Till Death Do Us Part

Reading about the Terry Schiavo case, I got to thinking about the phrase till death do you part. It never made much sense to me as a kid. It was years and years before I finally was able to undo the old-fashioned syntax and morphology to arrive at a clear and sensible reading:

1. As is: till death do you part
2. Undo the reversal of verb and direct object: till death do part you
3. Turn the subjunctive do into indicative does: till death does part you
4. Replace the emphatic does part with the ordinary indicative: till death parts you

Ah, much better! Until I was able to get from till death do you part to till death parts you, I kept trying to parse the phrase like this:

1. Instead of taking till to introduce an entire clause, taking it as a preposition with death as its object, to form an adverbial prepositional phrase.
2. Taking do you as a subject-auxiliary verb inversion, such as you might have after negative adverbs, as in Never have I been so insulted. (To which the proper reply is, “That’s because you don’t get around enough!”)

In other words, I was trying to read it as, “You part until death!” But that didn’t work because first of all, till death didn’t contain a negation, so it shouldn’t trigger the do you subject-auxiliary inversion. Second, even without the inversion, You part until death doesn’t make sense because part is a telic verb, but you need an atelic verb to go with the till/until adverbial. That is, since “until X” refers to an interval of time, you need a verb that refers to something that takes place over an interval, not at a single point in time. The only way it could work would be to imagine a continual sequence of parting, coming back together, and parting again, until death puts an end to the cycle.

So for me, the unworkable semantics trumped the otherwise good syntactic interpretation I put on the phrase, and I just had to wait until I knew enough about the language to make the syntax match up with what I knew must be the intended meaning. But it looks like there are others for whom the syntax won out over the semantics. You wouldn’t know it just by hearing them say till death do you part, because you is the same whether it’s a subject (in the nonsensical reading) or an object (in the intended but harder-to-reconcile reading). But the covert reanalysis becomes overt when you is replaced with us or them, and you find till death do we part and till death do they part occurring along with till death do us/them part.

As a linguist, I can understand it, but I don’t have to like it. Why, if I were a little more uptight, I might be asking myself, “How dare them!”