Ass/Fucking Intensification

Several years ago, when Randall Munroe’s xkcd web comic still consisted mostly of scanned images of doodles from his graph-paper notebooks, I got a laugh out of this one:

It’s funny because it’s true: I do the same thing.

In September 2010, Munroe revisited the topic of obscenity-based intensifiers with this diagram:

Although Munroe didn’t include ass in this survey, I’d say the same adjectives that you don’t find intensified with fucking or as shit, you also don’t find intensified with ass. A lot of the discussion on the xkcd forum focused on which adjectives could and couldn’t be intensified in these ways, but as I thought about these three obscenity-based intensifiers, it occurred to me that even one and the same adjective can’t always be intensified by all three of these intensifiers. In fact, I discovered that the rules for how to use fucking, ass, and as shit are pretty subtle.

For comparison, let’s look at the intensifier really. You can use really to intensify a predicative adjective (i.e., an adjective that comes after the linking verb be), as in

This car is really sweet.

You can also use it to intensify an attributive adjective (i.e., one that modifies a noun), as in

He has a really sweet car.

Fucking can intensify both predicative and attributive adjectives, too; you can substitute fucking for really in both of the example sentences with no problem:

This car is fucking sweet.
He has a fucking sweet car.

So can as shit, although as we see below, it starts to get a little awkward before an attributive adjective. That’s probably due to long adjective phrases in general not sounding so good before the nouns they modify.

This car is sweet as shit.
?He has a sweet-as-shit car.

Ass, however, can intensify only attributive adjectives. Put it with a predicative adjective and it’s just silly:

*This car is sweet-ass.
He has a sweet-ass car.

By the way, if someone says something is as “nasty as shit” or “disgusting as shit”, you might be able to interpret as shit is an ordinary comparative phrase. But when they say “sweet as shit”, you know as shit has now become completely grammaticalized as an intensifier. Come to think of it, the same goes for pissed as shit, something I actually heard a dormmate say in college.

So anyway, as I was saying, it looks like two of the obscenity-based intensifiers, fucking and as shit, can go with either predicative or attributive adjectives, while ass is limited to attributives. This peculiarity of ass may be a relic of its origin. Patricia O’Conner writes on her Grammarphobia blog that the original ass-suffixed adjective was big, and at first it was written big-assed, and referred to people that had big asses. She cites the Oxford English Dictionary‘s first attestation, from 1944:

The marines’ chosen name for their female aides is bams, from big-assed marines.

O’Conner continues:

An extended use of this literal meaning—applied to airplanes with big rear ends—was recorded in the military beginning in 1945. Both the OED and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang have citations from that time, when a plane with a large tail section (especially the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress) was referred to as a “big-ass bird” or “big-assed bird.”

The phonetic simplification from big-assed to big-ass is unsurprising; it’s exactly the same change that took place in ice(d) cream and is ongoing in ice(d) tea (which with the right accent can even sound like “ass tea”). The semantic shift from something with a big ass to something that is itself big is understandable as well. The OED‘s earliest example of that is from 1945, referring to a policeman’s “big ass nightstick”.

But the complications don’t end with the limitation of ass to attributive adjective modification. With fucking and as shit both able to modify predicative adjectives, there is the possibility of using both in a single predicative adjective phrase, as in

(That’s) fucking annoying as shit.

You can get a similar doubling fucking and ass with attributive adjectives; for example,

a fucking sweet-ass car

This kind of double intensification is much less natural with other intensifiers; for instance, ?his really very expensive car is questionable. You can also pair fucking with really or very, but there’s a condition: fucking gets to be closer to the noun:

a really/very fucking expensive car
*a fucking really/very expensive car

(You might be thinking that a fucking really expensive car sounds fine, but what’s going on there is that fucking is modifying the entire nominal really expensive car, the same way as it could to with car all by itself: His fucking car is parked across the sidewalk! If you put in some other adjectives and separate fucking from the nominal, the phrase is questionable at best: ?/*a totally awesome but fucking really expensive car.)

