Language Log

In this morning's mail:

My friend and I are avid Language Log readers. We were recently conversing over IM, and she was telling me about her boyfriend's great-aunt. Among the things she mentioned:

"She worked when women didn't work very much and never got married."

I interpreted her statement as my friend alluding to a time when women both didn't work and did not get married. After a few moments, I realized she was telling me that the great-aunt had a job and never got married; "when women" only modified "didn't work very much." We are unsure which reading is technically correct and therefore decided to ask.   Any insight you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not a syntactician, but I usually take the morning shift here at Language Log Plaza, so I'll do my best with this one — luckily, it seems pretty straightforward.

In responding to bad publicity about the "Craigslist Killer", Jim Buckmaster has been accused of violating the norms of English grammar. An article in the Boston Globe  ("Craiglist CEO: Our site is not sex-related", 4/22/2009) quotes him as telling CNN that "We feel terribly, and it's quite sad that anyone would lose their life". To which Paul Mulshine, a syndicated columnist for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, responded "No, you feel terrible; you merely speak terribly".

According to Mr. Mulshine, feel in this case is what he calls a "linking verb", which is followed not by an adverb but by a "predicate adjective", describing "not the action of the predicate but the condition of the subject". He calls Mr. Buckmaster's usage a "hypercorrectionism", caused by "some time-server of a teacher" who warned "little Jimmy" against leaving the -ly off of adverbs, but "never got around to explaining the role of a predicate adjective".

About a month ago, Brad DeLong took Ross Douthat to task for his unpleasant description of a failed undergraduate hook-up ("Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes on the Pill", 3/16/2009). DeLong made his case mainly by quoting Douthat's own words, from p. 184 of his 2005 book Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. The quoted passage was picked up and reproduced in more than a dozen other blog posts, for example in Wonkette ("Misogynist Neck-Beard Ross Douthat Shares his Sexy Stories", 3/18/2009).

It's hard to disagree with the rather negative tone of the comments on Mr. Douthat's attitude towards the young woman "who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon", and who "bored and somewhat disgusted" him by "drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks" and "pushing her tongue into my mouth". Perhaps the most temperate of these remarks was "it's clear he is no gentleman".

But I'm here to defend Douthat from the many commenters who also accused him of being an incompetent writer — e.g. Froborr at slacktivist.com who suggested that "once again we note the curious association between being a horrible person and being a bad writer".

It's always dangerous to speculate that some phenomenon hasn't been described in the literature, as I did with the I-T-PST recently. Someone will come along with a bibliographic reference, usually to something you've read.

So it is in this case. Russell Lee-Goldman wrote this morning with this quote from Fillmore (1988:51):

Many grammatical constructions can be shown to have this same context-characterizing preperty. As a simple example, the syntactic idiom which has the introducers IT'S TIME, IT'S ABOUT TIME, and IT'S HIGH TIME, generally requires that the following indicative clause be past tense in form.

(The reference is to Charles Fillmore's "The mechanisms of "Construction Grammar"", Berkeley Linguistics Society 14.35-55.)

Lee-Goldman remarks that this is probably one of the many cases where Fillmore and his associates mention a phenomenon in passing, without picking up on it later. I should have thought of Chuck Fillmore.

[Added 19 April: Fillmore's mention was of I-T-PST, but Geoff's original report was about I-T-PRS, and I still don't have a reference in the scholarly literature for that one.]

Now it's time to clarify some of the details of what I'll call the I-T-PST construction (as in "It's time that I left"), introduced by Geoff Pullum here. In fact, there are three relevant constructions, differing in which inflectional form they have in the subordinate clause:

I-T-PST: It's time (that) he had some success.
I-T-PRS: It's time (that) he has some success.
I-T-BSE: It's time (that) he have some success.

(The labeling here anticipates some results of the discussion to follow.)

People differ as which of these constructions they have and, when they have several, whether the constructions differ semantically or pragmatically, and whether there are contexts in which one construction is preferred to another. There are probably subtle differences between the that and zero variants and between the contracted and uncontracted variants, and there's certainly more to be said about the modifier about, as in the title of this posting (there's also it's high time …). But here I'm going to talk about less subtle matters.

I recently learned about a praiseworthy initiative, the Google Lime Scholarship for Students with Disabilities, whose eligibility requirements are expressed (in part) as follows:

Candidates must be:

• A student entering their junior or senior year of undergraduate study […]
• […]
• A person with a disability (defined as someone who has, or considers themselves to have, a long-term, or recurring, issue […]) […]

Try making sense of this sentence, out of today's free Metro newspaper in the UK:

Having been in Australia for 17 years, a foreign national wishing to work in Australia must be of good character.

