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Anonymous Posted 7 years ago
Grammar

British Grammar As In "I Was Stood"?

An american English teacher said this is ungrammatical : "I was sat" and "I was stood"

But, I saw a plausible argument/comment in Oxford dictionaries Blog. The writer seemed to be british.

He or she said : Clearly the usage has a purpose. "I was sat" and "I was stood" are stative. They describe an action that was done once. The state of being 'sat' or 'stood' continues but not the action, that is I am not engaged in consciously remaining standing or sitting as I am engaged in a continous running in "I was running". Usually the construction is used in the form "I was sat/stood doing ..." The doing (talking/eating, etc) is the continuing action engaged in, the "sat/stood" is the state in which I doing it (as a result of a past action). In effect "sat" and "stood" are not verbal but adjectival or rather it is an aorist participle. One also hears "I was laid (in bed ...)"for "I was lying". Your example "He is flown to New York later today" does not make sense because the clause clearly has a future sense, but "He is flown to New York" does; 'he is in the state of having flown to New York". He continues to be in that state but is not actively engaged in doing it! Nor is it passive. It does not mean "He was flown". Other languages do have this distinction for stative verbs. It might be non-standard but it is grammatically meaningful. The grammar books need to catch up.

Did you agree the argument?

  

Top answer

anonymous Did you agree with the argument? No. You can call any nonsense "non-standard" and dream up some spiel about it, but it remains nonsense.

— Anonymous

  • anonymous Did you agree with the argument?
  • No.
  • You can call any nonsense "non-standard" and dream up some spiel about it, but it remains nonsense.
  • If nobody knows what you mean, it is not language, let alone English.
  • "He is flown to New York" communicates nothing.
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3 Answers
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anonymousDid you agree with the argument?

No. You can call any nonsense "non-standard" and dream up some spiel about it, but it remains nonsense. If nobody knows what you mean, it is not language, let alone English. "He is flown to New York" communicates nothing.

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These verbs are mostly intransitive, that is, they do not take an object, and thus cannot take the passive form.

I sat on the couch.
The umbrella stood in the umbrella stand.

.The verbs do have a transitive usage (e.g. with an object), but it is quite rare:

When I misbehaved, my mother sat me in a corner and told me to stay there and think about my behavior.
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anonymous"I was sat" and "I was stood" are stative. They describe an action that was done once.

These observations are contradictory. Stative verbs do not describe actions.

Those are not stative.

Those expressions are exclusively British, by the way, so it's not surprising that an American teacher said they were ungrammatical.

CJ

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