Ever since I moved to central Pennsylvania, I’ve been hearing a little grammatical tick from many of my coworkers: they tend to leave out “to be” where you should normally expect to find it between two verbs (sorry, I don’t know the proper grammatical term for this part of speech). Thus, I hear:
“these papers need filed”
“those cups need washed”
“that contract needs signed”
and on and on.
I had never heard this before I moved to Pennsylvania. (Scarily, I’ve been working here long enough, and hear it so often that it’s almost starting to sound correct…) I’m wondering if anyone knows the derivation of this. I have a hunch that this might be a linguistic leftover from one of the major ethnic groups that settled this region – a result of first generation immigrants using the grammatical structure of their native language with English words, then passing the mistake on to their children. (I have heard that there are communities in the mid-West that still use a slightly stilted variety of English that incorporates some aspects of German grammar.)
Anyone have any idea about this? Is it just a random glitch in the local dialect, or is there some other explanation? And has anyone ever heard this in any other parts of the country?
That doesn’t sound all that odd to me (West coast upbringing.) But I would say that it sounds a little more natural with a -ing verb. Like, "The car needs cleaning.* Which makes me think it may come from Southern US.
“Your soul needs a spiritual healing!” Tt easy to drop the “a”, and from there people are just used to hearing “needs” directly connected to the verb. Perhaps.
My girlfriend has recently (past few months) started using this construction. She does customer service on the phone, so I wonder if she picked it up from her east coast customers.
Right, “the car needs washing” sounds perfectly normal to me, but “the car needs washed” just grates. The former is grammatically correct, because the gerund “washing” can be used as a noun - it’s the same pattern as “the car needs oil”. The latter, AFAICT, is simply wrong.
I think I’ve read somewhere that it’s a feature of Scots English… I’ll see if I can find a cite.
Also, this being GQ, referring to this dialect feature as a “glitch” isn’t right. Just because you’re unfamiliar with it doesn’t make it a mistake. Dialects vary. English speakers really shouldn’t complain about dialectal variations as much as they do, because in terms of the world’s languages, English dialects really don’t vary all that much.
When I read the thread title, I immediately thought “Pittsburgh”. My inlaws all talk that way, I guesss I’m used to it now. I don’t remember hearing it when I lived in State College, PA (dead center of PA), but I remember thinking it odd when I met my wife.
I think they just do everything a little half-assed in Pittsburgh.
(ducking!)
That’s becaused high school English teachers are in the business of preparing their students to speak, read, write, and understand a particular prestige dialect of English. What the OP is asking about, on the other hand, is one feature of a dialect he has recently encountered.
No, no. It’s, “Redd up the kitchen. Those cups need worshed.” (Help! I hear Myron Cope in my head!)
I grew up in Western PA and never knew that leaving out the “to be” was an incorrect sentence construction until I got dinged on a college essay. :smack:
Yes, let me exonerate the East Coast as the originator of this particular little horror. I was told about it (with equal shock and awe) by a Massachesetts native who had gone to college in Pittsburgh. So I know it as a Pittsburgh construct, which is odd, because in most ways, the Pittsburgh working class accent strongly resembles the Trenton working class accent, and I generally assumed it was roughly the same bunch of immigrants - Italian and Eastern European.
I wondered if it might not come from German, because I understand that western PA and Ohio were much more heavily settled by Germans than was New Jersey (although NJ had a high concentration of Dutch early on).