I’ve paired fucking with as shit, and fucking with ass, but what about ass with as shit? Sorry, no can do:

*This car is sweet-ass as shit.
*He bought a sweet-ass as shit car.

It’s no surprise that predicative sweet-ass as shit is no good, given that predicative sweet-ass is no good, either. Attributive *sweet-ass as shit may be ungrammatical simply because it’s a long adjective phrase coming before the noun it modifies–the same thing that happened with ?sweet as shit car, but made worse now with the addition of ass-intensification.

Another wrinkle turns up when it comes to comparative forms of adjectives; i.e. their -er or more ___ forms. Fucking, like really and very, can’t modify comparative forms, whether they’re predicative or attributive adjective. The same goes for ass with its attributive adjectives:

*This car is really/very/fucking sweeter.
*He has a really/very/fucking sweeter car than me.
*He has a really/very sweeter car than me.
*He has a sweeter-ass car than me.

So early in 2011 when the question came up on Twitter on what the proper comparative of bad-ass should be, the answer should have been not worse-ass, bad-asser, or even badder-asser, but none of the above.

Once again, though, the obscenity-based intensifiers are different from ordinary intensifiers. They can modify comparatives after all, provided they get introduced by a lot:

This car is a lot fucking sweeter.
He has a lot fucking sweeter car.

(There’s also the question of why it’s not *an a lot fucking sweeter car, but that’s another story.)

But wait a minute! What about as shit? It has complications of its own. I said above that it has been completely grammaticalized into an intensifier, but I lied. It still has some of its original meaning–not in the shit part, but in the part that compares some property of the modified noun with that of shit. Sure, to be dumb as shit means to be really dumb, but if we’re talking even dumber than that, we don’t just say *dumber as shit; it has to be dumber than shit.

Intensification with fucking, ass, and as shit: a taste of syntactic anal-ysis.

More Agreement With Nearest in Tag Questions

For my birthday in 1980, I was given the game Black Box. It’s a fun game, and I’ve kept it all these years. The object is to figure out where in an 8×8 grid your opponent has placed five balls. You do this by sending imaginary rays into a plastic model of the grid at various locations, and learning whether they have scored a direct hit, or been deflected in a new direction. When you figure out where a ball is located, you mark its place on the model with one of the yellow balls provided, which are just the right size and color to be delicious yellow gumballs. It occurs to me now that Parker Brothers probably stopped making the game because it was a choking hazard because of the yellow-gumball factor. I still have to resist the urge to pop one of those yellow balls into my mouth when I play Black Box.

I had to resist again when I showed Adam the game a few weeks ago. Adam didn’t seem to be affected; he just kept trying to figure out where I’d hidden my balls (my five balls, that is), and eventually asked me:

This is how your balls are arranged, aren’t they?

He was right, but how about that tag question? You’d expect a tag question starting with This is to end with isn’t it?, but instead it ends with aren’t they. It’s as if the question tag were attaching to the clause your balls are arranged instead of to the larger This is how….

I did something similar during a conversation a few months earlier. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember saying this at one point:

You don’t think she’s been coaching him, has she?

Again, you’d think a tag question beginning with You don’t would end with do you? Instead, the tag has been attracted to the smaller clause she’s been coaching him. But it’s not simply a case of agreement with nearest, as I classified it a few years ago. I chose the tag has she instead of does she because of the she’s in that nearer clause, but there’s still a way that the tag is tied to the farther-away clause. Notice that if the tag question were just She’s been coaching him…?, the tag would be hasn’t she instead of has she? The reason I’m able to have a non-negated tag is that the first clause, You don’t think…, is still having an effect. In short, the tag has she is a hybrid: It has the positive polarity of do you but the actual word choice and subject-verb agreement of hasn’t she.

One of these days when it’s not so late at night, I’ll get on COCA and see how often this kind of quasi-agreement-with-nearest turns up. In the meantime, your own real-life examples are welcome in the comments.

UPDATE, Jan. 12, 2011: I’ve replaced the paragraph discussing the coaching question with one that has a more explicit and (I hope) clearer discussion, and deleted the paragraph that originally came after it. Now I tell myself once again: Don’t do linguistics blogging so late at night! And this time I mean it!

uttered by me; what context?

Gay, Straight, or Lying

A few weeks ago I listened to an episode of the “Stuff Mom Never Told You” podcast about bisexuality. (Sorry, I can’t seem to find it on the SMNTY site, which is hard to navigate.) The hosts talked about a widely held belief to the effect that bisexuality does not exist, and those who identify as bisexual are “gay, straight, or lying.” They kept using this phrase to describe the situation, and after doing some Googling, I find that the phrase seems to have made it into wide circulation with the 2003 publication of J. Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. On pages 95-96, he wrote:

[Gay men] have a saying: “You’re either gay, straight, or lying.”

The phrase gained even wider currency after a July 5, 2005 New York Times article by Benedict Carey, who wrote:

People who claim bisexuality, according to these critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted. “You’re either gay, straight or lying,” as some gay men have put it.

Both sources attribute the phrasing to gay men, and imply that it’s been around for some time, but these sources are the earliest that I’ve seen it in written English. However, being the literal-minded kind of guy that I am, my question about this phrase is: Why isn’t it gay or straight and lying?

Let’s assume that the or in this phrase is intended to be exclusive or, since it’s coordinating the mutually exclusive properties of gayness and straightness. Furthermore, let’s assume that in this phrase, lying doesn’t refer to lying about any old thing, but to lying about being bisexual. In that case, gay, straight, or lying means that there are three possibilities:

1. You’re gay.
2. You’re straight.
3. You’re lying about being bisexual. That is, you’re either gay or straight.

The third possibility is just the union of the first two possibilities. Why bother saying it, then?

Well, the idea is to include the part about lying. If you identify as bisexual, you’re lying. You’re either gay or straight.

It seems to me that you could state this meaning more straightforwardly (if you will) with the phrase gay or straight and lying. But that’s certainly not what people say. I get exactly three hits when I search for “gay or straight and lying”. (And only four for “straight or gay and lying”.)

Maybe gay, straight, or lying is more appealing because it has a less complex structure — the nice flat kind of structure you see just below.

Gay or straight and lying has the two-tiered structure you see in the middle diagram, not to mention an extra word.

Worse, this phrasing could also be interpreted to have the structure in the bottom diagram, which to my ear makes lying want to scope not over bisexual, but over straight or gay. That gives us two unintended and hard-to-decrypt meanings:

1. “gay, or lying about being straight; i.e. gay or closeted gay”
2. “gay or lying about being gay, i.e. gay or gay-acting straight”

Which do you think is easier? Separating the intended compositional meaning from a few unintended compositional meanings in gay or straight and lying? Or skipping compositionality and simply assigning the intended meaning to gay, straight, or lying as an idiom?

Why To Bother?

A couple of months ago, I caught a few minutes of a local morning news show. Coming up was a segment featuring a guy selling a system that would protect your gutter from leaf debris and other gunk. As a teaser for the segment, just before the commercial break, there was a message on the bottom of the screen saying

Why to clean your roof

That one phrase poked a hole in what I’d thought was an interesting case of complementary distribution, which I’d only noticed a few weeks before. I had been thinking about tenseless clauses — clauses in which the verbs don’t have tense, such as Me worry? More specifically, I’d been thinking about tenseless WH questions, such as What to do?, which you might find as rhetorical questions or in soliloquies. For most WH words, the tenseless question uses an infinitive. If you just use the plain form of the verb, it’s ungrammatical:

• what to do / *what do
• who(m) to call / *who(m) call
• where to go / *where go
• when to go / *when go
• how to do it / *how do it

For one WH word, though, the pattern is reversed. At least, that’s what I thought:

*why to bother / why bother

I wondered if semantic, pragmatic, or functional differences between tenseless why questions and other tenseless WH questions might explain the difference in syntax. One difference in pragmatics that occurred to me is that the who/what/where/when/how questions are asking the details about an action that you’ve already decided you’re going to do. The why question does not make this presupposition. If you’re asking for a reason to do something, you haven’t decided you’re going to do it yet. But I didn’t see how that would bear on the choice of an infinitive over a plain verb form.

A functional difference that I noticed is that tenseless who/what/where/when/how questions are usually asked to oneself, often in literary contexts (a fact that CGEL notes), with an intention of finding an answer. The why question, on the other hand, is often asked of someone else, with the function of advising against a course of action, the understood answer being “there’s no reason to take this action.” Again, though, I didn’t see what that would have to do with the choice of an infinitive over a plain verb.

There was also, I thought, another syntactic difference, beyond the use of an infinitive or a plain verb form. The infinitival WH questions could stand alone as questions to oneself, or as embedded questions: I know {what to do, who(m) to call, where to go, when to go, how to do it. The tenseless WH questions using the plain form of a verb do not work as embedded questions: *I don’t know why to bother. But this difference still didn’t seem to say anything about the other differences.

After seeing the teaser on TV, I wondered if the original syntactic difference I’d noticed was real at all. A look into COCA shows that it’s not. Out of 103 results for why to, here is just a handful of the relevant hits to go with why to clean your roof:

• Students will need clear and understandable (browsable) instructions for how to do this as well as why to do this.
• He said he wants to cut contracting by 10 percent a year for the next three years, which, if you do the math, is about one quarter – a little more than a quarter of all contractors. Why to do that?
• Knowing what to do, how do it, and perhaps most important, why to do it has become an integral part of teaching.
• Here are some common reasons why people write short stories… and why to ignore them.
• think of how many articles help educate readers about how and why to do something
• Within a sport applications course devoted to teaching preservice physical education majors how and why to modify outdoor sports for secondary students, a 6-day flag football season structured around the Sport Education model is included.
• I think we lack common sense at times in our judgments of why to justify something.
• Instead, money had become why to do anything and everything.
• Not just telling them to be good people, but how to do it and why to do it.
• The Navajo storyteller Yellowman was asked why to bother to tell Coyote stories to adults.

I even found an embedded why to question:

But when you can say you are a litigator specializing in construction accidents relating to asbestos removal, then people are going to know why to hire you.

That said, there are still a lot fewer COCA hits for why to questions than there are who(m)/what/where/when/how to:

• how to: 70K
• what to: 20K
• where to: 7K
• when to: 3K
• who(m) to: 1.5K
• why to: 100

Now that I’ve learned that why can indeed go with infinitives, what about the other direction, with WH words other than why going with the plain form of the verb? That’s harder to search for, but if you find one in the wild, please put it in the comments.

I’m a Believer That

In September, Benjamin Barrett posted this message to the American Dialect Society email list:

A non-native speaker of English asks me whether the following is grammatical:

“I’m a firm believer that anyone can have a breakthrough right in her own backyard.”

It’s from an essay of Oprah in the current issue of O Magazine.

It took me about five reads before I spotted anything possibly amiss, but “a firm believer that” definitely appears wrong now that I see it.

I think this must come from a cross of “I’m a firm believer in the idea that” and “I firmly believe that.”

You have to wonder how bad something actually sounds to someone if they had to read it five times before they even identified it as something possibly ungrammatical. Still, as I thought about Barrett’s message, I realized that this agent nominalization of the verb believe was different from those of (other) transitive verbs. For example, the verb find takes a noun phrase (NP) object, as in find the lost wallet. But when you use the noun finder, you can’t just put an NP after it: *finder the lost wallet. You have to use an adaptor of sorts: the preposition of: finder of the lost wallet. (This paper by Mark C. Baker and Nadya Vinokurova discusses this fact for English and Yakuts, and has references to other literature on the subject.)

Prepositional phrase (PP) complements can go with a verb or its agent nominal with no change in form at all. For example, you can regularly listen to a radio program, or you can be a regular listener to Talk of the Nation (an example I found in COCA). (PP adjuncts don’t go so well with agent nominals. I wash with soap, but I’m not a *washer with soap.) I’m not sure about infinitival complements. You can say that Evel Knievel attempted to jump the Snake River Canyon, but you wouldn’t say that Knievel was an attemptor to jump it. As for clausal complements, believer shows that they can go with at least one verb or its agent nominal with no change necessary.