You must only be of good character after you have completed your 17 years of residence, but for the first 17 years you get a pass? Or does it mean even after you've been a foreigner in Australia for 17 years you still have to show you're of good character? Does this make any sense even in the crazy world of immigration law? Give up?

A new advertising campaign by the cellphone company Boost Mobile is a real head-scratcher, in large part due to its creative (possibly too creative) experimentations in English morphology. Morphological innovation has driven some other recent ad campaigns, notably the creation of "Snacklish" by the good people at Snickers (discussed by Arnold Zwicky here, linking back to earlier morpholiciousness from Snickers here). Both the Snickers and Boost Mobile campaigns revolve around self-conscious neologisms, but the similarity ends there. Whereas Snickers introduces lexical blends fusing a variety of words and word-parts, Boost Mobile exploits one particular morphological frame: un____ed.

I often have to point out that English grammar is not a settled body of dull doctrine, it's a live field of scientific investigation in which new facts are emerging all the time. So how long is it since I last learned something entirely new about the grammar of English? Oh, about… two minutes. In a press report about Al Franken's win in the Minnesota recount, I read that Franken said, "It's time that Minnesota, like every other state, has two senators." [See below for Ben Zimmer's observation that the AP report in which I read this was in fact departing, outside of the direct quotation marks, from what Franken actually said! It turns out not to matter for my purposes. The discovery in what follows is not about Franken.] That present tense on has struck me as odd. I would say It's time Minnesota had two senators. The idiom demands the preterite (simple past) tense in my variety of English. So I picked the random word sequence it's time everyone and Googled it, and I found that It's time everyone flies is a corporate motto of Cebu Airlines in the Philippines. And then, although instances of the preterite vastly outnumber cases of the present among the Google hits, I soon found it's time everyone understands and it's time everyone takes a moment on the ESPN site… It's already clear to me that people are starting to say It's time X does Y instead of It's time X did Y. That's not a major discovery; it's not especially important or interesting as far as I can yet see, because it doesn't relate to some descriptive thorny point or theoretical crux; but it's a brand new fact about English syntax that I had no inkling of when I woke up this morning.

Yesterday, Norm Geras spotted a lovely dangling modifier for the Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct's collection. The source was an article by Tim Adams ("The town that made Margaret", The Guardian, 4/5/2009), which featured this second sentence:

Now 83, and long gone from power, Britons remain fiercely divided over the reign of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher is the one who's "now 83" and "long gone from power", but the handiest peg to hang these modifiers on is the subject, "Britons". Geoff Pullum has argued ("Stunningly inept modifier manners", 3/10/2005) that such sentences don't "violate the syntactic correctness conditions for English", they're just "bad grammatical manners, the syntactic analog of … eating the butter from the butter dish".

Back in February I posted the abstract for my 2009 Stanford Semantics Fest paper, on alternations between direct and oblique marking of objects in English (flee the scene, flee from the scene). An expanded version of the handout is now available on my website, here.

A reader writes to ask about disjunctive subjects in English and how subject-verb agreement works in cases like the following:

Neither Barbara nor I ?am ?is ?are able to …
If you or I ?am ?are there, …

As it happens, I posted on the subject to ADS-L some years. I intended to post a version on Language Log, but I seem not to have gotten around to it. Until now.

In Athens for the EACL (European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics). Weather lovely, wish you were here. Athens more beautiful than I had expected. And for me, a grammarian married to a philosopher and interested in logic and mathematics, being in Greece is utterly awe-inspiring. The Greeks invented alphabets (writing systems that separate the consonants from the vowels) and the Western tradition of grammars (which basically start with Dionysius Thrax; yes, Panini in India was much earlier, but that is not where today's grammatical tradition comes from, because no one in Europe knew about it until late in the 18th century). They founded modern Western philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and logic. Barbara and I walked across a patch of ground called the Ancient Agora and realized that this was where Socrates taught. It is unbelievable. And then you climb up to the Acropolis and see the Parthenon and you realize it's unbelievably more unbelievable than you ever believed.

So, did I identify anything linguistic enough to justify putting this postcard on Language Log? Not really. But Barbara and I did have a giggle each day as we flipped the Do Not Disturb card on our door handle to signal that our hotel room was ready for cleaning. The hotel had not appreciated the vital nature of the little particle up, and they had printed on the card the words Make My Room. Somehow, since Clint Eastwood's Sudden Impact (filmed in Santa Cruz), that seemed very funny ("Go ahead!"). I have no idea why make up the bed and make the bed are basically equivalent but make up the room and make the room are not. Not everything about English syntax and semantics is regular and logically explicable. Some of it is as messy and lawless and unpredictable as Athens traffic or Dirty Harry's policing methods.