As I have ever seen IT?

Question

The environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
_{(Source: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs by Greg Smith (March 14, 2012). The New York Times.)}

I wonder. Why does the sentence not end with "....ever seen"? There is this strange it at the end, and I do not know the grammatical structure underlying beneath it.

Usually when "as...as" construction is used, comparative deletion takes place, omitting the part of speech that is being compared. Like this:

The man was as strong(adj.) as I am __ (slot for the omitted adjective, strong).

So why is it, which represents "environment", a noun that is being repeated in the subordinate clause(? I think it is..), used in the sentence?

Answer 1

The question in the post raises two vital issues:(a)retaining of "IT" (b) transformation of comparative to positive with as...as correlative.

We would take up (b) first for it can be explained summarily. After last 'as' of two "ASs" we drop words that are mere repetitive and use either nominal or objective form of personal pronouns. However subjective forms with or without verb are avoided as they are too formal; no doubt, you're comfortablely correct in your example.

It is important to remember that when context is of help we often think pronouns unnecessary but the irony of the situation is that they're recognized as a part of speech only for this function of substitution.

• He plays Hockey. He plays (it) when he finds time.

• He plays hockey when he finds time to play (it).

In the first example, standing alone the second sentence might be unclear with out the use of 'it' But from the context in the latter it is obvious hockey is referred to.

Reference may be drawn to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language, which in a nutshell explains why, barring imperative sentences and informal uses nouns and pronouns are never dropped in English as subjects. Similarly when used as an object to a verb or preposition, overt pronouns are more useful in English than in some other languages.

English is not a pro-drop-language and we are not mandatorily asked to omit pronouns where they are pragmatically inferrable. We retain such pronouns to avoid ambiguities, verbal stress or any shift in reference.

So, even if without the use of IT, the sense can well be imagined, still the writer makes use of the grammaticality unnecessary Pronoun -IT- to mean how unprecedented a turn the environment has taken; he didn't imagine it.

Grammatically, the sentence can do with or without "IT".

Answer 2

The environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

In the final clause, the verb is see. When it is used about things that we observe, it is normally transitive, and so requires an object. In this case, the object is the pronoun it representing the environment.

see can also be used intransitively in this sense, so one could argue that it can correctly be omitted. The omitted pronoun version looks like this sentence:

John is the tallest man I've ever seen

But really, John is represented in this sentence by an omitted relative pronoun:

John is the tallest man [that] I've ever seen

Regarding your second sentence:

The man was as strong as I am

This is a completely different construction: environment is the subject of the first sentence, whereas strong is the complement of the second sentence, and occurs inside the first as, rather than before it.