Little Women: Gapping and Wrapping

Two posts ago, I wrote about a right-node wrapping that I found in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. It was this:

At the door her sisters seized and bore her to the parlor in a triumphal procession.

An ordinary transitive verb (seized) and a transitive followed by a directional prepositional phrase (bore … to the parlor) are coordinated, and share a single direct object, her. The V+PP bore … to the parlor wraps around this direct object, giving rise to a syntactically non-parallel coordination that, if phrased in a parallel manner, would probably be written

…her sisters [seized her] and [bore her to the parlor in a triumphal procession].

Tonight I was reading aloud some more of Little Women, and it occurred to me that Alcott really seemed to like using another kind of non-parallel coordination that I’ve blogged about a few times: gapping. This is a coordination of two or more clauses that have the same verb, but different subjects, and different content following the verb. In this kind of coordination, some or all of the verb is simply left out, just like a shared subject or shared direct object might be omitted from a more typical coordination. You can find other examples in the other posts in the Gapping category; here’s what I was noticing in Chapter 8 of Little Women:

• Sitting on the floor with one boot on, Amy began to cry and Meg [began] to reason with her, when Laurie called from below, and the two girls hurried down, leaving their sister wailing.
• Meg flew to rescue Amy, and Beth [flew] to pacify Jo, but Jo was quite beside herself….
• Laurie had vanished round the bend, Jo was just at the turn, and Amy [was] far behind, striking out toward the smoother ice in the middle of the river.

Then, only a page or so after that last example (it’s hard to tell with the Kindle), I came to this sentence:

“She is not hurt, and won’t even take cold, I think, you were so sensible in covering and getting her home quickly,” replied her mother cheerfully.

I had to read that one twice. They covered her, and got her home. They didn’t cover her home and get her home. Wow — in one chapter, three cases of gapping, capped off with a right-node wrapping!

Little Women Right-Node Wrapping

Doug has been dragging his feet on his school reading list this year. He’s been coasting, taking advantage of the fact that he’s already read Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Call of the Wild. He made it through the copy of The Hunt for Red October that he got for Christmas (not on the list) in less than a week, and I figured the book would be done so soon that it wasn’t necessary to remind him of his reading list. He’d be back to it soon enough. But when I saw Patriot Games appear on his nightstand the day after Red October was done, I insisted that he get back to the list.

To help, I even downloaded free copies of the public domain novels on the list onto our family Christmas present, a Kindle. After that he read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but has now found himself slowed to a creep, as he agonizes his way through The Scarlet Letter, recently arriving at 5% of the way through. I keep telling him that the story has got to be really good, in order for the book to have obtained status as a classic despite passages like this:

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf–but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood–at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass–here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick.

So while Doug continues to chip away at the hard crust of The Scarlet Letter to get to the good stuff that must be inside, I’ve taken another step to move him along his list, and have made Little Women our latest read-aloud book. It moves a little slowly, too, and despite what you may have heard, it’s not about SW fetishes at all, but you don’t get as lost in its syntax as you do in Hawthorne’s stuff. And some passages are funny, like this rant from Jo, when Meg reminds her that she is a young lady:

I’m not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I’ll wear it in two tails till I’m twenty…. I hate to think I’ve got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy’s games and work and manners! I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy. How I wish that I had a penis! And it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!

Doug and Adam refused to believe the line about the penis was really in the book. Their mother didn’t believe it, either. “I would have remembered that!” she said. Meanwhile, sometimes I’ll speculate with the boys about what’s going to happen later in the book, and wonder if Jo will ever get her “special operation.”

Anyway, now we’re at Chapter 7, 12% of the way through the book. (It’s amazing how reading on a Kindle gets you used to thinking about being 5% or 12% through a book, and not about what page you’re on.) A couple of nights ago, I was pleasantly surprised to read this passage:

Beth hurried on in a flutter of suspense. At the door her sisters seized and bore her to the parlor in a triumphal procession.

This may be my earliest right-node wrapping yet. For those who are just joining us, or for those who need a refresher, the main thing is that if you read the parts that are joined by and as a strictly parallel coordination, it means that Beth’s sisters (1) seized her to the parlor, and (2) bore her to the parlor. Even if it were idiomatic English to “seize someone to someplace” (which it isn’t; I checked the Corpora of both Contemporary and Historical American English), it wouldn’t make sense to seize Beth to the parlor, and then to bear her there again. What Louisa Alcott clearly meant was that the sisters (1) seized Beth, and (2) bore her to the parlor.

