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.

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

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.

What and How, More and Faster

Two posts back, I talked about how coordinations like when and what could force verbs that are transitive or intransitive to be both at once, and that coordinations such as more and more often could do the same thing. There’s a similar pair of syntactic structures that will force a double parsing on certain kinds of nouns. The first one is another coordination of wh-words, but this time, instead of a wh-noun and a wh-adverb, it’s a wh-determiner and a wh-adverb.

First, some background. In English, plain old nouns can’t usually function as subjects or objects in a sentence: *Cat came to the door or *I saw dentist today are ungrammatical. You have to put the noun with a determiner, such as a, the, every or your, to form a noun phrase: My cat came to the door; I saw a dentist. Some nouns, however, can act as plain nouns, combining with a determiner to form a noun phrase; or they can go without a determiner and act as noun phrases all by themselves. These are teh mass singular nouns and the plural nouns: (The) slime covered the floor; (some) squirrels keep robbing the bird feeder. With that out of the way, here’s the example I used in a January 2005 post:

Every company has its own idea of what and how information should appear….

What is the wh-determiner; put together with the noun information, it would make the noun phrase what information. But since information is a mass noun, it can also serve as an entire noun phrase without a determiner, which is exactly what it does in the phrase ideas of how information should appear. When what and when are coordinated, then (in an indirect question that doesn’t have subject-auxiliary inversion, with a mass or plural noun functioning as the subject), the noun that follows can be both a plain old noun and a full noun phrase. Here’s another example that I found more recently:

…Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite, the only space-based instrument that can measure where and how much rain forms deep inside a hurricane.
Laura Allen, “Endangered Robots,” Popular Science, August 2007, p. 65

In this one, the order of wh-adverb and wh-determiner are reversed, and the determiner isn’t just a simple what; it’s the more complex how much.

It turns out that for noun-vs.-noun-phrase ambiguity, just as for transitive-vs.-intransitive ambiguity, both wh-coordinations and the kind of more and… coordinations discussed earlier can flush it out into the open. It happens when the first more is a determiner (instead of a noun phrase like in the other post), and the other word is an adjective (instead of an adverb like in the other post). An example I used in a later comment sa more and faster, with more as a noun phrase and faster as an adverb. But here’s an example with more as a determiner and faster as an adjective:

We need more and faster processors.

Processors is an ordinary noun when it combines with more, but it’s a full noun phrase when it combines with the adjective faster (under the standard analysis in which adjectives form phrases of the same category as the thing they modify).

More, and More Often

A couple of years ago I wrote about a sentence where a verb had to be parsed two ways because of different demands placed on it by two wh-words. An example would be this sentence from a 1985 paper by Alexander Grosu:

What and when does John (normally) eat?

For the what, eat has to be a transitive verb; for the when, eat is an intransitive. Either way, you parse it, you’re talking about an action of eating and a person doing the eating, but for the transitive case, you’re also talking about what got eaten; for the intransitive case, that part is left unsaid.

Coordinations of nominal wh-words (who, when, etc.) and adverbial wh-words (where, when, why, how) are good at bringing out this kind of simultaneous transitive/intransitive use of verbs that are capable of it. A few weeks ago, David Dowty found another way of doing so. A student of his was interested in a kind of comparative construction, and David found himself doing a search for the string more and more often. He was looking for more as an adverb, so he put in the often to avoid getting examples of plain old more as a noun phrase (as in, I want more) or determiner (as in, I want more chocolate). He was surprised, however, to find he’d caught a few cases of more as a noun phrase anyway. Here’s one of them:

With TESSCO, the more—and more often—you purchase, the lower your total cost. (link)

In this sentence, purchase has the same transitive/intransitive alternation that eat has. For the first more, the noun phrase version, purchase is transitive. For the adverb more often, purchase is an intransitive verb.

Here’s another example:

As with any promotional message the more — and more often — you tell people, the more effectively it will be remembered. (link)

The first more is a noun phrase again, and tell is a ditransitive; that is, it’s a verb that takes two objects: tell (someone) (something). The more fills in the (something) slot. The more often is an adverb, and for it, the tell is just a transitive — tell people — with the something that gets told understood from context.

These more and more often coordinations are an interesting find, since it’s been widely observed that verbs like eat can’t be both transitive and intransitive when you coordinate an ordinary noun and adverb:

*I eat slowly and peanut butter sandwiches.

(Actually, they can in the right circumstances, but that’s another story.) The more and more often coordinations do not involve wh-words, but they and the what and when-type coordinations seem to be grammatical to a comparable degree.

Post-Election Post

Here are a few election-related bits I accumulated during the weeks before the election, on election day, and today.

Ohio’s Democratic governor-elect, Ted Strickland, started off his acceptance speech last night by saying, “I am proud and humbled…” Seems like there should have been a yet in there.

