After my post about using an when an immediately following parenthetical begins with a consonant (but the first word after the parenthetical begins with a vowel), I felt the need to get some Google counts. What follows are the stats for strings of the form “a/an to me (at least/anyway) X”.
The finding is that Julian Barnes is not alone: there are a lot of people out there writing things like an–to me–unknown singer.
I wonder about the converse: a–obviously–preposterous idea. I easily found an example, “a (obviously refurbished) replacement unit”, but didn’t investigate systematically (and it seems there are a lot of people typing things like “displayed with a obviously wrong pixel ratio”, so we need to control for baseline use of a before vowels).
Tables and graphs come after the jump…
First, the raw numbers, for all the cases where more than zero hits were returned for “a/an to me X”. I used Bruce Hayes and Tim Ma’s Query Google. As a control, I also searched for words that begin with a consonant–you can see that they pretty much never have an. Just for fun, I tried a bunch of words that begin with [h] and then an unstressed vowel, but got hits for just one, hilarious.
| word | initial segment type | hits for “a to me X” | hits for “an to me X” | % “an” |
| bizarre | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| bizarrely | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| closely | C | 8 | 0 | 0 |
| complex | C | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| complicated | C | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| deep | C | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| distressing | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| fairly | C | 10 | 0 | 0 |
| fascinating | C | 21 | 0 | 0 |
| foreign | C | 73 | 0 | 0 |
| good | C | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| hitherto | C | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| holy | C | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| largely | C | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| larger | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| miraculous | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| much | C | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| nameless | C | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| new | C | 92 | 0 | 0 |
| novel | C | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| powerful | C | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| problematic | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| quite | C | 24 | 0 | 0 |
| radical | C | 8 | 0 | 0 |
| rather | C | 39 | 0 | 0 |
| reasonable | C | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| secret | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| still | C | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| strange | C | 30 | 0 | 0 |
| surprising | C | 61 | 0 | 0 |
| surprisingly | C | 21 | 0 | 0 |
| wonderful | C | 15 | 0 | 0 |
| worrying | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| very | C | 114 | 1 | 0.1 |
| more | C | 31 | 1 | 3 |
| hilarious | h | 12 | 0 | 0 |
| alarming | V | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| alarmingly | V | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| almost | V | 11 | 0 | 0 |
| amazing | V | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| entirely | V | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| especially | V | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| extreme | V | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| incomprehensible | V | 16 | 0 | 0 |
| incredibly | V | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| irrelevant | V | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| obviously | V | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| utterly | V | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| obvious | V | 10 | 2 | 17 |
| important | V | 4 | 1 | 20 |
| incredible | V | 4 | 1 | 20 |
| unintelligible | V | 4 | 1 | 20 |
| interesting | V | 9 | 3 | 25 |
| unknown | V | 137 | 46 | 25 |
| unnecessary | V | 5 | 2 | 29 |
| indecipherable | V | 2 | 1 | 33 |
| obnoxious | V | 2 | 1 | 33 |
| annoying | V | 2 | 2 | 50 |
| even | V | 4 | 4 | 50 |
| unbelievable | V | 1 | 1 | 50 |
| unheard | V | 1 | 1 | 50 |
| extremely | V | 1 | 3 | 75 |
| ill-defined | V | 0 | 3 | 100 |
| illuminating | V | 0 | 1 | 100 |
| uncomfortable | V | 0 | 2 | 100 |
Now in histogram form (losing the information about how well attested each word type is). You can see that the C-initial words pretty much never take an, but for the V-initial words, it’s actually not that unusual:
I tried the same thing with “a/an to me at least X”. I was curious to see whether a longer parenthetical would weaken the tendency to use an with vowel-initial X, but the data are probably too sparse here to tell:
| word | initial segment type | hits for “a to me at least X” | hits for “an to me at least X” | % “an” |
| fairly | C | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| good | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| loony | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| more | C | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| much | C | 55 | 0 | 0 |
| novel | C | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| rather | C | 15 | 0 | 0 |
| secret | C | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| strange | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| surprising | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| very | C | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| entirely | V | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| interesting | V | 8 | 0 | 0 |
| obvious | V | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| unknown | V | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| amazing | V | 0 | 1 | 100 |
| incomprehensible | V | 0 | 1 | 100 |
| incredible | V | 0 | 1 | 100 |
| unnecessary | V | 0 | 2 | 100 |
In histogram form:
And finally, “a/an to me anyway X”, with hardly any data, and none on V-initial X:
| word | initial segment type | hits for “a to me anyway X” | hits for “an to me anyway X” | % “an” |
| more | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| rather | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| strange | C | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| fun | C | 1 | 0 | 0 |
I personally use those, but not the converse… I am really wondering why… ?? ..
hi kie — these are interesting findings; i find it very difficult to imagine what my actual use is in these situations, so it’s good of you to collect some written data. but, i have noticed — and it pains me to admit this — that i often use “a” in front of vowel-initial nouns. for example, i know i easily say “a apple” with a glottal stop in between the article and the noun. “a apple” gets a whole lotta hits (there’s even a children’s book called “a apple pie”). also “a orange”, “a opera” (“a opera fan” “a opera in two parts”), “a operation”, “a appendix” and i s’pose many more. in light of this, it seems to me somewhat difficult to know what to make of “a (much overlooked) opera”: does the “a” reflect “much” or is it just someone who could write “a opera”?
(if it’s any comfort — to the extent my self-reporting is reliable — i can’t imagine that i say “an banana”.)
Hi, Curt–I agree that a before vowels is a possibility for a lot of people. So I see now that I should also have looked at plain “a/an X” for all the Xs. Maybe if I get my LSA talk done.
(Jane, you seem to be going in the opposite direction from Curt, in a way!)
At an LSA meeting several years ago, there was a poster on children’s acquisition of the a/an distribution, and the finding was that the rule is acquired surprisingly late— there were quite a few kids who frequently said “a apple” even at age six or later. The poster made the point that this late acquisition is unexpected in light of the apparent simplicity of the rule.
Unfortunately I can’t remember who presented the poster, or even which LSA meeting it was. But this research, if you can track it down, might be relevant for you.
I just found a cool example:
“speech and language therapy is a, to many people obviously, important discipline”
And I didn’t have to look far…