Islands be damned
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Listening to Weekend America on my way back from a holiday party on Saturday, I heard one of the best noun phrases I think I've ever heard (uttered by WA host John Moe). Coincidentally, it's in this short segment on holiday parties and cocktails, very near the beginning in fact, so take a listen if you care to. Here's the noun phrase in context:
This time of year weekends are a time for holiday parties, and all the traditions that go along with holiday parties. You know, the sweaters that you only wear just that one time of year, the conversations that you end up in with people who you're trying to remember the names of all the way through but you kinda smile and fake your way through…
Here's the tree. (Click it to enlarge.) Below it is the bracketed text that I used to generate the tree with the oh-so-cool phpsyntaxtree ("drawing syntax trees made easy"). Those of you with an eye for this sort of thing will notice, first of all, that the tree is relatively old-school (e.g. S-bar, Comp, Aux, non-binary branching, etc.), and that I've made a few, possibly idiosyncratic decisions about some things (e.g. the consituency of end up, that all is a P, etc.).
[NP [Det the] [N conversations_i] [S' [Comp that] [S [NP you] [VP [V end up] [PP [P in] [NP t_i]] [PP [P with] [NP [N people_j] [S' [NP who_j] [S [S [NP you_k] [Aux 're] [VP [V trying] [S [NP PRO_k] [Aux to] [VP [V remember] [NP [Det the] [N names] [PP [P of] [NP t_j]]] [PP [P all] [NP [Det the] [N way] [PP [P through] [NP t_i]]]]]]]] [Conj but] [S [NP you] [VP [Adv kinda] [VP [VP [V smile]] [Conj and] [VP [V fake] [NP [NP your] [N way] [PP [P through] [NP t_i]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]
The two most relevant things to note about the tree:
- The first head noun conversations appears to be understood as the object of three prepositions: (1) the in in you end up in, (2) the through in all the way through, and (3) the through in fake your way through. (Some may wish to argue that one or both throughs are intransitive versions of these prepositions; I would respectfully disagree.)
- The next head noun people, via its link to the who initiating the following relative clause, is understood as the object of the preposition of in remember the names of.
As I've said many times before — always as an excuse, like this time, for not bothering to go into too much detail — I'm not a syntactician. (I've gotten in trouble for delving too deeply into this area before; Kai advised me to leave such things alone, but I just can't help myself.) So, I leave the comments open in case any real syntacticians among our readers want to add comments on this example. Of course, this will most likely also serve as an open invitation for a bunch of amateurs to put in their two cents about whatever fancies them about the noun phrase. Oh, well, so be it.
Update: Of course, Lance is right. Here's the corrected tree:
mark (the ideophone) said,
December 14, 2008 @ 3:16 am
Nice tree, but is it very likely this representation is psycholinguistically realistic? To me it just looks like two sentences joined together:
"the conversations that you end up in with people who you're trying to remember the names of all the way through" – "but you kinda smile and fake your way through…". I particularly distrust the binding between the very last 'through' and 'conversations'. Couldn't context and pragmatics be doing the job your tree is supposed to be doing there?
Lance said,
December 14, 2008 @ 3:23 am
The thing is, m(ti), that "you kinda smile and fake your way through" isn't a sentence: the "that" that stands in for "conversations" is the object of that "through", just as it is of the other one. And I think it's still part of the restriction specifying which conversations.
Still, I think perhaps Eric meant:
[NP [Det the] [N' [N conversations_i] [S' [Comp that] [S [S [NP you] [VP [V end up] [PP [P in] [NP t_i]] [PP [P with] [NP [N people_j] [S' [NP who_j] [S [NP you_k] [Aux 're] [VP [V trying] [S [NP PRO_k] [Aux to] [VP [V remember] [NP [Det the] [N names] [PP [P of] [NP t_j]]] [PP [P all] [NP [Det the] [N way] [PP [P through] [NP t_i]]]]]]]]]]]]] [Conj but] [S [NP you] [VP [Adv kinda] [VP [VP [V smile]] [Conj and] [VP [V fake] [NP [NP your] [N way] [PP [P through] [NP t_i]]]]]]]]]]]
—that is, the "but" is conjoining "you end up in with people who you're trying to remember the names of all the way through" and "you kinda smile and fake your way through". (Out of fairness, I've little doubt that Kai would also advise me to leave such things to syntacticians.)
peter said,
December 14, 2008 @ 9:06 am
"Of course, this will most likely also serve as an open invitation for a bunch of amateurs to put in their two cents about whatever fancies them about the noun phrase."
Some of you guys at Language Log Plaza still don't seem to understand this Internet thing, do you? If you wanted a private conversation between certified professionals you should not use a blog.
David said,
December 14, 2008 @ 10:45 am
"Some of you guys at Language Log Plaza still don't seem to understand this Internet thing, do you? If you wanted a private conversation between certified professionals you should not use a blog."
Some of you guys in the comments thread still don't seem to understand this irony thing, do you?
language hat said,
December 14, 2008 @ 11:42 am
Well, to be fair, the irony would be more apparent if there hadn't been official Log complaints about poor commenting in the past.
That is indeed an excellent sentence, and I thank Eric for bringing it to our attention!
Arnold Zwicky said,
December 14, 2008 @ 12:16 pm
language hat: "Well, to be fair, the irony would be more apparent if there hadn't been official Log complaints about poor commenting in the past."