As for statewide issues, if you don’t live in Ohio you might think that two issues, publicized as “Smoke Less Ohio” and “Smoke Free Ohio,” would be redundant. They’re not, though. Smoke Free Ohio is a ban on smoking in indoor public places, meant to level the inconsistencies among cities on smoking policies. Smoke Less called itself a ban, too, but with a few exceptions, such as, oh, restaurants and bars. By smoke less, they mean less smoking in public indoors than there would be without a ban — though in places that already have a ban, such as Columbus, smoke less is a lie, since such bans would be for the most part lifted. Beyond that deception, I wondered if the namers of the issue also were hoping some people would hear it as smokeless instead of smoke less. What a difference a space or a stress makes! And on the website for the issue, there is no space between smoke and less. Luckily, this issue failed, and Smoke Free passed. But hey, now I wonder: Did anyone who voted for Smoke Free think they were voting for free cigarettes for everyone?

And on the national level, I was watching the news this morning talking about the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. They played a week-old clip of George W. Bush talking about soon-to-be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. He said:

They asked the lady who thinks she’s gonna be Speaker but she’s not, about tax cuts.

Put in strictly parallel syntax, this would have been one of the following:

…the lady who thinks she’s gonna be Speaker but isn’t…
..the lady who thinks she’s gonna be speaker but who isn’t

That is, you can coordinate VPs (thinks she’s gonna be Speaker and isn’t) or entire relative clauses (who thinks… and who isn’t). But Bush coordinated a VP (thinks…) with a clause (she’s not). Don’t you dare call it a Bushism, though! This kind of coordination is everywhere. Look, here’s one from the movie Cars that I never got around to writing about:

You know, the twins who used to be your fans but now they’re my fans?

Even Geoff Pullum does it:

[H]e brings up points that he thinks are new but they’re not.

And last, here’s an issue that was on the ballot for the Columbus suburb of Gahanna: Gender Neutralization. I don’t live in Gahanna, so I’m not familiar with the details of that one, but I really hope it was a language-related issue.

Linguistically Lost

I’ve run across two unusual chunks of syntax related to the show Lost in the past week. As is often the case on this blog, they involve coordination. First: We’re now three episodes into the new season of Lost, which ended its second season with three characters apparently killed by an explosion destroying the mysterious underground bunker known as the hatch. The disturbance was heard and felt all over the island, and even picked up by two chess-playing Russian dudes in a research station in Antarctica. Last week, we learned that (to give away as little as possible) at least one of these three characters (namely Desmond) survived, when the character Hurley found him naked in the jungle. Desmond described the events at the hatch to Hurley, who asked him:

Is that what made [the blender noise] and [the sky turn purple]?”

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.

Opportunities They Had But Lacked the Will to Do So

In the various columns, reports, and interviews concerning Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer of The Path to 9/11, one quotation from Nowrasteh keeps showing up. He says:

It also dramatizes the frequent opportunities the Administration [had     in the 90s to stop Bin Laden in his tracks] but [lacked the will to do so].

If, in my literal-minded way, I were to take this as a completely parallel coordination, I would take it to mean that Nowrastek’s teleplay does two things: It dramatizes the frequent opportunities etc. etc., but it lacked the will to dramatize these opportunities. (It dramatizes these opportunities despite an earlier unwillingness to do it!) But I wouldn’t do that. I”ve parsed it as intended, so that inside the big relative clause modifying frequent opportunities, there are two verb phrases coordinated by but; one of them with a gap (indicated with the underlining) corresponding to frequent opportunities, and one with no gap. I’ve written about this kind of coordination before; it’s exemplified by tears I’ve [sat here] and [cried    ] and something I [put in    ], [sit back], and [run    ].

There are two differences, though. First, in the other examples, the final coordinated phrase (cried, run) always has a gap, but in this one it doesn’t (lacked the will to do so). Second, in the other examples the conjunction is and, while in this example it’s but. I have a feeling these two facts are related, but don’t know how yet.

Things You Must Do or Suffer the Consequences

I was listening to some podcasts of NPR’s Science Friday last week, so I could finally clear them off my iPod. The show from February 24 was about the search for extraterrestrial life, and at one point the host, Ira Flatow, asked researcher Margaret Turnbull about how she narrowed down the set of stars to investigate. He put the question this way:

Is there a criteria, you know, a list of things that [a star has to pass __ ] or [it sort of gets eliminated]? (link)

This quotation reminded me of another one I’ve had in my files for a few years:

…Chomsky’s importance as a linguist lies in the fact that he regards the limitless abundance of language its most important property, one that any theory of language must [account for __], or [be discarded].
(Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man, 1982, p. 183)

Coordinated Questions at the Memorial Tournament

Adam and his friend G. were going to get together this afternoon and ride bikes, now that they both know how, but the rain which suddenly sprang up yesterday just got worse today. So instead the friend’s mom and I took the two of them to McDonald’s to have lunch and play in the indoor playset there.

“Man,” I said to G’s mom, “Where is all this rain coming from? It was so nice a few days ago!”

“Of course it’s raining!” she told me. “The Memorial Tournament is going on.“