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.

RNWs: Theory and Evidence

This month, my categorial-grammar analysis of right-node wrapping (RNW, aka “Friends in Low Places” coordinations) was published in Theory and Evidence in Semantics, a book edited by Erhard Hinrichs and John Nerbonne. Here’s what Nerbonne says about the article in the book’s introduction:

Neal Whitman’s piece “Right-Node Wrapping: Multimodal Categorial Grammar and the ‘Friends in Low Places’ Coordination” appears to describe a novel sort of construction, which he christens right-node wrapping. These coordinations have the form [A conjunction B] C D and are understood as if the element C were distributed over both sides of the conjunction, while the element D is interpreted only with respect to the second conjunct. Whitman offers the following example from the Los Angeles Times, 16 Oct. 2003:

(9) The blast [upended] and [nearly sliced] a [...] Chevrolet in half.

The bracketed phrases are the conjuncts A and B, a Chevrolet is the distributed object C, while the underscored in half is understood solely in combination with the likewise underscored second verb sliced, and crucially not with the first conjunct upended. Whitman provides a long list of examples from actual use, demonstrating the existence of the construction, in spite of the suspicion which Whitman himself confesses to having felt when he first encountered it. Coordination has been studied intensively in several grammatical frameworks, and especially within categorial grammar, so that it is surprising to see a new sort of coordination discovered, even more so one which is readily instantiated in newspaper prose (and elsewhere).

Whitman’s work is a clear continuation of other work on coordination in categorial grammar, most specifically work on non-constituent coordination, the earliest examples of which we are aware of being Dowty (1988) and Steedman (1985, 1990). Dowty (1988) based his account of non-constituent coordination on functional composition and type raising. In a sentence such as (10), the objects Mary and Bill are first raised from the type NP to the type (VP/NP)\VP which then compose leftwardly with the VP\VP-category adverbs yesterday and today:

(10) John saw [Mary yesterday] and [Bill today].

This paves the way for straightforward cancellation with respect to the VP/NP transitive verb saw and the subject.

Whitman formalizes his analysis within multi-modal categorial grammar, using a Gentzen-style rule system with an accompanying semantics. It turns out that it is sufficient to add a single rule of “mixed associativity”, which is assumed not to be universal, but rather specific for English. The author contrasts this with an alternative analysis which makes uses of a unary constructor. Although both analyses cover a good deal of the data, Whitman notes some overgeneration in both analyses, as well as undergeneration of data with respect to the first.

The “long list of examples from actual use” was compiled from the various posts on RNWs. I was disappointed to find — some weeks after submitting the final draft — that I’d left out one of my favorite examples because I had neglected to put a “‘Friends in Low Places’ coordination” tag on the relevant post, and missed it during my blog search. So if you read the article, you won’t see this grimly fascinating RNW in it:

Alternatively, infanticide was carried out by [burying alive], [smothering], or [turning a newborn infant on its face].
(Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005, p. 290)

Then there are the RNWs that I only found in the first place after submitting the final draft, like the one about Victoria Beckham’s dress, or the one about Abu Ghraib. In addition to those, there’s also this handful of attestations that I’ve had accumulating for a while:

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which manages the FHA, has [fined], [sued], and even [removed some of the rogue lenders from the program], but they keep coming back. (Froma Harrop, column of Jan. 7, 2009)
• Until and unless we find it in ourselves to [confront] and [roll that culture back], our inner cities will remained blighted places …. (Leonard Pitts, Jr., column of Feb. 7. 2009)
• [Wash] and [put wet lettuce/vegetables directly into Salad Sac]. (Instructions on a terrycloth bag to hold your salad. A Christmas present from Mom and Dad!)
• With the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, players can [collect], [trade] and even [take their dinosaurs into battle with friends to see who will become the ultimate Dinosaur King]! (Product description for Dino-King video game.)
• [Color], [cut out], and [mount game cards on tagboard]. (Instructions in a book of do-it-yourself games for teachers. I saw it when I was visiting Adam’s classroom.)
• You don’t [owe] or [have to pay anything back] at the end of the problem. (Answer to the riddle “Why is borrowing a good thing in math?” on one of Doug’s worksheets.)

