Words with extra relish, please – and don’t forget the ‘beens’ - by Rosalie Warren
When I visited my two-year-old granddaughter Daisy a few days ago, I hadn’t seen her for about four weeks, and one of the things I noticed was that her speech has progressed enormously. I was particularly struck by her starting to use the word ‘been’. This word never gets much attention from adult speakers – it’s a taken-for-granted sort of word that even the most ardent grammarians pretty much ignore (can grammarians be ardent, I hear you ask. You’d be surprised). ‘Been’ is a bitty little filler word that pops up in constructions like the present perfect progressive (‘I have been looking at the flowers’) and its less common future variant (‘I will have been sliding down the slide’). Years ago, when I studied computational linguistics (trying to get computers to speak English and other natural human languages), I remember writing a set of syntax rules for parsing or generating speech – and wondering how on earth to classify ‘been’ – is it a verb, an adverb, a particle…? In the end, I ...