FCE grammar question

fluffhead · Post by **fluffhead** » Sat May 01, 2004 10:26 pm

This is a bit of a weird problem, so I should give you a little background: I teach an FCE course that uses "First Certificate Gold" (Longman Press) as the course book. One of my more eager students went out and got herself a supplementary coursebook called "Mission: FCE" (Express Publishing).
Last week she handed me this extra book and asked me to take the book home to grade a few pages of exercises she'd done. I said "sure". Well, yesterday I was checking her work when I ran across a grammatical construction I'd never seen in 5 years of teaching this type of course.
It's one of those things where the student is given a sentence, followed by a key word, and is asked to use that word to make a new sentence that means the same as the first sentence. Pretty standard Cambridge exam stuff.
Here it is and I'd like some feedback if you can:

Mark ought to post the letter immediately.

Now rewite using 'sooner' in this sentence:

I___________________the letter immediately.

WTF? According to the examples in the book, the correct answer is:

I'd sooner Mark post the letter immediately.

Can that possibly be right? I know in America, when we use 'sooner' in place of 'rather', we say something like "I'd sooner do A than B". When I first saw this I thought maybe it's just an AmE vs BrE thing, but now I'm not so sure. I can't find any similar examples in the coursebook we use in class (only examples with 'rather'), nor in any of my grammar books or dictionaries. Plus, like I said, I've been doing this for 5 years and have never come across it before, nor heard it uttered by one of my British friends. In fact, one linguistically inclined Brit that posts in another forum saw this and thought it must be wrong.

Can someone set me straight here?

dduck · Post by **dduck** » Fri May 07, 2004 2:10 pm

I'd say it's not very common usage, so it's not worth worrying about. If you HAVE TO worry about it, I'd be forced to agree that it's "old fashioned, but correct".

Iain

Allan · Post by **Allan** » Wed May 12, 2004 5:28 am

Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back:

Han Solo: bla bla bla (can't remember, Han and Leia were arguing)
Princess Leia (sp?): I'd sooner kiss a wookie.
Han Solo: Yeah? I can arrange that! You could use a good kiss!

[storms off down the hall]

So you could also say

Assistant Manager: Mark'll send the letter when he's done drinking his coffee. He's bright enough, but not very motivated.
Office Manager: I'd sooner Mark post the letter immediately.

Other than "sooner A than B", I think this construction is used as a reply/retort (so I suppose it actually has a silent "than do the aforementioned thing that you said"). It seems strange when it's isolated without context.