Timeline for Is the interrogative structure "Is X to do with Y" grammatical?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Jun 16, 2020 at 9:11 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Dec 18, 2015 at 12:28 | comment | added | Senjougahara Hitagi | I'm confused, is this BrE? As an american this sounds wrong. For me, "does" sounds best by far, "has" sounds okay. I've never heard the "is" version. | |
| Mar 5, 2013 at 3:03 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @user3169: Don't misunderstand me. I certainly don't favour "have" over "be", and that seems to be what you're trying to achieve with your do-support. To be honest, since I've lived through the rise of "be" here in the UK, it actually seems better (in the sense of, more "modern") to me in most contexts. | |
| Mar 5, 2013 at 3:00 | comment | added | user485 | I have to agree with FumbleFingers related to using "do" instead of "is" in these sentences. Again because we are stating a relationship, not a state or identification. I think better wording would be "Does this question have to do with English...", This document has to do with..." and "This inspection has to do with...". | |
| Mar 5, 2013 at 2:13 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @snailplane: Good point. I'll edit to reflect. | |
| Mar 5, 2013 at 1:39 | comment | added | user230 | According to the Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary, "be to do with" is a chiefly British way of saying "have to do with". That might explain why you and FumbleFingers think it's fine, while it sounds somewhat odd to me and, I think, to Martha. | |
| Mar 5, 2013 at 0:25 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Matt: I'm not sure you can justify the "grammaticality" by citing an assuredly grammatical equivalent. But if you can, you'd have to say "to do with" means "relational to", because both forms need to be preceded by "is". But then you get in trouble because it's also valid to have to do with, whereas you can't say have relational to. I agree it's grammatical, of course. I just don't think that's a way of proving the case. To my mind, the proof is that we do say it (and after all, in the final analysis, "grammatical" simply means "what we say"). | |
| Mar 4, 2013 at 23:51 | comment | added | Martha | Given that you're the user who changed the title in question, naturally you'd think it's grammatical. :) Could you perhaps explain why it's grammatical? | |
| Mar 4, 2013 at 23:49 | history | answered | Matt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |