Functional Grammar of English Group 7

Question:

Are “need to be V-ed” and “need V-ing” constructions synonymous and perfectly interchangeable?

Discussion:

It’s not uncommon to find in grammar books such total equations as “The house needs to be painted. = The house needs painting.” (taken from突破高中文法句型 by 劉銘), which we used to take for granted and accepted as the way it was. However, after notions like semantic roles and prototypicality were introduced in class, we began to rethink the interchangeability of these two grammatical constructions. This report is thereby set to examine “need to be V-ed” and “need V-ing” from a functional perspective.

After browsing through some 300 search entries from an NBC search result with “needs to be” as the query, we observed that in terms of semantic roles, most entries[u1] were in the construction of “PATIENT needs to be V-ed (by AGENT)”, and derived a generalization that most patients in such a construction are [-human] and the agents are very likely to be omitted, as the instance that follows:

HHV 11617 That pattern needs to be changed now, not after the general election, to reflect the needs of industry and the county.

In this case (HHV), the semantic role of the subject is a non-human patient while the agent is unspecified, as described above. If the equation “need to be V-ed = need V-ing” holds true, then “need changing” is supposedly to be spotted in the corpus as well, and we did find some. The following are two of the retrieved entries with “needs changing” as the query:

B21 1406 It is not your partner that needs changing.

F9D 1067 All these questions can help you decide whether the ad is right or whether it needs changing.

Given these two representative entries as well as those of the first construction, we have drawn some more generalizations: Unlike the “need to be V-ed” construction, “need V-ing” constructions are realized as either “AGENT needs V-ing” or “PATIENT needs V-ing”, mostly with the agent being human (B21) and the patient non-human (F9D), respectively.[u2]

Possible Explanations:

In the first construction “PATIENT needs to be V-ed (by AGENT)”, can be viewed as, in one sense, “AGENT needs to V PATIENT” in a passive voice. Who the agent is supposed to be can be readily understood from the context or simply doesn’t need to be specified (like ‘by someone’). With the patient placed in the subject position, the agent can thus be omitted so as to achieve a minimal involvement of semantic roles. Also, the infinitive (‘to be V-ed’) suggests infinity along with changeability and is closer to the prototypicality of verbs, whereas the gerund (‘V-ing’) conveys durability and acts more like a noun. This is why in many entries where the “need to be V-ed” construction is utilized, it’s also pretty easy to discover another infinitive or a subordinate clause beginning with ‘so that’[u3] – both of which indicate the possible results after the implementation of the verb within ‘to be V-ed’, as with the red-faced portions of the following entries:

1) HHV 11617 That pattern needs to be changed now, not after the general election, to reflect the needs of industry and the county.

2) H7B 394 To be a success, personal computing needs to be done without detailed computer knowledge.

3) AM7 1317 Thus the traditional formulation of an agenda needs to be changed so that a meeting starts with clarification of purpose, agreement on timing, allocation of tasks and consolidation of process issues from previous meetings.

4) CHS 261 The delivery date for new furniture and equipment needs to be arranged so that the new site is fully operational once all the equipment and goods have been transferred.

In contrast, the gerund within ‘need V-ing’ is more like a typical noun, which is characterized as being ever-lasting. Sentences in constructions as such simply express facts or conditions and don’t usually indicate possible results as do sentences in “need to be V-ed” constructions.

1) A0J 173 Some alarms warn you when the batteries need changing by giving a special signal.

2) A3G 433 Current conference procedures are unsatisfactory, unfair, archaic and need changing.

3) H0E 1425 A plan may be designed as a five-year plan and may need changing after one year.

Conclusion:

Based on observation of corpus entries from BNC, our conclusion is that “need to be V-ed” and “need V-ing” are not really perfectly interchangeable and do distinguish from each other in meaning under certain contexts.

Dear all,

這裡關切的議題十分有趣，但正如我先前在文中的注解所說，你們必須將你們所觀察的句型分布趨勢以整體的統計數據呈現。本文中基本上只以3-5個例句解釋，證據力不足，因此容易流於主觀的見解，必須特別小心。

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[u1]If this is the case, then you need to provide statistics figures to support your point.

[u2]Again, we need more specific statistics figures to support the argument..

[u3]Is this the norm?—You need to give us some statistics results for stronger support.