Language Log

Vaguely parallel to preposition doubling, there's a phenomenon involving extra instances of that.  A typical pattern is …VERB that ADVERB that SENTENCE, e.g. this comment by Robert Gibbs about Mary Robinson:

There are statements that obviously that she has made that the president doesn't agree with, and that's probably true for a number of the people that the president is recognizing for their lifetime contributions.

Matt Bauer sent in a specimen of preposition doubling from a recent Chicago news story ("Man stabbed in head with screwdriver in Joliet", WGN/Chicago Tribune, 12/20/2009):

A Joliet man was stabbed in the head with a screwdriver by the husband of a woman with whom he was speaking with at a local bar, police said.

A "dangling modifier" can follow the intended understood subject in a sentence and yet still dangle. That is (let me rephrase, since the traditional "dangling" metaphor isn't very helpful): a subjectless non-finite clause in a phrase functioning as an adjunct may be hard to associate with a suitable target of predication even though the intended one is a subject noun phrase occurring earlier in the same sentence. Here is an example, from a short piece about comedian Russell Brand and singer Katy Perry that appeared in the UK newspaper Metro:

Russell Brand says Katy Perry's God-fearing parents loved his 'old school Englishness' after showering them with chocolates.

In my judgment (your mileage may differ), the clause showering them with chocolates occasions a brief moment of involuntary surprise and puzzlement. One does a very brief double-take and then searches back for the right noun phrase to be understood as the one who does the showering.

The judgment is subtle. Some will say that they don't see any unacceptability at all, and that's fine for them; but I'm not interested in the reactions of those who managed to see instantly what the right interpretation was. I'm interested in the structural properties that trigger the slight flicker of syntactic disquiet for those that experience it.

James Taranto starts out his latest Best of the Web column with some clever wordplay, based on the status of English as a semi-negative-concord language ("He Hasn't Accomplished Nothing", 12/1/2009):

Slate's Jacob Weisberg doesn't think Barack Obama has accomplished nothing, and Weisberg ain't usin' no bad grammar neither. Weisberg disputes the "conventional wisdom about Obama"–to wit, that he "hasn't done anything yet." This, he claims, "isn't just premature–it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20."

The ambiguity of negative concord vs. negative cancellation is a linguistic commonplace, but this is the first example that I can recall of it being used in a headline and lede. (I'm not complaining — Taranto's use is rhetorically clever, and appropriate in an opinion piece.)

In "On beyond personal datives" (11/5/2009), we discussed examples like "I nearly stepped on me a dog", which can be construed with the "personal dative" me following what Larry Horn plausibly describes as a "complex transitive verb". This analysis doesn't work quite as gracefully for some of the other examples from the same post, such as  "I'm going to the mall to shop for me a dress".

But still, you can (sort of) passivize the object of "shop for", as in the following web examples: "Is there a switch to more goods that are shopped for and purchased in a more price-conscious manner?"; "Clothing was shopped for out of catalogs, people rode on trains instead of in cars, and letters were written instead of text messages sent". And thus you can assimilate examples like "I'm going to the mall to shop for me a dress" to the canonical pattern of "I bought me a truck", where a personal pronoun in the ditransitive structure VERB PRONOUN NOUNPHRASE is interpreted as something in the affinity-group of constructions known as "datives of interest"; "personal", “ethical”, “free”, or “affected” datives; and so on.

But this morning's mail brings another report from Daniel Mahaffey, this time from a gathering over Thanksgiving. As with his earlier examples, the speaker is from Georgia:

When someone went to get a glass of water for another, they set them at ease with the sentence, "I'll be back with you some water."

Decades ago, when I was little, I read this joke in Mad Magazine:

Do your feet smell? Does your nose run? You may be built upside-down.

I giggled for a short time — just a couple of days, I think — at the surprising coincidence of the two verb senses, and the double pun, and then got on with whatever boys in short pants do during those parts of the day that are not taken up with giggling. But I see now that there is something linguistically interesting about the joke: the two questions convey the effect of a conditional. So the content of the joke could be phrased (though for some reason much less amusingly) like this:

If your feet smell and your nose runs then you may be built upside-down.

This similarity of effect between interrogative clauses and conditional clauses has a connection to the historical reason for an identity of form between the words introducing the interrogative subordinate clause in (1) and the conditional clause in (2).

