There’s Only So …

Almost seven years ago, I was cutting up some chicken fingers for Adam, and my wife dared to question my chicken-finger-cutting skills, asking if I was sure I was cutting it into small enough pieces. As I told her at the time:

There’s only so small I can cut it.

In the six years since then, I’m happy to report that Adam has learned to cut his own food, so I haven’t repeated the utterance. And in the case of chicken fingers, which Adam loves just as much now as he did then, he just picks them up and eats them as finger food anyway. But what interested me at the time, as I wrote here, was how easily I was able to generate that sentence, which I don’t find grammatical. I wasn’t doing diagrams on this blog back then, but if I had, I probably would have put up a diagram something like this to show the syntactic structure of the “There’s only so much” construction:

After the subject there and the verb is, there’s only one more chunk: the noun phrase only so much I can do. This NP has two parts: the determinative phrase only so much, and the “nouny” part of the NP (the nominal). As it happens, the nouny part of this NP doesn’t have a noun. I’ve labeled this missing noun N₁. If the phrase were something like only so much money I can spend, or only so much information you’re allowed to see, this is where the noun money or information would go. Right next to the N₁ is a relative clause that’s missing an NP in the place labeled GAP, which is subscripted with a 1 to show this gap corresponds to the N₁.

In my sentence about the chicken fingers, though, there’s no much followed by a nominal. There’s no NP; there’s some kind of business with the adjective small. How did my grammar get to a place where it could generate that? I think the first step was a reanalysis like this:

Now, after the There is, there are two constituents instead of one. The relative clause I can do GAP has broken free of the rest of the NP. Also, the GAP in the relative clause is now identified with the whole NP only so much, instead of the N inside it.

The last part is to lose the restriction to having just an NP and a clause with an NP gap. So here’s the more general version, with N replaced by ? to show that it can be an adjective phrase or adverb phrase — really, any phrase as long as it refers to something gradable. The clause that used to be just a relative clause is now a clause with any kind of gap, as long as it’s the same kind as the only phrase. Now this construction can handle utterances like my There’s only so small I can cut it or There’s only so far you can go.

The reason I was reminded of only so small I can cut it is that I was listening to the most recent episode of Risk (the podcast that had that real-life example of a squinting ambiguity). The host Kevin Allison was telling a story about a time when he was obsessively trying to memorize a comedy bit he was going to perform. But he hit a point of diminishing returns, because

There’s only so memorized the thing can get.

In my 2006 post, I ended with a link to a page of Google results with similar examples. COCA wasn’t around then — or if it was, I hadn’t heard of it yet. But it’s here now. When I searched for “there BE only so *”, I got 448 hits, of which 428 are instances with much or many. Of the remaining 20, twelve had far; six had long; the last two had fast. Here’s an example of each:

• there was only so far he could extend the examination before Djazir caught on
• there was only so long he could hold this form before his own magick turned on him
• There’s only so fast that the government can act

Got any examples with other adjectives or adverbs? Leave a comment!

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?

Pillaged for Dead

Time for a few more right-node wrapping coordinations that I’ve been accumulating. The most recent one, the one that completed the trio I’m posting today, I got via an online issue of the University of Texas alumni assocation’s newsletter. You’ll hear it in this video created by Jon Cozart, a UT theatre sophomore. He sings a capella parodies of the (mostly) “I Wish” songs from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Pocahontas, accompanying himself with himself as three backup singers (complete with visual reactions to each other). In the final Pocahontas parody, he sings the line

They pillaged, raped, and left us all for dead.

Laying aside the question of whether pillage can take people rather than towns or villages as its direct object, the meaning seems to be that they (1) pillaged us all, (2) raped us all, and (3) left us all for dead. However, if this were a syntactically parallel coordination, it would mean that they “pillaged us all for dead” and “raped us all for dead”, too. But since for dead just doesn’t go with those verbs, we know that the first reading was the intended one.

