| 词组 | convince, persuade |
| 释义 | convince, persuade The use of convince in a construction in which it is followed by to and an infinitive phrase has been controversial since about 1958. Edwin Newman is often mentioned in discussions of this issue, but he came late ( 1974) upon the scene; Bernstein, Copperud, Follett, and Shaw all had preceded him. Most recent comment centers on criticism of the construction with to and the infinitive, but accepts as legitimate complement phrases beginning with of and clauses usually beginning with that. Some commentators try to distinguish convince and persuade on the basis of various subtle differences in meaning that they descry; these commentators are a link to the past, as we shall see. A few— Bremner 1980, Barnard 1979—see no point in the controversy. Barnard 1979 says that a half century ago, when he was a freshman in college, he was taught that convince meant "mental acceptance," and persuade mental acceptance followed by action. Barnard's summary connects that era with ours, because the ascribed meanings are currently put to use to make a point about syntax whereas earlier they were used simply to distinguish the two words without explicit reference to syntax. The typical constructions—convince with that or of and persuade with to and the infinitive—were then used only in illustrating what was supposed to be a distinction in meaning. Both Vizetelly 1906 and Whipple 1924, for instance, employ the constructions as illustrations but make no explicit mention of them. The current use of convince with to and an infinitive can be seen as the final development in a long historical process in which these two verbs have moved into each other's sphere of influence. Richard Grant White 1870 is the earliest commentator we have found on this subject. His complaint is with persuaded. He finds persuaded used where convinced should have been used, and laments that the use is too well entrenched—he cites the King James Bible twice and Shakespeare once—to be eradicated. A "tender and delicate sense" has been lost. It is clear from White's examples that the use of persuaded he does not like involves its use where, to use Barnard's paraphrase, only mental acceptance is involved; no action is implied. This use of persuade is still current: • "There's no such thing as ghosts. People just make them up and think they see them." I still wasn't persuaded. I had been there and seen the ghost's dreadful effect on my grandmother —Russell Baker, Growing Up, 1982 It is probable that the handbooks of the early 20th century were attempting to tidy up usage in the way that White would have liked to see; they must have been concerned with fencing persuade off from convince, because we have no evidence of convince being used to suggest mental acceptance followed by action until the middle of the 20th century. In 1969 P. B. Gove, Merriam's editor in chief, answered a letter from a linguist about the construction in which convince is followed by the infinitive. He said that it was not in his idiolect and went on to explain why the construction was not illustrated in Webster's Third: the definer had only three examples of it as opposed to 61 of a clause following the verb. The definer no doubt thought it too infrequent a construction to be worth quoting. The definer has proved a poor prognosticator, however. Of the citations gathered between the editing of the Third and 1969, nearly 60 percent showed the infinitive construction. Flesch 1964 said that convince to was "a new idiom springing up under our noses," and he was right. Our earliest evidence for the new idiom comes from 1952: • A new political party, the Constitutional Party, is formed to try to convince the Electoral College to vote for Gen. MacArthur and Sen. Byrd —Current History, November 1952 It had undoubtedly already existed in speech for some time, and it gradually increased in use in print: • ... a method by which Congress in 1913 convinced Woodrow Wilson to modify his stand on currency reform —New Republic, 2 Aug. 1954 • He convinced the Russians to let him exhibit anyway — N.Y. Times, 13 Sept. 1958 • Widows and girls may be hired for the purpose of delivering love messages, patching quarrels, or convincing a girl to become someone's novia —Oscar Lewis, Tepoztlân: Village in Mexico, 1960 • This convinced me to fight —Darryl F. Zanuck, quoted in Newsweek, 6 Aug. 1962 • ... something I could never convince him to read — John Lahr, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 3 Dec. 1967 • ... asking me to convince McCarthy to do it — David Halberstam, Harper's, December 1968 • ... convinced the group to seek their pleasures elsewhere —Massachusetts Wildlife, September-October 1969 • ... to convince his compatriots to leave the country —Theodore Draper, N.Y. Rev. of Books, 12 Mar. 1970 The construction is fully established now: • She said to hell with it, she would skip Italy.... You convinced her to go —Jay Mclnerney, Bright Lights, Big City, 1984 • ... how his publisher had once tried to convince him to change a word in one of his manuscripts —Leslie Aldridge Westoff, N. Y. Times Mag., 10 May 1987 When Theodore Bernstein first noticed the construction in 1958, one of the corrections he suggested was the substitution of a that-dause for the infinitive phrase: "He convinced the Russians that they should let him...." Such a use of the clause complement when action is involved is apparently rare, however. We do have a few examples: • ... was convinced by his teachers that he should take a senior high school biology course —C. Robert Haywood, NEA Jour., January 1965 • When is a spoofy movie not quite convinced it should act like one? —Liz Smith, Cosmopolitan, December 1976 A review of the evidence in our files shows that almost always when convince is followed by a clause, mental acceptance only is connoted: • ... I doubt not your rising from the perusal convinced that our nation ... has enjoyed a continuous blessing —Quiller-Couch 1916 • ... which is to convince itself that there are too many lines in a sonnet —James Thurber, letter, 23 June 1952 • ... after he convinced himself that she was all right —"Centaur in Brass," in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 1950 • He had tried for weeks to forget her, he said, convinced that she was too young for him —Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar, 1955 • The agency lawyers were convinced the decision was a fluke —Eileen Hughes, Ladies' Home Jour., September 1971 And do not believe that persuade has disappeared from the use involving action: • ... Freud was persuaded to make an expedition to the great natural wonder of Niagara Falls —E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime, 1975 • Could language somehow be persuaded to come closer to experience? —Howard Nemerov, Prose, Fall 1971 Follett 1966 observes of the verb contact that most of those remaining who object to it probably remember it as a neologism. This seems to be the case with convince to as well. We suspect that people born in the 1930s or 1940s or later do not even notice the construction, while those born earlier do. And in another generation people may wonder what all the fuss was about. To sum up: long ago persuade became established in a use connoting mental acceptance without following action—a sense Richard Grant White thought should be reserved for convince. Persuade still has this use, often with the same of and that constructions regularly found with convince. Sometime around the middle of this century, convince began to be used to connote mental acceptance followed by action, usually in a construction in which an infinitive phrase follows the verb. This construction is now a fully established idiom. The earlier usage writers who tried to fence off persuade from convince and the later ones who tried to fence off convince from persuade have failed alike. And in another generation perhaps no one will care. |
| 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。