In addition to the above examples, here are a couple that Ben Zimmer noticed and sent to me last fall:

• DeCroce said the people of New Jersey would be better served if Gov. Corzine actually stayed in the state long enough to deal with the state’s economic problems instead of traveling around the country and doing the TV talk show circuit “alternately [praising] and [begging President-elect Obama for money].” (link)
• Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce (R-Morris) said Senate President Richard Codey (D-Essex) alternately [threatened] and [tempted him with state grant money] in an effort to halt a Republican hunt for documents that would expose how state funds were really being doled out by ruling Democrats. (link)

Thanks, Ben! I especially like the last one: “He threatened me with state grant money!”

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to get my author’s copy of Theory and Evidence in Semantics. There’s stuff in there by Chris Barker, Erhard Hinrichs, Jack Hoeksema, Pauline Jacobson, Manfred Krifka, Peter Lasersohn, John Nerbonne, Craige Roberts, and Greg Stump that I want to read. It’s supposed to be here by now!

UPDATE, Apr. 5, 2009: I’ve now received my copy. Looking at my own paper with fresh eyes, I see that I wrote on p. 248 that one drawback of my analysis is that it would generate sentences like *John [put away] and [got the dishes back out], where both verbs (not just the second one) are phrasal verbs. I said, “[I]n the years in which I have been hyperaware of RNW coordinations, I have yet to hear one with this pattern.” Except, of course, for the example on p. 239: Hey, Dad, can you [bring over] and [squirt some ketchup on my plate]? That’s what I get for putting in last minute examples. Oh well, at least what I thought was an overgeneration problem might not be one after all.

I also pointed out two examples on p. 240 in which the shared direct object was an unstressed pronoun (specifically them). My point was that these direct objects therefore had to split up the phrasal verb they appeared in, and could not conceivably be moved out to make the coordinated verb phrases nice and parallel. For some reason, I neglected to make the same observation about the example killing or allowing them to die from the previous page.

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Human Rights FLoP

Our old friend, the Friends in Low Places coordination, has popped up again. Arnold Zwicky discusses an example that he found in a headline on cnn.com:

Brinkley spouse slept with, gave teen $300K

Since we’re on the subject, I’ll add the most recent FLoP coordination I’ve found:

As became increasingly obvious in the months after the [Abu Ghraib] photos came to public light, this pattern of abuse did not result from the acts of individual soldiers who broke the rules. It resulted from decisions made by the Bush administration to bend, ignore, or cast rules aside.

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?

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.

Arson FLoP

From the LA Times Breaking News blog, regarding the arsonist behind one of the fires in Southern California:

“The FBI will bring to bear all of its national resources … to make sure that we track, apprehend and put this person or persons behind bars where they belong,” said FBI Special Agent Herb Brown.

Hey, a three-part right-node wrapping / Friends in Low Places coordination!

Condiment Coordination

As I was setting Doug’s and Adam’s drinks on the table, Doug knew he had to act fast. If I was already sitting down when he asked if he could have some ketchup, he knew from experience that I’d say, “Sure. It’s in the door of the fridge.” If he wanted me to get the ketchup for him, he would have to ask me specifically, and do so before I sat down. Furthermore, if all he requested was for me to bring the ketchup, and then, upon receiving it, he tried to expand the scope of my mission to include actually squeezing some onto his plate, I’d most likely say, “You can do that,” and head to my seat. If he wanted to take his ease while having both of these simple tasks done for him, he’d have to make both requests at the same time, and right now. So he quickly mustered his wits and said,

Hey, Dad, can you bring over and squirt some ketchup onto my plate?

