Variations on Multiple-Level Coordination

In the multiple-level coordinations I’ve written about before, the coordinated items (which I’ll call conjuncts) have been two smaller phrases and a bigger one. For example, in

It’s sick, twisted, and smells like old socks,

the first conjunct is an adjective (sick), the second is an adjective (twisted), and the third is a verb phrase (smells like old socks).

Actually, I’m more inclined to look at this kind of coordination as having a small conjunct between two larger ones. In this example, the first larger conjunct would be not just the adjective sick, but the entire verb phrase [i]s sick. The smaller conjunct is always missing something that appears in an immediately adjacent one; in the sick/twisted example, the small conjunct twisted could be expanded into a verb phrase like the other two by adding the is from the preceding conjunct, like this:

It’s sick, is twisted, and smells like old socks.

Later on I found a slightly different kind of multiple-level coordination, like the one above except that the smaller conjunct’s missing material comes from the conjunct right after it instead of the one right before it. That was the Dark Knight coordination

They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with.

The “bigger” conjuncts here aren’t actually bigger than the smaller one, but they are closer to being full verb phrases. They are three passive participial verb phrases — that is, strings of words that, in combination with the be, make a good passive verb phrase: bought, bullied, and negotiated with. The “smaller” conjunct is reasoned, which isn’t quite a participial verb phrase: It’s missing a with. The with, of course, is understood from the last conjunct, negotiated with. One way of phrasing it in a syntactically parallel way would be:

They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned with, or negotiated with.

Now I’ve come across a couple of other variations on MLCs. In all the previous examples, whether the smaller conjunct takes its understood material from the conjunct right before it or right after it, it’s still sandwiched between bigger conjuncts. Not with this one:

I had to promise to do all his chores for a month, give him my braided leather whip and fifteen cents in cash.
(Papa Married a Mormon, John D. Fitzgerald, 1955, p. 196)

In this example, the smaller conjunct comes at the end. The conjuncts are:

1. a verb phrase: promise to do all his chores for a month
2. another verb phrase: give him my braided leather whip
3. a noun phrase: fifteen cents in cash

As with the other examples, though, the missing material in the smaller conjunct is supplied from a neighboring conjunct: give him.

The other variation is multiple-level coordination with correlative conjunctions. From a column I read in the newspaper a couple of months ago:

If they can’t find you these days, you’re either a genius, a hermit or they aren’t looking very hard.
(Leonard Pitts, Jr. column, Sept. 8, 2009)

If it were just You’re a genius, a hermit, or they aren’t looking very hard, it would be just an MLC like many of the other discussed here: The or seems to be joining a clause (You’re … a genius), a noun phrase (a hermit), and then another entire clause (they aren’t looking very hard).

But this sentence has an extra complication: Instead of a coordinating conjunction like and or or linking the (unlike) phrases, it’s a pair of correlative conjunctions: either … or. Without going into messy details, I’ll just say that the first of a pair of correlative conjunctions is often able to appear in places other than right next to its conjunct. You can say, Either you got it or you didn’t, with either and or each right before a clause; or, you can say You either got it or you didn’t and have the same meaning, but with the either pushed inside its clause. So in Pitts’s example, instead of Either you’re a genius, a hermit, or they’re not looking very hard, we get the either pushed into that first conjunct: You’re either a genius…..

I guess there’s nothing really new going on here. Nonparallel structures with correlative conjunctions have been around for years, and so have multiple-level coordinations. This is just the first time I’ve seen them in the same structure.

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The Keyest Concept

“The discussion we had yesterday,” I began, “was a reminder to me that language data is always messy. I was trying to show you a simple picture of how parts of speech worked, and you guys kept giving me words that messed up the nice picture I was trying to paint for you. Language was invented over thousands of years by millions of people, so there are going to be exceptions, and words that you can’t easily label as one part of speech. That’s just the way it is. The good news, though, is that the tests we’re doing here are tests that you can do on your own, so you can see how a particular word is behaving.”

“Yesterday was also a reminder to me,” I continued, “that you can’t rely on just one test to determine what family some word belongs to.

Cheesy Toilet Dogs

I wrote on the whiteboard the familiar sentence I alluded to at teh end of the last post:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

“Linguists look at parts of speech a bit differently than how you’ve probably been taught,” I said. “They don’t look so much at whether a word refers to a person, place, or thing; or state or action; or what have you. They group them based on what kinds of places they can fit into.”

From there, my plan was to erase one word out of the sentence at a time, and ask for other words that could replace it, and then words that could not replace it, without using part-of-speech labels. Once we had samples of words that could and could not replace each word in the sentence, they would start to fall into families, i.e. parts of speech. However, doing this exercise with two classes of 5th and 6th graders was a reminder to me that linguistic data is always messy. Some of the highlights:

• For the second the, one student observed that you could replace it with nothing at all; that is, you could say, “…jumped over lazy dogs.” Other students said we could also do that with the first the, which led to a observation that words like fox in English need something like a or every in front of them, but others, like dogs, don’t.
• Another student offered cheesy as a replacement for the second the, and I put it on the OK list, promising to say more about it later.
• When we listed words that could not replace quick, brown, and lazy, one student suggested toilet, but I put it in the OK list. We speculated on what toilet dogs might be. Dogs that always drank out of the toilet? Dog figurines to put on the top of your toilet tank? Dogs that guarded the toilet? In any case, it didn’t matter that a toilet was a thing instead of a “describing” word: It fit in the slot, so it went in the OK list.
• Also during the investigation of quick and brown, one student suggested dead as something that couldn’t fill in the slot, since dead foxes couldn’t jump. But I pointed out that we could certainly imagine one jumping, and even say, “Last night, I dreamed that the dead fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”
• The same girl had a similar objection to shoe as a replacement for fox, and I had a similar response. And, I pointed out, it certainly wasn’t nonsense in the same way “The quick brown because jumped over the lazy dogs.”
• For over, the students suggested lots of other prepositions, and then again, one of them suggested replacing over with nothing at all. At first, I said no, on the grounds that to do that, we’d need a different jumped: a homophone that meant “attack someone.” But no: another student reminded me that jump could work just fine without the over to mean “jump over”, and I remembered elephants jumping the fence, checker players jumping their opponents, and Evel Knievel jumping canyons. So I had to leave a null symbol in the OK list for things that could replace over.

When it came time to put labels on the families of words we’d amassed, the students knew which ones would be called nouns, which ones verbs, which ones prepositions, and which ones adjectives. The category of determiner was new to them, of course. A theme I kept coming back to was that even within our families of words, there were different kinds. Some determiners, like a and that, were singular; others, like these and many were plural. So why did we call them all determiners, instead of having two parts of speech for them? Some verbs, like swam, flew, or ran, could replace jumped, but others, like tried and believed, don’t. So why do we call them all verbs, instead of having different parts of speech for the different kinds of verbs? More on that, I told them, in part two the next day.

But I never did come back to cheesy. I could just imagine Doug or one of his classmates saying months or years later, “What do you mean cheesy isn’t a determiner?! You told us cheesy was a determiner! You said any word that could replace the was a determiner!” Well, the classmate wouldn’t be saying “you”; they’d be saying “Mr. Whitman”, but you get the idea. I’d have to do a bit of repair work before I moved ahead into phrases the next day.

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A Predicate Has to Have a Verb?

About a month ago, I was reading a draft of a five-paragraph essay Doug had to write for language arts. I pointed out a couple of run-on sentences, and a minute later, he had separated them with periods. Then I moved on to the fragments. One of them was something like, “His brother, who wants the duke’s title.”

“But that’s a complete sentence!” Doug protested.

“OK, then what’s the subject?” I asked.

“His brother.”

“And the predicate?”

“Wants the duke’s title!” Doug answered.

I’ll spare you all the arguing that went on during the next half hour. Eventually, Doug grudgingly and still somewhat incredulously conceded that sentences could be packed inside larger things that weren’t sentences. The most eye-opening moment I had, though, was when I asked, “Is Nick the cat a complete sentence?”

“Yes!” Doug said. The subject was Nick. The predicate was the cat. Likewise, in the kitchen was a complete sentence, with subject in, and predicate the kitchen. “The subject comes first,” Doug told me, “and the rest is the predicate. That’s the rule they taught us.”