Now that I’ve been reminded of RNWs again, I’m interested to hear if they turn up in other texts from the 1800s or earlier. If you find one, leave a comment.

New Data Points

Here are a few items I’ve come across in the past several months. If this were my first year writing this blog, each of them would have been immediately worth a whole post. But since I’ve been doing this for more than seven years, I’ve already written about these topics, in some cases numerous times. So now they’ve just been sitting in my drafts pile until I had enough of them scraped together to put in a combined post.

On a Language Log post on a malnegation from Newt Gingrich, commenter Tom Recht went slightly off topic to offer the following:

A colleague, on hearing that a mutual friend had applied for the same fellowship she had applied for, recently said to me: “I hope he doesn’t get it and I don’t get it.”

What she meant was not “I hope that [[he doesn't get it] and [I don't get it]]”, but “I hope that [not [he gets it and I don't get it]]”. She was morphosyntactically negating only the first of the two coordinated clauses even though the negation applied to the entire coordination — grammatically impossible, you might think, but immediately intelligible in context.

A nice summation of exactly the kind of coordination that first grabbed my attention in a set of phenomena that I first called “coordination with half-negation” but now call by the more general term of wide-scoping operators.

Next, here’s something Glen sent me back in March:

Just found the following sentence in a student paper I’m grading:

“George believes that making the [website] template was better than buying [from an outside designer] because the integration costs associated with testing and integrating an external design into our existing system would be too high.”

FLoP?

FLoP, of course, is the initial name “Friends in Low Places” coordination, which I gave to the kind of nonparallel coordinations that I now call right-node wrapping. Not just any nonparallel coordination is an RNW. The last coordinate has to wrap around something that actually belongs to both coordinates. In this case, the complex verb integrate … into our existing system wraps around the direct object an external design. By all rights, that should encapsulate this noun phrase inside the second coordinate, but in fact, it’s also the direct object for the first verb, testing.

My wife and I were discussing the latest news from the hyper-religious Arkansas Duggar family. You know, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, who decided they would use no form of birth control, “let God decide” how many children they should have, and give them all names that begin with J, no matter how ridiculous those names became after they used the obvious ones. (Jinger? Does that rhyme with ringer or is it homophonous with ginger? I hope the latter.) God may have been indicating a decision when Michelle recently miscarried their 20th child. Giving me the news, my wife said,

The Duggars lost their 20th child.

I noticed the same ambiguity here that I noticed in sentences like Doug lost his first tooth. If you look just at first tooth or 20th child, you have to figure out what sequence you’re talking about. For Doug’s first tooth, you probably mean “first tooth to erupt in Doug’s mouth.” For 20th child, you probably mean “the 20th child that they conceived.” But in the construction VERB one’s Nth NOUN, the verb overrides the default set of ordered events, and the whole thing means “VERB a NOUN for the Nth time.” So Doug lost his first tooth has the intended meaning of “lost a tooth for the first time” along with the unintended meaning of “lost the first tooth that he cut”. And The Duggars lost their 20th child, in addition to the sad intended meaning of “lose the 20th child that they conceived,” could also have the much sadder, not-intended meaning of “lose a child for the 20th time.”

Lastly, here’s a sentence I heard from someone talking about picky eaters:

What is something similar to raw carrots that you’d be willing to give a shot?

Nice extraposition of the relative clause that you’d be willing to give a shot from the something it modifies, but what really interested me was the fact that in the verb phrase give [something] a shot, it’s the indirect object that got pulled out to be the modified noun: something … that you’d be willing to give a shot. In a recent post, I discussed why Who Brynn gave the cookies (with who as an extracted indirect object) sounded so much worse than Who Brynn gave the cookies to (with who as an extracted object of a preposition). Most commenters agreed that it was, but Glen commented:

Well, let me just register my surprise. None of the *-marked constructions here sound even slightly bad to me. Not that I object to the ‘to’, because it can help clarify things in some cases. But omitting it just isn’t a problem at all for me.

Well, Glen, here’s one that popped right out in spontaneous conversation. Now I’m the one registering surprise!