Here are some of the relevant examples of believer that that I found in COCA. There were 133 results; I just looked at the first page of 20 and found 18 relevant examples:

1. I’m a believer that a president looks strongest and best in mid-November to the end of December
2. I’m a big believer that there are 8-10 teams in the Western Conference that are about equal.
3. Im a believer that both Peru and Aruba cant wait to ship him back to Birmingh
4. I’m a firm believer that as long as we have the right science and the right engineering behind it
5. I’m a firm believer that you should be your best you.
6. WHETHER you’re an unwavering carnivore or a believer that burgers are only for statin dependents,
7. I am a believer that the system has gone badly awry and needs massive reform
8. Yoo is a firm believer that it is better to let each of the departments of the government stake its
9. Here’s why I’m a Believer that Neil Diamond belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
10. So you’re a believer that your body will tell you what it needs?
11. I’m always a believer that you would do better to let Microsoft to do a first service pack
12. I’m always a believer that you would do better to let Microsoft to do a first service pack
13. I’m a strong believer that each man has a destiny.
14. I’m a firm believer that a coach is whatever his record is.
15. I am a firm believer that, if you look good, you might feel better.
16. I’ve always been a firm believer that hard work pays off
17. I’m a strong believer that if the state would take the lead, it would make a huge difference
18. Vygotsky is a firm believer that social interaction and cultural influences have a

There were only 30 results for the plural believers that, of which the following eight were relevant:

1. people who are interested in alternative medicine even though they aren’t gung-ho believers that it’s a cure-all.
2. Some bolters are perennial quitters of associations or believers that the grass is always greener elsewhere.
3. While we’re firm believers that there’s something to love about nearly every beach
4. Lew and I may be the last of the naive believers that the system works if you get folks involved in it.
5. people in the chip industry are much more believers that this strain is good
6. the majority of us who are true supporters and believers that Bob Dole is the next president to lead us into the next century
7. And I’m pretty sure that I’m turning some of you guys into believers that I can evolve into myself at any given time.
8. Keith and I are firm believers that what goes around comes around.

For comparison, I also looked for agent nominals of other verbs that take clausal complements, but they’re hard to come by. All the COCA results I got for sayer were proper names. I got a few results for claimer, but none followed by a that clause expressing the claim. Nor with thinker or announcer. I did hit pay dirt with indicator:

Larger breasts sag over time, so it was an indicator that a woman was older.

Can anyone think of others?

Coming back to believer that, I did a search for Barrett’s preferred phrasing, believer in the idea that, and got exactly two results:

1. Houston appears to be a firm believer in the idea that love can conquer all.
2. I’m a firm believer in the idea that one person can make a difference

It looks like the shorter believer that option is the clear winner. In a later message, Barrett accepted the phrasing as “idiomatic usage”, but my conclusion is that this is just an ordinary agent nominalization of a verb that takes a clausal complement.

New Data Points

Here are a few items I’ve come across in the past several months. If this were my first year writing this blog, each of them would have been immediately worth a whole post. But since I’ve been doing this for more than seven years, I’ve already written about these topics, in some cases numerous times. So now they’ve just been sitting in my drafts pile until I had enough of them scraped together to put in a combined post.

On a Language Log post on a malnegation from Newt Gingrich, commenter Tom Recht went slightly off topic to offer the following:

A colleague, on hearing that a mutual friend had applied for the same fellowship she had applied for, recently said to me: “I hope he doesn’t get it and I don’t get it.”

What she meant was not “I hope that [[he doesn't get it] and [I don't get it]]”, but “I hope that [not [he gets it and I don't get it]]”. She was morphosyntactically negating only the first of the two coordinated clauses even though the negation applied to the entire coordination — grammatically impossible, you might think, but immediately intelligible in context.

