Man Accused of Assaulting Officer, K9 Indicted

My wife showed me a nice crash blossom yesterday. It went like this:

Mentally filling in the usual missing pieces of headline syntax, I arrived at this interpretation:

A Delaware County man is accused of assaulting an officer and a K9 has been indicted.

My wife and I agreed that that really sucked for the dog, who was taking the heat for that Delaware County man’s misdeed.

Of course, here is the intended reading, with slightly different missing pieces restored:

A Delaware County man who has been accused of assaulting an officer and a K9 has been indicted.

This crash blossom was made possible by two of the usual culprits in headline ambiguity. First, there’s the copula omission (i.e. omission of forms of be). In ordinary language, man accused of assaulting an officer wouldn’t be ambiguous; it would just be a noun, man, modified by an adjectival passive phrase, accused of assaulting an officer. Or, if you want, a “reduced relative clause”: who has been accused…. But because headlines leave out the copula, we’ve been trained to turn phrases like this into full clauses by inserting is or has been. Of course, that’s exactly what does have to happen for indicted: We have to supply our own is or has been, but being led to do the same thing for man accused paves the way for the second part of the misunderstanding.

The second part is based on the replacement of and with a comma. If the headline had read Delaware County man accused of assaulting officer and K9 indicted, the easiest parse would have been the correct one, in which and joins just officer and K9 as the objects of assaulting. Instead, the comma made the easiest parse the one in which we have two entire clauses, with K9 as the subject of the second one.

Make Sure and What?

Ben Zimmer passed an interesting coordination my way, from Buzzfeed, from an article on a new website called Agency Wank, which “is collecting the wankiest, cringiest copy lines from ad agency websites”:

Make sure and bookmark and visit Agency Wank. It’s updated daily.

Something about the phrase is a little odd. Not actually bad, but enough to stumble over and notice. It wasn’t the make sure and instead of make sure to (or be sure and). That’s interesting, but not odd. Like the idiom try and X, the phrase make/be sure and X is an example of asymmetric coordination. Make sure and go doesn’t mean the same thing as go and make sure.

Was it the coordination of the two verbs bookmark and visit after make sure? This coordination is a symmetric one; visit and bookmark Agency Wank means the same as bookmark and visit Agency Wank. So maybe the coexistence of an asymmetric and a symmetric coordination in the same verb phrase is what’s sounding strange.

Or not. I went to COCA and found 17 hits for the asymmetric make sure and X. In 15 of them, X consisted of just one VP, but two of them had two–nay, three or four:

• So make sure and cultivate those and hug together, cry together, and just be community.
• You make sure and come back and drop by and visit us again.

Those sound fine to me. OK, so maybe it was the fact that X does not consist of two coordinated VPs, but a single VP consisting of two verbs (bookmark, visit) and a shared direct object (Agency Wank). But why should that make a difference? Make sure and X is OK; bookmark and visit Agency Wank is OK; why wouldn’t make sure and bookmark and visit Agency Wank just as good?

I don’t know. I decided to go beyond Google and search Google for “make sure and * and *” and “try and * and *” to see if I could find other examples, and hear how they sounded. What I founded sounded OK:

• Don’t try and mix and match print tops with your print jeans. (link)
• To try and equalize and standardize child support throughout CA, the legislature created an algabraic equation….(link)
• requiring students to try and recall and record information gathered in classroom interaction (link)

You might be able to throw out the first one if you take mix and match to be an idiom that acts as a single verb. But not the other two. After reading a few examples like those, I had to wonder what could possibly have made the original example stand out. Now I notice that all the new Google examples have try and X instead of make sure and X, but if I blame the weirdness on that, I’m just looking for a scapegoat. In fact, looking at the original example again, I have concluded…

…that actually, it’s not so bad. That’s the trouble with poking around at weird syntax. Repeat it enough, and unlike individual words, what started off as an odd phrase starts to sound better. I’m OK with Make sure and bookmark and visit Agency Wank now. And what’s more, just look what else I found in my search:

Before stacking the cakes make sure and carve and cover all of your cakes in fondant.

That’s right–it’s an asymmetric make sure and X construction, with the shared direct object thing going on, in a right-node wrapping coordination!

Linkfest

The title of this post as it sat in my drafts folder was “October Linkfest”. But you know what? I don’t think I want to wait nine months to share these links with you, so here they are now!

1. From the folks who brought you COCA and COHA, and created user-friendly interfaces to the BNC and Google Books Corpus, it’s the Corpus of American Soap Operas. To get just a quick look at the difference between CASO and COCA, the search string “been with a man/woman” returns 47 hits out of COCA’s 450 million words, but with CASO’s mere 100 million, we still get a respectable 34 hits.
2. In this first of two from Language Log, Mark Liberman asks: How do you pronounce the final consonant in with?
3. When I was a teenager, I’d see the commercials for Raid insecticide on TV, with its tagline, “Raid kills bugs dead!” I didn’t like how they were trying to use kill with an object complement, as if it were a verb like make or render. I also didn’t like the redundancy of kill with dead. Oh, well, I was probably suffering from the Recency Illusion, anyway. But there’s one more problem with kill s.t. dead that I hadn’t thought about: What do you do when your direct object is long enough that you decide to move it to the right of kill dead? Think about it, then check out the news headlines in this Language Log post.
4. What’s a ranga? Find out in this post from Fully (Sic). By its etymology, I’d guess its pronounced /ræŋə/, but I find that I want to pronounce it /ræŋɡə/.
5. Since January 2011, Neal Goldfarb has been keeping a blog on linguistics and the law called LawnLinguistics (get it?), which I have now installed on the blogroll.
6. John Wells has written a blog post on the affrication heard in words like truck and dry (and which I’ve blogged about, too). His question: Does it happen when the tr or dr cross word boundaries, as in night rate and head room?
7. Nancy Friedman, with a nod to Language Hat, tells about “said-bookisms”, which turns out to be the word for an author’s use of more and more distracting words to replace said in written dialogue.
8. A checked out the blog of Quirkycase, someone who recently started following me on Twitter, and found this enlightening post on why some German past participles begin with ge- and some don’t.

