this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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Ok maybe a very stupid question but
Isn't that gramatically incorrect? Shouldn't it be "The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced on Thursday"?
I see this kind of writing a lot in news articles so surely it's not actually wrong, but that's not how I was taught English writing.
Dialect variation. For me, saying “the car needs washed” sounds truly strange but millions and millions of people say it. You’re experiencing similar with this phrase.
Is there a name/term for this abomination? I've only ever heard one person speak in that form (omitting "to be"), and it has haunted me ever since.
I think you’d call this elision. Assume that the phrase is originally “the car needs to be washed” but you cut out “to be”, making it into a shorter form. It’s pretty common in language to shorten things to make it faster to speak. Think of the endless contractions in English or perhaps leaving part of a sentence completely unspoken because the content is easily assumed by the interlocutors.
Worse, to me, is that there is a perfectly grammatically correct way to be just as brief.
Wrong:
Right:
And for a linguist the question is really whether there are native speakers who consider it correct. Here there are millions who say yes.