A nice summation of exactly the kind of coordination that first grabbed my attention in a set of phenomena that I first called “coordination with half-negation” but now call by the more general term of wide-scoping operators.

Next, here’s something Glen sent me back in March:

Just found the following sentence in a student paper I’m grading:

“George believes that making the [website] template was better than buying [from an outside designer] because the integration costs associated with testing and integrating an external design into our existing system would be too high.”

FLoP?

FLoP, of course, is the initial name “Friends in Low Places” coordination, which I gave to the kind of nonparallel coordinations that I now call right-node wrapping. Not just any nonparallel coordination is an RNW. The last coordinate has to wrap around something that actually belongs to both coordinates. In this case, the complex verb integrate … into our existing system wraps around the direct object an external design. By all rights, that should encapsulate this noun phrase inside the second coordinate, but in fact, it’s also the direct object for the first verb, testing.

My wife and I were discussing the latest news from the hyper-religious Arkansas Duggar family. You know, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, who decided they would use no form of birth control, “let God decide” how many children they should have, and give them all names that begin with J, no matter how ridiculous those names became after they used the obvious ones. (Jinger? Does that rhyme with ringer or is it homophonous with ginger? I hope the latter.) God may have been indicating a decision when Michelle recently miscarried their 20th child. Giving me the news, my wife said,

The Duggars lost their 20th child.

I noticed the same ambiguity here that I noticed in sentences like Doug lost his first tooth. If you look just at first tooth or 20th child, you have to figure out what sequence you’re talking about. For Doug’s first tooth, you probably mean “first tooth to erupt in Doug’s mouth.” For 20th child, you probably mean “the 20th child that they conceived.” But in the construction VERB one’s Nth NOUN, the verb overrides the default set of ordered events, and the whole thing means “VERB a NOUN for the Nth time.” So Doug lost his first tooth has the intended meaning of “lost a tooth for the first time” along with the unintended meaning of “lost the first tooth that he cut”. And The Duggars lost their 20th child, in addition to the sad intended meaning of “lose the 20th child that they conceived,” could also have the much sadder, not-intended meaning of “lose a child for the 20th time.”

Lastly, here’s a sentence I heard from someone talking about picky eaters:

What is something similar to raw carrots that you’d be willing to give a shot?

Nice extraposition of the relative clause that you’d be willing to give a shot from the something it modifies, but what really interested me was the fact that in the verb phrase give [something] a shot, it’s the indirect object that got pulled out to be the modified noun: something … that you’d be willing to give a shot. In a recent post, I discussed why Who Brynn gave the cookies (with who as an extracted indirect object) sounded so much worse than Who Brynn gave the cookies to (with who as an extracted object of a preposition). Most commenters agreed that it was, but Glen commented:

Well, let me just register my surprise. None of the *-marked constructions here sound even slightly bad to me. Not that I object to the ‘to’, because it can help clarify things in some cases. But omitting it just isn’t a problem at all for me.

Well, Glen, here’s one that popped right out in spontaneous conversation. Now I’m the one registering surprise!

Dip Your Card

Over at Visual Thesaurus, I have a column talking about how diphthong (or dipthong) has joined a family of dip-based insults, including dipstick, dipshit, and just plain dip. When I researched the column, I was surprised to learn that my imagined chronology for these insults was backwards. I first heard dipstick in the early 1980s, as my peers picked it up from Rosco P. Coltrane in The Dukes of Hazzard. When I later heard dipshit, I figured it was some kind of folk-etymology/eggcornization of dipstick by people who didn’t understand what was so insulting about the stick part, and figured it ought to be something legitimately taboo. Then when I started hearing dip in the mid-1980s, I thought it was simply a clipped version of (depending on the speaker) either dipstick or dipshit, done by speakers who were too embarrassed to say either of the longer words. But I’ve come to find out that dip probably originated in the early 1930s; dipshit came next, in the 1960s, and at about the same time or a little later came dipstick. At least, in its insult sense. The literal meaning was in use for quite a while prior to that.

But I could still be right, you know. I really never did hear dip as an insult until after dipstick and dipshit, so I think it’s at least plausible that the dip of the 1930s died out, only to be reinvented as a clipping of one of the dip compounds.