A fascinating story, and equally fascinating 2:36 video on “Silbo Gomero”, a whistled version of Spanish used on the Canary Island of La Gomera.

Let’s Diagram the Oath of Office!

Just in time for tomorrow’s inauguration ceremony, but a little bit late for the actual swearing in that took place today, here is the presidential oath of office, as written in the Constitution, put into a tree diagram just for you! Over the years, I’ve used the PHP Syntax Tree Drawer to make my diagrams, but a couple of years ago, Miles Shang’s Syntax Tree Generator came online, so now I have two phrase-diagramming apps to choose from. I couldn’t decide which one to use this time, so I chose both! Now you can decide which style you prefer. Here’s the diagram from the PHP Tree Drawer, with the familiar blue labels and red words you’ve come to love, and the top node of the tree centered horizontally. Click to embiggen.

Now here’s the diagram done with Shang’s Tree Generator, with blue node labels and green words. The top node of the diagram, like all the nodes in the tree, dominates branches of equal length, instead of making one branch reach much farther than the other, as you can see happens with the diagram above. Another nice thing about Shang’s Tree Generator is that it allows you to draw movement lines, so that if your theory of syntax has WH words actually moving from a place inside a clause to the front of the sentence (for a WH-fronting language like English), you can do that. On the other hand, the PHP Tree Drawer makes it easier to put subscripts on the labels. Look closely at my VP labels, and you’ll see that in the upper diagram, they’re subscripted to show whether they are nonfinite (headed by a verb’s base form in this sentence) or finite, but no such subscripts appear in the diagram below.

If you want to try out these apps yourself, here’s the string I used to generate the tree for both of them:

[Clause_fin [NP [Pron I]] [VP_fin [Aux do] [VP_base [Adv solemnly] [VP_base [V_base [V_base swear] [Conj or] [V_base affirm]] [Clause_that [Comp that] [Clause_fin [NP [Pron I]] [VP_fin [VP_fin [Aux will] [VP_base [Adv faithfully] [VP_base [V_base execute] [NP [Det the] [Nom [N Office] [PP [P of] [NP [N President] [PP [P of] [NP [Det the] [Nom [Adj United] [N States]]]]]]]]]]] [Conj and] [VP_fin [Aux will] [VP_base [PP [P to] [NP [Det the] [Nom best [PP [P of] [NP [Det my] [N ability]]]]]] [VP_base [V_base [V_base preserve] [V_base protect] [Conj and] [V_base defend]] [NP [Det the] [Nom [N Constitution] ][PP [P of] [NP [Det the] [Nom [Adj United] [N States]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

In particular, you might not agree with how I’ve parsed the adverbs. For example, I’ve taken faithfully to attach to the entire VP execute the Office of President of the United States, but you could also make a case that it attaches just to the verb execute, and that this string then forms the VP with the Office of President of the United States. And as we were reminded in 2009, adverbs have some flexibility in where they can be placed in a sentence, so you could even experiment with diagramming faithfully execute the Office…; execute faithfully the Office…; and execute the Office … faithfully. Have fun!

Adjective, Participle, or Gerund?

In my last post, I talked about present participles that aren’t adjectives, in examples such as are frightening the cats or is running for his life. In this post, I’m going to follow the practice of CGEL and refer to these simply as present participles. In my last post, I also talked about present participles that are adjectives, such as frightening (without a direct object), exciting, daring, scathing, etc. Following CGEL, I am not going to call these participles anymore. I will refer to them simply as adjectives, and if I need to distinguish between these adjectives and adjectives that were not derived from verbs by adding -ing, I will speak of participial adjectives.

All the examples in my last post, whether they involved participles or adjectives, used these words in a predicative position — that is, following a linking verb. The diagnostic I used to separate the adjectives from the participles was the adverb very. Unlike most adverbs, very can modify only adjectives or other adverbs, so if you know that X is either an adjective or a verb, and very X is grammatical, then X must be an adjective. Using the very test, we know that frightening is an adjective in The kids are (very) frightening, as well as in The kids are (very) frightening to the cats. We also saw that very didn’t work in *The kids are very frightening the cats (unless you’re Freddy Mercury or Junie B. Jones). This could mean that frightening is not an adjective in this sentence, or that it is an adjective but for whatever reason can’t be modified by very. Given the results of some other diagnostics that I won’t go into right now, it’s more sensible to conclude that frightening is not an adjective, but a participle.

Now I want to use the very test on adjectives and participles in an attributive position — right next to a noun, as in the frightening kids. Here, too, frightening passes the very test, indicating that it is well and truly an adjective:

the very frightening kids

But some verbs, such as playing, fail the very test in that same position:

*the very playing kids

But wait! Both frightening and playing are modifying kids in these examples; doesn’t that mean they’re both adjectives? Not according to the very test, it doesn’t. It took me a while to get my head around this. I reminded myself: You can modify a noun with things other than an adjective phrase. You can modify it with a prepositional phrase: the kids in the pool. You can modify it with another noun: the school kids. And you can also modify it with a verb, in the form of a participle.