Two from The Ridger

Karen Davis, who blogs at The Greenbelt and frequently comments here using the handle The Ridger, emailed me a couple of interesting linguistic finds this week.

First up, a quotation from someone named Matt Smith on BBC America, on what is evidently a feature called “Dr. Who Insider”. He seems to have said it around April 23:

River Song sort of beguiles, infuriates, endears, and turns the Doctor on, all at the same time.

Karen had two things to note. First of all, there’s the unusual usage of endear. For her and for me, endear has to be used in the frame X endear Y to Z, in which X causes Z to like Y. In this passage, though, the frame is X endear Y, with X pleasing Y (or Y liking X).

Karen wondered if this might be something specific to British English. I don’t know. I haven’t found this usage in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, though I didn’t look through every hit. I did find one example of it in the British National Corpus:

Our impression over a two week jaunt round the Republic was of a country shedding the shackles of its tortured past without sacrificing its most endearing features. What endeared us most was the CRACK — convivial evenings of booze, banter and traditional music.

Leaving that aside, Karen’s second observation was that the whole coordination is one more example of right-node wrapping. All four verbs (beguiles, infuriates, endears, and the phrasal verb turn on) share the Doctor as their direct object, but the last one wraps around it. If we were to interpret this coordination as a parallel coordination, we would end up with ungrammatical phrases like *beguiles the Doctor on, *infuriates the Doctor on, and *endears the doctor on.

Karen’s next example is from a workplace flyer for an employee referral program. It says:

Think about getting eight hours paid time off or possibly up to $5,000 for every one of those people you refer and are hired.

She stumbled over the relative clause you refer and are hired. In the first part of it, the noun phrase those people is the understood missing direct object of refer, but in the second part, those people is the understood missing subject of are hired. As Karen puts it, the omitted relative pronoun in for the first clause is whom; for the second clause, it’s who. It’s another case of coordinated relative clauses with different kinds of gaps. Sometimes these sound OK; other times, like this one, they sound strange. Karen suggests that the problem is the case clash between who and whom, but I don’t think so — first, because these coordinations sometimes work; second, because whom is moribund, and many speakers, if they used a relative pronoun for the first clause at all, would use who; and third, because those relative pronouns aren’t there, so I don’t think they can cause a case clash. An example of this kind of coordination that sounds pretty good is this one from one of the other posts on this topic you’ll find under the relevant category at the bottom of this post:

New Mexico, which the president leads [] but [] was still uncalled as of noon Wednesday…

If any of you have some ideas on why this sentence sounds better than Karen’s example, comments are open. (Of course, they’re open in any case, but you know what I mean.)

Carry or Hold Your Child’s Hand

Karen Davis (aka The Ridger) emailed me about an interesting coordination that’s been in front of her every day for years, but which she just took note of recently. “I know I’ve heard it before,” she wrote, “but today I noticed it. In the DC Metro system there’s a recorded message about how to take your stroller-riding child on the escalators:

If the elevator is out please carry or hold your child’s hand.

“It would be hard to carry your child’s hand without holding it, but I guess you could stuff it in a pocket or something…”

Indeed. My first reaction on reading this was to think of this song:

Karen has found a great example of a right-node wrapping, those non-parallel coordinations fitting the template A conj B C D, and meaning the same thing as if they had been phrased A C conj B C D. In this case, A = carry; B = hold; C = your child; and D = ‘s hand. The intended meaning (I assume) was “Carry your child, or hold your child’s hand.”

Most of the RNW’s I’ve collected have verbs for A and B, with a shared direct object for C, and an adverb or prepositional phrase to complete the meaning of B, but not all of them. This one is clearly not one of them, either, and I believe it’s the first one I’ve seen in which D contained the possessive sufffix ‘s. Like some of the other troublesome ones I noted in my paper, it is not generated by the analysis I proposed.

RNW Example from 1813

Karl Hagen of Polysyllabic sent me the following message…

All the examples I’ve seen for FLoP coordination on your site or Language Log have been fairly recent. I don’t know if the historical dimension of the construction is of interest to you, but I just ran across this example, probably from 1813 (from Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine), and thought you might be interested:

At midnight you will hear a tapping at your door. Open it, and two men in masks will appear outside. They will blindfold, and conduct you to her.

