Bad Habits

I saw a magazine cover that had a teaser for an article by Dr. Oz. The list of things I could learn in his “Healthy-Life Handbook” included “Facts You Must Know,” “Tests You Need Most,” and this:

Bad Habits to Break

Let’s see, what would be a bad habit to break? Getting some exercise every day — it would be bad to break that habit, if I had it. Eating lots of fruits and vegetables — breaking that habit would be a bad thing, too. What else? Does not smoking count as a habit? It would be bad to break that habit by quitting not smoking.

When I looked inside the magazine at the article itself, the actual habits in the list consisted of eating fat-free stuff that has added sugar; taking pills to stop pain instead of finding its root cause; sitting too much; and overrelying on technology.

In other words, Oz wasn’t talking about habits it would be bad to break; he was talking about bad habits that you should break. In fact, the wording on the list title inside the magazine made this clear: It called them “Bad Habits You Should Drop.” Probably a lack of space on the magazine cover led to the ambiguous wording I saw there. The reading that the editors intended for bad habits to break corresponds to this parse:

The adjective bad modifies the noun habits, and that whole chunk is modified by to break. (The label Inf/NP means an infinitive phrase has a noun phrase gap. To break bad habits would be an Inf, but without that direct object, it’s Inf/NP.) I’ll call this the intersective reading, because the meaning is the intersection of two sets: habits that are bad, and habits that you should break. This interpretation implies that there are bad habits that you shouldn’t break, which might have been one factor that pushed me in the direction of the other reading.

That other reading corresponds to a different parse:

Here, the adjective bad and the infinitive phrase to break work together to form a meaning something like “X such that breaking X is bad”. This sort of discontinuous adjective phrase wraps around the noun it modifies, habits, and we end up with “habits such that breaking them is bad”. In a 1983 paper, Michael Jones gives the name “property fusion” to this kind of adjective-infinitive meaning.

So I read “bad habits to break” with the “property fusion” meaning, instead of the intersectional meaning, and the result was a completely different set of habits. But if the phrase had instead been good habits to develop, the ambiguity would have been hardly noticeable. The fusional meaning of “habits that it would be good to develop” and the intersective meaning of “good habits that are also habits you can/should develop” are for all practical purposes the same. Or are they? What would be some good habits to develop that are actually impossible to develop?

Man Accused of Assaulting Officer, K9 Indicted

My wife showed me a nice crash blossom yesterday. It went like this:

Mentally filling in the usual missing pieces of headline syntax, I arrived at this interpretation:

A Delaware County man is accused of assaulting an officer and a K9 has been indicted.

My wife and I agreed that that really sucked for the dog, who was taking the heat for that Delaware County man’s misdeed.

Of course, here is the intended reading, with slightly different missing pieces restored:

A Delaware County man who has been accused of assaulting an officer and a K9 has been indicted.

This crash blossom was made possible by two of the usual culprits in headline ambiguity. First, there’s the copula omission (i.e. omission of forms of be). In ordinary language, man accused of assaulting an officer wouldn’t be ambiguous; it would just be a noun, man, modified by an adjectival passive phrase, accused of assaulting an officer. Or, if you want, a “reduced relative clause”: who has been accused…. But because headlines leave out the copula, we’ve been trained to turn phrases like this into full clauses by inserting is or has been. Of course, that’s exactly what does have to happen for indicted: We have to supply our own is or has been, but being led to do the same thing for man accused paves the way for the second part of the misunderstanding.

The second part is based on the replacement of and with a comma. If the headline had read Delaware County man accused of assaulting officer and K9 indicted, the easiest parse would have been the correct one, in which and joins just officer and K9 as the objects of assaulting. Instead, the comma made the easiest parse the one in which we have two entire clauses, with K9 as the subject of the second one.

Dummy Prepositions

I dropped by a weekly discussion group at OSU yesterday, to hear Carl Pollard talk about the version of categorial grammar he’s currently developing. When it came to prepositions, he made a distinction between prepositional phrases that actually referred to a location (as in I saw a mysterious figure on the roof); and those that might as well just be plain noun phrases for all the meaning the preposition contributes. The example Carl gave was depend, which takes an on-PP as a complement, as in depend on me. He proposed not even calling on me in this example a prepositional phrase; instead, its syntactic category (its “tecto” in Carl’s jargon) would be simply be an “On Phrase”.