At this point, you might consider the possibility that playing actually is still an adjective, and that it fails the very test for some other reason. However, look what you can do with playing but can’t do with frightening: You can modify it with a just-for-verbs adverb, such as carefully:

*the carefully frightening kids
the carefully playing kids

Playing is definitely acting more like a verb than an adjective here.

Are there -ing verb-derived words that modify nouns and fail both the very and the carefully tests? Sure! Here’s one:

my jogging shorts
*my very jogging shorts
*my carefully jogging shorts [unless you have shorts than like to jog]

And with that, we’ve moved from participial adjectives to participles to gerunds. Here’s a summary of our progression, in convenient flowchart form. (In the chart, “AD-VERB” is my way of indicating an adverb that modifies only verbs, such as carefully.)

Very Frightening

Life, as we know, is full of tough decisions.

Participles are often described as “verbal adjectives,” but recently I was called on to be more specific with a participle: was it a verb, or an adjective? (Sorry, I can’t tell you why I had to do that; it’s TOP SECRET.)

In high school, I was unconflicted: Participles were a kind of adjective, end of story. Even in a sentence like The kids are frightening the cats, I considered frightening to be an adjective, and frightening the cats to be an adjective phrase, just as proud of themselves is an adjective phrase in The kids are proud of themselves. I was annoyed to lose a couple of points over it in a quiz. However, I wasn’t looking at the bigger picture. I wasn’t considering the other properties of adjective phrases that frightening the cats didn’t have, such as these that I read about in CGEL.

First of all, you can’t make the head participle comparative or superlative, the way you can with typical adjectives. You can’t modify it with very, either:

• The kids are prouder/proudest of themselves.
• *The kids are more/most frightening the cats.
• The kids are very proud of themselves.
• *The kids are very frightening the cats.

It’s for reasons like these that frightening the cats is considered to be a participial phrase — i.e., more verby than adjectivey.

On the other hand, with frightening by itself, you can make comparatives and superlatives and use very:

• The kids are more/most frightening.
• The kids are very frightening.

So by itself, frightening can be considered simply an adjective.

In fact, frightening can even be an adjective inside an adjective phrase. The key is that you can’t just go putting a noun phrase complement (such as the cats) after it, the way you’d do with a verb. Instead, you give it a complement more suitable for an adjective; namely, a prepositional phrase. Here’s how it shakes out with the PP to the cats:

• The kids are more/most frightening to the cats.
• The kids are very frightening to the cats.

Frightening is actually an unusual case: It’s a participle that in one guise has completely crossed over to become an adjective, but in another still works as a verby participle in progressive tenses. Other participles like this are loving, (for)giving, disturbing, and amazing. In contrast, participles such as running never pass the comparative/superlative/very adjective tests: Sam is more/most/very running.

So with all that said, now we can talk about what the fictional kindergartner Junie B. Jones has in common with the glam rock group Queen. From Junie B. Jones and the Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, by Barbara Park:

The creamy filling was very squishing between my toes. (p. 25)

From Queen, of course, we have this line from “Bohemian Rhapsody”, with our much-discussed participle frightening:

Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me! (~3:18 in the video)

In both examples, the very tells us to take the participle as an adjective, but other factors force us to take it as a non-adjectival participle. In the Junie B. Jones example, it’s the context of a progressive tense that does it; in the Queen example, the NP complement me.

I wonder why I’ve never heard anyone complain about this aspect of Junie B. Jones’s grammar, when these books have certainly been criticized for daring to have a six-year-old over-regularize her past tenses and use accusative pronouns where nominatives are called for. Probably it’s because the other grammar complaints are so easy to make, while this one requires some analysis in order to put your finger on the problem. (JBJ uses very with other non-adjectival participles, too, such as watering and practicing, also from JBJ:YBF.) As for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” that song is weird in too many other ways, I think, for people to have focused on the grammar of that one line that comes just between the “Scaramouche” and “Galileo” bits.

There’s more to come about participles, adjectives, and even gerunds, in my next post!

New Development for Backformed Kudo

A couple of years ago, in a post about the backformation of the Boy Scouting-related singular noun Webelo from Webelos, I mentioned the similar backformation of kudo from the Greek borrowing kudos. Here are a couple of examples from COCA (the source of all the other examples in this post, except as noted):

• And there was a little kudo called the Award of Merit
• One even resulted in the ultimate scientific kudo.

The OED has kudo from as far back as 1941, though I’m not so sure about that citation. But their 1950 citation is a clear example:

A man sitting on a toilet bowl swung open the men’s room door and added his kudo to the acclaim.

This backformation is the most obvious sign that someone thinks of kudos as a plural, but other clues can be detected even in the absence of the giveaway form kudo:

1. Pronunciation of the s in kudos as [z], as if it were the plural marker
2. Lengthening of the /o/ before this [z] — the same difference you hear in the pronunciation of gross [groʊs] and grows [groʊːz]
3. Plural verb agreement when kudos is the subject of a clause:
   • Kudos go to San Diegobased Qualcomm Corporate Foundation.
   • Critical kudos acknowledge the success of her approach.
4. Use of count-noun determiners with kudos:
   • Many kudos for the essay by guest host Sharon Paul
   • A few kudos to get you started

Three months ago, I saw another step in the development of backformed kudo: its use as the modifying part of a compound noun. Compound nouns usually, but not always, have a singular as their first element — the noun that modifies the head noun. For example, we have gumball machines, not gumballs machines. So even someone who might never have occasion to reveal a backformation by talking about “one rabie” might well talk about attaching rabie tags to their pets’ collars. Similarly, in the October 5, 2012 issue of Entertainment Weekly, there was this sentence about TV’s Emmy awards:

The last time nipple covers, shrimp truckers, and demented garden gnomes were mentioned during an Emmy telecast was the year 19 hundred and … never. But that’s what made the 64th annual kudofest on Sept. 23 so engrossing–if a tad bewildering. (“Best and Worst of the Awards,” Lynette Rice, p. 21)

COCA provides two more such examples, also from EW, and also about award shows:

• He predicts a shiny night for four-Buckle nominee Brad Paisley, forecasts Sugarland to win Video of the Year for ” All I Want to Do, ” and believes that this kudocast will appeal to those beyond the country-fried set. (2009)
• If you loved seeing Jack Black … rock the children silly on the big screen, you might contract a case of the giggles watching him host this kiddie kudocast (say that 10 times fast). (2006)

However, I’ve discovered that kudo isn’t always a backformation. If you’re talking about mixed martial arts, it’s a portmanteau of karate and judo!

Christmas Codas

During some of the Advent church services in the past month, and the Christmas Eve service earlier this week, I’ve had occasion to be reminded of a phonotactic constraint that, evidently, wasn’t so hard and fast when a lot of our classic Christmas music was written. Specifically, I’m talking about syllables that end with [vn], as in heav’n and giv’n, which come up a lot in these songs. Often they come up very close to each other in order to make a close-enough rhyme. For example, there’s this pair of lines in “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:

How silently, how silently, the wondrous Gift is giv’n;
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His Heav’n.

It also happens with [zn] in the ris’n that I ran across in another song. So to generalize, these songs allow a syllable to end with a voiced fricative (i.e. [z] or [v]) followed by an [n]. The other voiced fricatives in English are [ð] (as in thy) and [ʒ] (as in genre). As far as I know, there are no English words that end in [ʒən], so there’s no chance of finding such a word shortened to end in just [ʒn]. English words that end in [ʒən] include words like vision and fusion, but those tend to turn up in hymns so much. As for words that end in [ðən], there’s heathen, so I’d predict that if any of these songs had the word heathen in them, we could expect to see it written heath’n. But I checked, and heathen isn’t such a popular word in hymns.

As I struggle to sing heav’n and giv’n as single syllables, I have to wonder why it’s so difficult. After all, the consonant clusters [vn] and [zn] aren’t so different from other consonant clusters that form easily pronounceable syllable codas in other English words. (A syllable’s coda is the string of whatever consonants occur at its end.) Fricatives in a syllable coda can combine with certain non-nasal stops, provided the voicing is the same. Here are the admissible and inadmissible combinations of voiceless fricatives with voiceless stops:

• *[fp]
• [ft] lift
• *[fk]
• *[θp]
• [θt] frothed (for some speakers)
• *[θk]
• [sp] asp
• [st] mist
• [sk] ask
• *[ʃp]
• [ʃt] mashed
• *[ʃk]

Summing up the voiceless fricative-stop combinations, it looks like [s] can combine with any of [p], [t], or [k], but the other fricatives can only go with [t]. Now here are the admissible and inadmissible combinations of voiced fricatives and voiced stops:

• *[vb]
• [vd] lived
• *[vg]
• *[ðb]
• [ðd] breathed
• *[ðg]
• *[zb]
• [zd] raised
• *[zg]
• *[ʒb]
• [ʒd] massaged
• *[ʒg]

These are even more restricted than the voiceless combinations: Now, only three out of the four eligible fricatives ([v], [ð], and [z]) can combine with a stop, and even then only with [d]. However, the fact is that these voiced fricatives can combine with [d] to form a syllable coda. Furthermore, the only difference between [d] and [n] is that for [d], your nasal passage is blocked, whereas for [n], air is coming out through your nose. So why are [vd] and [zd] so easy for English speakers to say, while [vn] and [zn] aren’t?

One possibility that occurred to me was to blame it on the fact that [n] is a continuant. That is, because the airstream can escape through your nose, you can stretch out an [n] as long as you have breath, whereas a [d] is over in an instant. For that reason, the [n] after another consonant feels like another syllable. But that won’t work, because fricatives are continuants, too, and fricative-fricative codas are perceived as one syllable: buffs, lives, writhes, fifth.

Instead, the rule seems to be that a sonorant sound can’t come after a fricative in a syllable coda. Sonorants consist of vowels, liquids (that is, [r] and [l]), glides ([j] as in yet and [w]), and nasals, so this rule also explains why words that end in [zm] or [ðm], such as chasm or rhythm have two syllables instead of one. (I imagine that this rule has been long known, and written up in some article or textbook somewhere, but I haven’t found it. References or corrections are welcome in the comments.) Sonorants after sonorants are OK, as in kiln, barn, and film (though I understand that in some dialects, film is pronounced with two syllables: “fill-em”). For another phonotactic constraint involving codas and sonorants, see this handout for a UMass linguistics class taught by Kyle Johnson.

All that’s well and good for present-day English, but I still wonder: When did it stop being OK for English codas to end in [zn] and [vn]? Was it ever part of everyday language, or just for poetry and songs?

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch

When I was in eighth grade, my friend Philip Thrash introduced me to the standup comedy of Steve Martin by lending me his cassette tape of A Wild and Crazy Guy. At one point, Martin was going through a list of books he’d written, with titles such as I’ll Take the Alphabet and Renegade Nuns on Wheels. When he came to The Apple Pie Hubbub, he added, “That was a significant novel for me, because that’s when I first started using verbs.” A pause, then: “My novels really brightened up after that.”

