Even More Wide-Scoping Operators

One of my regular readers is Deborah Lipp, who blogs at Property of a Lady, and has written several books on Wicca and paganism in addition to The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book (“One of these things is not like the others,” as she admits in Sesame Streetwise fashion). She also, as it turns out, is a big fan of AMC’s series Mad Men. I learned this when she wrote to me asking a language-related question about the show and mentioning her and her sister’s MM fan blog, A Basket of Kisses. That reminded me that I’ve had a Mad Men-related post sitting in my pile of drafts, so it seemed like a good time to pull it out and consolidate it with a number of other draft posts on the same topic.

The topic is “Wide-scoping operators”, and here’s the example, from the October 18, 2008 episode of Mad Men:

Jane Siegel (Peyton List)

How do I know I’m not just going to eat another mushroom and this room will disappear and I’ll be back on the train to Trenton?

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.

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.

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.“

Pullum’s Non-Parallelism

In a recent Language Log posting, Geoff Pullum has this to say about a movie reviewer who read the book The Da Vinci Code and made some observations about Dan Brown’s strange and klunky syntax, observations already made by Geoff Pullum two years earlier:

[Anthony Lane] sounds a tiny bit like an intelligent literary stylistician who has just been awakened from a two-year coma and thus attracts a certain amount of eye-rolling at conferences as he brings up points that he thinks are new but they’re not.

I was interested in the points that he thinks are new but they’re not bit. Pullum uses a relative clause to zero in on what kind of points he’s talking about. Specifically, he’s talking about points that have two properties: 1) He (Lane) thinks they are new; and 2) they’re not new. The first property appears in the relative clause as he thinks [ ] are new, with silence instead of a subject for are new. The missing subject corresponds to points. The second property appears in the relative clause as they’re not. No missing subject here; points corresponds to the actually-spoken subject they.

So why didn’t Pullum leave out the they here, just as he did in he thinks [ ] are new? That is, why didn’t he write this?:

…points that he thinks are new but aren’t.

I could ask him, but hey, Geoff Pullum is a busy man. I’m sure he won’t mind if I just speculate a little. He’s a pretty tolerant guy, after all. Maybe he wanted the sentence to end with a stressed not for emphasis (which you don’t get if it’s swallowed up in the contraction aren’t) and it sounded better as but they’re not than but are not. Or, maybe he wanted to avoid having points fill different kinds of gaps in the two phrases. Sure, points corresponds to a subject in both he thinks [ ] are new and [ ] are not, but in the former, it’s the subject of the embedded verb after thinks that’s being left out, while in the latter it’s the subject of the main verb are. Perhaps in Pullum’s grammar, this kind of double duty sounds as strange as a noun corresponding to both a subject and an object in a relative clause, like some of the ones here.

Whatever the reason, it evidently sounded better to Geoff Pullum to keep the they in the second clause. The result is that we have another coordination in which something is marked only on the first coordinate which nonetheless has scope over both coordinates. We’ve had examples involving negation, modality, and question formation, as illustrated below:

• Negation: “It was fun to run into someone who [wasn’t stodgy] and [thought at some point you should call it quits],” remembered Ellen. (link)
• Modality: “[They must have loosened the hooks] and [Mr. Cleaver didn’t notice it],” Jerry said. (link)
• Question formation: [Did you make your own contributions to a complying superannuation fund] and [your assessable income is less than $31,000]? (link)

Pullum’s is the first example crucially involving relative clause formation.

It Might Be Modal Subordination and I Never Realized It

Doug and I have now finished the Great Brain series (well, except for that posthumously published eight volume, which I don’t really count). Now we’re reading Brave Buffalo Fighter, another book by John D. Fitzgerald, which I never came across as a kid. In one chapter, the tailgate on a family’s covered wagon comes open as they’re going up a riverbank, spilling all their supplies. The narrator’s brother Jerry blames the kids:

“They must have loosened the hooks and Mr. Cleaver didn’t notice it,” Jerry said.

The Latest Non-Parallel Coordinations

I’ve been accumulating some more examples of coordinations in which some operator, such as a negation or question-marking is clearly intended to apply to all the coordinated elements in the coordination, but is positioned inside just the first one.

The first few are more negations. First, there was the time a few months back when Doug was playing with a Happy Meal toy, noticing that you could move its arms with a lever, but not vice versa. He said:

You can push this and these’ll move, but [you can't push these] and [this will move].

That is, it is not the case that: you can push these (arms) and this (lever) will move.

Then there are a couple that I just read in the past week. One is from a book that my wife gave me just before Doug was born, which I’m finally getting around to reading, about inventor and shipwreck hunter Tommy Thompson:

“It was fun to run into someone who [wasn't stodgy] and [thought at some point you should call it quits],” remembered Ellen. “He never thought there was some point where you had to call it quits.”
(Gary Kinder, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, 1998, p. 89.)

Here you definitely know the negation fused into the wasn’t in the first coordinate also applies to the second coordinate, because Ellen restates the proposition about thinking you should call it quits all by itself, complete with its own negation (never). Next is one from a book she gave me for Christmas, which I am reading right away (since that’s what I do with books by this author):

“…she has vowed that [the sun shall not shine] or [the rain fall on her head] until he is home again.”
(George Macdonald Fraser, Flashman on the March, 2005, p. 49)

Moving out of the examples with negation, here is one with a modal, namely can. A TV ad for a hig-speed Internet provider has a guy saying:

[I can be on the computer] and [she's talking on the phone].

Even though the can is buried between the subject and predicate of the first clause (I, be), it scopes semantically over both clauses. The guy means that it is possible for him to be on the computer and her to be talking on the phone.

And lastly, here’s one with only, from volume five in the Great Brain series that I’ve been reading to Doug:

And I would be lucky if [I only lost my allowance for six months] and [Papa and Mamma didn't speak to me for a month].
(John D. Fitzgerald, The Great Brain Reforms, 1972, p. 15)

The narrator means he’ll be lucky if only the following occur: he loses his allowance for six months, and his parents give him the silent treatment for a month. Heh. Usually the complaint about only–indeed, the very complaint that James J. Kilpatrick was writing about once again in his column today–is that it’s placed to take too wide a scope when it actually takes a narrower scope, as in I only ate two instead of I ate only two. Here it’s just the opposite, with only looking like it should apply only to the clause it’s buried in, but actually applying to that clause and its sister in the coordination.

More Coordination with Half-Negation

A while back, I wrote about these two sentences:

I nodded so hard I’m surprised [my neck didn't snap] and [my head fall to the floor]. (Yann Martel, Life of Pi, p. 37)

I hope [she didn't die] and [nobody told me]. (Greg Larson)

In each case, two clauses (indicated with square brackets and boldface) are coordinated; the first one contains a negation that scopes over both clauses, not just the one that contains it. That is, Yann Martel is surprised that NOT((neck snap) & (neck fall to floor)), and Greg Larson hopes that NOT((she die) & (nobody tell Greg)). I also mentioned how question markers could behave the same way, in sentences such as, “Do you want to ask for a raise but you’re afraid to do it?” And in fact, I now notice in Martel’s example that even the tense marking does this: The didn’t in the first clause must be taken to convey past time not only for clausemate snap, but also for fall in the second clause.

Now I have a couple more of these coordinations, again involving negation (instead of question formation or tense-marking). The first one is another one from Greg:

I’m really looking forward to this job. But like I have said before, I hope [I don't work there], and [they pull off a mask, and go, "BLLLAAAAUURRRGHHH!!!" and be some horrible place]. If they do, they sure had me fooled good.

The next one is from a posting on a listserv concerning autism. I find this one especially interesting, since the negation here isn’t in the form of an auxiliary verb, as in the previous examples, but in the form of the subject no one:

In the true work force there is a nondiscrimination policy – [no one measures I.Q. points when you apply for a job] and [you are then paired with fellow employees who are of your mental ability]. You are mixed with the smartest of workers as well as some who might be more challenged to keep up though still typical.

These coordinations remind me of the FLoP coordinations: Where those have something trapped in the last coordinate that really belongs to all the coordinates, these have something trapped in the first one that really belongs to all of them–i.e. the negation, question-marking, or tense-marking. For an example of all three of these at once, we could have:

[Didn't he get the job] and [the boss fire him a month later]?

I might even call these anti-FLoPs, but that name’s been taken.

Faulty Parallelism, Concise Non-Parallelism

Eric Bakovic at Language Log has been intrigued by coordinations that for one reason or another, sound a bit off. In these posts he lists a few and figure out what bothers him about them. Mark Liberman talks about this kind of thought process, saying:

We need a new term. Prescriptive grammar says “thou shalt not say (things that meet conditions) XYZ”. Descriptive grammar says “love the vernacular, and say what you like”. But what do we call it when you’re taken grammatically aback by something you hear or read, and then try to figure out what the problem was?

The process he describes is one that I use quite a bit. “Hmm, a place to eat doesn’t (usually) mean a place that you’re actually going to consume. I wonder why that is? Are there patterns here waiting to be discovered?” So I’m glad someone’s putting a name on it. The name Liberman proposes is WTF grammar, although he doesn’t make clear what this kind of linguistic musing has to do with the World Trade Federation.

Some of the “WTF coordinations” that Bakovic discusses are examples that I sent him after his first post, which appear in a paper I wrote. But he also gets into a kind of coordination that I didn’t cover, with this bad boy here:

I nodded so hard I’m surprised [my neck didn't snap] and [my head fall to the floor]. (Yann Martel, Life of Pi, p. 37)

His point is that even though the negation didn’t appears in only one of the coordinates, it really has scope over both. That is, an accurate paraphrase is not

…I’m surprised that my neck didn’t snap and I’m surprised that my head fell to the floor.

but rather

…I’m surprised that it’s not the case that [my neck snapped and my head fell to the floor].

This same thing happens in a sentence my friend Greg wrote about his grandmother. Before I get to it, though, consider the sentence

I hope she didn’t die.

This can be paraphrased as

I hope that it’s not the case that she died.

Now what Greg actually wrote was:

I hope she didn’t die and nobody told me.

Here it’s even more clear that the didn’t takes scope over both coordinates. An accurate paraphrase is not

I hope that it’s not the case that she died, and I hope that nobody told me.

Told him what? It doesn’t make sense. As with Bakovic’s example, the didn’t takes scope over both coordinated clauses, even though it belongs syntactically to only the first one. A more accurate paraphrase is

I hope that it’s not the case that [she died and nobody told me].

Negation’s not the only thing that can do this. This example on p. 1332 of CGEL does it with an interrogative marker (namely the inversion of did and you):

[Did you make your own contributions to a complying superannuation fund] and [your assessable income is less than $31,000]?

At first, these coordinations seem a bit wrong, but after closer analysis, you realize that there’s really not a better way to express them. “I hope that it’s not the case that my grandmother died and nobody told me”? “Is it the case that you made your own contributions … and your assessable income is less than $31K?”? Come on!