It can be tricky identifying these “dummy” prepositions. It’s easy enough to discard clear cases of meaningful prepositions, in verb phrases like walk to school, but it gets harder as the prepositionals become metaphorical, in phrases such as stare at him. Furthermore, you have to avoid “intransitive prepositions” (sometimes called particles), in phrases like tie up the prisoner. You might mistake up for a dummy preposition because it certainly doesn’t seem to contribute any spatial meaning. The trouble is that it also doesn’t take an object. Although it might look like the prisoner is the object, of up, if you replace the prisoner with a pronoun, you quickly realize that up isn’t taking it as an object. If it were, a phrase like *tie up him would be grammatical, just like stare at him is. Instead, the phrasal verb has to “wrap” around its pronoun direct object: tie him up. So to get a true dummy preposition, you want a preposition that contributes no spatial meaning, and also takes an object. The on after depend meets these requirements.

To further demonstrate that this kind of meaningless PP was a different thing than an ordinary PP, Carl ran it through a classic ambiguity test (which I’ve described here), having a single on-PP function in both ways at once:

It’s on Mt. Everest that I live and depend.

I laughed, and Carl said, “I knew you’d get that!” And to fellow syntactician Bob Levine, who was turning around in his seat to look at me: “Neal can coordinate anything!”

“That sentence wasn’t grammatical for you, was it?” Bob asked.

“No,” I answered. “That’s why I’m laughing!”

Gotta love that linguist humor. Where else would It’s on Mt. Everest that I live and depend work as a comedy one-liner? If you’ve got some others, let’s hear them!

Found in the Wild

On the August 30 episode of Kevin Allison’s Risk! podcast, I heard two examples of syntactic phenomena that I’ve written about before, that supposedly don’t occur much in actual written or spoken English. Not to say that they never happen, but they’re rare enough to have caught my attention.

As Allison says during each episode, Risk! is the podcast where “people tell true stories they never thought they’d dare to share.” It’s labeled “Explicit” on iTunes, and I should note that they don’t mean explicit in the way that a good mathematical proof or instruction manual should be. They mean sexually explicit, and some of the episodes truly are. Allison himself did a story spanning three episodes called “Kevin Goes to Kink Camp,” which I didn’t care to listen to past the middle of the Part 2. But if you want to hear a depressing yet hilarious story featuring not only sex, but also excrement and vomit, there was this other episode that’s got to be from sometime in August, but I can’t seem to find it again. Other stories are completely family-friendly, like the one from a couple of years ago involving a standardized test and a squirrel. Sometimes I’ll take a risk (as Allison likes to recommend) and listen to the latest episode in the car while Doug and Adam are with me, and hope it’ll be one of the clean episodes like that one. Sometimes it is.

Anyway, like many podcasts, Risk! has sponsors, which Allison promotes wholeheartedly. I liked when he talked up one sponsor, an online sexual accessories store, in a gravelly, old-tar sailor’s voice, telling us, “Yer gonna buy yer lube an’ yer condoms anyway, so ye might as well get ‘em from….” In recent episodes, the sponsor hasn’t been nearly as interesting: an online purveyor of postage. But Allison gushes over it gamely, and on the August 30 episode, he said

There’s a lot more mailing that should have been being done before that is being done now….

A nice example of a past perfect progressive passive, a kind of verb cluster that I’ve also written about in passing in this post, and as the main topic in this Visual Thesaurus column.

Shortly after that utterance, Allison gave his usual spiel on how to take advantage of a special offer on that website, and make sure that his show got credit for referring you:

So go to [sponsor] before you do anything else, click on that little radio microphone at the top of the home page, type in R-I-S-K, and get going.

So we have four main clauses, coordinated:

1. Go to [sponsor]
2. click on that little radio icon,
3. type in R-I-S-K
4. get going

Then there’s one subordinate clause: before you do anything else. The way Allison says it, there’s no pause between the first main clause and this subordinate clause, and there is a pause between anything else and click. So it sounds like the before clause modifies Go to [sponsor]. That could work, if he truly means for me to visit this website. On the other hand, the utterance makes more sense if the before clause is modifying click on that little radio icon. If you click the radio icon before you do anything else on that website, Risk! gets the credit.

In short, we have a phrase that could look backwards to modify something, or forwards to modify something. It’s a forward/backward attachment ambiguity, better known (to some at least) as a squinting modifier! Here’s what the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage has to say about squinting modifiers:

[T]he squinting modifier is more of a theoretical possibility — with, it must be admitted, a catchy title — than a real problem.

