October | 2009 | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for October, 2009

Food and drink as events

October 12, 2009

In my little posting on visitors coming by with pizza, after which a movie was watched, I observed that this description probably should be taken as conveying three events rather than two: the arrival of the pizza-bearers, the eating of the pizza, and the watching of the movie.

This isn’t guaranteed: maybe the visitors brought the pizza because they were going to take it on to some later event, or dispose of it in a garbage dump, or display it as found art, or whatever (no necessary pizza-eating); maybe, as a commenter on that posting said, the pizza was indeed consumed, but during, rather than before, the movie-watching; or maybe the pizza was consumed, but after the movie-watching; or maybe the movie-watching took place after the arrival and the pizza-eating, but long after them (like, say, a week later); and so on. All the original sentence said is that there were two events, the arrival with pizza and the movie-watching, occurring in that order. All the rest is everyday reasoning and implicature.

Consider, for example, how pizza-eating gets involved in the story. Why do people bring pizza on a visit? (Note that we assume that it’s hot, just-baked pizza, not a frozen pizza or left-over cold pizza, although that’s not stipulated in the sentence.) Customarily, people bring food on visits so that it can be eaten, and in fact eaten communally. That’s a fact about social customs. In addition, the writer of the original sentence (who turns out to have been me) did mention pizza prominently, so we reason that it’s relevant. That’s an implicature. Put these two things together, and we conclude that everyone (or at least everyone who wanted some) ate pizza.

Now I turn to another factor that contributed to my understanding that the pizza-eating preceded the movie-watching: the wording “… bearing pizza, after which we watched …”

A fact about the semantics of English nouns is relevant here: names of food and drink can be used, metonymically, to refer to events in which these substances are consumed.

Before/During/After pizza, we watched a movie.
Before/During/After salad, we can talk about business.
Before/During/After martinis, we can talk about business.

can convey ‘before/during/after eating/drinking …’ (There are a number of possible variants here: “after a/the/our pizza(s)” and the like.)

Dictionaries don’t generally list such understandings of such nouns, because the metonymy is systematic and productive.

In any case, the existence of this pattern seems to have biased me towards thinking of the pizza as an event as well as a food.

Posted in Semantics | 2 Comments »

Short shot #16: Euro-words

October 11, 2009

In the October 10th Economist there’s a leader (“Wake up Europe!”, p. 13), on current events in the European Union, with some nice Euro- words in it:

[on the EU constitution] Some Eurosceptics want to fight on, hoping that a Tory victory in Britain could mean a new referendum.

[on the presidency of the EU] One could imagine, say, Angela Merkel sitting down as an equal with Presidents Obama and Hu; but she has another job. So the choice is the usual Europygmies or Tony Blair …

Neither word is brand-new. Euroscepticism and Eurosceptic have been around long enough for the first to get a Wikipedia page (where you can also find Europhilia). The Economist seems to be especially fond of Europygmy, but others have used it, since at least 2002.

(Spelling varies on these words. You can find Europygmies, Euro pygmies, and europygmies, and similarly for the others.)

Euro- words get their first element from the word Europe, and their second element is usually a free-standing word (as in Europygmy), though sometimes it’s a combining form (like -phile) or an element extracted from a larger word (like the vision of Eurovision, extracted from television). These words then often look like portmanteaus in their origin, but in any case act like compounds morphologically.

Michael Quinion’s Ologies and Isms has an entry for Euro-, with more details (including some items with the variant Eur-) . What it doesn’t say is that Euro-words have two accent patterns, differing in which of the two parts has the heavier accent: the first in Eurovision and Europhile, the second in Eurocommunism and Eurocentric. (Alternative accent patterns are well-known for many types of compounds.) I suspect that some people vary in their treatment of certain specific words, but I haven’t looked at the matter in any detail, nor have I examined the factors that are relevant to the choice of one pattern or the other.

Posted in Compounds, Morphology | 3 Comments »

Just In: NYT Violates PAP!

October 11, 2009

I haven’t posted for some time on the Possessive Antecedent Proscription (PAP), a fictitious principle of English usage/grammar that bars possessive-marked nouns as antecedents for personal pronouns, as in this NYT front-page headline on October 9:

Astor’s Son Is Convicted of Stealing From Her

Astor’s (referring to Brooke Astor, “the legendary New York society matriarch”) is the possessive-marked noun, and it serves as antecedent for the personal pronoun her (functioning here as the object of the preposition from).

