After repeated remarks from Tim, I spent some time investigating the correctness of the construction “needs doing.” It looks like I might have conflated it with “needs done” as a regionalism. According to the Columbia Guide to Standard American English (at Bartleby.com), “needs”:
… can combine with the preposition to plus an infinitive or a passive infinitive, as in She needs to see [to be seen by] a dentist, or it can be followed by a gerund as direct object, as in The lamp needs fixing. The past participle in a somewhat similar construction is dialectal and Nonstandard: This lamp needs fixed.
I haven’t found any other sources that look respectable, though I’d be interested to hear more. It looks like, despite the strangeness of “needs doing” to my ear, it is probably standard.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:36 am
While I agree that “needs doing” is acceptable to most (including Bartleby the Scrivener), I think that “needed done” might legitimately viewed as a “regionalism” - perhaps yours?
“…the letter basically said I could help them with any landscaping project that needed done, and because my business was slow during the summer….”
January 10th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Yes, I meant that “needs done” is a non-standard regionalism and I had conflated “needs doing” with it and assumed that the latter was a regionalism as well. Both sound odd to me though it’s possible that I’d use them in informal speech.