In a recent One Big Happy, Ruthie and her mother stumble through Ambiguityland:
An ambiguity both lexical and structural.
Archive for the ‘Constructions’ Category
look pretty Adj
July 24, 2017Packaging content into words
November 26, 2012A 2005 Savage Chickens cartoon (by Doug Savage) with what’s labeled as a “future perfect passive”:
The label isn’t exactly wrong — it alludes, somewhat indirectly, to the semantics of the material will have been disappointed with subject you and complement with your life — but the label invites comparison to material like amāverō ‘will have loved’ in Latin (expressing the “future perfect”). But English and Latin work very differently in how they package content into words.
until the eagle grins
September 14, 2012Susan Cheever in Newsweek for August 13th and 20th, p. 6,“Gin Without the Tonic”, on the rich:
There are still titans with a conscience in the 21st century — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Oprah Winfrey, for instance — but some of the rich hang on to their money until the eagle grins.
The point of interest here is until the eagle grins, an idiom that will probably baffle most non-Americans (and some Americans as well).
Who(m) to V
April 18, 2012From a Comcast (cable tv) program description:
(Airdate January 9, 2007) Stabler and Benson are at odds over whom to believe in a “he said, she said” rape case involving a husband and wife (Blair Underwood, Michael Michele) in the middle of an extremely bitter child-custody dispute.
I was struck by the whom of whom to believe. Not unacceptable, but very much not what I would say or write.
Meanwhile, Stan Carey has posted about a kerfluffle on Twitter, in which various tweeters have objected strongly to the name of the Twitter feature Who to follow. Carey finds this variant entirely acceptable (and the whom variant stilted), as do I. But Business Insider thinks it’s “bad English”; GalleyCat calls it “one of the most viewed and easily overlooked grammar mistakes on the Internet”, adding that it’s “reassuring to watch a major social network struggle” with grammatical rules; Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, believes it’s a “grammatical error”; and other Twitter users are variously bothered, disappointed, or annoyed by the phrase. Carey provides lots of quotes, with links.
He maintains that all the critics are wrong and provides a long and detailed account of the who/whom issue, with many citations of sources. Well worth reading.
Here my concern is with the choice of pronouns in the specific construction in the Comcast and Twitter examples.
as would’ve
August 9, 2011A little while ago Geoff Pullum wrote me with what he thought might be a counterexample to our treatment of Auxiliary Reduction in English (in “Cliticization vs. inflection” and in the longer, still unpublished version of “Licensing of prosodic features by syntactic rules: The key to Auxiliary Reduction”). The relevant bit is the third instance of would’ve in this passage from a review in Slate (all three instances boldfaced here):
It’s fun to think about what Cowboys & Aliens might have been if any creativity had crept past the title page. Instead of bonding over their shared humanity, it would’ve been fascinating to see the cowboys and Indians take opposite sides in the movie’s climactic intergalactic battle. Cowboys & Aliens vs. Indians would’ve been a far superior film, as would’ve Cowboys vs. Aliens & Indians. Or Cowboys vs. Aliens & Indians & Predator. What we’re left with instead is a dumb movie that thinks it’s smart. (link)
[extracted from this] (1) Cowboys & Aliens vs. Indians would’ve been a far superior film, as would’ve Cowboys vs. Aliens & Indians.
The crucial fact is that the third instance seems to be in an occurrence of Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI); the other two are instances of Subject+VP (SVP), which (while they might set the scene for the third would’ve) doesn’t involve inversion. The problem is that SAI inverts a single auxiliary, while on the Z&P analysis of reduced auxiliaries, would’ve is, from a syntactic point of view, a sequence of two auxiliaries.
SAI survey
July 5, 2011As background for another discussion, I give an outline survey (originally prepared for introductory syntax classes) of Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI) in English.