All this writing about dips reminded me of something I saw during our family trip to New York City during the summer. We stayed in Jersey City, where we went out to eat one night with Ben Zimmer’s family, and Doug and Adam played Cut the Rope with Ben’s son on Ben’s iPad. The next morning, we took the subway into Manhattan. At the station, we were buying a fare card at an automated dispenser, and paid with a credit card. When it was time to pay, the instructions on the screen said, “Dip your credit card.” But the slot to put the credit card into wasn’t vertical; it was horizontal! At gas stations where I live, this instruction is usually rendered as “Insert and withdraw credit card in one smooth motion.” In my lexical semantics, that meaning can only go with dip if the motion is vertical. The same goes for the programmers of the credit card readers, too, I think. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they opt for the four words of Dip your credit card over the eight words that I usually see? Is this a New York thing? A generational thing? Who else has noticed this semantic broadening?

How to Identify Active Voice

This week, Grammar Girl is running a guest script I wrote on the active voice. It’s actually part 1 of a two-episode series on passive voice. As Geoff Pullum said of his 2,500-word Language Log post on passive voice, “I can’t make it simpler than it is.” GG and I tried, planning on a single episode to clear up what is and is not passive voice, but eventually decided to split the episode and spend part one establishing just what active voice is. Even that turned out to be a bit much for one episode, so I just aimed to raise listeners’ awareness of the many kinds of active-voice clauses in which the subject is not performing an action. What I left out was a paragraph on my (attempt at a) quick-and-dirty style diagnostic for whether a clause is in the active voice. So here it is for those who are interested. I suggest listening to or reading the Grammar Girl episode first, if you don’t know what I mean by semantic roles. And if you got here because you clicked over from the Grammar Girl website to begin with, welcome!

With all those possible roles for a verb’s subject, how do we know if it’s in the active voice? We need an anchor, something that we know beyond all doubt is in the active voice. Our anchor will be to take the subject and verb and put them in a simple present-tense clause with no helping verbs. No matter what, this kind of clause is in the active voice. Then, we can check the semantic role expressed by the subject in this clause, and if it’s the same one expressed by the subject in the verb phrase we’re interested in, then that verb phrase is also in the active voice. Here’s an example: Is Roscoe is dying in the active voice? Compare the simple present-tense clause Roscoe dies. The subject, Roscoe, is filling a patient role. What about in Roscoe is dying? Here, too, the subject Roscoe is filling a patient role, so Roscoe is dying is in the active voice. Another example: Is Steve has always loved Amy in the active voice? Let’s compare it to Steve loves Amy. In this clause, the subject Steve has the role of experiencer. In Steve has always loved Amy, the subject Steve is still the experiencer, so this clause is in the active voice.

Too Much

Back in October, I wrote about the opinion that thank you much is ungrammatical. I quoted a comment I left on one website where the issue came up:

“Thank you much” IS a complete sentence, at least if you accept “Thank you” as a complete (albeit noncanonical) sentence in the first place. If you object to “much” instead of “very much”, note that it appears alone in questions and negative sentences, e.g. “he doesn’t talk much”, “Does he talk much?” If you’re objecting to the use of plain “much” outside these “negative polarity contexts”, that’s a different matter, because that does sound odd in present-day English.

In the course of writing the thank you much post, I came across this video for learners of English as a foreign language:

In it, a teacher named Valen explains how to use much, many, and a lot of. Her explicit message is that much goes with mass nouns; many goes with count nouns; and a lot of goes with either. But in her examples, she seems to send the message that unadorned much is a no-no. Valen’s first two examples with much are:

I drank too much water.
Our teacher gave us too much homework.

Then she moves on to an example with many: Many cars are equipped with GPS systems. After that, she illustrates the mistake of putting many with a mass noun:

*I drank many coffee.

She then reiterates that since coffee is a mass noun, it can’t go with many, but can go with much. She erases many from the sentence, and replaces it not with much, as she seemed to be getting ready to do, but with too much:

I drank too much coffee.

