More Wide-Scoping Modals

Two posts ago, I was talking about sentences like They must have loosened the pins and {he didn’t notice / him not have noticed}. Based on just examples with epistemic modals, the interim conclusion I reached was:

It looks like the pattern here is actually that the second clause must have tense, but person/number marking is optional.

Commentator Ellen K. added that she preferred the phrasing They must have loosened the pins and he not have noticed, so this is another possibility to consider. However, it is still consistent with the hypothesis that person/number marking is optional; the only detail is whether the no-person/no-number verb requires a nominative subject or not. For now, I’m going to avoid this third phrasing option, and just see what patterns there are with the phrasings I’ve been working with. The grammaticality judgments I’ll be giving are mine alone; however, my own intuitions have probably been compromised by thinking about these sentences and saying them to myself so much. I welcome your grammaticality judgments.

So, now I’ll look at some sample sentences with deontic modals, i.e. those that express obligation or permission. I’ll start with those expressing obligation, and go ahead and include the quasi-modal have to with them:

Deontic modals: requirement or obligation

• PRESENT TIME
  
  
  
  1. You must steal the medallion and {*they don’t see you / them not see you}.
  2. You have to steal the medallion and {?they don’t see you / them not see you}.
  3. You should steal the medallion and {*they don’t see you / them not see you}.
  4. You ought to steal the medallion and {*they don’t see you / ?them not see you}.
• PAST TIME
  
  
  
  1. You had to steal the medallion and {*they didn’t see you / them not see you}.
  2. You should have stolen the medallion and {*they didn’t see you / *them not see you / them not have seen you}.
  3. You ought to have stolen the medallion and {*they didn’t see you / ?them not see you / them not have seen you}.

With obligation deontic modals, then, it looks like the second clause again must have tense: You can see this in the past-time examples where them not see you is ungrammatical. Now, however, person/number marking is not optional; it’s forbidden. As for why the ought example sounds bad either way, I don’t know.

I’m not done with these wide-scoping modals yet. Soon I’ll look at dynamic modals (those that talk about ability or willingness), and I want to take a closer look at negations that scope over an entire coordination, too.

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Outrageous, Ridiculous, and Just Plain Suck

From today’s Columbus Dispatch:

Most say the gas prices are outrageous, ridiculous and just plain suck.
(Tim Doulin, “Going numb, gallon by gallon,” p. A4)

I am shocked and disgusted to read this kind of language in the newspaper! Here, I’ll fix it:

Most say the gas prices are outrageous, ridiculous and just plain sucky.

That’s better. Instead of the non-parallel coordination of the tree on the left, we have the nice, parallel coordination of the tree on the right.

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Modals, Negation, and Caviar and Beans

I read in Dear Abby earlier this week about a nephew who was given some money to treat his grandparents to dinner, but for unknown reasons, did not do so. The current Abby responded in his defense:

He might have offered, and the offer was declined.

It’s another case of a modal that is syntactically part of just one clause (He might have offered), but semantically spreads its hypotheticality over two coordinated clauses (the second one being the offer was declined). The last example of something like this that I wrote about was

They must have loosened the hooks and Mr. Cleaver didn’t notice it.

Better and Best

Matthew Watson asks:

For some time, I have been wondering about constructions like “He better tell me,” which use “better” as a modal verb. I have always used a separate auxiliary like “had” (e.g. “He had better tell me”) and parsed the sentence as a truncated sort of comparative statement (e.g. short for “He had better tell me than not”). However, I have read so many good writers now that use “better” by itself that I am beginning to think the construction has become an idiom.

Do you know what’s correct - should I use “had” with “better,” and how do you parse a solitary “better”?

Check These Out

I’ve accumulated a number of links to linguistics posts that I’ve been meaning to recommend; now it’s time to get them all out of the docket at once.

First, here’s a guy giving a demonstration of the difference between [ʌ] and [ɘ], in a language where the schwa can be in a stressed syllable.

Folk etymology meets the acronym (OK, initialism or initialization, if you insist) in this discussion of courtesy copy from Josh Millard.

When you see a page of Old English text with stuff like Forþon him gelyfeð lyt, se þa ah lifes ƿyn on it, the first thing you notice is how different the words and letters are. And if you don’t know how to read Old English, that’s all you notice, so you never appreciate, for example, how different the syntax is. Karl Hagen of Polysyllabic meets this need by taking a piece of Modern English prose (by Dan Brown!), and putting it into Old English syntax while leaving the words and morphology unchanged. Interesting fact: Hagen was a consultant on the recent computer-animated movie version of Beowulf.