A month or so ago, I read this sentence in a magazine that my genealogy-enthusiast Aunt Jane gave me a gift subscription to:

Creating a reproduction of the original heirloom … means every family member can hold, own, or view it on a computer. (Denise May Levenick, “Dear Diaries,” Family Tree Magazine, Jan/Feb 2013. p. 28.)

This case is a little less clear-cut. The meaning seems to be that every family member can (1) hold it, (2) own it, or (3) view it on a computer. To parse it as a parallel structure, you’d have to take it to mean that family members can hold it on a computer, and own it on a computer. Although they’re a bit unidiomatic, you could parse these phrases this way if you were really determined to. However, having read the article, I say that my non-parallel, RNW-style parse gives the author’s intended meaning.

The earliest of the trio comes from the October 11, 2012 episode of the Freakonomics podcast. It’s about the so-called “Cobra Effect,” whereby placing a bounty on any nuisance you want to encourage people to eliminate simply encourages them to create more of these nuisances in order to kill them and collect more bounties. One segment was about wild boars in Texas, and contained this sentence:

They spend a lot of time trapping and removing pigs from the base.

Parsing this as a non-parallel structure, you get that people are (1) trapping pigs and (2) removing them from the base. If you insist on a parallel parse, you get that people are “trapping pigs from the base”. That’s not grammatical. Well, it is, but only if you take from the base to modify pigs instead of trapping. Try it with them instead of pigs to get the full effect: trap them from the base. No good.

So there you have them, the latest three RNWs in my ongoing collection.

Correlatively Comparatively Speaking, Part II

On Fritinancy, Nancy Friedman commented on a poster for a walk for breast cancer. Here’s the poster, lifted from Nancy’s blog post:

Nancy’s reaction:

As I see it, the line needs a second relative pronoun to be properly parallel in structure: “The more of us who walk, the more of us who survive.”

She wanted another who in there so that the two parts of this comparative correlative would be maximally parallel, but in fact, there are some speakers who wouldn’t even put a who in the first part. As for me, I’m not even sure what I would do. (Maybe I should do a search on this blog and see if I’ve generated any data that would say.)

The uncertainty comes from the fact that comparative correlatives like the one Nancy found are a little different from others. In many comparative correlative clauses, the comparative part — the X-er — corresponds to a gap in the remainder of the clause. This gap might be a direct object gap, as in (1) below; an indirect object gap, as in (2); or a prepositional object gap, as in (3). It can even be a predicative adjective gap, as in (4), adverbial gap, as in (5).

1. DO gap: the more [I learn __]
2. IO gap: the more people [you give __ a break]
   (if you allow extraction from ditransitive VPs)
3. PrepObj gap: the more people [we talk to ___]
4. PredAdj gap: the happier [we'll be ___]
5. Adv gap: the more [we get together ___]

Interestingly, all these kinds of comparative clauses can also have a relative pronoun before the gappy part of the clause, as if it were an actual relative clause. Even the gaps for predicative adjectives and adverbs can take a relativizer, as long as it’s that. Instead of making up examples this time, here are some from Google:

6. DO gap: The more people who [you can get ___ to dine with us that day]
7. IO gap: the more people that [you give __ a break]
   (OK, I did make this one up)
8. PrepObj gap: the more people that [you can connect with ___]
9. PredAdj gap: “The Smarter That [I Think I Am ___], the Dumber [I Get ___]“
10. Adv gap: The faster that [the boat goes ___]

Example (9) is interesting in that it’s like Nancy’s example: a relativizer in the first clause (the smarter that I think I am), but not in the second (the dumber I get). But let’s leave aside relative pronouns for the moment and talk about the main difference between Nancy’s example and other comparative correlatives. It’s easier to see if we put some brackets in them and gap labels, the way we did with the others:

11. Subj gap: the more of us who [___ walk]
12. Subj gap: the more of us [___ survive]

In these examples, the comparative phrase the more of us corresponds to a subject gap in the remainder of the clause. In (11), this linkage is handled by the relative pronoun who. In (12), it isn’t. If you think of comparative clauses as relative-clause structures, then probably you don’t like (12), because in English, you typically can’t delete relative pronouns that connect to a subject gap. (The exceptions are in sentences such as There was a farmer had a dog.) But if you never thought of comparative clauses as a kind of relative clause — in other words, if you just thought of them as the, plus a phrase containing a comparative adjective/adverb/determiner, plus a clause missing that same kind of phrase — then there should be no problem with (12).

