I received the following e-mailed SOS about a grammar issue yesterday, April 26, 2013, from a newspaper columnist-friend whom I won’t identify here to protect his privacy:Joe,
I corrected somebody’s “resulting to.” I said it should be “resulting in.” “Show me the rule that says it should be ‘resulting in,’” said she, in a piqued and challenging manner. I immediately picked up your book
Give Your English the Winning Edge and looked for the relevant rule. I didn’t see it or I could not find it.
Please cite me the rule before the lady goes into a rage. Many thanks!
Oscar
My reply to Oscar:April 26, 2013
Dear Oscar,
I’m afraid that my book
Give Your English the Winning Edge doesn’t cite a definitive rule on the usage of the form “resulting in,” but that form does appear in the list of “frequently misused phrases using prepositions” that I provided on Page 196 in my earlier book,
English Plain and Simple. In her pique, however, your friend obviously won’t find the mere appearance of “resulting in” in that list as a convincing argument against her preference for “resulting to.”
Let me therefore cite two authoritative sources below to support the strong primacy of “resulting in” over “resulting to” in English usage:
The
Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus classifies
“result in something” as a phrasal verb that means “to cause a particular situation to happen,” as in “The fire
resulted in damage to their property” and “Icy road conditions in Teesdale
resulted in two roads being closed.”
In the same vein, the
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs classifies
“result in something” as an idiom that means “to achieve something; to bring about something; to cause something to happen,” as in “I hope that this will
result in the police finding your car” and “All my effort
resulted in nothing at all.”
I must add at this point that I don’t know of any English usage authority that cites or vouches for “result to something” as a legitimate idiom or phrasal verb.
Now, by definition, a
phrasal verb consists of a verb and a preposition or adverb that modifies or changes the meaning of that verb; for instance, “give up” is a phrasal verb that means “stop doing” something, which is very different from “give.” The word or words that modify a verb in this manner is also known as a
particle.
In the case of the phrasal verb “result in,” the verb is “result” and the particle is “in”; together, they form an idiom or expression with a meaning and nuance distinct from those of the verb “result” alone. Of course, some will argue that the form “result to” can be used as well to yield the same meaning and, admittedly, it would be difficult to refute their argument from a grammar standpoint alone. Among native English speakers, however, the form “result in” is the conventional and well-accepted usage, such that it can safely be said that the correct idiom is “result in” and not “result to.” Thus, those who persist in using “result to” in educated circles put themselves at risk of being deemed uninformed or—at the very least—unidiomatic in their English.
On several occasions, I had called attention to and critiqued the frequent misuse of “result to” by the Philippine print media. You may want to suggest to your friend to check out my English-usage website, Jose Carillo’s English Forum, and read my critiques on that faulty usage and other grammar gaffes. I’m sure she’ll find it interesting to read particularly
“Media needs a reporting standard for prophets and plain guessers” (April 24, 2010) and
“Very frequent preposition misuse mars today’s English journalism” (June 12, 2011).
I trust that when your grammar adversary is through with these two readings, she would be enlightened and finally relent in her defense of the form “result to.”
With my best wishes,
Joe Carillo
