grammar - "Responsible" as predicate adjective

"They are the only responsible for the situation"

"They are the only ones responsible for the situation"

"They are the only one responsible for the situation"

Which of these options is/are grammatically correct? There are many hits for all of them in Google.

I would've thought the third option is incorrect.

Answer

"They are the only responsible for the situation"

This sentence is ungrammatical because the is a definite article which can only modify nouns, and there is only an adjective present. You could, however, restructure it to be Only they are responsible for the situation.

"They are the only ones responsible for the situation"

Here they refers to a group of people, and ones agrees with this plurality.

"They are the only one responsible for the situation"

Though there has been some debate about it in the past, many people accept they as a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, otherwise referred to as the singular they. Accordingly, one agrees with this.

grammar - sentence formation using such and so

I have two questions:

1. I have the following sentence:

   
   
   

   
   

   "It was so extensive an area that"

   
   

   
   
   

   why do we prefer to write the above sentence instead of

   
   
   

   
   
   

   "The area was so extensive that"

   
   




2. Can we use "such" instead of "so" like:

   
   
   

   
   

   "It was such an extensive area that"

   
   

grammatical number - Plural of an initialism that ends with the letter S

I was answering something on Super User and wrote OSes as part of my normal flow without really thinking about it. On a re-read I decided that it didn't look right, so I changed it to OSs, which still felt incorrect. I also considered OS's, but that didn't feel right either, so I thought I'd ask on here.

In this specific case, what is the written plural form for OS?
The intention is to mean multiple Operating Systems.

And, is there a general rule for the plural form of an initialism that ends with the letter S?

Answer

A search on Google for OSes returns results from several established websites such as infoworld.com, osnews.com and linux.com, which suggests OSes is the accepted form.

etymology - When did the terms prescriptivism/prescriptivist enter the English language?

Though the issue of linguistic prescription is a few centuries old, the terms:

prescriptivism

• (language) the belief that there are correct and wrong ways to use language and that books about language should give rules to follow, rather than describing how language is really used.

and prescriptivist

• believing that there are correct and wrong ways to use language and that books about language should give rules to follow, rather than describing how language is really used.

( Cambridge Dictionary)

appear to be relatively recent, from the '50s according to Google Books.

There are a number of sources that deal with this issue, but I was not able to find information about:

• when the two terms were first used and by whom they were introduced.

Answer

OED's citations of the two words are somewhat confusing. Prescriptivist is cited in 1952:

He is likely not to see any reason why absolute uniformity, the desideratum of the prescriptivist, should be any particular concern of the student of language even if it were possible of attainment.

• Thomas Pyles · Words and ways of American English · 1952.

OED says, "compare with later prescriptivism, but provides an earlier attestation for linguistic prescriptivism from 1948.

Prescriptivism is the form of authoritarianism characteristic of the English, not Scottish, grammarians of the latter half of the 18th century.

• I. Poldauf · On Hist. Probl. English Grammar · 1948.

Regardless, the word prescriptive was used slightly earlier to refer to linguistics, so either way, the relevant etymons were forming in the context of grammatical prescriptivism in the 1930's.

Of greater value, however, than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descriptive grammar.

• Jens Otto Harry Jespersen · Essentials of English Grammar · 1933.

These dates seem to correspond as early precursors to the growth in use of the terms shown on Google Ngram.

etymology - Why did the old pronouns and their respective endings vanish from daily usage?

If I’m not wrong, the verb conjugation in the past used to be:

I have           we have  
thou hast        ye have  
he/she/it hath   they have

This conjugation is closer to its equivalent in the German language:

ich habe         wir haben  
du hast          ihr habt  

er/sie/es hat    sie/Sie haben

The thing is: Every verb in every tense in German ends with -st in the second person singular, and as far as I know, in Elizabethan English the verbs used to end in this way as well in the second person singular (thou shouldst, canst, makest, eatest, composest, etc.).

Why exactly did the old thou disappear, as well as related forms thy, thee, thyself, and thine, as well as the corresponding verb ending -st? Same for -eth in third person singular (it hath, maketh, etc.), why did it just disappear from daily usage?

I’m a Brazilian and my mother-tongue is Portuguese, so I’m not well aware of the background of this, and I am very curious. These forms can be found in the old King James Bible and in the poetry of William Shakespeare, as well as in many other sources, but I would like to know exactly why they’re gone, and for what reasons.

Answer

I'm sorry, but in questions of language, and especially of language change, "why" questions don't usually have answers, other than "because that's what happened".

The Early Modern English forms you give had already changed - in Old English, the pattern was very like modern German, but the distinct plural forms had mostly dropped out of use before Shakespeare's time (you still find ye goeth in the King James Bible).

The remaining distinctions are -est and -eth vs -s. The first of these disappeared when thou disappeared. The second was a dialect difference: IIRC -s was Northern, and -eth was Southern, though it may have been more complicated than that.

Edited to remove a wrong claim.

modal verbs - Is there another way to say "needn't have done"?

I'm learning modal verbs now and get in trouble with "need" one.

In my textbook it is said that:

don't need to == needn't -- present simple
didn't need to -- past simple
needn't have done -- present perfect

In some inexplicable reason I think that needn't have done sounds weird (may be because I haven't ever heard of such construction).

So my question is: Is there a sentence that equal to needn't have done but without the needn't part (like the past simple one)? Or everything is just fine with it and I shouldn't keep in mind?

Answer

Actually, all of the examples are a little weird. Need is very rarely used as a modal any more, and it's likely that you'll be able to go your entire life without ever encountering it in speech. It is sufficient that you be able to recognize and understand sentences like the above, but don't expect to use them much. Just treat need like any other verb:

Present: don't need to

Present perfect: haven't needed to

Simple past: didn't need to

Past perfect: hadn't needed to

That said, the three examples are grammatically correct, strictly speaking. The phrase needn't have done is a fine, though archaic, way of saying didn't need to have done...

subordinate clauses - The referent of relative pronouns [grammar]

"The boss expressed his displeasure about the absence of the staff at the meeting yesterday , which had caused the delay of projects approval."

Is the sentence grammatically correct ? if so , the "which" is referring to the boss's displeasure or the absent of staffs ?