Most readers will fail to see any problem with the NYT headline, but a few will recoil from it. These will be people who have been explicitly taught the PAP, in school or in a usage handbook or style sheet. I have yet to come across anyone who tacitly induced the PAP from their linguistic experience. In fact, in my experience everyone who espouses the PAP violates it (with no apparent awareness of having mis-stepped) on occasion. (I used to track such violations down, but it was a time-consuming and unrewarding occupation, and I’ve given it up.)

[Before I go on, let me say that if you want to cleave to the PAP, that’s fine. If you do so, no one will criticize you for your bit of harmless nuttiness (sort of like not stepping on the cracks in sidewalks). Just don’t go around slapping people down for not sharing your avoidance of possessive antecedents.]

The PAP seems to be mostly a product of three bad ideas:

(1) the idea that pronouns are simply replacements for repeated nouns (“That’s why they’re called pronouns, dummy!”);

(2) the idea that possessive-marked nouns are adjectives (because they modify — in some sense of modify — nouns), so of course — see (1) — they can’t serve as antecedents for pronouns; and

(3) the idea that if a linguistic element can in some way contribute to difficulty in understanding, ambiguity, unclarity, or awkwardness, then it should always be barred.

Idea (3) is breath-takingly silly, though it’s trotted out again and again as ammunition against some usage or construction a writer doesn’t like; the writer cites some examples, involving the item in question, where one of these defects arises. Taken at face value, (3) would prohibit speech and writing completely.

The other two ideas spring from more technical misapprehensions, both with long histories in the Western intellectual tradition. But in both cases, they are just hypotheses, however venerable, and most modern linguists reject them, for good reason.

For a more extended discussion of the PAP, see the material here (please check this before you comment on this posting), and note these Language Log postings:

GP, 10/5/03: Menand’s acumen deserts him: (link)

AZ, 10/8/03: Louis Menand’s pronouns: (link)

AZ, 10/21/03: Grammaticality, anaphora, and all that: (link)

AZ, 10/23/03: In search of the fimpossant: (link)

AZ, 2/20/06: Collateral damage: (link)

AZ, 5/22/08: More theory trumping practice: (link)

Posted in Anaphora, Usage advice | 2 Comments »

The implicated event of pizza-eating

October 10, 2009

I have a large and ever-growing collection of notes to myself on linguistic topics. This morning I came across one of these notes, a slip of paper with the following example on it:

(1) They came by bearing pizza, after which we watched The Music Man.

(The note doesn’t identify the source of the sentence or the date when I collected it.)

On the most straightforward reading, this sentence has a summative relative clause, “after which we watched The Music Man“, in which the relativizer which refers to the event of some people’s coming by bearing pizza; that is, (1) asserts describes two events, an arrival-with-pizza event and a movie-watching event, occurring in that order. In still other words, (1) is paraphraseable as

(2) They came by bearing pizza, after which event we watched The Music Man.

(In fact, some usage writers insist that (1) is unacceptable, because which has no noun antecedent in the sentence — so that (1) is “vague” — and that something like the clunky (2) must be used instead. See the summatives posting linked to above.)

And now for a subtlety. Although (1) describes only two events, most readers will understand (1) as implicating a third event, of pizza-eating, intervening between the other two, and the author of (1) surely intended this implicature. A nice little case of how sentences can end up conveying more than they literally mean. (The sentence is true if no event of pizza-eating occurred on the occasion in question.)

Posted in Anaphora, Implicature, Relativization | 5 Comments »

Eggcornish note: fragrant abuse

October 10, 2009

Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words site carried this item today (in newsletter #660):

The sweet smell of failure: a large number of news outlets reported the sentencing on Tuesday of Ian Clement, a former deputy mayor of London, for fiddling his expenses. (Margaret Chandler read it on Yahoo! news.) Many of the reports noted: “Sentencing Clement, the judge said he ‘fragrantly and arrogantly’ abused public money to indulge himself with meals.” Did the judge really say that, or did the Press Association (which wrote and circulated the story) make a mistake and nobody queried it?