That line kept coming back to me as I read Constance Hale’s book-length appreciation of verbs, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch. When I first heard about it, I couldn’t quite get a clear picture of what it was about. The subtitle is Let Verbs Power Your Writing. That made it sound like a style or usage guide. On the other hand, some of what I read about it online suggested an enthusiastic wallow in linguistics like Steven Pinker’s Words and Rules, or an exploration of the syntax of awesome sentences by the most skillful writers, like Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Reading the press release that came with my review copy of the book, I learned that VHSS is intended to be all of these things.

The title is taken from the four sections contained in each chapter. The Vex sections provide the linguistic content to sketch out the basic information about the chapter’s topic. The remaining three sections are more about advice. The Hex sections bust myths and bogus rules about language and grammar–in other words, the rules that should not be heeded (at least not all the time). The Smash sections give examples of what not to do–in other words, the rules or guidelines that should be heeded. The Smooch sections finish with good examples, ways to have fun with verbplay, or both.

The strongest parts of the book are the Smooch sections, which fulfill Hale’s intention of showing good writing and highlighting how it makes use of the properties of verbs she has discussed in the chapter.

The Smash and Hex sections have good moments and bad. Sometimes I didn’t know how Hale decided which rules she would strike down in the Hex section, and which ones she would elevate in the Smash section. Sometimes I disagreed with her judgment. For example, within the class of linking verbs, Hale highlights what she calls “wimp verbs”, which are “disappointments in the name of a verb, because they allow a writer to hedge … rather than commit to an idea.” Two problems here. First of all, most of her wimp verbs don’t hedge, but straightforwardly express a meaning: become, keep, prove, remain, and stay. Second, sometimes a writer needs to hedge. Elsewhere, Hale writes that sentences without hedges “can seem, well, too bold. Get used to it.” She has seen too many cowardly hedges, I guess, so now she hates them all.

Other times, I agreed with Hale’s overall point, but disagreed with her example. This happened in Chapter 3, where Hale discourages needlessly Latinate or Greekate verbs when simpler alternatives exist. She quotes one guy criticizing a bureaucratic body when he said:

I essentially have to ask the approval of management to see certain documents. They go cogitate and then tell me whether I can see them.

Why not use think instead of cogitate? Hale asks. I’d say the speaker is showing an appreciation for the sound and connotations about verbs equal to Hale’s own: Pompous, out-of-touch power holders don’t just “think” about a matter; oh, no, they “cogitate” upon it.

In addition, not every chapter had a good-fitting topic for the Smash and Hex sections. For example, the Smash section in the chapter on verb tense is a good place to tell writers to choose their tenses carefully, and not go switching them with no reason. This Hale does, but in the chapter on verbs borrowed from other languages, how did she decide to criticize phrasal verbs with redundant prepositions (such as circle around)? Turning to the Hex sections, the chapter on phrasal verbs is a natural place to debunk the rule about stranded prepositions, and Hale does so. But in the chapter entirely devoted to the development of prescriptive grammar traditions in English, which rule is the lucky one to be Hexed? Multiple negation, as it turns out.

Like the Smash and Hex sections, the Vex sections have highs and lows. It is clear that Hale loves linguistics, as she cites linguists such as John McWhorter and David Crystal, tells about growing up speaking Hawaiian Pidgin, and discusses topics (such as crash blossoms) that show she’s a fan of language columns and blogs. At the high points, Hale clearly explains linguistic concepts to an audience of nonlinguist language lovers. My delight at those sections made the comedown even harder in the places where Hale’s explanations reveal her misunderstandings of linguistic concepts, and present misinformation that may cause readers confusion later. Furthermore, the Vex sections seem, more than the others, to strain at a playful tone in order to make the content less threatening. Here’s a selection from pages 107-108, where Hale introduces a bread metaphor to talk about different kinds of verbs, with the particularly grating parts underlined:

[L]et’s imagine that the universe of verbs is represented by a giant batch of bread dough. One half of the batch has been made with crunchy, hearty whole grains (wheat berries, oats, rye millet), the other half with refined white flour. … These [kinds of flour] give us our two main categories of … Verbs: Dynamic and Static. … The thing about white flour is that it’s hopelessly bland. Baguettes and ciabatta need other accoutrements–butter, raspberry jam, tapenade, caponata–to make an exciting meal. And guess what? Static Verbs need some delicious nouns and adjectives to make us salivate over the sentences they hold together.

I would rather read this kind of material in books like McWhorter’s What Language Is, or Crystal’s The Fight for English, where it is presented more thoroughly and accurately. I don’t object to extended metaphors; I loved McWhorter’s extended metaphor of coral seen dead and out of the water versus coral seen alive undersea to distinguish between most people’s understanding of language and how language actually is. I’ll list some of VHSS‘s linguistics-related high and low points at the end of the review. For now, here’s an overview of the chapters, with some of my comments mixed in.