“OK,” I said, but as I walked to the fridge, that familiar feeling came over me, that nagging post-processing sensation that something wasn’t quite right. I mentally reviewed Doug’s utterance as I returned with the ketchup, and realized that — hot dog! — he had just created another “Friends in Low Places” coordination (aka right-node wrapping, or RNW) to add to my list.

A review of the anatomy of an RNW coordination: It has form A and B C D, but is semantically equivalent to [A C] and [B C D], instead of [A C D] and [B C D], as it would if it were parsed as an ordinary, parallel coordination. In this example:

A = bring over
B = squirt
C = some ketchup
D = on my plate

His intended meaning was equivalent to [A C] and [B C D], i.e. “bring over some ketchup and squirt it (the ketchup) on my plate”; it was not “bring over some ketchup on my plate and squirt it on my plate.”

Do I dare say that I relish moments like this?

iPod FLoP

I was looking for an old message in my email folders, and came across an email from a Literal-Minded reader named Zohar Kelrich, who thought he might have found another Friends in Low Places coordination to add to my collection. For my consideration:

Creative has asked the ITC to issue an order stopping Apple from marketing, selling or importing iPods into the US. (link)

So we have three coordinated gerunds: marketing, sellling, and importing. Outside them all we have the noun that serves as the direct object for each verb: iPods. And finally, we have a prepositional phrase, into the US. If this were an ordinary coordination, it could be expanded out into:

• marketing iPods into the US
• selling iPods into the US
• importing iPods into the US.

But of these three verbs, only import fits idiomatically into the V+NP+into+NP frame. So moving on to the hypothesis that this is a FLoP coordination, it would have to be expanded as:

• marketing iPods
• selling iPods
• importing iPods into the US.

But wait: Is the order supposed to stop Apple from selling and marketing iPods at all, or just in the United States? I can’t quite tell, but it seems to me that an accurate unpacking of the coordination would be more like this:

• marketing iPods in the US
• selling iPods in the US
• importing iPods into the US.

As I wrote to Zohar, “They want the into the US to go with all three coordinates, but because the preposition is into instead of in, it can only go with the last one. In a language that didn’t make such a distinction, this would be an ordinary coordination, with in/into the US associating with all three coordinates. In short, a perfect specimen of a FLoP (aka RNW) coordination.” In English, though, I don’t know what to call it.

A Right-Node Wrapping; a Backformation; and a Double Passive Gone Wrong

Here are a few recently observed examples of things that I’ve talked about on numerous other occasions.

First, here’s one more right-node wrapping (aka “Friends in Low Places” coordination), from Monday’s episode of Fresh Air, in which Terry Gross interviews Dr. Melinda Merck, author of book on forensic veterinary medicine. Terry asks about one case:

What was her story, like why was she collecting so many cats and then either killing or allowing them to die? (13.23-13.30)

And also on the subject of veterinary medicine, here’s a backformation I heard at the vet’s office earlier today:

…and here’s his rabie tag; you’ll need to put that on him…

Rabies is a borrowing from Latin; in Latin, it’s a fifth declension noun, and -es is the nominative singular ending, not a plural marker. But in English, rabies has occasionally been interpreted as a plural noun. If it’s a plural noun in your lexicon, then you’ll need to strip off the -s to make it singular in order to form compounds such as rabie tag and rabie shot.

Lastly, here’s an attempt at a double passive that Glen noticed and brought to my attention. It may be that sentences such as The marshmallows were forgotten to be brought (meaning, “Someone forgot to bring the marshmallows”) are ungrammatical in your English. They’re not grammatical in mine, though it would be convenient if they were. But even though they’re not grammatical for me, they don’t quite sound like errors, either. This, though, sounds like an error:

“A lot of guys I know, actually, have become radicalized, or initially took the first steps towards learning more about Islam and their way of life as a result of them being tried to being forced to marry someone they don’t want to marry,” Butt tells Simon. (link)

It would have been better (though still not quite grammatical for me) if he’d said being tried to be forced. As for tried to being, not only is it not in my grammar, I’d bet it’s not in Butt’s grammar either.