Next, Greg Larson goes on one of his celebrated rants, this time on an abuse of the adjective extreme by Pringles EXTREME Screamin’ Dill Pickle potato-chip-like salted snacks.

Finally, a couple of recent items of interest from Language Log, for any readers out there who don’t already read it. Here is Geoff Pullum on a simple argument that I’ve never heard made before that puts one more nail in the coffin of the case against singular they. And here is Arnold Zwicky on a construction that you would think just has to be — has to be — a mistake, but which seems to be produced intentionally by a number of speakers.

Let’s Be Safe Than Sorry

Here’s a post that’s been sitting in my pile of drafts for more than two years. I know it’s been that long; just look at the “current events” item from January 2006 that it starts out with:

Last week, David Lee Roth’s morning radio show in New York (a replacement for Howard Stern’s program) was canceled, after less than four months, following bad reviews, low ratings, and conflict with the station management. I learned about the situation in an AP story the week before the cancelation. In it, the editor of a radio trade publication was quoted as saying:

I think the radio industry expects this will end sooner than later.

Every Monster’s Mouth

A friend of mine recently wrote, asking:

I have a question regarding grammar. We have a book called “One Hungry Monster” and throughout the story, you get to count monsters from 1 to 10 as they beg to be fed. Finally, the little boy decides to feed them, and then you get to count from 1 to 10 the different types of food he brings (2 loaves of bread etc.) The 10th thing is “10 jars of peanut butter”, but the boy adds “and not a speck of jam, because I want every monster mouth shut tighter than a clam. Should it be “monster mouth” or “monster’s mouth”? I think they both sound correct, so I have no idea.

I was a little surprised by this question, since this book didn’t seem at all like my friend’s typical taste in leisure reading, and I’m almost certain she can count much higher than 10. Anyway, I’ll share what I wrote back:

Every monster mouth and every monster’s mouth are both correct. The first is just the compound noun monster mouth (it doesn’t matter that it’s written as two words) just like peanut butter or oven cleaner, put together with the determiner every to make a noun phrase. (A noun phrase is a noun plus any adjectives you care to add [in this case, none] and a
determiner if needed. Determiners include a, the, some, every, no, etc., as well as possessive forms: my, your, Neal’s, every monster’s.) Every monster’s mouth is a noun phrase, too, consisting of the plain old non-compound noun mouth and a determiner: every monster’s. (Inside that determiner lurks another noun phrase: every monster. But that’s another story.) In short:

Other grammar questions? Send them here!

Kamuga Junku

Sometimes I find myself singing,

Kamuga junku, kamuga junku!

What does kamuga junku mean, you wonder? Well, me too. Unlike the helpful lyrics of “Hakuna Matata”, which explain very clearly that the phrase means “No worries,” the lyrics to “Kamuga Junku” state that there are no easy solutions for understanding this phrase:

Kamuga junku, kamuga junku!
There is no English equivalent.
Kamuga junku, kamuga junku!
Kamuga junku, kamuga junku!

Consistently Behaving Beats Behaving Consistently

Not too long ago, somebody lost track of how low we were getting on cat food, and consequently somebody found themself having to buy whatever cat food they could find in an unfamiliar pet-supply store. After walking past the bins of live crickets in the “weird pets” section, I got to the dog section and saw this sign posted in the aisle:

We’ll help you train your dog to behave more consistently.

That could lead to trouble, I thought. Just imagine…

Customer: I want a refund for the money I wasted on this stupid training course!
Employee: I’m sorry you’re dissatisfied. Did the course not work for your dog?
Customer: Hell, no! Riley used to sometimes pee on the floor instead of barking to go outside, but now he always pees on the floor! He used to chew up the newspaper every now and then, but now he does it every single morning!
Employee: The training worked! Your dog is behaving in a much more consistent manner than he did before!

Maybe Rhyming Words Can Sound the Same

One of my favorite poems is Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”. I know at least one first-grade teacher who dares not read it aloud to her students these days, but I used to read it aloud a lot to Doug and Adam — both the Little Golden Books version that’s on loan from Mom and Dad (who used to read it to my sister Ellen), and a newer version that Jan Brett illustrated. I like that you can sing it to the tune of “Beep-Beep” and have it match right down to the repetitions at the end of each verse; that when Doug was a toddler he’d say “you elegant fowl” as “you elephant fowl”; and that piggy-wig is an exception to Steven Pinker’s rule on rhyming nonsense pairs.

However, I cannot abide Edward Lear’s limericks.