• Chapter 1: Some possible origins of language, and what language might have been like before syntax developed, with opinions from Derek Bickerton and Ray Jackendoff.
  • Vex: A side trip to take a look at nouns, including memorable noun-heavy passages from the Bible and a Hawaiian creation story.
  • Hex: The myth that writing is just about word choice; encouragement to consider words’ phonology and morphology for more adroit manipulation of mood and shades of meaning.
  • Smash: “Bad noun habits,” including compound nouns that “pile abstractions on top of abstractions and leave us clueless as to the people, places, things, or ideas they are actually describing,” circumlocutions, and confusing syntax from news, both written and spoken.
  • Smooch: Fun with writing with few or no verbs, as in some tweets and texts.
• Chapter 2 introduces the basic notion of subjects and predicates.
  • Vex: Combining subjects with predicates, including the issue of agreement, and keeping careful track of how many predicates go with any given subject.
  • Hex: The myth that sentence fragments are always bad grammar.
  • Smash: “False starts” such as beginning a sentence with “I think” or existential There; tortured syntax that comes from attempting to avoid saying “I”.
  • Smooch: Describing a character by making him or her the subject of many predicates in a row (as opposed to switching subjects), and choosing “lively” predicates.
• Chapter 3 tells about verbs borrowed from other languages.
  • Vex: A typical condensed history of English, including a summary of the relevant parts of McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and the obligatory excerpts from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales.
  • Hex: The advice to use words of Anglo-Saxon origin when possible.
  • Smash: Redundancy in collocations such as merge together, and in cliched coordinations such as cease and desist. Use of
  • Smooch: An exercise of describing many people all performing the same action in their own particular way, as a prompt to explore the nuances that different verbs can convey; short piece by Garrison Keillor as a model.

  BTW, you can read or hear excerpts from this chapter in the current episode of Grammar Girl.

• Chapter 4: The rise of prescriptive grammarians.
  • Vex: Two more usual checkpoints in histories of the English language (Shakespeare and the King James Bible); “the rise of the grammar cops” (including Jonathan Swift and Robert Lowth); how it was decided English had eight parts of speech. A sidebar defines various morphological processes for creating new words (see my linguistic comments below).
  • Hex: The history of multiple negation and its fall from grace.
  • Smash: Bad verb-formation habits, including conversion (aka “verbing nouns”), overuse of -ize, and some backformations. Hale doesn’t universally condemn these practices, but recommends more specific verbs when they exist.
  • Smooch: An exercise of describing one person doing many things, as a prompt to use existing verbs in an unexpected way; models are an observer’s descriptions of Louis XIV’s routine, and part of Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
• Chapter 5: A broad classification of verbs.
  • Vex: Static verbs (i.e. linking and auxiliary verbs) and dynamic verbs (all the others).
  • Hex: The myth that Standard English is the only appropriate dialect to use, in all situations. But why is that topic in this chapter, instead of the Hex part of Chapter 4?
  • Smash: Periphrasis with be (e.g. is desirous instead of wants); overreliance on static verbs; wordiness in general.
  • Smooch: Passages rich in dynamic verbs from several authors, including one from Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit.
• Chapter 6: Verb tense.
  • Vex: A glimpse of the plethora of historical Indo-European tenses, and Old and Middle English verb suffixes. Overview of simple, progressive, perfect, and perfect progressive tenses; auxiliary verbs (with the term helping verbs reserved for those that show tense (i.e, do, have, be), including a sampling of how they can interact, but no overall set of rules or summary; a passage from John Hersey’s Hiroshima to illustrate interaction of simple past and past perfect tenses.
  • Hex: Nonstandard tense formations, with a concise summary of some in Black English.
  • Smash: Clintonian use of verb tenses for evasion; Palinian performance errors in tense formation; guessing at irregular past tenses instead of looking them up in a dictionary.
  • Smooch: The historical, “narrative” present tense; dialectal or nonce tense formations; deliberate chaotic use of tenses to show a narrator’s mental instability. Examples include John Steinbeck and a Caribbean novelist named Chamoiseau.
• Chapter 7: Verb voice.
  • Vex: History of the passive voice, and the widespread cluelessness about what it actually refers to in grammar; comparison of active and passive voice across 12 tenses (with an unexplained switch in example verb halfway through); good reasons to use passive voice; bad reasons to use passive voice.
  • Hex: The oversimplified advice to avoid passive voice. Examples of effective use of passive voice by several authors (but with one verb phrase incorrectly labeled as passive). Headlines ruined by avoidance of passive.
  • Smash: Passive voice used to avoid placing or accepting blame, with a Zimmer-like history of the phrase Mistakes were made; similarly for corporate responsibility-avoiding speech (but with another mislabeled passive voice!).
  • Smooch: Effective use of active voice, even when you might expect to have to use a lot of passives, in a passage from a short story by Thomas Curwen; powerful interaction of active and passive voice in the Gettysburg Address.
• Chapter 8: Verb mood.
  • Vex: Indicative, imperative, and subjunctive mood; modal auxiliaries and conditional sentences; a classification of conditionals that gets the basic facts right; imperatives in a poem by Donne; modal auxiliaries in lines from songs and poems.
  • Hex: Premature reports of the death of the subjunctive, with a list of the most common places where you’ll find them (though for some reason, the only verb she uses in wish clauses is were; never had or could or knew…).
  • Smash: Conditionals with would have; use of may have where might have is appropriate; use of wish … was instead of wish … were.
  • Smooch: Samples of texts rife with indicative verbs or imperatives; authors include Henry James and Tom Wolfe.
• Chapter 9: Verb valence.
  • Vex: Intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs. Verbs with object complements such as elect; verbs of causation such as make, let; verbs with patient subjects such as burst (which she calls ergatives, which is less Hale’s fault than the fault of syntacticians who misuse the term than; a less confusing though still jargony term is unaccusative); a toy phrase-structure grammar summing up these kinds of verbs, with examples of each using political slogans from American history.
  • Hex: The lack of respect for sentence diagramming; two sample Reed-Kellogg diagrams and one tree diagram.
  • Smash: Confusion of lay and lie, who and whom, I and me; sentences that depart from a verb+complements structure to get weighted down with many phrases that don’t fit neatly in.
  • Smooch: Sentences that stick to a verb+complements structure for maximum power in minimum length, including memorable telegraph messages, and a passage from Hemingway. (Unfortunately, one telegraph story presented as truth is, in fact, a long-debunked story about Cary Grant.)
• Chapter 10: Nonfinite verbs.
  • Vex: Participles, gerunds, and infinitives; confusion between past tense and past participle; infinitives as subjects and complements of verbs (though she calls them direct objects).
  • Hex: Splitting infinitives.
  • Smash: Dangling participles; possessive subjects of gerunds.
  • Smooch: Good use of gerunds and participles from sources including Toni Morrison, Susan Orlean, and some Viagra commercials.
• Chapter 11: Phrasal verbs.
  • Vex: Phrasal verbs and the distinction between prepositions and particles; the term prepositional verb for phrasal verbs that use prepositions instead of particles.
  • Hex: Ending sentences with prepositions; Ben Zimmer’s debunking of the “up with which I wil not put” story. However, Hale ignores the distinction between prepositions and particles that she so nicely made in the Vex section.
  • Smash: Separating a verb and its particle with a long-ass noun phrase. (Here, an example that should have been in the Smooch section has crept in: Hale praises Ronald Reagan’s phrasing of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”) Choosing the wrong preposition for a phrasal verb; unnecessary prepositions when the verb itself is sufficient; unnecessary phrasal verbs when a single-verb option exists.
  • Smooch: Phrasal verbs with up, exemplified in Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up”.
• Chapter 12: A grab-bag of verbs that cause confusion for one reason or another.
  • Vex: A grab-bag of verbs that cause confusion for one reason or another.
  • Hex: The belief that there is only one right way to express some thought.
  • Smash: Misunderestimate, refudiate, aggravate.
  • Smooch: Careen, carom, career; deliberately nonstandard usage in dialogue, with examples from Cormac McCarthy and the Beatles.
• Epilogue: Thoughts on style that go beyond the grammar, including metaphor and various rhetorical devices, with more good examples from spoken and written English.