“I see the problem,” I said. “You’re right that every sentence has to have a subject and a predicate, but what you didn’t realize is that not everything is a sentence. Predicates have to have a verb, at least in English they do. If there’s no verb, it’s not a predicate, and you don’t have a complete sentence.”

“A predicate doesn’t have to be a verb!” Doug said. “They never told us that!”

“Well, what you probably didn’t notice on all the worksheets you did where you identified subjects and predicates was that the predicates all had verbs.”

Doug was furious with his previous teachers for having allowed him to arrive at this overgeneral definition of a sentence.

“Do you think other kids have this same misunderstanding?” I asked. “Or other misunderstandings about sentences?”

“Yes!”

“Hmmm,” I said. At the beginning of the school year, Doug’s language arts teacher had given me an invitation to come in and speak to her classes about linguistics when I had a chance. She didn’t even care about the topic; whatever it was, she’d find a way to connect it to the objectives the students were working on. She’s been doing Latin and Greek word roots with them, so I’d been thinking about bringing in an exercise in reconstructing words from proto-languages, if I could find one that didn’t require too much preparation work in phonetics. Now, though, there seemed to be a more immediate objective that I could give a linguist’s perspective on.

So it was that last Tuesday, I stood in front of Doug’s language arts class, asking how many had ever lost points on a worksheet or test because they hadn’t written an answer as a complete sentence. Just about all of them had. Only a few dropped their hands when I asked if they’d ever wondered what the big deal was, as long as the teacher had understood their answer. Then I moved to a different topic, and reminded them about learning about parts of speech in previous years. My question: Who had ever wondered what they were supposed to do with this knowledge now that they’d learned the eight or ten or however many parts of speech. They all had. My aim, I announced, was to take these two topics, parts of speech on the one hand, and sentences on the other, and fill in the missing material that connected the two. We’d start with a sentence they’d probably heard before…

To be continued

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The Latest RNWs

Three more for the “Friends in Low Places”/right-node wrapping files. First, something I heard on All Things Considered one day during the summer:

…attempting to recruit, train, and deploy diplomats to the world’s hot spots.
(NPR, All Things Considered, summer 2009)

You don’t recruit people to a place; you recruit them to an organization. And you don’t train them to a place, either. So the intended meaning is recruiting diplomats, training them, and deploying them to the world’s hot spots. A clear case of RNW.

Second, from my wife’s description of a dream she had one night:

We were selecting and selling wine to restaurants.

You don’t select wine to restaurants. Intended reading: selecting wine, and selling it to restaurants.

Lastly, something I read in a resume a friend asked me to read:

Cofounder and owner of a small consulting firm for 15 years

The cofounding didn’t take place over 15 years; just the owning did. Unlike most of the other RNWs I’ve collected, which involve coordinated verbs, this one has coordinated nouns. The only other one with a noun that I recall is:

Tony Nadal, the uncle and coach of Rafael Nadal since he started playing as a youngster

Presumably, Tony was Rafael’s uncle even before Rafael started playing tennis, although it’s possible that he married into the family at just that time, and really was both uncle and coach for the same period of time. Returning to the cofounder and owner example, I see that the nouns are in fact verbal nouns, which brings them closer to the more typical RNWs I’ve seen. I could even imagine it rephrased as a sentence with actual verbs: Cofounded and owned a small consulting firm for 15 years.

Dancing with Myself

In the evenings, my wife and I will sit watching TV, which is when I see episodes of various shows I’ve mentioned here. Often I’ll be working on the computer, and when I’m really trying to focus on something, I won’t want to watch something that will distract me. Those are the nights when my wife turns on the stuff I don’t care about, like Burn Notice or Glee. Or Dancing with the Stars. I should be more interested in that show, since ballroom dancing was a good portion of my social life in college—and is even how my wife and I met. But the competitive dancing on that show is not much like the social dancing I learned in college.

