Speaker Paul Ryan said "encouraged with" but media is saying "Ryan encouraged by". Why?

*Note: The first half of this question, in bold, is streamlined and expresses the gist of my message. You can skip the second half of the question if you would rather not slog through all my chattiness.

I.) Statement in question uses "with"

• Paul Ryan, after meeting with Donald Trump, said: "I was very encouraged with..."

Here's the statement in a video clip, at 1:18 and 1:40 he states "encouraged with": http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/12/trump-ryan-to-meet-amid-growing-republican-calls-to-unify.html

II.) Statement in question was re-worded with "by"

Here's what some news reporters wrote:

• "Paul Ryan 'encouraged' by Trump meeting, sees unity on horizon" - Boston Herald

• "Ryan encouraged by Trump meeting; unity the goal" - KSPR

• "Paul Ryan ‘Encouraged’ by Meeting With Donald Trump, as Bizarro Circus Unfolds Outside" - Vice News

• "Speaker Ryan: I Was Very Encouraged by What I Heard From Trump" - NBC New York

III.) Which is the correct preposition, "by" or "with"? Why?

Ugh, I know already, I know. This "with vs. by" thing. Again.

But why?

I did a bit of digging and found plenty of bountiful discussion here, and on many other grammar sites, about "by" or "with", transitives, agents, objects, passive, etc. Yet, no definitive answer.

Listening to the statement more carefully, I thought it was a speech-writer power move: Ryan, by stating with instead of by, was asserting himself to be the agent and the meeting to be the instrument, and thereby not conceding any power to Trump. At least, not implying that it was Trump himself who was encouraging, but the fact of the meeting itself with which he felt encouraged. I mean, Ryan is not the slacker, "I'll let my popularity and smiling mug make up for my lapses in articulation and lack of intelligence," kind of guy. After all, he is the Speaker of the House. It had to be calculated, right?

A similar question, different context, of "by" or "with" came up on ELL, and I thought that after taking a stab at answering that, I'd be satisfied with my self-schooling, resolve all my inner prepositionalization insecurities, and hereafter and forevermore have an answer for any who might ask. (Keep in mind I grew up in a household where I was told to "close the light" instead of "turn off the light", and though I can read the nuances of "lip pointing" very well, I have deep-seated doubts about scary grammar stuff.) https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/89978/the-source-code-can-be-extended-by-or-extended-with-line-s-of-code/89985#89985

So, to prove my point to myself, I got back online and re-googled Ryan's statement, certain that I would find validation of my newly acquired, but admittedly still a bit shaky knowledge, only to find that many of the news outlets were replacing his "with" with their "by". Others avoided the "by v with" thing entirely. Agh!

Please help me. If I just have to suck it up and accept that I'm just as wrong when I use "by" or "with" after a particular but unclassifiable kind verb as I am when I use that other form of "regardless" (no, I won't say it) then, I can accept that.

But if anyone out there has noticed this tricky-spin, slight-o-the-hand thing, that the media outlets have done with Ryan's "with" by their "by", and has an honest and true answer for me, please bring it.

And if, there really is no answer, just tell me. Do me a favor and disabuse me of my piffling notions that there is a need for a definitive, clear-cut, yay-nay, "by" or "with". I'll just go back to practicing my "por o para" or "ser y estar" vocabulario and get my fix for fixed-things in that way.

Here's the statement:

"The speaker didn’t pretend that everything was peaches and cream, telling reporters: "I was very encouraged with the meeting but this is a process. It takes a little time. You don't put it together in 45 minutes.” ..."

(From one article on foxnews.com, but I will try to find the YouTube clip...)

Here's the statement in a video clip, at 1:18 and 1:40 he states "encouraged with": http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/12/trump-ryan-to-meet-amid-growing-republican-calls-to-unify.html

Solution 1:

Sigh!!

"Encouraged by" means that the presence or occurrence of something has injected courage into the encouraged person.

"Encouraged with" means that some mechanism or action has injected said courage.

Perhaps fittingly, the proverbial donkey is encouraged by a carrot and encouraged with a whip.

