| 词组 | purport |
| 释义 | purport Fowler 1926 started this hare. He discovered "an ugly recent development" in the use of purport: it was being used in the passive and also with a personal subject. His disapproval has been repeated in Evans 1957, Bernstein 1962, 1965, Copperud 1970, Freeman 1983, Bryson 1984, and Longman 1984 (and by Gowers in Fowler 1965). Fowler thinks the passive use new, because he can only find one example in the OED, dated 1897. It is actually a newer construction than Fowler thought; there are no examples of a true passive in the OED. What Fowler found was a participial adjective, used attributively; the usual pattern of a passive in English is be (or get) plus the past participle. The OED shows that in the 19th century purport was undergoing changes in its idiomatic construction: the purporting recommended by Fowler in place of purported dates only from 1879 itself; purport appears with a personal subject in one meaning in 1803 and in the meaning Fowler comments on only in 1884. Purport came into English in the 16th century as a transitive verb with a noun or pronoun direct object, and by the very end of the 17th century could take a relative clause as object. In the 18th century it began to be followed by what some grammarians (for instance Quirk et al. 1985) call a "subjectless infinitive clause"— a clause with an understood subject in which the verb is an infinitive. The earliest example in the OED (1790) reads: • This epistle purports to be written after St. Paul had been at Corinth —William Paley, Horae Paulinae, or the Truth of the Scripture History of St. Paul Evinced Here are modern examples of the same construction: • The regime adheres to a false philosophy which purports to offer freedom, security, and greater opportunity to mankind —Harry S. Truman, inaugural address, 20 Jan. 1949 • This book purports to be a history of American imperialism —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Saturday Rev., 5 Feb. 1972 This construction, with the infinitive complement, has now almost monopolized the verb; although the older transitive uses with noun or pronoun or clause still turn up, they are fairly rare. Now a transitive verb can be made passive; for every "Man bites dog" there can be a "Dog is bitten by man." Purport, however, gives us no evidence of real passive use. And the predominant modern construction, with the infinitive complement, cannot be made passive. In "this book purports to be," purport is more like a copula, or linking verb, than a transitive. But what about examples like these? • The second act brings the fairies with their military quartet to the castle, where each of the latter is set to woo the Beauty in what is whimsically purported to be his native fashion —George Jean Nathan, Theatre Arts, March 1953 • ... Cantelli introduced to this country a symphony, in C major, that was unearthed in Cremona after the war and is purported to have been written by Mozart at the age of fourteen —Douglas Watt, New Yorker, 21 Mar. 1953 • ... a scene of what is purported to have been passionate revenge —Ray B. West, Jr., Sewanee Rev., 1949 These examples, like a couple of examples near the end of Fowler's exegesis, look like passives: they consist of a form of be followed by a past participle. But like the active purport with the infinitive complement, this construction too lacks its reciprocal: it has no active counterpart in which the subject of the passive verb becomes the direct object of the active verb. Thus they are not true passives. Is purported means and functions the same as purports. Most likely they are what Quirk calls a pseudo-passive, in which the be is not an auxiliary verb but is a copula. And we have two more constructions to look at, as represented by these examples: • ... when I smoked a cigarette purported to contain hashish and fainted dead away after two puffs —New Yorker, 12 Feb. 1949 • ... an undated instruction of the same period purported to have been sent to the Soviet Military Attaché —O. Edmund Clubb, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 1951 • ... a theory, purporting to come from a critic of high repute, that is worth mentioning —F. R. Leavis, Revaluation, 1947 • ... found to be carrying forged documents purporting to prove that Dr. Merida's moustache was not his own —Punch, 12 Sept. 1945 In these, the past and present participles are used much like postpositive adjectives with an infinitive complement, somewhat like pleased in "I'm pleased to meet you." Fowler lumped similar past participles in with his disapproved passives; the present participle in the same construction received his blessing. That is a heavy dose of grammar, but it shows us that the older (and not quite dead) transitive purport has largely been supplanted by an active construction in which the verb is most like a copula, a construction that looks passive but is not, and a pair of constructions in which participles are used much like adjectives. So the grammatical objections of Fowler and his repeaters to the passive are actually miscast: they criticize a usage that does not exist. There is one further observation to be made about purports/is purported. If we say "This book purports to be," we imply that what is asserted is overt—somehow, perhaps in a subtitle or in the preface, the book declares itself openly. In "This book is purported to be," however, may reside a suggestion that someone other than the book's author has discovered this undeclared purpose. The two constructions are likely not to be synonymous; perhaps here was a distinction aborning that Fowler, defender of distinctions, overlooked. Fowler's other objection is to the use of a personal subject with purport. For Fowler's generation the usage was still fairly new (first attested in 1884); the OED called it rare. By Fowler's time it apparently was not so rare any more, and it is not at all rare today: • ... the man who purports to offer a general discussion of political or military events —Malcolm Cowley, New Republic, 20 Mar. 1944 • Most of the sequences in which Mr. Webb purports to be a Lothario of the silent screen are pretty funny —John McCarten, New Yorker, 2 Aug. 1952 • ... Vice President Nixon who with a smile, albeit somewhat wry, purports to welcome the Maine results —Griffing Bancroft, New Republic, 4 Oct. 1954 • ... they purported to be too far from the sources of power ... to be sure of the exact causes —Richard H. Rovere, New Yorker, 6 Aug. 1955 • ... interviewed someone who purported to be a member of their studio audience —Whitney Balliert, New Yorker, 24 Sept. 1973 • None purports to have found a link between the quantum world and that of gravitation —Timothy Ferris, N.Y. Times Mag., 26 Sept. 1982 Summary: Purport is most commonly used in these constructions: (1) active verb {purport, purports, or past tense purported) + infinitive complement; (2) be + purported + infinitive complement; (3) noun + purporting + infinitive complement; (4) noun + purported + infinitive complement. In addition the transitive use— purport + noun or pronoun or relative clause—is occasionally found. Of these the active verb is by far the most common and most commonly appears with an inanimate subject. All of these constructions, including the relatively rare transitive, are established in standard English. These constructions, which Fowler distrusted, have stood the test of time—they are more common now than they were before 1926. The objection to is purported on the basis of grammar and a "passive meaning" (Fowler, Evans) we have found to be baseless because the construction is not grammatically passive. We have also noted that the active verb and the is purported construction seem to carry different connotations: the active verb connoting an overt claim, and is purported tending to suggest that somebody unnamed and perhaps unknown thinks so. Thus, • ... publication of what is purported to be a semi-autobiographical novel —N. Y. Times, 14 Aug. 1976 suggests that the semi-autobiographical quality is alleged by somebody other than the author or publisher and not advertised on the front cover. |
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