Maybe so, but there it is, in the wild!

Waste or Recycle, Please

Elliot Anderson sent me this picture from a trip to Disneyland or Disney World (he didn’t say which), and told me, “I didn’t know whether I should waste or recycle.”

As I wrote in response:

I think either of these messages would be OK on its own, but together, they generate the kind of puzzlement you experienced. When I’m in the post office and I see the trash can labeled “Waste,” I get a micro-chuckle about imagining that they’re encouraging me to waste stuff, before coming back to the message of “(Put your) waste ([noun] here).” I would do the same thing at Disney World for a trash can by itself. But right next to a recycle bin with a similar message, you get the interference. Unlike waste, recycle cannot (yet) be used as a noun, so you’re forced to interpret the message as an explicit command. And then by association, you want to do the same with the garbage can, essentially being forced to give it the stupid reading.

Lay Down and Throw Up Your Arms

In my last post (so very long ago!), I said that the song “Twenty One Guns” by Green Day was linguistically interesting to me for two reasons, one of them being the pronunciation of twenty one guns. The other was that it reminded me of writing chapter 2 of my dissertation. Now, over a month later, I’ve finally pulled myself out from under a pile of teaching and grading obligations and am here to finish what I had to say about “Twenty One Guns”.

So as you’ll recall, the refrain went like this:

One
Twenty-one guns
Lay down your arms
Give up the fight.

One
Twenty-one guns
Throw up your arms
Into the sky.

First of all, a correction: The chapter I was remembering was chapter 1, not chapter 2. In chapter 1 of my dissertation, I was writing about diagnostic tests for whether you have a pair of homonyms or a single word whose meaning is vague enough that it can cover the meanings you’re interested in. I summarized some of these tests from a classic work by Arnold Zwicky and Jerry Sadock (which itself was a summarization of various ambiguity tests they had seen in the literature), and one of them they called the crossed-senses test. Take a sentence like

Doug and Adam both like rock.

This could mean that my sons both like rock music, or that they are both geology enthusiasts. But how about this: Could it mean that Doug likes rock music, while Adam likes igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary pieces of the Earth’s crust? If it can, then rock passes the crossed-senses test for these two meanings, indicating (according to the theory) that musical rock and geological rock are not homonyms, but a single word with a meaning vague enough that it encompasses both meanings of rock.

As it happens, I can’t get this crossed-senses reading, except as a joke. For comparison, if I said Doug and Adam both read a book, it could certainly be true if one read a hardback and the other a paperback. If you can’t crossed senses for both like rock, then for us at least, musical and geological rock are homonyms: separate words that happen to sound the same (and be spelled the same too). Since they’re separate words, you see, the single utterance of rock can only be one or the other.

Years after Zwicky & Sadock, a paper by Alex Lascarides, Ann Copestake, and Ted Briscoe observed that failing the crossed-senses test wasn’t enough to conclude that you had a pair of homonyms. Why? Because you get the same kind of goofiness even when you repeat that word with the two meanings. Using the rock example again:

Doug likes rock, and Adam likes rock.

Can you get the crossed senses now? I can’t. So at this point, whatever is blocking the availability of both meanings of rock, it’s not that they are homonyms instead of a single, vague word. If they’re homonyms, there should be no problem with having the geological one in the part of the sentence about Doug, and the musical one in the part about Adam. There must be something else going on, and whatever it is can also explain why Doug and Adam both like rock fails the crossed-senses test, too. For what it’s worth, LC&B argue for a pragmatics-based explanation.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about recently when I listened to the chorus of “Twenty-One Guns”. The plural noun arms has two meanings. In the phrase lay down your arms, it refers to weapons. In the phrase throw up your arms, it refers to the body parts between your shoulders and your hands. Now suppose we had a sentence with just one token of the word arms, but with both meanings needed; something like…

Lay down and throw up your arms.

Does it pass the crossed-senses test? No way. For me, it cannot mean to surrender your weapons and then quickly raise your arms above your head. It could mean to lie down (with the nonstandard usage of lay) and then quickly raise your arms above your head. Or it could mean to place your body-part arms on a table in front of you before raising them in the air. Or it could mean doing the same thing with your weapons. Of course, throwing up your arms could also mean vomiting them up, whether you’re regurgitating weapons that you’ve eaten, or your own arms that you previously chewed off in an act of autoanthropophagy. So the three meanings multiply out to six, but in no case can I get arms referring first to weapons and then to one’s upper limbs (or vice versa).