Never a word of explanation why she’s doing this. (Also noted: She pronounces /str/ as [ʃtr], at least in the word abstract.)

Since that post last month, I’ve been thinking more about whether much is becoming (or has become) a negative polarity item (NPI). Whatever its status, it’s certainly not purely an NPI, since there are so many positive polarity contexts in which it sounds OK; for example, in the company of modifiers such as very (as in Thank you ~ much) and too (as in the video), much doesn’t sound bad at all.

As it turns out, Ji Won Lee at SUNY Buffalo has been looking into the question of NPI much, using an arsenal of corpora to find out. On her web page are handouts from several presentations on this topic. Her findings include that the development of much as an NPI was followed by the rise of a lot of/lots of, and that the shift to mostly-NPI much (and to some extent many, too) happened pretty quickly, between the late 1890s and 1940.

UPDATE, Nov. 29, 2011: Joe Kessler (in the comments) and JillianP (via Twitter) and Ji Won herself (in a polite email) have made me aware that I chose the wrong gendered pronouns to refer to Ji Won in the post. I have made the corrections, and apologize for the error. I’m also embarrassed that I didn’t remember meeting Ji Won at LSA 2011; she reminded me that she had come to look at my poster, and I see in my notes that indeed she did.

The Witch Mary

Grammar Girl is running a guest script I wrote today (that is, she’s running it today; I wrote it some time ago), on difficult syntax in Christmas carols in general, and in particular in “What Child Is This?” The script was inspired by a real-life misunderstanding that Doug had seven years ago, and which I blogged about at the time. I’ve also been thinking about that song because Adam has been practicing playing it on the piano, and he sounds really good!

As I wrote in that blog post and in today’s Grammar Girl podcast, part of the difficulty is due to the perennial confusion between lie and lay (which I also wrote about in this post about the song “If I Just Lay Here”). For a while, I considered concluding the podcast with a sentence or two about how other traditional Christmas carols can serve as good models of for using lie and lay in the way that is currently considered the standard:

• Where the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even
• the little lord Jesus laid down his sweet head
• the stars in the sky looked down where he lay
• how still we see thee lie
• …certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay

I decided against it, because I didn’t want to give the impression that the whole episode was just about lie vs. lay. But as my wife and I were thinking about other Christmas songs, she started running through “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” (which I wrote about last year). The second verse goes like this:

In Bethlehem in Israel this blessed babe was born,
And laid within a manger upon this blessed morn;
The which his mother Mary did nothing take in scorn.

This one isn’t so good for helping you remember the difference between lie and lay. Sure, you could parse it as was [born and laid], the standard way, but if you don’t already know that’s how it’s supposed to be, you could easily just parse it as [was born] and [laid], with laid used nonstandardly as an intransitive verb.

However, that wasn’t the part that grabbed my attention. Before my wife could move to the third verse, I was interrupting with, “Mary, a witch?!” Then: “Oh, which!”

Two changes in English created this misunderstanding. First is the simplification of the consonant cluster [hw] to [w] for many speakers, as highlighted in this Family Guy clip that I learned about from Language Log a few years ago.

Having the last name I do, I think I still have the [hw] cluster in my language. Sometimes when I give my name over the phone, the person on the other end will hear it as “Quitman”, because they don’t have [hw] in their speech and figure that I must have been saying [kʰw] instead of [hw]. On the other hand, other times they’ll simply not hear the [h] at all, and think my name is “Wittman”, which makes me wonder if I actually pronounce [hw] as consistently as I think I do.

The second change is the loss of the which as a relative pronoun. I never knew about it until I listened to this verse. The which is in the Oxford English Dictionary, though. It’s sure enough archaic now, but was showing up in the 1300s, as in this OED citation:

How god bigan þe law hym gyfe Þe quilk the Iuus in suld life.

Their last citation is from 1884, from Tennyson:

He holp the King to break down our castles, for the which I hate him.

There have to be kids who got all confused when they learned Jesus’s mother was a witch. Any of you know of any?