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.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

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.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

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.

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?

Doug’s Multiple-Level Coordination

What was going to be a Christmas present for Doug and Adam turned into a Valentine’s Day present. Then it turned into an (early) Easter present. But today, after months of delay, the game that Doug and Adam had been anticipating for months finally came out, and we went and picked up our copy of Hyper Crush Bros. Knockdown-Dragout. Doug and Adam started playing it as soon as we got home from our errands, and managed to get in a couple of rounds before it was time to wash up for supper. As we sat down, I asked them how they were liking it. Doug said:

We haven’t tried training mode, versing mode, or looked at all the items yet.

Wild and Crazy WTF

About this time of year back in 1991, I was reading Henry Beard’s Latin for All Occasions, a collection of sentences such as “I didn’t expect you home so soon” and “The waitress drew a smiley face on my check” into Latin. It wasn’t funny enough to buy for myself, but that was OK; I had bought it to give to my cousin for Christmas. For that reason I was being extra careful as I turned the pages, so my cousin would never know I had turned his gift into a secondhand one. For the same reason, I made Glen promise he wouldn’t tell what I had done when I shared a few of the translations with him.

Two weeks later, I unwrapped Glen’s Christmas present to me: a copy of Henry Beard’s Latin for All Occasions. There was a card tucked inside the cover. It read:

Sinking and Living to Tell the Tale

If you can’t get enough of multiple-level coordinations like Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus and others that you’ll find in the posts in this category, go read Geoff Pullum’s two wonderfully literal-minded parsings of

How many people have been on a ship that’s hit an iceberg in the middle of the night, sunk, and lived to tell the tale?

Beckham RNW

I picked up a magazine in the airport on our way back from Las Vegas last week. The cover story was on plastic surgery for people in show business. Actually, there were three articles on the subject, and one of them had several before-and-after photos of famous people. I liked the lead on this one: “For a household name, it’s just as futile to attempt a ’secret’ eye lift as it is to replace your head ‘discreetly’ with a basketball.” Cool simile! I had to show it to Doug, since his teacher’s been doing similes (and of course metaphors; you’re not allowed to talk about one without the other). As an aside, I never could see why it was so important that “similes use a like or an as,” and metaphors don’t. And I never heard a really interesting one in class; they’re always more entertaining when found in the wild.

Anyway, check out this item I found in the pair of photos for Victoria Beckham:

I suspect Posh’s implants are so hard and round for purely athletic reasons. After all, Beckham can’t touch them. He can only kick, head-butt, or juggle them with his knees.
(Cintra Wilson, quoted in Willa Paskin, “Scar Wars: Double Takes,” Radar, Dec./Jan. 2008, p. 70)

First of all, there’s the apparent restriction of the word touch to mean “touch with one’s hands,” which looks like a clear case of R-based narrowing (”the socially motivated restriction of a set-denoting term to its culturally salient subset or member”, as defined in this manuscript by Larry Horn). The other unusual bit about the sentence is the right node wrapping (”Friends in Low Places” coordination) that Cintra Wilson produces. I know it’s an RNW, because if it were an ordinary coordination, we’d be talking about David Beckham kicking Victoria’s augmented breasts with his knees, head-butting them with his knees, or juggling them with his knees. Now maybe you believe that kicking can include making forcible contact with a knee, and maybe you don’t, but I took an anatomy class in college, and I know for certain that you can’t head-butt something with your knees.

Take and Put the Desk Away

If I’d known how many “Friends in Low Places” coordinations (right-node wrappings) would cross my path this month, I’d've saved them all for one post, instead of writing about one of them here and another one here. Oh, well, too late now. I’ll just put the last couple I found in this post.

Where, When, and How Many?

I saved a section of the newspaper a year ago because there was a sentence in it I wanted to write about. But I didn’t get around to it right away, and it was of topical interest, so I ended up never doing it. It’s topical again, though, so I picked up the article off my desktop where it’s been sitting all that time, and looked at the sentence again:

They’re all violating ordinances that regulate where, when and how many campaign signs can dot the local landscape.

The coordination of where, when, and how many is like a couple of coordinations I wrote about back in 2005. What’s interesting is that campaign signs is doing two jobs.