Solution 2:

My hypothesis is not supported by any list of linguistic references, but based on my own understanding of the English language. I apologise for the lack of academic rigour.

In the more common uses of "To encourage someone with something" as in the examples given by commentators on this post, the encouragement is the use of an inducement or facilitation to get someone to do something:

parental involvement is encouraged with strong links between the school and the local community.

children must be encouraged with love

I encouraged my donkey with a carrot

my donkey was encouraged with a carrot

So, it seems that in the common uses of the past participle of 'encourage' as an adjective + with + something, the something is normally the inducement or facilitation. In these cases, the purpose of the encouragement (what my donkey was encouraged to do with the help of the carrot) is sometimes undefined in the phrase, but it is understood from the wider context of the text or speech.

In the case of the meeting between Trump and Ryan - I was very encouraged with what I heard - there was no mention of what Ryan was encouraged to do by Trump's carrot, so it seems most likely that he did not mean this, it was a slip of the tongue.

The resulting I was very encouraged with what I heard was quite understandable in spoken English, but once committed to paper might jar with the reader because of its unexpected nature - especially in a front page headline of a few words.

I believe that the editorial staff changed 'with' to 'by' to make their headlines more readable.

Solution 3:

Forget everything you have read until now in the answers, and, forget google and Ingram. He said /with/ instead of /by/, most likely due to one of the principal features of spoken language versus written language. There are many lists re these features on the internet, most of them do not cover using one word instead of another when the speaker is actually a high-level, fluent speaker of a language.

Speech is characterized, among other things, by truncation, repetition, restatement, etc.

Here is a partial list of these features: http://linguistics.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/english-language-teaching/spoken-english-features

A useful technical word for this is dysfluency:

It is useful to think of speakers’ fluency as if it were distributed on a Gaussian curve. Extremely dysfluent speakers would be located at the left of the curve [[George Bush, for example], followed by various degrees of hesitant speakers, passing through the majority of speakers who are reasonably fluent, and ending at the right in a small group of extremely fluent speakers [[Obama]]. In spontaneous speech, it is not unusual to hear someone saying one word instead of another, or mixing up the syllables of a word. These are so-called performance errors or normal dysfluencies.

Thank you Brigitte Zellner: Pauses and the temporal structure of speech (p.48)

Solution 4:

According to ngram, “encouraged by” is quite standard—while its use seems to be dropping according to ngram, “encouraged with” flat-lines all the way across the bottom of the chart.

If you simply Google the phrase “encouraged with,” you will see a number of sites that do use “encourage with” the way Paul Ryan has—you’ll get about 450,000 results. But, if you Google “encouraged by,” you will get almost 14 million.

Some might say “encouraged by” is standard, and “encouraged with” is not (except in a statement like “children must be encouraged with love”).

However, I do not believe that Paul Ryan meant anything significant by using “with.” The key word here is “encouraged,” not “with.” Because Ryan has not declared his support for Trump, speculation is rife that the Republican party is about to explode. This statement was, IMO, designed to tamp that speculation down.

Some consider “encouraged with” perfectly natural. Maybe Paul Ryan is one of them. It may be that “encouraged with” is a regionalism—that people in his part of Wisconsin say that—or perhaps it’s something he got from his parents. Or, perhaps, speaking without notes to a national press corps that is clamoring for news, he simply misspoke. People do that. He did not, IMO, add any emphasis to the word "with," or make any facial gesture, that would suggest a hidden meaning.

In any event, that he felt “encouraged” is what the media picked up on. There is nothing at all nefarious about the way they have quoted Ryan. In the first place, those news services that wrote out the entire statement or even just that one sentence consistently included the “with”—nobody has changed his quotation. When they were simply reporting the upshot of the statement, they put quotation marks around the key word and then employed what to most is probably the standard preposition following that word. There is no reason the media should call attention to a word that deserves none, and no reason they should use it just because Paul Ryan did. It is very possible that had Ryan used the word “by,” it would not have been included within the quotation marks either. There is no reason it should—again, the key word is “encouraged.”

IMO, you are imagining things.