| 词组 | lay, lie |
| 释义 | lay, lie These verbs are one of the most popular subjects in the canons of usage. They first attracted attention in the second half of the 18th century, when educated usage seems to have been rather indifferent to the distinctions between them. Lounsbury 1908 says that when Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey was published in 1768, a critic attacked the line "But Maria laid in my bosom," maintaining that readers might "conclude that Maria was the name of a favorite pullet." (It is highly improbable that anyone actually reading Sterne would be liable to such a misapprehension.) The earliest commentator in our collection to mention lay and lie is Baker 1770. Early in his book he sets down the principle parts of the two verbs and gives examples of how they should be used. Later on he observes that lie is very seldom used for lay (this is still a true observation) but that he has found lain (the past participle of lie) used for laid. He cites a writer named Bluet who wrote this: "after they have lain aside all Pretences to it." Lain is a very literary-sounding substitution to 20th-century ears. However, Emily Dickinson had made the same substitution: • Thank you for "the Sonnet"—I have lain it at her loved feet —letter, Spring 1886 The opposite change is much more common. Campbell 1776 criticized this passage: • ... my studies having laid very much in churchyards — The Spectator, 24 Oct. 1712 Once the grammarians had picked up lay and lie as a subject, it was soon entrenched both in the schools and in the handbooks and usage books. Our collection includes about sixty commentators upon the subject. To them you could add the standard dictionaries, all of which mark the intransitive lay for lie as nonstandard in one way or another (Flesch 1983 cocks a snook at the dictionaries for being so prissy). Almost all of these commentators tell you what the principal parts of each verb are and note that even though many people have confused them, you should not; the details are in your dictionary. Let's look first at the history of the usage. The OED shows that lay has been used intransitively in the sense of "lie" since around the year 1300. From then until the latter part of the 18th century, the usage was unmarked: Sir Francis Bacon, for instance, used it in the final and most polished edition of his essays in 1625. Lounsbury notes its occurrence in such 17th- and 18th-century writers as Pepys, Fielding, Horace Walpole, and Mrs. Montagu. But from the 19th century on, there are fewer and fewer literary examples. Byron has a rather famous, or infamous, "there let him lay" in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1818; it is cited in the OED and many other places, but it does not really count. Byron was driven to it: he needed a rhyme for spray and bay. Jane Austen used it in an interesting way in Mansfield Park, 1814. She has her uncultured Mr. Price ask, "Whereabouts does the Thrush lay at Spithead? Near the Canopus?" According to McKnight 1928, Miss Austen does this to show the social class of Price, but it is just as likely that she used it to show Mr. Price's familiarity with nautical lingo. The OED notes that lay "lie" was established in nautical parlance in various expressions; Mr. Price in the novel had a son in the navy, and Jane Austen had two brothers in the navy. Whatever subtlety she intended, you may not even see the usage unless you read a carefully edited edition. In an inexpensive reprint we have seen, Miss Austen's lay has been silently corrected to lie by some unthinking editor. If the grammarians and the schoolmasters and the schoolmarms and the usage writers have succeeded in largely establishing the transitive-intransitive distinction between lay and lie in standard discursive prose, they have not done so well in speech. The persistence of lay "lie" in speech in spite of the marshalled opposition of the schoolteachers is reinforced by several factors. First, there is the failure of what Bolinger 1980 calls contrast. The two verbs overlap in some ways: they share an identical form, lay; in the past tense the common use with down sounds about the same whether spelled lay down or laid down. Evans 1957 and the OED note in addition that lay once had a use with a reflexive pronoun that meant the same as lie down: "Now I lay me down to sleep." • ... I laid me down flat on my belly —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719 Evans says that the pronoun dropped out but was understood, giving intransitive lay. Lamberts 1972 thinks that the irregular principal parts of lie sound a bit bookish in speech and that this feeling tends to promote the use of laid in place of lay and lain. This feeling is probably illustrated here: • I got the knife away from the kid and made him lie down again. But, from that moment, Bill's spirit was broken. He laid down on his side of the bed, but he never closed an eye —O. Henry, "The Ransom of Red Chief," 1907 Then we have some idioms in which lay functions