VHSS has several appendices, which are billed in the press release as useful references. Some of them are; others would have been if they had presented a more thorough and organized picture of their topic.

• Appendix 1 discusses ideas about the origin of language that didn’t make it into Chapter 1, including the hoary “ding-dong,” “bow-wow,” and “yo-he-ho” hypotheses that I remember reading about 25 years ago.
• Appendix 2 attempts to present all the troublesome cases for subject-verb agreement in one place: collective nouns, every, fractions, singulars that end in -s, compound subjects, and more. This is a great idea–I wish Hale had pushed it a bit further. She covers compound subjects linked by and, but what about pronouns linked by or, as in you or I? And what about sentence like What you need is/are better apps?
• Appendix 3 briefly reviews several popular dictionaries. This is a good summary.
• Appendix 4 lists all the most common irregular verbs. Hale begins with a glimpse of the linguistic history of irregulars. However, she mentions only strong and weak verbs, saying nothing about weak verbs whose past tense resulted from contraction (such as beat), or suppletion (come/went, is/was)–although these verbs still appear in the list. Worse, in the introductory paragraph she even highlights–as an example of a “once strong verb”–the most famous example of an originally weak verb that has developed a strong/irregular past tense: sneak. An admirable attempt to put some linguistic information into a grammar reference has ended up a source of linguistic misinformation.
• Appendix 5 covers phrasal verbs in a list whose members were chosen more for their entertainment value than for representativeness of phrasal verbs. Idiomatic meanings aren’t explained; they’re just used as if the reader knows them. Hale uses run over as a phrasal verb in the phrase running him over, but never mentions that for many speakers, over acts as a preposition instead of a particle, as in running over him. At times she even loses sight of what actually constitutes a phrasal verb, as when she discusses try to and try and, neither of which contains a particle.
• Appendix 6 is a usage guide on misused verbs. Some of the mnemonics don’t make sense. For example, to remember the difference between wax and wane, Hale advises the reader to remember that “wane precedes wax alphabetically, just as small comes before big.” Huh? Maybe, if you’re thinking about living things, but I tend to think about the moon when I think of waxing and waning, and in that case, small comes both before and after big, month after month.

In Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, Constance Hale has ambitiously tried to create something that Geoff Pullum has often called for: a linguistically informed prescriptive grammar or style guide. Though she succeeds in the Smooch component, the mix of good information with misinformation and misunderstandings in the Vex, Hex, and Smash components causes it to fall short.

 

Where Hale gets it right when it comes to linguistics

• Noting that verbs are an open class. (Introduction)
• Moving away from the notional definition of nouns (“person, place or thing”) and giving a more syntactically oriented view. (Introduction)
• Introducing the idea of selectional restrictions by noting, “You can’t just take any noun and hitch it to a verb.” (2)
• Briefly but accurately (as far as I can tell) describing nonstandard verb tenses in Black English. (6)
• Defining the passive voice accurately (or at least accurately enough). (7)
• Accurately presenting intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs, and not claiming that any verb phrase with an indirect object can be rephrased with a to prepositional phrase. (9)
• Distinguishing between prepositions and particles when discussing phrasal verbs. (11)