Ah, yes, ballroom dancing in college. And that one time when correcting someone’s grammar caused me a lot of embarrassment. Not just retrospective embarrassment, as I look back on it; embarrassment right then. I remember it like it was about 20 years ago, because it was about 20 years ago… [cue wavy screen]

Harry Potter and the Attributive Adverbs

“I’m mad, Dad,” Doug said. He has been wanting to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, preferably with some of his friends, but I’ve been dragging my feet about putting any kind of outing like that together. Unlike when the other HP movies came out, this time Adam is old enough to appreciate it, and I’d like him to be along to see it, too. He hasn’t wanted to see the other ones until recently, but now that he’s been watching them on video with us, I don’t want to leave him out of a family outing to see this one in the theatre. And I don’t want to go as a family when one or two of us has already seen it, either. I’m not going to boycott what sounds like a great movie if some of Doug’s friends invite him to see it with them first, but I’m not going to make a special effort to make that happen.

In that case, why haven’t we gone ahead and seen HP6 as a family? Well, before we do that, to maximize Adam’s enjoyment of it, I want him to have read — or more accurately, heard read aloud — at least the first five Harry Potter books. We listened to Goblet of Fire last summer, but did we then go right on to Order of the Phoenix? No, we did not. I put it off and put it off, and now we find ourselves listening to it in the car, the longest of the seven books in the series, while Doug waits for his chance to see Half-Blood Prince in the theatres. Oh, well. There are plenty of kids who will have to wait for the video, or won’t even be able to see it at all, so I don’t feel too bad about making Doug wait.

Anyway, as I listen to Jim Dale read the book aloud, I stand in awe of his talent. I’ve read articles here and there (usually when a new Harry Potter book was published) about all the voices he’s created for the hundreds of characters, and hearing them for myself, I am amazed at the job he’s done. I don’t think he’s created hundreds of distinct voices, but it’s certainly in the dozens, and even the voices that sound similar he uses consistently. When I read to Doug and Adam, I use my regular voice for the protagonist; then I bring out my Bert voice, my Marvin the Martian voice, my Howard Sprague voice, my gravelly creaky voice, my Cruel Shoes voice, my Simpsons teenager-with-acne voice, very occasionally my Grover/Yoda voice or Mr. Creosote voice, and a few other voices I don’t have names for, by choosing them on the spot when we meet a new character. But if the character disappears for a few chapters and reappears later, I rarely remember what voice I used for them. From now on, I’m going to take my reading aloud up a notch by recording a sample sentence on my iPod for each character to reference later, a technique I read about in one of those articles on Jim Dale.

However, hearing Jim Dale read the books aloud has raised my awareness of a complaint I’ve heard about J. K. Rowling: that she uses too many adverbs. I wrote before that I’d never noticed this, but I am finding it disconcerting as I listen to Jim Dale read the book — sometimes. It sticks out most when she uses them with verbs of attribution, as she does here:

“Keep muttering and I will be a murderer!” said Sirius irritably, and he slammed the door shut on the elf. (p. 110)

I didn’t find it awkward when I read the book myself, but I do now. Is it because I’m now familiar with the complaint about Rowling and her adverbs? Maybe, but here’s what I think is really going on. When I read the book to myself, an adverb like irritably after said is informative. Sure, fiction writers may say, if an author does their job well enough, then it should be obvious how a character says something, and the adverb will be superfluous. But sometimes, a single adverb does the job more quickly than a sentence or two of “show, don’t tell”. However, when Rowling says someone says something sarcastically or loudly or doubtfully, Jim Dale actually says it that way, and you can hear it, and the adverb really is superfluous. By contrast, when he reads that someone performed some non-speech action distractedly or slowly or however else, it still sounds just fine to my ears.

I’ve noticed a couple of other interesting things while listening to the audiobook. Still on the subject of adverbs, Rowling uses a couple of them often enough for me to have noted Jim Dale’s unusual pronunciation of them: dully and shrilly. These adverbs, of course, are formed by suffixing the adjectives dull and shrill with the suffix -ly. Because of a rule of English orthography, we don’t write dullly or shrillly, with three L’s in a row, but that’s how I think of them, and I pronounce them (I think) with an /l/ at the end of the first syllable and an /l/ in the onset of the second one. In phonetic terms, I have a geminate /l/. Dale, however, degeminates the double /l/, pronouncing dully to rhyme with Tully, Sully, and hully gully; and shrilly to rhyme with frilly, silly, and Milli Vanilli. You can see the difference on a spectrogram as well as hear it. I recorded myself and used Praat to find out that my dull-ly and shrill-ly took about 0.6 seconds to pronounce, while dully and shrilly took 2/3 to 3/4 of that time.

Now that I think about it, though, why shouldn’t we get degemination here? It happened with fully and really long ago. Another adverb that Rowling used often enough for me to notice Dale’s pronunciation is coolly, and that one Dale seems to pronounce sometimes with a geminate /l/, and sometimes without. (I wonder how he’d pronounce Pooland.)

As for the other interesting thing I noticed, look at these other sentences with quotations:

“Department of Mysteries,” said the cool female voice, and left it at that. (p. 135)

“I’m going to get started on some homework,” said Ron angrily, and stomped off to the staircase to the boys’ dormitories and vanished from sight. (p. 294)

Did you catch that? No, not the angrily; I’m talking about the unusual (for J. K. Rowling) construction she used in these passages. Follow the last link and this one to see what I’m talking about.

UPDATE, 11 Aug. 2009:

“Now!” said Mrs. Weasley, and withdrew. (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, p. 95)

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Family Owned and Imitated

A tire shop that opened a year or two ago puts funny messages on its marquee. They’re so funny that I can’t seem to recall any of them right now, except of course for the one I’m going to tell you about now. It said:

Family Owned and Imitated

Family owned: So a family, let’s call them the Smiths, owns this business. Family imitated: A family (presumably the Smiths again) also imitates this business. The Smiths imitate their own business? How is that possible? Maybe it’s like that that Greek family I read about. They ran a chocolate shop in nearby Granville for years, but then had a falling out, so that there are now two chocolate shops, run by two branches of the same family, located within two blocks of each other in downtown Granville, each claiming to possess the truest version of the family’s recipes for chocolate confections.

But never mind that. I’m pretty sure all they’re saying is that this business is family-owned, and that it’s imitated. This reading makes sense: Lots of businesses say that they’re imitated, usually before a warning that they’re never equalled or duplicated. In this reading, the coordinated elements are family-owned and imitated, as illustrated on the left.

To get the reading that leads you to imagine a rift in the family, you have to parse it with just owned and imitated as the coordinated elements, with family applying to both, as illustrated on the right. So why did I want to parse it this way, anyway, since it gives the weird and unlikely reading?

It’s at least partly because of the common collocation that the sign is harking to: Family Owned and Operated (or sometimes, family owned and run). In those phrases, family is clearly intended to form a compound with both owned and operated, as in the diagram. After all, who’d want to say that a family owns some particular place of business, and that (get this) someone operates it? If it’s open at all, the latter claim is obvious, and stating it violates the principle of Relevance. Only if it’s taken to mean “family-operated” does the statement say something useful: The fact that some place is run by the family that owns it might not be obvious to the casual observer.

By using this recognizable phrase as their point of departure, they primed me to parse Family Owned and Imitated in the stupid way. Now that I think about it, though, family owned and operated could be useful as a deceptively ambiguous phrase, for a family that has recently contracted out the operation of its family business but doesn’t want to change the wording in their advertisements. I wonder if that’s been done. Do any of you know of businesses that advertise that they’re “family owned and operated”, and are operated by someone other than the family?

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They Swim As Good As They Look

While I was out and about today, I saw a girl wearing a T-shirt promoting her high school swim team. On the front, it said:

If only we swam as good as we look!

Even More Wide-Scoping Operators

One of my regular readers is Deborah Lipp, who blogs at Property of a Lady, and has written several books on Wicca and paganism in addition to The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book (“One of these things is not like the others,” as she admits in Sesame Streetwise fashion). She also, as it turns out, is a big fan of AMC’s series Mad Men. I learned this when she wrote to me asking a language-related question about the show and mentioning her and her sister’s MM fan blog, A Basket of Kisses. That reminded me that I’ve had a Mad Men-related post sitting in my pile of drafts, so it seemed like a good time to pull it out and consolidate it with a number of other draft posts on the same topic.

The topic is “Wide-scoping operators”, and here’s the example, from the October 18, 2008 episode of Mad Men:

Jane Siegel (Peyton List)

How do I know I’m not just going to eat another mushroom and this room will disappear and I’ll be back on the train to Trenton?