Tolkien, Rowling, and Quotative Inversion

Yesterday I finished reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to Doug and Adam, and that’s enough Harry Potter for a while. I haven’t decided what we’ll take up next, but I did read them a little bit out of The Hobbit tonight to see how they liked it. We read only five and a half pages, but look what I found:

“We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. …I can’t think what anybody sees in them,” said our Mr. Baggins, and stuck one thumb behind his braces, and blew out another even bigger smoke-ring. (p. 7)

More Harry Potter Grammar

There! I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, including the epilogue. You won’t get any spoilers from me, unless you wanted to find out for yourself that J.K. Rowling still makes all her interactions of coordination with quotative inversion strictly parallel (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In the whole book, I don’t remember coming across any sentences like, “It’s me,” said Harry, and walked in, and I’m pretty aware of them now. She always diligently puts in the subject of the second verb phrase — “It’s me,” said Harry, and he walked in — so that it becomes a parallel coordination of two entire clauses.

On a matter of morphology, who notices the nonstandard(?) grammar in Harry must defeat He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? Q-Pheevr does!

As for dialectal variation between British and American English, I remember that the first Harry Potter book referred to “boogers” twice: once regarding Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavor Beans, and another time regarding the end of a wand that had been jammed up a troll’s nose. In the movie version, it was “bogies,” which was my first clue that this lexical variation existed. In Deathly Hallows, though, the American publishers don’t bother changing it anymore: It’s bogies. I wonder if the British also use this term to refer to over-par golfing, or suspicious items on a radar screen.

And now here’s a bit that fits right in with my last few posts, where a coordination of dissimilar things forces a word to be parsed in two ways. This is a spoiler only if you haven’t read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Harry Potter and the Grammar Police

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to Doug and Adam tonight. As I’ve read it for the past few nights, I’ve been paying special attention, seeing if it’s really true that, as Jan Freeman writes, “Even Harry Potter’s most loyal fans would concede that his creator, J.K. Rowling, has a weakness for adverbs.” I’ve heard this said before, but it’s never been something I really picked up on. Of course, it’s hard to know how seriously to take the criticism when, as Freeman demonstrates, some of the complainers don’t seem to know what an adverb is. In her column, Freeman quotes one ignorant reader who seems to think that adverb means “word that ends in -ly,” and who criticizes Rowling for having an adverb — deathly — right in the title of the final Harry Potter book.

Coordination and Quotative Inversion Meet Again

I’ve been reading another book by Beverly Cleary to Doug and Adam. This one is Muggie Maggie, which was published in 1990. As I read it, every now and then I notice a sentence that, although perfectly good standard English, strikes me as unusual style for Cleary. Finally, I decided I had to go through the whole book and find all these sentences. Luckily, the story is only 70 pages, so within ten minutes I had picked out:

1. “Many letters start up slowly, just like a roller coaster, and then drop down,” she said, and she traced over the first stroke of each letter with colored chalk. (14)
2. “Today we practice our signatures,” she said, and she looked at Maggie. (32)
3. “Well, it’s wrong,” she said, and she sighed so hard that Kisser looked anxious. (61)
4. I will not enjoy it, thought Maggie, and she said, “All those loops and squiggles. I don’t think I’ll do it.” (8-9)
5. “Oops,” said Mr. Schultz, and he closed his loops. (20)
6. “Good for you, Goldilocks,” said her father, and he rumpled her hair. (43)

Now, compare those sentences with these, from a post from back in June. These are from Cleary’s Henry and Ribsy, published in 1954:

1. “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and ran over to the driveway. (46)
   
2. “Wuf,” he said mildly, and waited patiently while Beezus frantically pried Ramona’s fingers loose from his tail. (64)
   
3. “Hi,” she answered, and entered the kitchen with her arms full of packages. (73)
   
4. “Ow,” he exclaimed, and pulled away. (7
   
5. “Wuf!” he said, and looked hungrily at the lunch box. (129)
   
6. Come on, salmon, bite, he thought, and tossed out his line.
   
7. “I won’t,” promised Henry, and got back into the car. (15-17)
   
8. “I have come to haunt you,” said Henry in his hollow voice, and let out a groan. (19)
   
9. “I just stepped into the market to buy a pint of milk to drink with my lunch,” began the officer, and went on to explain what had happened. (30)
   
10. “Wuf,” said Ribsy, and went to the refrigerator to show that what he really wanted was another piece of horse meat. (37)
    
11. “Day in and day out,” said Mrs. Huggins, and laughed. (39)
    
12. “Aw, keep quiet,” answered Henry, and grinned. (70)
    
13. “Oh, it’s nothing,” said Henry modestly, and bared his teeth. (90)
    
14. “Ribsy!” yelled Henry, and grabbed his dog by the collar. (94)
    
15. “Try and get it,” taunted Scooter, and began to laugh. (96)
    
16. “I wonder if…” began Mrs. Huggins and paused. (100)
    
17. “O.K., you old dog,” muttered Henry, and steeled himself for the meeting with Scooter and Robert. (103)
    
18. “Good old Ribsy,” said Henry, and hugged him. (111)
    
19. “Wuf,” answered Ribsy, and worried the rope. (112)
    
20. “Better not count on it,” said Mr. Grumbie, and yawned. (14
    
21. “Don’t lean out,” said Mr. Huggins sharply, and rewound the rope. (167)

See the difference? In H&R, whenever (1) Cleary uses and to indicate a sequence of two events; (2) the verbs for each event have the same subject; and (3) the first event is one of speech or thought, Cleary regularly omits the subject for the second verb. Thus for example, “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and ran over to the driveway, and not “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and he ran over to the driveway. In the whole book, you will not find a sentence like that. In MM, however, a book half the length of H&R, there are the six such sentences reported above. Moreover, there is not a single instance of Cleary omitting the subject for the second verb when the three conditions are met.

What happened between 1954 and 1990 to cause such a complete flip-flop? My guess is that a prescriptive grammarian got to her, and convinced her that the non-parallelism of “Ow,” he exclaimed, and pulled away was ungrammatical (unlike the non-parallelism of, say, John came early, and Marsha, late). All you linguists out there reading books by Beverly Cleary, check out how she handles sentences like these. With enough books for data points, we can answer important questions such as: When did the switch occur? Was it gradual? Has she alternated between styles over the years? Hey, we could make this the Beverly Cleary meme! On second thought, let’s not. If I launched a meme, then I’d feel guilty about ignoring memes I get tagged with.

Coordination Meets Quotative Inversion

Last summer, I added to my list of Friends in Low Places coordinations a couple that I got from a posting on Blogslot, written by Bill Walsh, a copyeditor for The Washington Post. Walsh read my post quoting him, and had this to say in a comment:

I have a similar problem with a common fiction device:

“I don’t love you anymore,” she said, and turned away from me.

She said it, but she didn’t turn-away-from-me it. I think another “she” is required after “and.”