Where Hale misses the mark

• Claiming that in some languages, verbs are less important than in English, and illustrating with an Arabic sentence with a zero copula. Lots of languages do this! Show me a different missing verb to convince me. (Introduction)
• Writing that swear is the oldest verb in English, since it’s attested as early as 688 CE. Does she mean “oldest verb attested from a time when English is still considered English”? What about all the (other) verbs that English inherited from Proto-Germanic, or Proto-Indo-European?
• Calling sad a morpheme (true) which can combine with other morphemes to form words such as saddle. (1)
• Alluding to the newscasting style that Geoff Nunberg calls “Inglish”. (1) Hale says it doesn’t have verbs, but it does! They’re all participles!
• Claiming that a passage in George Orwell’s Newspeak omits verbs. (1) In fact, the only one it omits is is, and the others are simply in abbreviated form.
• Giving an example of one subject with two predicates that’s really two clauses with repeated subject we. (2)
• Getting the constituency wrong in a cursory look at tree diagramming: really pretty isn’t parsed as a constituent in most really pretty girls. (2)
• Unwittingly including a multi-level coordination in a passage intended to show how someone “carefully coordinates his subjects and predicates”. (2) (The coordination is have solidified her muscles, seasoned her pugnacity, and … the suddenly limp police horde perceives the murderous intent….)
• Claiming that English’s “full palette of phonemes gives us the change to let vowels and consonants echo the sound of real things”. (3) Full palette of phonemes? We don’t have any uvular consonants, or front round vowels, or clicks. People who speak click languages, for example, would have a much easier time than we would of making the verb for “knock” sound like actual knocking.
• Disregarding her own advice by needlessly inventing new words for morphological processes. In her sidebar in Chapter 4, compounding becomes smishsmashing, and conversion becomes slipsliding. These words are less transparent than what they replace. For example, I would have guessed that smishsmashing referred to blending (i.e. portmanteau words).
• Noting that verbs, in particular, forms of be, are optional in some Hawaiian sentence, but not saying the same about Black English, which she discussed on the previous page, or other languages with copula deletion. (5)
• Implying that helping verbs are not just auxiliary verbs, but any verb that takes a verbal complement, such as make, let, or cause. (5)
• An editing error: printing thorns as p in passages from Old English. (7)
• Implying that passives can be constructed with have (which is true), but giving had been sowed as an example. (7) It’s passive, but because of the been, not the had.
• Labeling the verb phrase was to remember as passive voice. (7)
• Implying that there are three passive clauses to be found in a quotation from the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, when there are only two. (7)
• Claiming that the saws that cut the rectangular wood tiles for Milton Bradley’s Scrabble game are now still is in the passive voice. (7) These last two examples were such disappointments after such an otherwise clear-eyed assessment of passive voice!
• Calling auxiliary verbs with elliptical complements intransitives, as in You wouldn’t or I do. (9)
• Writing as if the syntactic subtypes of the verbs presented in Chapter 9 are all of the subtypes, without mentioning verbs that take clausal or infinitival complements.
• Insisting that subjects of gerunds must be possessive (10), without considering differences in meaning, or what to do with expletive subjects (the problem of its being too foggy to drive?)>
• Giving credence to the Global Language Monitor. (Chapter 1 notes)

Overpowered!

It’s been more than four years since Doug and Adam got the game Hyper Crush Bros. Knockdown-Dragout for the GameCube. (The GameCube!) But they still play it, as well as the sequel game that came out for the Wii a couple of years later. For all the first-person shooters that Doug plays (which he calls FPSs), with realistic weapons like submachine guns (SMGs), he has said more than once that the best party videogame is this one. Adam agrees. And just tonight, they were down in the basement playing Hyper Crush on the GameCube, because of a glitch that Adam read about today.

The most formidable opponent in the game, the final boss at the end of some mode of play or another, is nothing but a giant hand that can pound you, smack you, drill you into the fighting platform, or just flick you away into the vast reaches of space. Adam found out about a glitch that would let you actually play as this Master Hand, not just face it as a boss.

I hadn’t remembered that Master Hand was a non-playable character, so I asked, “Oh, you couldn’t play as Master Hand before?”

“Oh, no,” Doug answered;

Think about it; he’d be overpowered.

With the meaning of overpowered that I’ve used most of my life, this sentence is completely contrary to what I know Master Hand. It means that playing as Master Hand, you’d be quickly and easily defeated. But with the meaning that Doug standardly uses when talking about characters in his FPSs that have too many weapons and abilities, it means that nothing could defeat you.

The ambiguity comes down to the ambiguity of the -ed suffix. Its the past participle suffix, of course, so for a verb like overpower, the -ed suffix gives us the overpowered that means (in the words of the OED) “Subdued or overcome by a superior force or influence; overwhelmed.”

But -ed can also attach to nouns, to give us adjectives that mean “having [NOUN],” as in a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater. Attach it to the noun power, and you get powered with the meaning “having power”. Of course, power is also a verb, so you can get the homonym powered “having been supplied with power”, which means pretty much the same thing as noun-derived powered. But here’s where things get different. When you attach over to the noun-derived powered, you get Doug’s meaning of overpowered. As it turns out, this definition is in the OED, too: “Having a greater than usual or excessive degree of (mechanical) power.” They have attestations going back to 1971:

• 1971 A. Diment Think Inc. iv. 56 Fast acceleration because Corvairs are overpowered if anything which is definitely the right way to be.
• 1990 Good Housek. May 7/2 (advt.) And because it powers a more efficient vacuum cleaner, it doesn’t need to be overpowered.
• 2000 J. Doyle Taken for Ride xxii. 440 The industry moved from four- to six-cylinder engines in the 1930s..to the overpowered Pontiac GTO and Dodge Charger muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s.

The OED even agrees with my morphological analysis. Look at its etymology for my meaning of overpowered and for Doug’s:

• [verb-derived] Etymology: < overpower v. + -ed suffix1.
• [noun-derived] Etymology: < over- prefix + powered adj.

Or in the presentation style that I prefer, here is the latest in a list of English contronyms, joining cleave, sanction, and all the rest: