Timeline for inversion with "could" in conditionals
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 2, 2017 at 22:06 | comment | added | Colin Fine | @Chaim: I don't know for certain; but I'm pretty sure that in Jonson's day the construction may have been literary, but was current; I think this was also true of Melville's day: note that his text is a journal, which you would expect to be in current language. | |
| Feb 2, 2017 at 18:20 | comment | added | Chaim | @ColinFine We agree that the construction is used today only for an antique effect. I wonder whether Melville and Jonson also intended an antique effect, and whether in their day (as in ours) these constructions were artificial? | |
| Feb 2, 2017 at 17:37 | comment | added | Colin Fine | I'm making the point that this is an obsolescent construction, used today only in a deliberately archaizing way, @Chaim. | |
| Jan 31, 2017 at 23:04 | comment | added | Chaim | Although I'm not sure what point you're making, I also wondered about the age of the quotations. It's certainly an archaic construction, but I also think that copyright laws and the dwindling importance of poetry in our culture will tend to make older poetry more prominent on the web, where I did my searches. I only read the hits for celebrated writers and ignored current and little-known examples. This might exaggerate the appearance that the form is disused. | |
| Jan 31, 2017 at 22:59 | comment | added | Colin Fine | And all of these are nineteenth century or earlier. | |
| Jan 31, 2017 at 20:47 | comment | added | deadrat | Nice answer.___ | |
| Jan 31, 2017 at 20:24 | history | answered | Chaim | CC BY-SA 3.0 |