Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 12:01:30 +0100

From: Aaron Drews aaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]LING.ED.AC.UK

Subject: Naive queries?



First of all, I think Terry's idea of letting the students on the

list is great for all sorts of reasons.

Secondly, I have a "naive" question myself.

Lately, I've come across the term "in future" in American

language. It was in a recent novel I'm reading by an American author. A

few days ago, some lawyer or another concerned with the Federal

campaigning case said something about being concerned with an item in

future.

When I first came to Scotland, "in future" sounded odd to me, but

I took it to be a dialect syntactic variation. As a General American

speaker, I would have never said "in future", rather "in the future".

"We will be allowing undergraduates on the list in (the) future",

for example. The the is obligatory for me.

Is this something that's changing in American speech, or did I

miss that day in school?

Cheers!

Aaron



___________________________________________________________________________

Aaron E. Drews aaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ling.ed.ac.uk

Ph.D. Candidate http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron

The University of Edinburgh +44 (0)131 650-3485

Departments of Linguistics and fax: +44 (0)131 650-3962

English Language