Archive for the ‘Ellipsis’ Category

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Nominal ellipsis

December 8, 2009

In a recent posting I looked at some English constructions (Gapping, Verb Phrase Ellipsis) with verbal ellipsis in them, in light of the claim in some usage handbooks that ellipsis is subject to a formal identity condition, requiring that the understood verbal element be in the same form as the overt one. I find many examples that violate this condition to be entirely acceptable, but apparently some people are pickier than I am.

Then I thought to look at some cases of nominal ellipsis where the overt material and the understood material are in different forms. Things like

I accept the first argument, but reject the other two ___. [understood arguments]

I accept the first two arguments, but reject the third ___. [understood argument]

That was your dream. Kim’s ___ were all nightmares. [understood dreams]

Those were your dreams. Kim’s ___ was a nightmare. [understood dream]

For me, the first two are impeccable. The last two I judge to be acceptable but to require a bit of processing work. Others might have different judgments.

I haven’t come across treatments of nominal ellipsis in the advice literature, but then it’s hard to search for.

Posted in Ellipsis, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Ellipsis woes

December 6, 2009

In collecting handbook comments on government of verb form by the nearest, I came across advice about a very different sort of “failed parallelism” bundled together with advice about the verb form cases. What the two phenomena share is data involving ellipsis in coordinate sentences and an appeal to parallelism.

So in the same passage Pink’s Dictionary of Correct English (1948) cautions against a change of “tense” in

(1a) always has [done] and will continue to do

and a change of number in

(2a) so marked is his preference and so cosmopolitan [are] his tastes

(where the ellipted material is in square brackets). And Bernstein’s Watch Your Language (1958) generalizes about ellipsis, saying that the understood word must be in the same form — number, tense, person — as the explicit one, and giving as parallel violations

(1b) all men who have [served] or will serve

(2b) Ammunition was seized and 150 suspects [were] freed.

(similarly in his Dos, Don’ts, and Maybes of English Usage (1977)).

Here we see a common tactic in the advice literature: putting different proscriptions together as instances of a more abstract piece of advice. As I said in a fairly extensive Language Log posting of 2005 on (claimed) failures of parallelism, such umbrella advice mixes together phenomena of very different statuses and typically overgeneralizes in ways the advice writers don’t appreciate.

(more…)

Posted in Coordination, Ellipsis, Syntax, Usage advice | 2 Comments »

Government of verb form by the nearest

December 3, 2009

From a draft of a soliciting letter mailed to me recently, for my signature (details concealed):

[Institution X has made N grants to scholars over the years] – people who have and are making important contributions to [science].

(The problematic piece is boldfaced.) The draft was prepared by highly educated people who write a lot in their work, but still they came up with this example of a classic type of non-parallel coordination, with two conjoined complement-taking verbs (here, perfect have and progressive are) but a complement with a verb form appropriate only to the second, and not to the first (perfect have governs a past participle, progressive are a present participle: have made, are making). This is “government of verb form by the nearest”.

What I said to the colleague (and friend) who sent me the draft is that I have in fact studied the phenomenon, adding:

I don’t view it as a lapse in grammar, but a great many people do, and I would probably look foolish if this went out under my name.  Grammatical sticklers would insist on:

… people who have made and are making …

Actually, I used to view such examples as lapses in grammar, but over the years I have softened my assessment. As far as I know, I don’t use this sort of government myself, but I have come to think that for many people it’s not an inadvertent error, as many usage advisers have thought, but just an aspect of a grammar somewhat different from mine — a variant construction.

(more…)

Posted in Coordination, Ellipsis, Government, Syntax, Usage advice | 6 Comments »

Ellipsis on an island

October 16, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell, “Offensive Play”, New Yorker 10/19/09, p. 52, quoting a football player:

(1) “They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting.”

“I probably shouldn’t have ___” contains an instance of Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE); the underlines mark the location of the elliptical material. VPE is a type of anaphora, zero anaphora in particular, so we need to find a referent for the missing VP.

The way VPE normally works is that the referent is supplied by an overt VP in the linguistic context that serves as an antecedent for the anaphor, as in this real-life example, where the antecedent is bold-faced.

I lost weight with Jenny Craig, and you can ___ too.

(that is, you can lose weight with Jenny Craig too.)

But sometimes the referent has to be dug out from non-VP material. Some people find such examples unacceptable — they are often at least hard to process — and there’s a considerable literature about some of them, under the heading “anaphoric islands”; see the Language Log discussion here.

(1) is such a case, where the elliptical material is something like “practiced” or “gone to practice” and the referent has to be dug out “from within” the noun practice, which is derived from the verb practice.

Some further examples (some of them intentionally jokey) from my collection:

(2) Many cases go unrecorded, and those that are ___ rarely make it to court. [referent from within the adjective unrecorded]

(3) Me: That’s a gift.
Wife: And he is ___. He’s very gifted. [referent from within the noun gift; note wife’s repair.]

(4) Constants aren’t ___ and variables don’t ___. [referents from within the nouns constants and variables]

(5) Friendly fire isn’t ___. [referent from within the NP friendly fire]

(6) one of those see-through blouses you don’t even want to ___! [referent from within the adjective see-through]

(7) A Writer Who Doesn’t ___ [referent from within the noun writer]

Posted in Anaphora, Ellipsis | 2 Comments »

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 »

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