I say “probably” 1813 because I found it in a 1909 edition [p. 152], which claims to be taken from the first edition, but the 1814 edition that is in Google Books has a modified version this passage that doesn’t have the RNW construction, so I can’t be absolutely certain that it wasn’t added later, although that doesn’t seem too likely.

Thanks, Karl! This is a good one. RNWs (right-node wrappings) you’ll recall, have the form A conj B C D, where C belongs to both A and B, while D goes only with B. In this example, A = blindfold, B = conduct, and C = you. When we arrive at you, the shared direct object for both blindfold and conduct, it looks like the coordination is closed off and finished. But wait, there’s more! Along comes to her, which like you, should also belong to both blindfold and conduct–if we’re looking at a standard, parallel coordination. It would mean “they will blindfold you to her and conduct you to her.” Since you can’t blindfold one person to another, we have to conclude that to her is only intended to go with conduct. We have ourselves an RNW.

He Chased Down and Killed Himself

Ben Zimmer alerted me to this headline featured in a post on Headsup: The Blog:

Ben wondered if this might be another example of a right-node wrapping, along the lines of Take and put this away (i.e. “take this and put it away”), or flipped and tore an SUV in half (i.e. “flipped an SUV and tore it in half”).

The headline is definitely weird, but not weird in the right way to be an RNW. Readers will doubtless recall that an RNW typically features a coordination of two or more verbs, sharing a single direct object, with the complication that the last verb is a phrasal transitive verb that wraps around its direct object (e.g. put away, tear in half). This headline looks tantalizingly like an RNW at a first pass, because it almost contains the necessary ingredients. It has a pair of coordinated verbs, one of them an ordinary transitive (kills), and the other a phrasal transitive verb (chase down); it also has a shared direct object for these verbs: 5. In fact, we could make a nice, if nonsensical, RNW out of these ingredients: kills (and) chases 5 down. (I guess it could make sense if someone came and snatched the dead bodies, and the was trying to get them back.)

However, these verbs and their direct object are strung together in a perfectly ordinary English way: chases down (and) kills 5. The weirdness comes in when the headline doesn’t end there, but goes on to say then himself. This could still be an ordinary, if complicated coordination, one involving coordinated verbs and coordinated direct objects. Syntactically, it could be just like

I edited and published a blog post, then a podcast episode.

Multiplying out the two verbs and two direct objects, we end up with four events: editing a blog post, publishing that same blog post, editing a podcast episode, publishing that same podcast episode. Doing the same thing with the headline, we again end up with four events: chasing down five people, killing them, chasing down himself, killing himself. (If we could read the original article, it probably said that the guy “turned the gun on himself“.) It’s at that third event that things break down.

Assuming that the headline writer actually meant, “chases down five people, kills them, then kills himself”, this is some weird syntax, and at this point I think it’s probably an error. Given a chance to rewrite it, the copy editor would probably rephrase. On the other hand, it’s just possible that this is part of someone’s grammar; that is, they would see no problem with it even when prompted to take a second look. If I see coordinations like this again, I’ll have to wonder about that possibility. I know the people at Headsup found it ungrammatical, as did I; how about you?

College Dorm Right-Node Wrapping

I was looking at an online photo history of college dorms, and saw this caption:

Until the 1830s, Harvard students were required to purchase, chop and haul their own firewood back to the dorms (while dodging the livestock and pigpens that crowded the university’s campus).

What do you know? Another right-node wrapping. For those new to the blog, these are a long-standing interest of mine. What we have is a coordination of transitive verbs, starting with purchase and chop. Their shared direct object is their own firewood. The complication comes with the third verb in the list: haul. If the coordination were simply

Until the 1830s, Harvard students were required to purchase, chop and haul their own firewood.

…there’d be nothing more to say. However, the verb haul comes with not only a direct object, but a directional prepositional phrase (PP): back to the dorms. This PP comes after their own firewood, the direct object that all the coordinated verbs share. Once you hit something that the coordinated verbs share, that usually means you’re done with the coordination, and everything further down the line is also shared. Going by that rule here, the sentence should mean the same as:

Until the 1830s, Harvard students were required to:

1. purchase their own firewood back to the dorms,
2. chop their own firewood back to the dorms, and
3. haul their own firewood back to the dorms

But you can’t purchase something to someplace, or chop something to someplace. Even though the PP is in a syntactic position to go with all three verbs, semantically it only goes with the last one.

Almost Right-Node Raisings

The following sentences are examples of what linguists refer to as Right-Node Raising (RNR):

I don’t care for, but Doug can’t get enough of, bird-watching.
She told me, and I told Boris, that there would be layoffs.
They suspect, but don’t know for sure, that I’ve been eating their Girl Scout cookies.

An RNR structure is a coordination of strings of words that don’t form a nice neat phrase, because something is missing from the right edge of each of them. In the first example, I don’t care for and Doug can’t get enough of are neither verb phrases nor complete sentences, because each is lacking an object of a preposition. The final element in the sentence, bird-watching, fills the hole in each of those partial sentences.

You may recall that I chose the name “right-node wrapping” for what I’d been calling “Friends in Low Places” coordinations because of their similarity to RNR.

I have a couple of new RNWs to add to the list. First is one I heard on All Things Considered yesterday:

“Have we forgotten? Have we forgotten what happened to America on 9/11?” asked Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee. “Have we forgotten who did it? Have we forgotten those who protected and gave them a safe haven?”

Even though them logically belongs to both protected and gave, it’s wrapped inside the gave ~ a safe haven verb phrase.

Next is one sent to me by my brother Glen:

A&E kicks off the original real-life series “Runaway Squad,” following former NYPD detective Joe Mazzilli and his team of private investigators, who track, rescue and reunite runaways with their families. (link)

Here, runaways is the direct object of track, rescue and reunite. The trouble is that reunite has to have a with phrase right after its direct object, so runaways gets wrapped and trapped inside it.

Lastly, here’s another coordination that could almost be an RNR. Ben Zimmer found this one and sent it on to me. But speaking of Ben Zimmer, let me interrupt this post to offer him my warmest congratulations on being selected as the new “On Language” columnist for The New York Times Magazine! He’s done so much good work there as a frequent guest columnist that they couldn’t have made a better choice.

So as I was saying, this next example is from Ben. It’s a quote from Sarah Palin:

I don’t think terrorists are worthy of rights that people like my son fight and are willing to die for.

Ha, ha! Her son fights rights! That’s how you want to read it. But wait a minute: Why can’t this one be an actual RNR? Couldn’t it be a coordination of fight and are willing to die, with for understood to go with both strings of words?

No! The final element in a RNR has to be stressed. In order for this to be a RNR, Palin would have had to put intonational breaks before and after and are willing to fight, and put stress on for, like this:

*…people like my son fight — and are willing to die — for.

Doesn’t that just sound ridiculous? At least to me it does. I’m not sure why I can’t stress that final for, but I can’t. I can do it in phrases like Who is it for?, but when the for is all by itself, with silence before and after, I just can’t.

More RNWs

Right-node raisings (aka “Friends in Low Places” coordinations) continue to trickle in from my readers. Here’s one from Ben Zimmer, who has contributed several of the others in the growing collection:

This past spring semester I have been living and working in Washington, DC for a congressman. (link, via Wonkette)

Parsed in parallel manner, it would mean that she lives in Washington, DC for a congressman (the weird part), and that she works in Washington, DC for a congressman (the unremarkable part).

Now for the strangest RNW yet, sent my way by Blar:

A woman has taken out a temporary restraining order against Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs, according to online court records. On Friday afternoon, a judge ordered that Suggs cannot abuse, contact or enter the woman’s home. (link)

Taken as a parallel coordination, it would mean:

1. Suggs cannot abuse the woman’s home.
2. Suggs cannot contact the woman’s home.
3. Suggs cannot enter the woman’s home.

In context, though, the first two propositions don’t make sense. Clearly the writer means Suggs cannot abuse or contact the woman herself. So in this RNW, it’s not some adverbial phrase that wraps around the verbs’ shared direct object; it’s the possessive suffix ‘s plus the possessed noun that follows. I don’t know if my analysis will cover this one or not — I’ll have to reread my own paper to see if it will.

UPDATE, Jan. 15, 2010: Oops, I forgot one that I heard earlier this week, just before a commercial on a daytime talk show:

We’ll talk to Carnie Wilson about losing and then gaining weight again.

Now it may be that Wilson has been on a weight-loss roller coaster, so that again could apply to both losing and gaining. But the then is turning me toward the RNW analysis, such that again is intended to apply only to gaining.