But unlike the example with rock, which fails the test whether you say Doug and Adam like rock or Doug likes rock and Adam likes rock, this one improves greatly when you say the word arms twice. I’d been listening to the song for a couple of years before I ever took note of the two meanings of arms coexisting in the same refrain. How does that happen?

Actually, arms doesn’t pass the crossed-senses test so easily in a sentence like this:

Lay down your arms, and throw up your arms.

I can get the crossed senses, but not as easily as I do when listening to the song. The context helps: The idiom lay down your arms always refers to surrendering your weapons, and more figuratively to “giv[ing] up the fight”. The phrase throw up your arms doesn’t have an idiomatic meaning that I’m aware of (beyond that of vomiting, as noted earlier), so that would nudge listeners toward the more literal body-part meaning. Maybe the typical hip-hop exhortation to “throw your hands in the air” (usually in a manner so as to suggest that you just don’t care) helps a bit, too. Even so, the meanings rub against each other enough to make me think about the other possible interpretations, and smile to myself.

So once again, how did the song lyrics manage to slip these two meanings of arms past the crossed-senses barrier without my noticing for all that time? My only guess at this point is that in addition to the context cues, you have those extra words in between, giving more space for the first arms activation in your brain to die down before the second one comes along. That, and the fact that Green Day sing this chorus so very slowly!

Ask the Cashier

I’ve been teaching academic writing at Ohio State University’s ESL Composition Program this quarter (hence the sparse blogging). After class one day last week, I stopped at a coffee shop that was right inside the building to get a Coke to go with my lunch. As I handed my money to the cashier, I noticed the sign on the register:

Ask him if I’d like a receipt? What was I supposed to say, something like “Uh, would I like a receipt?”

What kind of weird question was that? Then, to use a phrase I’ve used before, like a Necker cube flipping inside out, the phrase shifted to match its meaning. I’d been parsing it like in the diagram on the left, when really it was intended to be read like the one on the right:

In the diagram on the left, the subordinate clause if you want a receipt is a complement to the verb, just like the cashier. The role the cashier plays is the person who gets asked something, and the subordinate clause has the role of whatever question is to be asked. You can parse it this way because if is something like an honorary wh word, so subordinate clauses it heads up can go with verbs like ask or wonder: I asked {what he was doing / where they were going / whether there was any pizza left / if we were free to go}.

In the diagram on the right, on the other hand, the verb ask only has one complement: the cashier. The question that gets asked goes unspoken, and you have to get it from the context, the same as you would in sentences like Ask mom. The if-clause, meanwhile, modifies the whole thing, saying under which conditions you should ask the cashier whatever question you have. We can parse it this way because if can also be used in its regular old “if” conditional sense.

So the intended meaning was this: If the circumstance arise in which you want a receipt, ask the cashier something. From context, the most obvious question is, “May I have a receipt?”

Meanwhile, the food court in the new student union has it right:

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?

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!

The Gadhafi Bounty

I read the front page of the Columbus Dispatch earlier this week, and saw this headline:

I thought, they’re offering the guy a bounty? That is, I read it as diagrammed on the right. I saw the verb offer, and automatically seized the name that followed as the recipient of the offer (in syntactic terms the indirect object). The noun after that was the item offered (i.e. the direct object). This parse was also easy to fall into because of the line break, putting Gadhafi all by itself next to offer.

Real-world knowledge forced a re-read, and I quickly got the intended reading, as diagrammed on the left. Instead of taking offer as a two-object verb (direct and indirect), this time I took it as a simple transitive verb, and grabbed onto Gadhafi bounty as a single noun phrase for the direct object: “a bounty on Gadhafi”. Much more sensible, although it required a little more thinking to make Gadhafi an attributive noun describing bounty.

Of course, like McDonald’s fries holy grail for potato farmers, this ambiguity exists only because of the telegraphic style of newspaper headlines. In regular English, it would have been

The rebels offered A Gadhafi bounty

and there would have been no question. Or, if you really meant it the crazy way, it would be

The rebels offered Gadhafi A bounty.

Of course, if Gadhafi turns himself in to collect the bounty, I guess both readings could be true.