It has nothing to do with themesmeric power of Bandycoot Cabbagepatch ’s nameor aparticularly wow grammar ofdogeor anything else thatmight affect your power to even . No , we take to go back toeven ’s canonical use . For exemplar , these speech sound fine :
She doesn’tevengo here . She hasn’tevergone here . She did n’t goanywhere .
But these sound weird :
- Sheevengoes here.*She hasevergone here.*She wentanywhere .
What ’s up with these sentences?Even , and its friendseverandany , are a type of word known as aNegative Polarity Item(NPI ) . They work with a sentence that’salready got a negative in it and make it even more negative , but they just do n’t sound correctly in the positivistic ace . you could think of them like the chicken feed - half - empty of grammar .
So , it ’s fairly absolved thatI ca n’t evenis unforesightful for a longer phrase likeI ca n’t even handle thisorI ca n’t even call back aright now . And becauseevenis an NPI , there ’s no equivalentI can even handle thisorI can even think right now , so there ’s also noI can even .
And it ’s the same thing with just plainI ca n’t . It ’s shortened from something likeI ca n’t go onorI ca n’t empathize why I like this so much . In hypothesis there could beI can , but we do n’t seem to be using it the same path .
But then thing get interesting . You see , the affair is , the uncomplete phrase " I ca n’t " and " I ca n’t even " look an awful muckle like far more common types of complete phrase , " I VERB " and " I ca n’t VERB , " as in " I make out , " " I ca n’t slumber , " and so on . What if we just pretended thatcanandevenwere in reality normal verbs ?
Well , in that causa , you could do withcanandevenanything you could do with a normal verb . For deterrent example , you may talk about your ability to can / even , as inthis delicious bent of examplesthat I take in a while back :
" I am unable to can . ““I am unable to even . ““I have lost the ability to can . ““I have lost the power to even . ““I am all out of can . ““I’ve lost all power to can . ““I firmly believe in your ability to can . ““The world seemed to have misplace the ability to can . ““I seem to have temporarily misplace my ability to can . ““My ability to even carry on to send me out - of - agency emails . ““My power to can has been compromised . For the relief of my life I will have to take medication to help me deal with my can deficiency . "
Turning one part of language into another is a really common affair to do , especially in English where we do n’t have a lot of prefixes or postfix that tell you whether something ’s a noun or a verb . Thus we geta recordfromto track record , orto blogfroma blogfroma web logarithm . In fact , canandeventhemselves originally come from sixteenth century reanalyses of an Old Englishverb(canhas thesame antecedent asknow ) andadverb(efnemeaning " likewise , just , exactly " ) .
But can you in reality do everything with the newevenandcanthat you’re able to with a normal verb ? Well , maybe not . There ’s a tidy on-line speech communication residential district that ’s whole all right with the variations on " power to can / even " above and yet find the examples below just a step too far :
" So aroused … I ca n’t even . Maybe I ’ll even tomorrow . ““Successfully regained my ability to even ! I ’m quite good at evening!““I just got out of a encounter , so now I can stop evening . ““I evened for a while , but then I go out that gif and I could n’t even anymore . "
What ’s the divergence ? It seems that using the uninflectedto canorto evenis an easy step than pee-pee it past ( even out ) , future ( I ’ll even ) , or reformist ( even ) .
So my good guess is thatcanandevenare in a country of flux properly now . At the instant , people are pushing them into new areas of grammar , but with full knowledge that they vocalise a moment weird , which I ’ve calledstylized verbal unintelligibility mirroring emotional incoherence .
And we may stop there . Or , canandevenmay keep along the route towards full reanalysis . There are some thing that are beyond even a linguist ’s ability to can .
Part of a new series oninternet philology .