    (1) I don't know if the car will start.
    (2) We won't go if the car won't start.

The two ifs share an etymology, but they have grown apart.

It is an exhausting business trying to keep up with the extraordinarily dumb content of the continuing flow of truly awful grammar texts as the amateurs crank them out. I am so grateful to Brett Reynolds for having shouldered some of the burden by putting reviews of recent ghastlies on his blog English, Jack. He has discussed the over-loose definition of "phrase" in the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics; he has critiqued Eric Henderson's Writing by Choice; he has excoriated Ron Cowan's The Teacher's Grammar of English in at least four posts, this one, this one, this one, and this one; he has done battle with the "Grammatically Speaking" column from TESOL's Essential Teacher magazine; and there are other posts accessible from these. He is fighting the good fight. Thank you, Brett. When I say that grammar books are being written by the incompetent and published by the blind or uncaring, I do not exaggerate. Just take a little time to read Brett Reynolds on this topic.

Let me return to the issue of wildly incompetent grammar text writing and the question (which I posed here) of whether and how you can find three adjective phrases in the following list of word sequences:

1. thank you said Jim
2. Janet ran home
3. the poor injured duck
4. a shivering and frightened
5. give me that
6. with a heavy bag

If you would like the answer, read on.

Mark Liberman's post, "On beyond personal datives?", has generated quite a bit of discussion in the comments section, much of it related to Larry Horn's paper, "'I love me some him': The landscape of non-argument datives", in Bonami & Hofherr (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 7, 2008. Larry has sent along a response to the commenters, which is reproduced here as a guest post.

Yesterday, Daniel Mahaffey wrote to ask about his friend's "unusual indirect object sentences". Thus after backing into a dog in a crowded kitchen, she said "I nearly stepped on me a dog".

I received this email message this morning:

Dear Student Systems User

There are currently problems with the main database server, affecting NESI, EUCLID, WISARD, STUDMI, etc.

IS are investigating, but we have no timescale for a resolution. Sorry for any inconvenience

Regards
Student, Admissions & Curricula Systems

You might like to reflect awhile on the linguistic lessons you can learn from this. Then read on…

Anita Krishnakumar posts at Concurring Opinions on November 2 about a Supreme Court judgment by Justice Anthony Kennedy that turned quite crucially on the distinction between active and passive voice in the language of criminal statutes, only (you're ahead of me already aren't you, Language Log readers?) Justice Kennedy doesn't know his passive from a hole in the ground, so the claims made are nonsense. I see no way to read what he says that does not involve assuming that he thinks if serious bodily injury results and if death injury results are passive clauses. And the point is a general one, crucially tied to grammar: Kennedy thinks that in general "criminal statutes use the active voice to define prohibited conduct" and use the passive voice to specify mere sentencing factors associated therewith, and courts should pay attention to that distinction. Only there isn't a distinction in the statute he cites. I won't go on about it, since a couple of sensible commenters do my work for me right after the post, citing Language Log, where so many posts have been devoted to this topic (I aggregate them for reference here). But heavens above: You can get to be a Supreme Court justice, and write about actives and passives, without having any clue how that distinction is normally defined by grammarians, and without giving any alternative definition? Could we perhaps organize a few lunches at which linguistics department chairs meet with law school deans or something?

Now for another piece of evidence (I gave one here) that even if you have no clue about grammar you can write grammar textbooks or reference handbooks and make good money by doing so. Here is an exercise set in Pupil Book 4 in the Nelson Grammar series (published by Thomas Nelson, now Nelson Thornes Ltd in the UK; ISBN 0-17-424706-0):

Three of the examples below are adjective phrases and three are sentences. Find the three adjective phrases. Add a verb and any other words you need to make each one into a sentence. Find the three sentences and write them with their correct punctuation.

1. thank you said Jim
2. Janet ran home
3. the poor injured duck
4. a shivering and frightened
5. give me that
6. with a heavy bag

Can you do this homework, Language Log readers? It appears to be aimed at children in elementary school, not older than 8 or 9. You will need the definition of "phrase", which is given on the previous page: "A phrase is a group of words that does not contain a verb" [sic; I swear I am not making this up]. I will now leave you to do the exercise (comments are open). Later I will come back to this and discuss it.