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.

Three More Right-Node Wrappings

The latest additions to the list of “Friends in Low Places” coordinations (aka right-node wrapping)…

The most recent sighting is from Glen, who found this one in an article about an out-of-control North Carolina sheriff:

[H]eavily armed deputies were sent at night to the home of an 18-year-old student suspected of assaulting and robbing another student of a video game. (link)

You can’t assault someone of a video game. Next, one I found when I was thinning the stacks of magazines in our bathroom:

During the War of 1812, American troops occupied and burned the town to the ground….
(Mike Michaelson, “Through the Mist,” Home & Away, Sept/Oct 2005, p. 1

Towns can be burned to the ground, but not occupied to the ground. And last, one from my wife, about a withdrawal from the bank to be recorded:

I’m gonna take and put this in the checkbook.

She took the receipt and she put it in the checkbook, but she didn’t take it in the checkbook.

FLoP Is Now Right-Node Wrapping

I’ve finally come up with a more suitably linguisticky-sounding name for what I’ve been calling “Friends in Low Places” coordinations, or FLoP coordinations for short. But first I have to mention the term given to coordinations like this one:

Adam likes, but Doug dislikes, peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

Instead of coordinating two noun phrases, or two verb phrases, or two of some other nice, neat category, this sentence coordinates two sequences of noun phrase plus partial verb phrase: Adam likes, Doug dislikes. The direct object that completes each verb phrase, peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, is factored out and put at the end. For historical reasons, this kind of coordination is referred to as right-node raising (RNR). The original example of a FLoP coordination, as you will no doubt recall, is:

The whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away.

It resembles RNR in that here, too, two sequences of noun phrase plus partial verb phrase are coordinated (the whiskey drowns, the beer chases), followed by a direct object (my blues). The difference is that the second verb is a phrasal verb, chase away, which wraps around the direct object and produces the unusual lack of parallelism. Hence, my new name for the FLoP coordination: right-node wrapping (RNW).

I’ve written a short paper on RNW, which anyone who’s interested can access here. (In fact, even those who aren’t interested can access it there. Not that I’m expecting them to, but, you know, they could.) The analysis I lay out (in the categorial grammar framework) handles the RNW example mentioned above, as well as examples such as

wash, dry, and put the dishes away
upended and nearly tore a Suburban in half

but not examples such as

unwilling or unable to perform the tasks without injury
the uncle and coach of Rafael Nadal since he started playing tennis

all of which have been discussed here in the past. Should an analysis of RNW cover these cases, too? Or are they (or some of them, at least) a different phenomenon that looks like RNW on the surface? That, as we academics like to say, is beyond the scope of this paper!

Syntactic Gems from Jared Diamond

The Language Guy mentions Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel in this post. Funny he should mention this book. I’ve never read it, but it recently made it onto my mental reading list because I’m finding another book by Jared Diamond so interesting. The book is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Aside from its compelling and scary content (supported by wide-ranging case histories that Diamond has done an astonishing amount of on-the-ground research for), I’ve found an unusually high number of syntactic or semantic oddities in this book. Enough, in fact, for me to gather them together in a single post here.