to have used to

[Phaedrus]

(1a) He claims that he used to live there.
(1b) He claims to have used to live there.

(2a) It is believed that he used to live there.
(2b) He is believed to have used to live there.

I'm curious to know whether other native speakers of English besides
myself are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.

Thank you.

 

[emsr2d2]

(1a) He claims that he used to live there.
(1b) He claims to have used to live there.

(2a) It is believed that he used to live there.
(2b) He is believed to have used to live there.

I'm curious to know whether other native speakers of English besides [STRIKE]myself[/STRIKE] me are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.

Thank you.

Note my correction above. You've probably picked up this incorrect usage of "myself" from multiple native speakers who seem to think that using "myself" instead of "me" makes them sound intelligent (or that it's more formal). I certainly wouldn't use either sentence (b).

I'd use:

He claims to have lived there/He claims to have once lived there.
He is believed to have lived there/He is believed to have once lived there.

 

[GoesStation]

(1a) He claims that he used to live there.
(1b) He claims to have used to live there.

(2a) It is believed that he used to live there.
(2b) He is believed to have used to live there.

I'm curious to know whether other native speakers of English besides
myself are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.

I think we've discussed this before. Jane Austen might have used such a construction. I wouldn't even consider using them. They are so dated as to be ungrammatical in modern English.

 

[jutfrank]

I don't consider the (b) sentences grammatical.

 

[Phaedrus]

Thanks, everyone. I'm just subjecting used to to a battery of syntactic tests in preparation for writing a master's thesis on it. In this case I couldn't decide whether the (b) sentences were grammatical. I myself am fine with them, but this marks the second time they've been roundly rejected online!

I hadn't asked about this precise thing before.

Note my correction above. You've probably picked up this incorrect usage of "myself" from multiple native speakers who seem to think that using "myself" instead of "me" makes them sound intelligent (or that it's more formal).

I was aware that the reflexive pronoun isn't technically justifiable in that case. I simply find it much more natural (not more formal) than the objective/accusative-case pronoun there. But don't worry, I would never advise a learner at this site to choose as I do in such a case.

 

[emsr2d2]

I was aware that the reflexive pronoun isn't technically justifiable in that case. I simply find it much more natural (not more formal) than the objective/accusative-case pronoun there. But don't worry, I would never advise a learner at this site to choose as I do in such a case.

I don't consider it technically unjustifiable. I consider it grammatically incorrect. I would hope that you wouldn't advise learners anywhere to use it. I advise you not to use it!

 

[Phaedrus]

I don't consider it technically unjustifiable. I consider it grammatically incorrect.

Reflexive pronouns sometimes behave in strange ways in prepositional phrases. Have you ever had a learner ask whether to say, e.g., "She took her cat with her" or *"[strike]She took her cat with herself[/strike]"? The second sentence is clearly ungrammatical, at least in a normal context (without exaggerated emphasis on "herself"), yet the customary advice about using a reflexive pronoun when the pronominal object of a verb or preposition is co-referent with the subject of the clause would lead us, inappropriately, to use the second sentence instead of the first. At least one dissertation has been written about conundrums in that department.

In the sentence of mine that you object to ("I'm curious to know whether other native speakers of English besides myself are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical"), the reflexive pronoun ("myself") may not be co-referent with the subject of its most local clause (the "whether"-clause, the subject of which is "other native speakers"), but it is co-referent with the subject of the sentence as a whole ("I"). Thinking about it, I believe that makes a difference to my perception of it as not incorrect, at least in my dialect of English (native Californian). We could test whether our judgements are similar here.

We agree that (3a) and (3b) are correct. Sentence (4a) was my sentence from the OP. We know that I'm OK with it and you are not. I'm equally OK with (4b), in which the reflexive pronoun has been changed and the subject of the highest clause has been changed to "agree" with the reflexive: "I"-"myself"; "He"-"himself." What I find interesting is that I am not OK with (5a) and (5b), in which the reflexive pronoun "agrees" neither with the subject of the most local clause (the "whether"-clause) nor with that of the highest clause: "I"-"himself"; "He"-"myself." Perhaps we could agree that (5a) and (5b) are worse than (4a) and (4b). Do we?

(3a) I'm curious to know whether other native speakers besides me are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.
(3b) I'm curious to know whether other native speakers besides him are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.

(4a) I'm curious to know whether other native speakers besides myself are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.
(4b) He's curious to know whether other native speakers besides himself are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.

(5a) I'm curious to know whether other native speakers besides himself are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.
(5b) He's curious to know whether other native speakers besides myself are comfortable with judging the (b) sentences grammatical.