There is no such thing as an "official [Language] Log complaint". Every posting and every comment comes from an individual. I've had it explained to me many times that my disabling comments on most of my postings and my complaining about off-topic comments are signs of arrogance and contempt, and also of ignorance of the conventions of blogging (which require that comments always be allowed, and that the comments sections be available as spaces where anyone can post about anything they want). So I'm an arrogrant, ignorant bastard. But that's just me.
Yes, there's a comments policy (written by Mark Liberman), but it serves no function whatsoever, and might as well just be deleted from the site. In any case, complaints come from individual bloggers; no complaint has ever been issued by the bloggers as a group.
Eric Baković said,
December 14, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
Lance — you're right, of course, and I've added an image of the tree corresponding to your bracketed text representation as an update to the post. Thanks.
Eric Baković said,
December 14, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
I agree with Arnold, except the bit about the comments policy. Near the bottom of the policy is the following warning: "Comments that violate these guidelines will be deleted. Repeat offenders may be banned." I'm perfectly happy to delete comments on my own posts that I feel violate our policy — as I already have for this post — and I have my own, curmudgeonly definition of "relevance" when it comes to evaluating comments.
Mike Aubrey said,
December 14, 2008 @ 12:58 pm
In any case, I'm just glad that this post is filed under "Awesomeness, Syntax." Those two categories go extremely well together.
Baylink said,
December 14, 2008 @ 5:01 pm
> Yes, there's a comments policy (written by Mark Liberman), but it serves no function whatsoever, and might as well just be deleted from the site. In any case, complaints come from individual bloggers; no complaint has ever been issued by the bloggers as a group.
Though my comment was one of those Eric deleted, I've still an opinion, and it's somewhat more pertinent now: it would be safe for you to assume, Arnold, that we the commenters *do* assume that complaints from "staff" posters (that is roughly you, Lieberman, Pullum, and Shuy, in my personal perception) are de facto "official" complaints.
In any event, it's impractical and unreasonable for you all to expect 0% metacomments, and if you really think that the small amount of meta seen here — mostly generated in response to precisely the viewpoint on the part of the posters which started this — is that much of a problem, then you probably ought to just turn comments back off.
You'll be idiots if you do, though; 60-70% of the value of the place — for me, at least — comes from the comments. Even when they're not mine.
And no, Arnold: it's not your leaving comments off that makes you seem arrogant. It's your *arrogance* that makes you seem arrogant: like the time you blew me off in private email for calling you on a *material* factual inaccuracy that blew the entire point of your post.
Dan T. said,
December 14, 2008 @ 5:15 pm
I do find it frustrating on occasions when I have an on-topic thing to say but can't because comments are closed on the post in question.
"You're supposed to e-mail the logger about it!", they say in such cases, but it can be a big treasure-hunt to try to find any of their e-mail addresses these days, a situation for which one can presumably thank all the spammers out there whose presence discourages the old-fashioned straightforward presence of normal, accessible, un-munged addresses hyperlinked with "mailto:" for easy one-click replies as was common in Web sites circa 1995 (I still stubbornly insist on doing this in my own sites, even though this gets me tons of spam).
Arnold Zwicky said,
December 14, 2008 @ 6:25 pm
Dan T." ""You're supposed to e-mail the logger about it!", they say in such cases, but it can be a big treasure-hunt to try to find any of their e-mail addresses these days …"
But no. Click on the name of the LLogger in the header for the posting or in the list of authors at the right side of the main page, and (except, so far as I know, in two cases) you'll get a webpage to link to, and there you'll find the Llogger's e-mail address. Or google on the LLogger's name to get to their webpage.
It's not a one-click operation, but it's also not "a big treasure-hunt".
And, as several of us have said here before, if you have a long or complex response, or one that is of potential interest but a side matter in the original posting, you should post this material on your own blog, perhaps with a link to your posting in a Language Log comment.
Sara said,
December 14, 2008 @ 6:28 pm
I'm embarrassed: I didn't get the irony, either. It's because of Arnold Zwicky's contemptuous attitude, but here AZ is plainly correct in saying there is no reason to attribute his attitudes to Eric; after all, we don't assume that the other LL Plaza denizens share Geoff Pullum's idiosyncrasies!
Skullturf Q. Beavispants said,
December 15, 2008 @ 12:15 am
I enjoy the comments that delicately straddle the line between relevance and digression, but still have something reasonably substantial or insightful to say about language.
blahedo said,
December 15, 2008 @ 1:11 am
"Some may wish to argue that one or both throughs are intransitive versions of these prepositions; I would respectfully disagree."
Can I ask why? It certainly seems clear that "through" can function without an explicit object; is there particular evidence that's not happening here? I mean, this is a rambly on-the-fly sort of sentence in any case, but I can imagine a related sentence along the lines of:
This sentence seems perfectly well-formed to me without having to parse in any implicit object of "through"; in which case a similar analysis could presumably apply to the original awesome NP. (This induces other fun syntactical issues into the parse, of course.)
blahedo said,
December 15, 2008 @ 2:34 pm
Sorry, on that last post, the first part of the blockquote, from "the conversations" to "with people", was supposed to be in strikethru (i.e. not part of the suggested example). I did check it in preview, but apparently the comment preview area is WYSI-Not-Quite-WYG.