XPost: alt.usage.english
> she may have given up her career in law
This is definitely poor writing (wording) because
i read it a few times and assumed that she DID quit law(job) sometime.
The uncertainty is only about WHY she quit.
_________________ but that's not waht happened!
(this is a counter-factual sentence) so this has to be written as:
What a Supreme Court justice revealed on CNN suggests that,
had she received her daughter's autism diagnosis earlier,
she might have given up her law career to help raise her.
here [give up] is like an action that occurs at one point (in time)
[may have given up] is the wrong tense
-------- it (usually) refers to a State that began in the past and
continues to NOW.
What a Supreme Court justice revealed on CNN suggests that,
had she received her daughter's autism diagnosis earlier,
she may have long given up her law career to help raise her.
so maybe the problem here is more with Tense, rather than Evidentiality?
On 9/15/2024 3:03 AM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 15/09/2024 6:21 p.m., Mike Spencer wrote:
Seen in the news:
A Supreme Court justice revealed on CNN she may have given up her
career in law to help raise her daughter, who has autism, had she
received an earlier diagnosis.
My reading of that is the (nonsensical) assertion that she doesn't
know whether or not she has given up her career at the time she's
speaking.
I would have written:
She might have given up her career had she received...
where she recognizes that she did not give it up.
I've seen this usage elsewhere and find it grating.
Any comment from a.u.e gurus? Rules about the subjunctive?
I'm not a guru. And I'll avoid the word "subjunctive", which leads to
other confusions. But I've been interested in this since I first noticed
it in the 1980s.
(1) "May" and "might" are near-synonyms in today's English:
He may have a gun. He might have a gun.
Call this present uncertainty. Speaker doesn't know for sure whether he
has or not.
You can put this uncertainty in the past using "have":
He may have had a gun. He might have had a gun.
I guess you could call this past uncertainty, though strictly it's a
past situation about which we are (presently) uncertain.
(2) But the "might have" that's a problem is a different thing, which involves alternative time-tracks or possible worlds:
The South might have won the Civil War (if...)
This also works grammatically with "could/should/would have", but all
depend on our knowledge that, in fact, they didn't. "Counter-factual"
is another useful term.
For you (and me) this just will not work with "may". We only read "may
have" as past-uncertain. But a generational shift has taken place.
Probably nobody under 50 has this restriction any more; they're not even aware that the restriction exists for older people. What I said above
about "may" and "might" is the explanation -- they are pretty much interchangeable, so either should work in the counter-factual.
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