intransitively: • ... I see that you, too, plan to lay off for Holy Week —Alexander Woollcott, letter, 21 Feb. 1941 • He begins by saying he can't get hold of enough books to find out whether we have any literature or not and then he proceeds to say we have none. I am sure he will lay for me somewhere —Robert Frost, letter, 22 Feb. 1914 And, finally, there is the simple longevity of intransitive lay, almost 700 years of continuous use. The conflict between oral use and school instruction has resulted in the distinction between lay and lie becoming a social shibboleth—a marker of class and education. Thus, writers can use it to identify characters, as Jane Austen may have done as early as 1814, or to build up a dialectal integrity. • He was troubled with a wonderful pain in his chest and amazin weakness in the spine of his back, besides the pleurisy in the side, and having the aguer a considerable part of the time, and being broke of his rest of nights, cause he was so put to't for breath when he laid down —Frances Miriam Whitcher, "Hezekiah Bedott," 1855, in The Mirth of a Nation, ed. Walter Blair & Raven I. McDavid, Jr., 1983 • Old Eagle had done already took off because he knowed where that old son of a gun would be laying —William Faulkner, Saturday Evening Post, 5 Mar. 1955 • "I mean, I don't change sheets in the morning, after I wait on the breakfast eaters ... without having no place to lay down...." —John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire, 1981 A linguistic shibboleth is only a reliable social marker when an individual either uses or avoids it on all occasions. Persons whose education or status would lead them to avoid such use in formal situations may use the stigmatized word in informal, friendly circumstances: • She thinks every story must be built according to the pattern of the Roman arch ..., but I'm letting it lay —Flannery O'Connor, letter, 25 July 1964 • ... I didn't want anybody, the workers or the contractors or anybody, to lay down on the job —Harry S. Truman, quoted in Merle Miller, Plain Speaking, 1973 And there is another curious influence on the use of transitive lay in speech: a folk distinction between lay and lie seems to be in operation that cuts across the distinction of the school books. Evans 1957 says, "There is a tendency in present-day English to prefer the verb lay in speaking of* inanimate objects, and the verb lie in speaking of living creatures." A baseball announcer on television has put it in the pithier folk form: "Lay is for things, lie is for people." We even have some printed evidence of this "lay is for things" use: • ... the book really lays flat when opened —Mabel C. Simmons, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 May 1976 • ... we block and size most every carpet we sell to be sure they lay flat —advertising brochure, 1981 • The System Unit Board, laying flat at the bottom of the box, includes a 5 Mhz 8088 microprocessor — Sergio Mello-Grand, InfoWorld, 19 Dec. 1983 Notwithstanding the belief of some that social judgments can be solidly based on language use, the lay-lie shibboleth seems to be changing its status. For instance, several commentators, such as Evans 1957, Follett 1966, and Flesch 1983, are perfectly willing to give the distinction up; Bolinger 1980 thinks it is already a lost cause not worth defending; Copperud 1970, 1980 judges the consensus of his experts to be that at least some uses of lay for lie are verging on standard. Flesch even goes so far as to recommend using lay for lie if it comes naturally to you. We have some evidence that reporters have so used it; an angry letter to the editor of Fortune in 1982 complains about it, and the Winners & Sinners of 24 March 1988 points a finger at two recent examples from the New York Times. And we have this writer, too, drawing attention to an earlier usage of his own: • "The dead hand of the present should not lay on the future," I wrote in a recent harangue —William Safire, N.Y. Times Mag, 11 Oct. 1987 Additional evidence of a change comes from the usage surveys. When Leonard made his survey in 1932, the intransitive lay examples were deemed "illiterate." When Crisp replicated the survey in 1971, the ranking of the usage had risen to "disputable" (one perhaps war-weary group of college English teachers felt it was established). If lay "lie" is on the rise socially, however, it is likely to be a slow rise, as indignant letters to the editor attest. Bolinger observes sensibly that if you have invested some effort in learning the distinction, you will not want to admit that you have wasted your time. And by far the largest part of our printed evidence follows the school-book rules. On the other hand, evidence also shows no retreat of intransitive lay in oral use. So what should you do? The best advice seems to be Bolinger's: • Many people use lay for lie, but certain others will judge you uncultured if you do. Decide for yourself what is best for you. |
| 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。