Faked cry vs Fake-cried

[GoesStation]

Others may have used the construction, but I wouldn't follow "feigned" with an infinitive.

 

[emsr2d2]

Ngram shows that "feign to" and "feigned to" might have been in use in the 1800s but not now.

 

[emsr2d2]

Maybe they're more natural in AmE then.

 

[Phaedrus]

Others may have used the construction, but I wouldn't follow "feigned" with an infinitive.

Feign isn't an extremely common word and doesn't appear in many grammars.

It does appear in Poutsma's magnificent grammar, however, and he endorses the infinitive pattern that I find abundantly exemplified on COCA.

to feign, as in:
Martin feigned to fall asleep. -- Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, Chp. IV, 32 a.
We all drew nearer to the cages, feigning to examine the birds. -- Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Ch. V, 35.

- H. Poutsma. A Grammar of Late Modern English: Part I: The Sentence: Second Half, Chapter XIX. P. Nordhoff: Groningen, 1929.

 

[emsr2d2]

It's interesting that those examples are both from books by Charles Dickens, who was writing in the mid- to late-1800s.

 

[GoesStation]

Maybe they're more natural in AmE then.

Not to me. If I saw the construction I'd guess the writer had mixed up "feign" and "deign".

 

[Phaedrus]

If I saw the construction I'd guess the writer had mixed up "feign" and "deign".

It's probably safe to assume that Charles Dickens was aware of the difference between "feign" and "deign."

If we go back to the time of the King James Bible (1611), the infinitive construction with feign was already being used, but with a reflexive pronoun first:

2 Samuel 14:2: "And Joab sent to Tekoah, and fetched thence a wise woman, and said unto her, I pray thee, feign thyself to be mourner, and put on now mourning apparel, and anoint not thyself with oil, but be as a woman that had a long time mourned for the dead."

1 Kings 14:17: "And the LORD said unto Ahijah, Behold, the wife of Jeroboam cometh to ask a thing of thee for her son; for he is sick: thus and thus shalt thou say unto her: for it shall be, when she cometh in, that she shall feign herself to be another woman."

 

[GoesStation]

If I saw the construction I'd guess the writer had mixed up "feign" and "deign".

It's probably safe to assume that Charles Dickens was aware of the difference between "feign" and "deign."

If we go back to the time of the King James Bible (1611), the infinitive construction with feign was already being used, but with a reflexive pronoun first:

Your examples demonstrate that feign to was used six hundred years ago and a hundred and sixty years ago. The Ngram shows it had almost entirely out of use by a hundred years ago. It's not helpful to teach an archaic construction to learners.

 

[Phaedrus]

Your examples demonstrate that feign to was used six hundred years ago and two hundred and sixty years ago. The Ngram shows it had almost entirely out of use by a hundred years ago. It's not helpful to teach an archaic construction to learners.

How many years ago was the grammar I quoted published? How many years ago were the numerous examples on COCA written? COCA is a corpus of contemporary English, not of archaic English.

 

[Phaedrus]

Turning now to perhaps the most exotic source in my grammatical arsenal, I shall quote an entire section dealing with this pattern (emphasis mine).

1183—Type 'He affected to approve of the scheme'

Verbs of feigning and affecting that take an infinitive as object are: affect, counterfeit, dissemble, feign, pretend.

Examples with dissimulate, simulate and sham have not been met with. There are no instances with an infinitive not preceded by to.

With to:

1412-20 Lydgate, Troy Bk. (1555) II, s She vnto some pretendeth to be trewe (OED).
c1522 St. Th. More, Wks. (1557) 82 H12, [they] faine to haue the vertues that they lack.
1536 Pilgr. Perf. (W. de W. 1531) 204, Yf he had pretended to suffre payne & had feled no smarte.
1548 Udall, Paraphr. Erasmus upon the New Test. 110 b, False teachers . . . countrefeiting to preache my gospell (OED).
1563-87 John Foxe, Actes & Monuments (1684) II, 79, I, He that hath no Faith, and yet faineth or pretendeth to haue.
1590-06 Spenser, F.Q.II. I, 9, Feigning . . . in every limb to quake.
1600 Shakesp. A. Y. L. IV, iii, 174, Take a good heart, and counterfeit to be a man.
1679 Sheffield & Dryden, Essay on Sat. 70, How that affects to laugh, how this to weep.
1693 Dryden, The Satires (ed. Scott/S.) Notes 136, Egeria . . . with whom Numa feigned to converse by night (Sod.).
1749 Fielding, Tom Jones II, VI, He was ignorant, or at least pretended to be so.
1753 Smollett, Ct. FAthom (1748) 138, I, he affected to approve of the scheme.
1778 Han. More Florio II, 185, Yet feigned to praise the gothic treat.
1813 T. Busby, tr. Lucretious iv, 913, Fancy . . . Lost friends, past joys, dissembleth to restore.
1847 Sir Arthur Helps, Friends in Council I, 10, Pretending to agree with the world when you do not.
1816 Scott, Antiquary (1879) II, xxv, 52, He tired, or affected to tire.
1865 Dickens Mut. Fr. II, xvi, Tremlow feigns to compare the portrait.
1879 M. Arnold, Irish Cath. (in: Mixed Essays) 100, I have never affected to be surprised . . . at the antipathy of the Irish to us.

With for to:

c1387 Trevisa, Higden I, 91, Þey feyneÞ for to flee and sodeynliche ; turneÞ and riseÞ aᴣen (MMED).

-- F. Th. Visser. An Historical Syntax of the English Language, Volume III, p. 1321. E. J. Brill: Leiden, 1969.

 

[Phaedrus]

Lastly, here are some recent quotations from The New Yorker, the best-written and most carefully edited magazine in the United States:

"No one else could even feign to know his moods, the source of his abrupt decisions."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/07/22/the-war-for-the-kremlin?reload=true

"But the data for this, of course, are nonexistent, and Albright and Ashbrook do not even feign to find them."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/17/god-on-the-brain

"In football, prospective professional players have essentially no choice but to attend college, or feign to."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/team-spirit-4

For his part, Liebling admired, and meant to emulate, the British writers of the eighteenth century who observed every corner of society, the Fancy who ruled things and the Poor who feigned to listen; he favored above all the ones who wrote least stingily both in volume and in metaphorical profusion—Defoe, Egan, and Hazlitt.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/29/reporting-it-all

 

[GoesStation]

Turning now to perhaps the most exotic source in my grammatical arsenal, I shall quote an entire section dealing with this pattern (emphasis mine).

That's more evidence that feign to is archaic. The most recent example is 140 years old old. The examples from The New Yorker demonstrate it still existed more recently in at least one rarefied environment.

 

[Phaedrus]

That's more evidence that feign to is archaic. [. . .] The examples from The New Yorker demonstrate it still existed more recently in at least one rarefied environment.

You are wrong, GoesStation. You and your "likers" can no longer pretend that it doesn't exist or feign not to notice it. I have proven that the construction has existed since at least the thirteen-hundreds. It is, indeed, in Visser's work (1969), one of the two prototypical verbs (verbs of feigning and affecting) for the pattern taken by pretend, which you and ems find yourselves able to tolerate. The construction has never ceased to exist. It is alive and well today among highly literate people, even if, for whatever reason, your own private dialects resist it. There is nothing wrong with the construction. There never has been anything wrong with it. And there is nothing wrong with showing the construction to learners. If you like, I can go on all day, when I have free moments, providing respectable examples, restricting myself to examples from the twenty-first century. Shall we proceed to The New York Times? Pick your poison.

 

[Phaedrus]

I don't think anybody has claimed it doesn't exist.

To call it archaic is tantamount to claiming that its many tokens in contemporary literary English are effectively linguistic zombies.

 

[Rover_KE]

I've moved this thread as the OP has long since lost interest.;-)

 

[probus]

To call it archaic is tantamount to claiming that its many tokens in contemporary literary English are effectively linguistic zombies.

One last word, Phaedrus. Literary English is like ballet, opera, and symphony orchestras. Some people love some or all of that quartet. A much larger segment of the people have no interest in any of them. That large majority includes plenty of intelligent and highly educated people. Personally I love the English language and have read widely for pleasure all my life. But tell me a novel is literary and I'll find something else to read.