preferred distinction between infer and imply. That distinction is easy enough to observe, certainly. |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。