I'm not sure if this is recency bias on my part, but, in the past few years, I have noticed a shift in verb placement in noun clauses by many speakers. At first, I thought this may have originated from a confusion of whether the noun clause is a direct or indirect quote, but, in some sentences, that doesn't make sense unless it became pervasive for that reason and then spread. My other thought is that people are mistaking noun clauses that start with
who, what, why, and
how for questions when they are actually just functioning as subjects or objects of the main verb. In an interrogative sentence, the verb is inverted, but, in a noun clause, the declarative word order is still followed, i.e. the verb follows the subject ("
How is he?" vs. "I told her
how he is.").
A common example:
correct: "I asked him what
the problem is."
incorrect: "I asked him what
is the problem."
correct with direct quote: "I asked him, 'What is the problem?'"
This can't really be explained with a misunderstood direct quote if the main verb is not something like "ask" or "tell". Perhaps, this could be explained as two separate sentences, but the speakers in question usually do not put any kind of verbal cue to indicate such (i.e. a pause)
Correct: "I don't understand what
the problem is."
In correct: "I don't understand what
is the problem."
Correct as two sentences: "I don't understand. What is the problem?"
It also can't be explained by a mistaken direct quote if the same individual is both the indirect object of the main verb and the subject of or the possessor of something in the noun clause:
Correct: "I asked
him what
his problem is."
Incorrect: "I asked
him what
is his problem."
If it were a direct quote, it would require the second person possessive adjective: "I asked him, 'What is
your problem?'"
An example that can't be attributed to a mistaken direct quote or punctuation comes from the video below:
"In this video, you're going to learn what
is a hostile takeover, what
is a poison pill, how successful
are poison pills in preventing hostile takeovers, and what could happen from here."
With correct verb order, it reads, "In this video, you're going to learn what a
hostile takeover is, what a
poison pill is, how successful
poison pills are in preventing hostile takeovers, and what could happen from here."
Other languages have different rules for verb inversion, so, for people whose first language is not English, mix-ups in word order happen. However, by and large, I notice native speakers of English doing this.
Have you noticed this? Do you have any hypotheses on its origins or whether this will become the predominate word order in the future? It sticks out like a sore thumb when I hear it. "Language evolves" is not a good answer because it ignores cause and mistakenly states that language becomes more complex over time when it usually becomes simplified over time (e.g. Latin -> French, Spanish, Italian), at least as far as I know.