The comment assumes that fragrant abuse was an inadvertent error on the part of either the judge or the journalists reporting the story. If the first, then it was a “Fay/Cutler malapropism”, an error in retrieving the intended word (and getting a phonologically similar word instead), or possibly a slip in pronunciation, perhaps with an anticipation of the /r/ in flagrantly. If the second, then it was a simple typo, perhaps with an anticipation of the R in arrogantly.

But there’s another possibility, namely that the mistake was advertent: fragrantly was just what the judge intended to say. That would make the mistake a “classical malapropism”, perhaps of the eggcorn variety (with fragrant substituted for flagrant because it contributes a meaning component of strong smell).

The eggcorn analysis seems unlikely in the case of the judge, who should be long familiar with the word flagrant ‘conspicuously or obviously offensive’. But there’s some evidence that some writers intend the word fragrant in expressions like fragrant abuse.

You can google up a moderate number of occurrences of fragrant abuse. Some are plays on words (“Perfumiers scent an end to a fragrant abuse”), but others appear to be straightforward:

Is this a fragrant abuse?? Either way, yes Tony deserves a medal, and a cheque… (link)

The image above comes into my mind every time I hear a Republican complaining about President Obama not having fixed the economy “already” in only seven months in office, after EIGHT years of their fragrant abuse against it, … (link)

This is the end of my rant about Hollywood and their portrayal of technology and computing. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for any fragrant abuse of what is real and just plain absurd … (link)

(Not mentioned on the eggcorn site or in Brians’s Common Errors.)

A fair nunber of the hits are from Nigerian sources, e.g.:

On the frontline of the protests is the Mubi Community Awareness Forum (MCAF), a socio-political group which wants the embattled Rector removed from office and prosecuted for alleged fragrant abuse of the American and Nigerian currencies as well as sundry other offences ranging from misappropriation of public funds, abuse of office, and conversion of official property to personal use. (link)

These suspects accuse EFCC operatives of asking for bribe; torture and fragrant abuse of human right. I have always taken these as the ranting of desperate men in quest of justice. But my visit to 15A Awolowo Road Ikoyi, gave me first hand information about the level of rot in EFCC. (link)

It looks like fragrant abuse has spread in Nigerian publications. Of course, the original flagrant abuse also appears in these publications.

Posted in Eggcorns | 1 Comment »

Non-parallel gaps

October 9, 2009

Return with me now to some “amazing coordinations” from 2005, here, in particular coordinations where a constituent fills a subject gap in one conjunct and an object gap in another. I gave three examples in that posting, including these two (with the position of the gaps indicated by underlines):

(1) … the “Control Panel” (which you presumably have to know ___ is there and how to get to ___) …

(2) … people who I’m not going to give ___ a cox-2 and ___ also have a history of ulcers …

(1) has a subject gap in the first conjunct and an object gap in the second, while (2) has the reverse configuration.

I observed in that posting that there is some question as to whether such examples should be treated as a violation of a constraint on coordination (as Gerald Gazdar once proposed), that is, as straightforwardly ungrammatical. The alternative would be to treat them as merely hard to process.

Actually, some examples don’t seem to me to be particularly hard to process. Here’s one that I nearly missed, from the episode “Teenage Wasteland” of the television show Law and Order (episode 12 of season 11, first aired in 2001):

(3) … [the defendant is] not old enough ___ to drink, but old enough to execute ___

(with subject gap + object gap).

These examples are different in their details, and the easiest “fixes” are different: a pronoun instead of a gap in the second conjunct of (1):

(1′) … the “Control Panel” (which you presumably have to know ___ is there and how to get to it) …

repeating the relativizer in (2):

(2′) … people who I’m not going to give ___ a cox-2 and who also have a history of ulcers …

and using an explicit is in (3), to give coordinated VPs (each with its own gap) rather than coordinated predicative AdjPs:

(3′) … [the defendant is] not old enough ___ to drink, but is old enough to execute ___

My collection of subject + object gaps is growing very slowly, so I welcome further examples.

Posted in Coordination, Ellipsis, For reference | 3 Comments »

Dangling postings

October 8, 2009

Here’s an inventory of postings, on Language Log and this blog, on non-default SPARs (subjectless predicational adjuncts requiring a referent for the subject — non-default when they don’t obey the Subject Rule, that is, when they don’t pick up this referent from the subject of the main clause), commonly known as “dangling modifiers” (though some writers extend this label to a variety of other phenomena).