If you’re one of the speakers who are OK with (12), and in general don’t think of comparative correlatives as a species of relative clause structure, I suspect that you still might be comfortable uttering comparative clauses like the more of us who walk. The reason involves a third kind of comparative correlative that I haven’t been talking about. However, that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of worms, which will have to come in a separate post. See you then!

Anti-Passive! It’s Like a Passive for Ergative Languages!

Over the weekend, I speculated on how English might work as an ergative language. Today, on National Grammar Day, I’m taking it a step further into the reversed grammar of ergative languages, to show what might happen if you tried to use the passive voice in ergative English. What would that even look like, when our ergative English already has its transitive verbs agreeing with their patients?

In you’ve forgotten what that looks like, here’s the suite of sample sentences we arrived at in our morphologically and syntactically ergative version of English. The pronouns in red are in the ergative case; they denote agents who do things to others. The pronouns in blue are in the absolutive case; they denote either “subjects” (in this context, someone or something that performs an action which doesn’t directly affect someone or something else), or patients who are affected by an action.

1. 1. She kiss me.
   2. I kisses her.
2. 1. Her smiles.
   2. Me smile.

Before I go further, I need to comment on the vocabulary. First of all, the terms agent and patient have to be understood as referring not only to very obviously agentlike roles such as “hitter,” “writer,” and “creator,” and very patientlike roles such as “struck,” “written,” and “created,” but also to pairs such as “seer” and “seen,” or “one who loves” and “one who is loved.” This is true for ordinary English as well as our imaginary ergative variety.

Second, we saw earlier that the term subject has a specialized meaning when we’re talking about whether a language is ergative or not (or more concisely, its morphosyntactic alignment). It’s not just any subject; it’s the subject of an intransitive verb. So what term do we use when we want to talk about the subject of a transitive verb? In the last post, we called them agents, in keeping with the subject-agent-patient terminology of morphosyntactic alignment. But now, the agents aren’t going to be the … subjects? … anymore. In Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, Bernard Comrie’s attitude is “Tough noogies, welcome to the real world!” That is, it’s no simple matter crosslinguistically to say what’s a subject. Is it the thing that the verb agrees with? Maybe, but in some languages, transitive verbs agree with both their agents and their patients. So before reading further, say goodbye to your old notions of what’s a subject. The closest we’ll come is when we note which noun(s) a verb is agreeing with.

So now, onward to passives and antipassives. Ordinary English, as well as many other so-called “nominative-accusative languages” gives you two options for expressing a transitive verb. There’s the more straightforward option of the active voice, with agent as the noun that the verb agrees with (She kisses me; I kiss her); and the more complex passive voice, in which the patient is promoted to the place where verb agreement goes on, and the agent disappears or is expressed in a by phrase (I am kissed (by her); she is kissed (by me)).

In ergative English, the more straightforward option has the patient as the noun that the verb agrees with: She kiss me; I kisses her. The more complex option, analogous to the passive in ordinary English, is the antipassive. To show antipassive, I’ll use the passive morphology from ordinary English, to give you the maximum effect of how things are turned around here. In the antipassive, the agent gets promoted to agree with the noun, and the patient gets moved to the background:

1. Me am kissed (by her). [Think of it as "I do some kissing (on her)."]
2. Her is kissed (by me). [Think of it as "She does some kissing (on me)."]

That’s crazy!

