obtained to be

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 5:19 am

I'm editing a lot of scientific papers on atomic research written by (South!)Koreans these days and they are fond of this kind of construction. I keep red-inking it but I'm beginning to wonder.

"the values of αna, and n are obtained to be 0.2~0.5 and 3~4"

I googled it and the 1st couple of examples are from Japan/Korea, but there does seem to be a lot. What do you think of it?

(This non-native input is one of the problems with google corpus linguistics I've noted here before)

My office mate suggesed I run it through Word to see if is OK! Anyone think that this method is at all valid for this particular sort of thing? (word seems to OK it, as it goes).

I red inked "the error bounds" to "boundaries" today too but I now find that I am probably misguided. They ought to let me access a computer while I edit things really.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 7:47 am

Either Google is a bit strange or I'm stupid. For "results were obtained to be" it says 691.000 but there are only three pages at the bottom plus when you start scrolling it gives up at 21 hits. "Values were obtained to be" taps out at 49 although initially claiming 400,000 hits. You can get it to 119 hits by repeating duplicates. Similar phenomena for "values are obtained to be" and exact phrase "obtained to be" with duplicates gets to a mere 878 if you keep clicking on the highest page number.

So perhaps it's hardly used at all! And googling doesn't seem up to much.

My take is that you have to imagine the scientific community trying to passivify

"We obtain(ed) the values to be....."

and ask yourself how you react to that. I don't mind it.

J.M.A. · Post by **J.M.A.** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 8:47 pm

It sounds strange to me. The "were obtained to be" phrase actually sounds better than "are obtained to be" to me, though. My first instinct would definitely be to highlight the present tense form as an error and be suspicious of the past tense form. This is just speculation on my part.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Thu Oct 15, 2009 1:40 am

Thanks.

Google does seem to work in some very odd ways.

Editing the science papers of Koreans is such a headache. Scientists often seem to use time-saving constructions and special jargon/formations and it is very difficult to know where to insist on very normal seeming usage. And yet you are forced to make these calls.

Being a paid "editor" makes me realize that unless you put some red ink on the paper you feel lazy and vulnerable. One more reason why "descriptivism" will never go mainstream.

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Thu Oct 15, 2009 6:16 am

IMO, it's wrong. They could say "the values were determined to be such and such" because the the verb "to determine" takes object complements. i.e. "we determined the values to be such and such". The verbs "to discover" and "to find" also fit this pattern. See https://arts-ccr-002.bham.ac.uk/ccr/pat ... 3.html#s04

However, the verb "to obtain" does not take object complements. You wouldn't say, "we obtained the values to be .5 and 3~4". Scientists do "obtain" values from experiments, e.g. "The values which we obtained were .5 and 3~4.", but in that structure, the verbs "obtained" and "were" do not combine as a phrase.

I encourage you to continue marking this with red ink. As Barney Fife would say, "Nip it, nip it, nip it. Nip it in the bud or there' gonna be trouble up ahead."