I recently came across a reference to the Henny Youngman “take my wife” joke, which turns on the ambiguity of that phrase, with two very different uses of take, one of them very restricted in its syntax and discourse function, the other free in both respects.
Archive for the ‘Discourse’ Category
Take my wife
September 8, 2012Old recipes IV: George Leonard Herter
May 5, 2012Now for some really old recipes (see here, here, and here) — like the Virgin Mary’s recipe for spinach. As relayed by George Leonard Herter is his magnificent Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices.
To come: a couple of recipes from Herter; background on the man and his work; and some remarks on cohesion vs. coherence in texts, Herter’s writing being fine on the cohesion front but often laughably deficient on the coherence front.
Two remarks on reversals
April 28, 2012Viewpoint reflexive?
April 19, 2012Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky points me to an interview with Bradford W. Parkinson, the chief architect of GPS, which contains the remarkable sentence
It was hurting themselves.
with an instance of themselves that flagrantly fails to satisfy the Clause-Mate Condition on reflexives in English, requiring that
Reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must belong to the same clause. (link; the sense of belong to here is explained in this posting)
But “untriggered reflexives” also occur in English, and there’s considerable variation from speaker to speaker as to which of these are acceptable. Even with context, Parkinson’s sentence is unacceptable to many speakers, but it does fit into a class of cases that some speakers accept: viewpoint, or perspectival, reflexives.
Notes from school
April 15, 2012Last week’s notes from my grand-daughter’s school included this report from a student in the middle school:
In L.A [Language Arts — what used to be called English] we had a lesson on how to organize a story with a follow-up question: Do people make decisions with his head or her heart.
Now, people is plural, used for generic reference, so the standard pronoun anaphoric to it is they (their in the possessive): with their head or (with) their heart. Why go with singular his or her instead?
Two possible factors. One, people doesn’t look plural; it doesn’t have a plural suffix. And two, peevish objections to “singular they“, even with generic antecedents — Everybody thinks either with their head or (with) their heart — have led people to be suspicious of anaphoric they with generic antecedents, even when these are in fact plural. The proscription against singular they has contaminated ordinary anaphoric usage. (For other cases of proscriptions contaminating perfectly innocent constructions, see here.)
Unfree variation again
February 18, 2012Announcement of a talk at Stanford this coming Tuesday, with abstract:
Investigating a Syntactic Analysis: Revisiting Raising-to-Subject
Scott Grimm, Stanford UniversityVerbs such as “seem’” or “appear’” allow an alternation between infinitival and finite sentential complements. An example typical of those considered in the literature is given in (1) (Davies and Dubinsky 2004).
(1a) Barnett seemed to understand the formula.
(1b) It seemed that Barnett understood the formula.The standard treatment in generative syntax of this alternation is the raising-to-subject analysis [Subject-to-Subject Raising, or SSR], which is introduced to account for the observation that the surface subject of (1a) is taken to be the subject of the embedded verb (‘understand’), a relation that is established in different ways in different syntactic theories. In the instantiation which gives this phenomenon its name, the subject of the embedded verb “raises” to become the subject of the matrix verb.
This analysis assumes that (1a) and (1b) are meaning-equivalent and claims that the choice of infinitival or finite sentential complementation is a syntactic matter. Much recent work in syntax has shown that comparable alternations are influenced by a variety of semantic, pragmatic, and/or usage factors. For instance, the dative alternation has been shown to be affected by syntactic weight and animacy (Bresnan et al. 2007), as well as information structure constraints (Snyder 2003).
Based on an examination of corpus data, I show that the two constructions in (1a) and (1b) can also be distinguished once a broader array of examples are systematically evaluated. The two constructions manifest significant distributional asymmetries in terms of (i) their information structure preferences and (ii) whether they align with statements based on direct, i.e. experiential, evidence, or indirect evidence, e.g. inferences…
Drifting as far as
November 21, 2011This comment from musician Les Claypool caught my ear on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday:
(1) It’s a wonderful place to be, as far as a creative person.
This is an instance of verbless topic-restricting as far as (AsFarAs for short, labeled “prepositional as far as” in MWDEU), but one drifting some from its earlier uses and now serving as a more general restrictor — in (1), with as far as a creative person roughly paraphrasable as for a creative person, restricting the applicability of the assertion in it’s a wonderful place to be.
(more…)
Disregarding context
July 24, 2011From an earlier posting on danglerology, a promissory note:
[this example] illustrates that the acceptability of such sentences depends not merely on their internal syntactic structure, but also on their place in a larger discourse. (For a later posting: why so many people have thought otherwise.)
Consider:
(1) After writing a book, it seems that Harry is at loose ends.
(1) has no overt subject for the predicate writing a book, and such sentence adjuncts require that the referent of this subject be supplied (they are SPARs, in my terminology); a general principle, the Subject Rule, says that this referent is supplied by the subject of the main clause (the clause the adjunct modifies). But what’s the status of the Subject Rule?
Data points: anaphora 4/25/11
April 25, 2011An account to friends of my sighting a famous Palo Alto resident who happens to be (like me) a Princeton graduate.
Dinner at Mandarin Goumet, couple to my left, the man very familiar-looking, older, ramrod-straight, expensive but understated suit, imperious in tone. Then the guy to his right and my left mentioned Princeton, and he and I both swiveled to look at him for a moment.
The issue is the referent of the he and the referent of the him in the final clause. Two men have been mentioned, and in principle either pronoun could refer to either of them. But my little tale was about the first man mentioned, and he is clearly the referent of the he, so that the second man must be the referent of the him. I could have used the first man and the second man (or some other NPs), but 3sg personal pronouns do the trick just fine, despite the in-principle ambiguity of my version.
as well
March 25, 2011Over on ADS-L a few days ago, Charlie Doyle reported on a usage that struck him as odd:
I have just read a student essay in which about 10% of the sentences begin with “As well [comma]” — instead of “Moreover” or “Furthermore” or “What is more” or “Also.” Our students (evidently) have been taught to stick in lots of “transitions,” but sentence-initial “As well” strikes me as abnormal. As well, the essay didn’t have much content.