The inventory isn’t annotated, and it doesn’t include postings that mention danglers only in passing. I might have missed some relevant postings; I invite readers to suggest further postings in comments.

GP, 12/14/03: Dangling etiquette: (link)

AZ, 7/7/04: Don’t dangle your participles in public: (link)

GP, 3/1/05: Without Washington’s support… who?: (link)

GP, 3/10/05: Stunningly inept modifier manners: (link)

GP, 5/12/05: The Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct: (link)

AZ, 5/16/05: The Dangling Participles: (link)

GP, 7/4/05: Dangling modifier in the Declaration of Independence: (link)

GP, 1/24/06: Unlike dangling: (link)

ML, 4/26/06: Who is the decider?: (link)

AZ, 3/24/07: Dangling in court: (link)

ML, 3/25/07: Dangling in Paris: (link)

AZ, 5/21/08: Why are some summatives labeled “vague”?: (link)

ML, 6/2/08: Advice from numbers: (link) [see comment by ML]

AZ, 6/14/08: by-topicalization (link):

AZBlog, 2/26/09: A spiritual accessory (link)

ML, 2/26/09: Teaching zombie rules: (link)

GP, 4/15/09: Who’s been to Australia?: (link)

ML, 8/14/09: Compared: (link)

GP, 10/8/09: A dangler in The Economist: (link)

Posted in Danglers, For reference | 1 Comment »

Teaching what?

October 7, 2009

Among the letters (October 6) to the NYT Science Times spurred by Jane Brody’s “From Birth, Engage Your Child With Talk” (September 29), in which she wrote that speaking and reading to young children will help develop their communication skills, is this odd item from Susan Poser of Lincoln, Nebraska:

I could not agree more with Ms. Brody’s exhortation to talk and read to young children all the time. It reminded me of the game that my husband, a chemistry professor, and I would play with our daughter when she was 2.

We would each hold one of her hands, and on every step we would lift her up and say one of the elements of the periodic table. By the time she was 4, she could recite the first 45 elements of the periodic table (up to Rhodium), on demand.

It seems that with persistence and ingenuity, you can teach a young child almost anything. But I don’t see how reciting the periodic table could contribute to developing communication skills (whatever you think “communication skills” are).

Posted in Language acquisition | 4 Comments »

The Safire watch

October 6, 2009

Since the death of William Safire, the linguasphere has been full of obits, reminiscences, appreciations, and so on: a short obit by Ben Zimmer on Language Log (with links to Languagehat, Mr. Verb, Wishydig, and Grant Barrett); a longer version (of September 28) by Ben on Word Routes; Ben back on Language Log with some further thoughts on Safire and links to another Word Routes column of his (of October 6, mostly about WS on could care less), to a Fresh Air piece by Geoff Nunberg, and to Ben’s NYT “On Language” column on Safire (to be published in hard copy on October 11, but available on-line from October 5); and Geoff Nunberg on Language Log about his Fresh Air piece, with links to Jan Freeman, Todd Gitlin, Aaron Britt, and David Bromwich.

If you have other pieces you’d like to suggest, Nunberg has invited readers to add these as comments on this last posting. None of us is trying to assemble a full inventory of this material, of course, but we could easily have missed things of interest; if so, Nunberg’s posting is the place to take notice of them.

Posted in People | Leave a Comment »

But,

October 6, 2009

Last time it was sentence-initial yet followed by a comma, in a New York Times editorial. This time it’s but, in the editorial “Mr. Obama’s Promise of Transparency” (October 5):

As a senator, President Obama co-sponsored a robust proposal to protect journalists and their sources who rely on confidentiality to reveal abuses, scandals and other inner workings of government agencies. But, White House officials are now proposing deep revisions to a Senate Judiciary Committee bill that weaken protections against forcing reporters to reveal their sources.

In my earlier posting I quoted MWDEU on sentence-initial but:

The only generally expressed warning is not to follow the but with a comma…

The argument is that the force of the but is weakened by the unneeded comma. Such commas are rare in the materials in our files.

It seems to me that in cases like the NYT quote above, the effect of the comma is not to weaken the force of the but, but to indicate a short pause after it and so to throw some emphasis onto it. A colon would be even stronger, but a comma will do the job. The effect is one to be used sparingly, but I don’t see that the comma should be banned here.

Posted in Punctuation | 5 Comments »

Arnold Zwicky's Blog