Now actually, ergative English probably wouldn’t use an antipassive to express these thoughts. Just as ordinary English tends to use passive in situations where the agent is unknown, unimportant, or just less important than the patient; ergative languages tend to use antipassive when the patient is unknown, unimportant, or less important than the agent. (This is according to Ann Cooreman in “A Functional Typology of Antipassives”, in Voice: Form and Function, 1994, edited by Barbara Fox and Paul J. Hopper.) Functionally, they’re like detransitivized English verbs, such as eat, teach, write, etc. When you say “I’m eating,” or “I’ve taught for years,” or “Write every day,” the patient is assumed to be something obvious: food, courses or students, stuff you write.

Thinking about passives and antipassives, I thought about the disapproval of passives that speakers use to avoid placing (or accepting) blame. “Don’t say ‘Mistakes were made’! Admit your responsibility and just say, I made a mistake’!” If English were an ergative language, would English teachers tell their students, “Don’t say ‘Me am eaten!’ Take responsibility for your actions and say what you ate! Don’t try to gloss over it!”

Well, no, they wouldn’t, because all that was phrased in ordinary English. They’d say … let’s see … “Let no one say ‘Me am eaten’…” Ah, forget it! It was tricky enough to get my ergative examples straight as it was. Right now I am absolutely ergatived out!

Ergative English

As National Grammar Day approaches, I’ve been thinking about one way in which the grammar of some languages can be mind-bendingly different from the grammar of English. Specifically, I’ve been wondering what it would be like if English were an ergative language.

Imagine this. Imagine that in a sentence like She kissed me or I kissed her, the agent has the nominative she/I case form, and the patient has the accusative me/her case form.

Hmm. All right, I guess, you don’t have to imagine that, because that’s how English is already. But now also imagine this. Let’s take a sentence like She smiles. The way English is now, the subject of this intransitive verb has the same form, she/I, as the agent of the transitive verb kiss, and the patient of the transitive verb kissed is the odd one out, with its her/me case forms. I’ll sum it up in a list, with the matching case forms having the same color:

1. 1. She kisses me.
   2. I kiss her.
2. 1. She smiles.
   2. I smile.

Now suppose that instead, the subject of this intransitive verb has the same form as the patient of the transitive verb kiss, and the agent of the transitive verb kissed is the odd one out. It might look something like this:

1. 1. She kisses me.
   2. I kiss her.
2. 1. Her smiles.
   2. Me smile.

In an arrangement like this, the she/I forms would be called ergative case forms, and the her/me forms would be called absolutives. So that’s how English might look if it were an ergative language.

Eh. That’s not so mind-bendingly different. But it’s also not as ergative as we can make it. So far, we’ve grouped intransitive subjects and transitive patients together in having the same case forms, but what if we also made the verbs always agree with the absolutive noun phrase? Here are our four sample sentences again, this time with the verbs agreeing with the absolutes. To bring it out more prominently to the eye, I’m underlining the verbs and what they agree with:

1. 1. She kiss me.
   2. I kisses her.
2. 1. Her smiles.
   2. Me smile.

Now this is starting to look pretty weird. But it’s still not as ergative as it could be. At this point, we’ve just made English “morphosyntactically ergative”. When we replaced the nominative/accusative case forms with ergative/absolutive ones, that was just a change in the morphology of the pronouns. When we also changed the verb agreement rules, we started to get the syntax involved, and hence the term morphosyntactic. However, we could let this ergative/absolutive way of thinking infect the syntax even more deeply, and turn English into a thoroughly “syntactically ergative” language. The main way that this shows up (at least, the way it’s demonstrated in the sources I’ve read) is in coordination.

In ordinary English, you can combine sentences with like subjects the way I’ve done with our examples below:

She kisses me; she smiles. –> She kisses me and smiles.
I kiss her; I smile. –> I kiss her and smile.

The single, factored-out subjects She and I function as both the agent of kiss and the subject of smile. In ordinary English, that’s no problem, because both those things are considered to be subjects. What you can’t do is try to factor out a noun that’s the patient of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive. In other words, sentences like these next ones can’t be shortened, where the person getting kissed is the one who smiles:

She kisses me; I smile. [No way to factor out the me/I]
I kiss her; she smiles. [No way to factor out the her/she]

In syntactically ergative English, what you can and can’t do get reversed. If the same person is doing the kissing and the smiling, you can’t shorten the sentence:

She kiss me; her smiles. [No way to factor out the she/her]
I kisses her; me smile. [No way to factor out the I/me]

On the other hand, if the same person is getting kissed and smiling, you can factor that patient/subject out:

She kiss me; me smile. –> She kiss me and smile. [I'm the one smiling!]
I kisses her; her smiles. –> I kisses her and smiles. [She's the one smiling!]

And these aren’t even all the possibilities. This presentation is based on information I got from Bernard Comrie’s Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2ed (1989), which also describes languages that are syntactically ergative while still maintaining nominative/accusative case forms, languages in which some verbs work ergatively and others don’t, and various other combinations and degrees of ergativity. But if you’re like me, just the stuff I wrote up here should have been enough to get your mind thoroughly bent out of shape.

Still, you may be wondering something. English does have a way to make patients of intransitive verbs serve as subjects: the passive voice. So do ergative languages have some analogous workaround for when you don’t want the patient of a transitive verb to serve as the thing that the verb agrees with? Tune in on National Grammar Day to learn about … the “anti-passive”!

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.

Make Sure and What?

Ben Zimmer passed an interesting coordination my way, from Buzzfeed, from an article on a new website called Agency Wank, which “is collecting the wankiest, cringiest copy lines from ad agency websites”:

Make sure and bookmark and visit Agency Wank. It’s updated daily.

Something about the phrase is a little odd. Not actually bad, but enough to stumble over and notice. It wasn’t the make sure and instead of make sure to (or be sure and). That’s interesting, but not odd. Like the idiom try and X, the phrase make/be sure and X is an example of asymmetric coordination. Make sure and go doesn’t mean the same thing as go and make sure.

Was it the coordination of the two verbs bookmark and visit after make sure? This coordination is a symmetric one; visit and bookmark Agency Wank means the same as bookmark and visit Agency Wank. So maybe the coexistence of an asymmetric and a symmetric coordination in the same verb phrase is what’s sounding strange.

Or not. I went to COCA and found 17 hits for the asymmetric make sure and X. In 15 of them, X consisted of just one VP, but two of them had two–nay, three or four:

• So make sure and cultivate those and hug together, cry together, and just be community.
• You make sure and come back and drop by and visit us again.

Those sound fine to me. OK, so maybe it was the fact that X does not consist of two coordinated VPs, but a single VP consisting of two verbs (bookmark, visit) and a shared direct object (Agency Wank). But why should that make a difference? Make sure and X is OK; bookmark and visit Agency Wank is OK; why wouldn’t make sure and bookmark and visit Agency Wank just as good?

I don’t know. I decided to go beyond Google and search Google for “make sure and * and *” and “try and * and *” to see if I could find other examples, and hear how they sounded. What I founded sounded OK:

• Don’t try and mix and match print tops with your print jeans. (link)
• To try and equalize and standardize child support throughout CA, the legislature created an algabraic equation….(link)
• requiring students to try and recall and record information gathered in classroom interaction (link)

You might be able to throw out the first one if you take mix and match to be an idiom that acts as a single verb. But not the other two. After reading a few examples like those, I had to wonder what could possibly have made the original example stand out. Now I notice that all the new Google examples have try and X instead of make sure and X, but if I blame the weirdness on that, I’m just looking for a scapegoat. In fact, looking at the original example again, I have concluded…

…that actually, it’s not so bad. That’s the trouble with poking around at weird syntax. Repeat it enough, and unlike individual words, what started off as an odd phrase starts to sound better. I’m OK with Make sure and bookmark and visit Agency Wank now. And what’s more, just look what else I found in my search:

Before stacking the cakes make sure and carve and cover all of your cakes in fondant.

That’s right–it’s an asymmetric make sure and X construction, with the shared direct object thing going on, in a right-node wrapping coordination!

Let’s Diagram the Oath of Office!

Just in time for tomorrow’s inauguration ceremony, but a little bit late for the actual swearing in that took place today, here is the presidential oath of office, as written in the Constitution, put into a tree diagram just for you! Over the years, I’ve used the PHP Syntax Tree Drawer to make my diagrams, but a couple of years ago, Miles Shang’s Syntax Tree Generator came online, so now I have two phrase-diagramming apps to choose from. I couldn’t decide which one to use this time, so I chose both! Now you can decide which style you prefer. Here’s the diagram from the PHP Tree Drawer, with the familiar blue labels and red words you’ve come to love, and the top node of the tree centered horizontally. Click to embiggen.

Now here’s the diagram done with Shang’s Tree Generator, with blue node labels and green words. The top node of the diagram, like all the nodes in the tree, dominates branches of equal length, instead of making one branch reach much farther than the other, as you can see happens with the diagram above. Another nice thing about Shang’s Tree Generator is that it allows you to draw movement lines, so that if your theory of syntax has WH words actually moving from a place inside a clause to the front of the sentence (for a WH-fronting language like English), you can do that. On the other hand, the PHP Tree Drawer makes it easier to put subscripts on the labels. Look closely at my VP labels, and you’ll see that in the upper diagram, they’re subscripted to show whether they are nonfinite (headed by a verb’s base form in this sentence) or finite, but no such subscripts appear in the diagram below.

If you want to try out these apps yourself, here’s the string I used to generate the tree for both of them:

[Clause_fin [NP [Pron I]] [VP_fin [Aux do] [VP_base [Adv solemnly] [VP_base [V_base [V_base swear] [Conj or] [V_base affirm]] [Clause_that [Comp that] [Clause_fin [NP [Pron I]] [VP_fin [VP_fin [Aux will] [VP_base [Adv faithfully] [VP_base [V_base execute] [NP [Det the] [Nom [N Office] [PP [P of] [NP [N President] [PP [P of] [NP [Det the] [Nom [Adj United] [N States]]]]]]]]]]] [Conj and] [VP_fin [Aux will] [VP_base [PP [P to] [NP [Det the] [Nom best [PP [P of] [NP [Det my] [N ability]]]]]] [VP_base [V_base [V_base preserve] [V_base protect] [Conj and] [V_base defend]] [NP [Det the] [Nom [N Constitution] ][PP [P of] [NP [Det the] [Nom [Adj United] [N States]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

In particular, you might not agree with how I’ve parsed the adverbs. For example, I’ve taken faithfully to attach to the entire VP execute the Office of President of the United States, but you could also make a case that it attaches just to the verb execute, and that this string then forms the VP with the Office of President of the United States. And as we were reminded in 2009, adverbs have some flexibility in where they can be placed in a sentence, so you could even experiment with diagramming faithfully execute the Office…; execute faithfully the Office…; and execute the Office … faithfully. Have fun!

To Kill a Mockingbird RNW

I found this hastily scribbled line in my linguistics spiral notebook recently:

They chewed up and spat out the bark of a tree into a communal pot and then got drunk on it.

I had written it down as soon as I heard it sometime in the past few months, but I couldn’t remember where. I’d forgotten I’d even heard it until I saw that page in my notebook again, but it was clear enough why I’d written it down. It was another right-node wrapping. The transitive phrasal verb chewed up is coordinated with the transitive phrasal verb spat out, with the shared direct the bark of a tree. But after that shared direct object, there’s one more phrase in this sentence’s predicate, and it belongs just to spat out. It’s the prepositional phrase into a communal pot.

Googling the phrase, I see that it’s from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I listened to in the car during the summer. Mystery solved!