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”?

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!

Double Passives in Hebrew, Norwegian, and Danish

The last time I reported on double passives, it was to say that I’d learned they existed in Turkish as well as in English. For those new to the conversation, this post gives an overview of double passives in English. Now I’ve learned of a few other languages with double passives.

Humility, Nobility, Etc., Part II

So as I was saying, something always bothered me about the line

You have humility, nobility, and a sense of honor that are very rare indeed.

My reaction was always, “…that are very rare? Don’t they mean is?” This thought was always followed by, “Oh, wait, it’s not just the sense of honor that’s rare. The humility and nobility are, too.” And then: “OK, so why do I keep wanting it to be just the sense of honor that’s rare?” And ultimately, I’d give up.

Humility, Nobility, and a Scent of Urine

You know the feeling when you walk into your son’s room and find yourself wondering, “What’s that smell? It smells like … cat urine!”? Sure you do. We all do.

And you walk around sniffing, trying to figure out where it’s coming from, but you can’t quite pinpoint it, so you decide it must have been your imagination? And then you leave, and the next time you go in there, the smell hits you again? We’ve all been there.

That’s how I felt in fifth grade when our music teacher would have us sing “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” from the musical of that name. It’s not that I disliked the song. It was actually a good tune, as were “Fifty Nifty (United States)” and “Milk’s the Soft Soft Drink”, two other songs Mrs. Eisley was partial to. It started like this:

You’re a good man, Charlie Brown! You’re the kind of reminder we need.
You have humility, nobility, and a sense of honor that are very rare indeed.

Like a room smelling faintly of cat urine, there was something not quite right in the second line of the song. I never had time to dwell on it while we were singing the song, but by the end of the year, the song had been well-drilled into my head. The teacher had even had us memorize it, replacing Charlie Brown with the name of the school principal, who was retiring, and we sang it to him at a ceremony during the last week of school. So like the herpes virus, the melody is permanently lodged in my brain, poised to flare up as an earworm every now and then. Unfortunately, only about half the words have stayed with me, so that when the song is running through my head, I can’t get the full satisfaction of singing the whole thing. What I do get is the irritation of whatever is bothering me about that second line. But now, I know what the problem is.

So you know how, after a while of smelling the cat urine that you can’t get a fix on, you get one of those ultraviolet lights? And you turn out the lights and walk around shining the UV light on the floor and you can finally see the source of the problem? Next to the bookshelf … and in front of the closet … and behind the garbage can? Of course you do. A syntax course in graduate school was my urine-detecting ultraviolet light for “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”. I’ll shine the light on the offending spot next time. Until then, do you smell it, too?

FDR RNW

They played a clip on NPR yesterday of Franklin Roosevelt’s first fireside chat, which had taken place exactly 71 years earlier, March 12, 1933. At the end of the address he said:

We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work.

A 71-year-old right-node wrapping (aka “Friends in Low Places” coordination). To refresh the memory: an RNW has the form

A and B C D

but means the same thing as “A C and B C D” — not, as you’d expect in a completely parallel coordinate structure, “A C D and B C D”. In this case:

• A = support
• B = make
• C = it
• D = work

and the meaning is “support it and make it work”, not “support it work and make it work”.

One other thing I noticed in the excerpt on NPR was that Roosevelt said:

You people must have faith.

I guess you people hadn’t acquired the strong connotations of reprimand, disapproval, or prejudice that it does today. (Or maybe it had, and that’s the tone FDR wanted to take, but that doesn’t seem very likely, given that FDR was trying to encourage the citizenry.) I wonder when that happened?