A reader of The Manila Times who identified herself as a first-year journalism student sent me the e-mail below that posed an intriguing question about the behavior of the verb “overcome.” Here’s her letter along with my answer:

Dear Mr. Carillo,

In my Speech Communication class, our teacher asked each one of us to deliver a speech for our final exam. A classmate of mine talked about “stage fright,” saying that “Nervousness is normal. It can be overcome.” He delivered his speech well, but since last week, I have been arguing with another classmate, Jesse, about the second sentence of that line: “It can be overcome.” Jesse said that our classmate should have used “It can be overcame” instead. I said that our classmate did the right thing; I argued that “overcome” was correct because the one being addressed had not overcome the nervousness yet. Another correct way of saying it, I said, was “It could be overcome.” This didn’t convince Jesse, who said that he would do more research on it.

Irritated that he didn’t believe me, I told Jesse that there’s no such word as “overcame” in the first place. “Overcome,” I said, could have no past tense since it has no root word; one could tell if it’s in the past tense only if it is “helped” by the auxiliary verbs. I said that simply because we’d hear the word “overcame” every now and then didn’t mean that using it was proper. Well, yesterday, I finally learned that “overcame” is definitely the past tense of “overcome” (thanks to my pontifical intelligence!), but I still couldn’t believe that what I had read from the book is true!

Could you please enlighten me on this? I’d really appreciate it.

Lucky Mae Q.

Here’s my reply to the above e-mail:

Dear Lucky Mae:

I can very well appreciate your dilemma over such a sentence as “It can be overcome.” In “overcome,” you and Jesse had actually stumbled on one of those perplexing, few-of-a-kind irregular verbs that simply won’t follow the English grammar rules as we know them. Compounding the situation is that “overcome” here happens to be consorting with two other strange grammar bedfellows: the modal “can” and the linking verb “be.” The result, as you have seen, is bedlam.

First, let’s get something straight about “overcome.” This verb can be both transitive (needs a direct object) and intransitive (won’t take a direct object); in “It can be overcome,” it works intransitively in the sense of “gaining superiority over something”—in this particular instance, over the aspect of “nervousness.” We must also take note here that when used transitively, “overcome” can be inflected in two ways: into the past tense “overcame,” and into the gerund or progressive form “overcoming.” (This should validate your finding that “overcome” does have a legitimate past tense.) Intransitively, however, “overcome” keeps its uninflected form—meaning that the word doesn’t change at all in a passive construction.

Recall that verbs normally use the following formula in the infinitive of their passive form: “to be” + the main verb’s past participle. Thus, the verb “watch” takes the passive infinitive form “to be watched”; “frighten” inflects to “frightened” to form “to be frightened.” Verbs ending in a vowel, like “take,” add an “n” to themselves to form the past participle, so “take” becomes the passive infinitive “to be taken.” Some verbs, of course, do even more strange things; “buy,” for instance, inflects to “bought” to form the passive infinitive “to be bought.”

There are a few verbs, however, that don’t inflect or change at all when forming their past participles. “Hit,” “cut,” and “shot” are such verbs, forming the passive infinitives “to be hit,” “to be cut,” and “to be shot.” “Overcome” behaves in exactly the same way: it doesn’t inflect to form its past participle. This explains why “to be overcome” is correct and “to be overcame” is wrong. (One other “come” word, the verb “become,” takes the passive infinitive form “to become,” not “to be become”; it gets rid of the extra “be” in the interest of euphony. Such are the errant and confusing ways of some English verbs.)

Now, in the sentence “It can be overcome,” the modal “can” has simply taken the place of the infinitive in “to be overcome.” As we know, “can” indicates current ability in the same sense as “able to,” but being a modal, it also puts some element of uncertainty in the statement. It tells us that although there’s a strong possibility of overcoming one’s nervousness in public speaking, we can never be 100% sure that it will happen. In any case, “overcome” is definitely not being used in its present tense here. It is in every way in the past participle form, except that it had retained its uninflected form and simply didn’t follow the usual rules. (April 14, 2004)

-----------
From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 14, 2004, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment

Among nonnative English speakers, easily the most movable and most easily misplaced modifier is the word “only.” In any of its three roles as adjective, adverb, or conjunction, “only” can effortlessly flit from place to place, creating as many meanings as the number of positions it perches upon in the sentence. It is, in a word, the ultimate floating quantifier, either intensifying or diminishing the semantic degree of the nouns or verbs it modifies, at times neatly linking one clause to another of its kind, but in the process baffling linguists and students of the language for the last 500 years.

Consider, for instance, the different meanings “only” creates by virtue of the five positions it takes in the following sentences:

• “Only I think Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“It’s only I that think Jennifer belongs to this league.”)

 

• “I only think Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“That’s the only thought I have at the moment: that Jennifer belongs to this league.”)

• “I think only Jennifer belongs to this league.” (“This is what I think: only Jennifer belongs to this league and no one else around here.”

 

• “I think Jennifer belongs only to this league.” (“This is what I think: Jennifer belongs only to this league and to no other.”)

• “I think Jennifer belongs to this league only.” (“This is what I think: it is only to this league that Jennifer rightfully belongs.”)

 

Then, after these five adjectival or adverbial roles, consider, too, how “only” works as a conjunction:

• In the role of “but”: “You may vote anyone you like, only vote wisely.”

 

• In the role of “and yet”: “Jennifer looks lovely, only she’s already very much married.”

• In the role of “except” or “were it not that”: “I’d like to bring Jennifer to Baguio, only that she might enjoy the place so much and stay there the whole summer.”

 

Even without its role as a conjunctive, however, “only” is already capable of creating so much ambiguity and semantic mischief if we are not careful. For instance, when describing a situation where we wanted to talk to a manager but only got as far as talking to his secretary, we probably would say “I saw only his secretary” or “I only saw his secretary,” either of which would adequately convey what happened. Then take note that a rather stilted way to say it, “I saw his secretary only,” even more faithfully describes what happened. Even so, the ambiguity remains.

The situation isn’t that bad in spoken usage, where “only” can be floated more freely without creating ambiguity. This is because a stronger stress can always be given to the word that the speaker wants “only” to modify, thus clearly establishing a clear intent and semantic linkage. We can see how this speech mechanism operates in the following spoken constructions, where the stressed words are shown in all-capital letters:

“I only saw HIS SECRETARY.” (“I saw nobody else.”)

“I only SAW his secretary.” (“Yes, I did see her, but I didn’t speak to her.”)

Taking into account the pitfalls in using “only” as a floating modifier in written prose, language experts have come up with the following recommendation: to be safe, place “only” immediately before the phrase we want it to modify. This means that in the office situation we described earlier, for instance, the safest—but not necessarily the best—written construction to describe what happened is the first version: “I saw only his secretary.” With “only” coming right before the noun phrase it modifies, “his secretary,” the construction poses the least danger of ambiguity. When spoken, however, the most natural and most felicitous version is obviously this other one: “I only saw his secretary.” It is much closer to the rhythm of speech, and it will be foolhardy for us to tinker with it simply to conform to the norms for edited or more formal prose.

For sure, there will be situations when written and spoken prose will clash head-on as to where to position “only” in a sentence. When this happens, we have to take recourse to what linguists call disambiguating qualifiers, or additional statements designed to clarify our meaning and eliminate ambiguity. This was the purpose of the parenthetical statements that accompanied the five “only”-usage examples that we took up earlier.

Those statements, of course, are not real disambiguating qualifiers because they are not part and parcel of the sentences themselves. A true disambiguating qualifier is integral to the statement, and already anticipates the ambiguity created when the main statement uses “only” as a floating quantifier. A good example is this: “I think only Jennifer belongs to this league; all the others simply fall short of the stringent requirements.”
In written prose, that’s actually the surest, most elegant way of preventing statements modified by “only” from going haywire. (March 4, 2004)

-----------
From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 4, 2004, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment