Language Log

A tricky agreement situation arose for "Bagehot" while writing his eponymous column in The Economist last week. The topic was the "furious festival of blame in Britain recently". Among other scandals, two crude radio shock comics recently called a much-loved aging actor's answering machine and told him that one of them had fucked his granddaughter, and the call was recorded, and editorially approved, and actually broadcast. Bagehot wrote:

Two comedians make cruel jokes on BBC radio: heads must roll! (They did—one of the comedians, plus two executives, were forced out.)

My interest is in the agreement form chosen for the verb I have underlined. People like Stephen Fry in prescriptivist mood would say that the subject is the noun phrase one of the comedians, which is singular, so it should be was forced out. However, I'm not dinging Bagehot on the plural agreement form. I believe it's not just a simple binary decision in this case. Things are much more subtle and interesting.

Mark Liberman has reported on a use of the transitive verb quiesce 'render inactive', in a passive used adjectivally: "Server is currently quiesced". Transitive quiesce seems to be almost entirely restricted to computer contexts, and also to be recent enough to have escaped general dictionaries.

A postcard from my friend Chris Ambidge, an ad for the comedy movie Stiff Luv (2008), picturing six cast members, all dressed as women:

Something tells me, Arnold, that not all these women actually are.

(To judge from the cast list at the movie's website, I'd guess that NONE of the women actually are.)

Ok, Chris's note is a joke. The sentence isn't grammatical (though it's entirely comprehensible). But what's wrong with it?

Joel Berson wrote to the American Dialect Society mailing list on 12 November:

In the NYTimes Thursday, Nov. 6, Alessandra Stanley wrote (in "Cheers, Tears and a Sense of the Historic Moment"), "There was many a confessional detour, from Dan Rather reminiscing … to the former White House adviser David Gergin describing …".

This seems awkward, when "there were many confessional detours" is available (and uses the same number of keystrokes).

Many a N is "notionally plural" — it refers to more than one N — but grammatically singular:

Many a linguist has/*have wondered about how to analyze this construction.

So the singular was in Stanley's sentence is just the form you'd expect. But Berson found it awkward, and others agreed with him. Ben Zimmer suggested that the problem was the proximity of the verb to many, in which case you might get "agreement with the nearest": 

There were many a confessional detour…

This still doesn't satisfy me, because the unproblematic many confessional detours is available as an alternative.

As Ben noted, there's a problem here only because the sentence is existential, with there as the grammatical subject (in subject position, preceding the verb) and a referential NP in the predicate (following the verb). In standard English, this predicative NP determines the number of the verb (with some wrinkles for there's). And if this predicative NP has the form many a N, the plural quantifier many ends up as the nearest potential determinant of agreement on the verb (while when many a N is in subject position, the singular N is not only the head of the NP but also the nearest potential determinant of agreement on the verb).

It's been a while since we looked at agreement with the nearest, so maybe a re-play of another case involving existentials is in order.

As I read the text of Rob Balder's latest PartiallyClips strip, about whether magic is perhaps secretly taught in universities, I experienced a moment of terror over whether linguistics was going to turn up in the third panel. But our discipline dodged the bullet. Check it out.

A nice little example of "variety individuation" (see here), in which a mass noun N (like wine) has corresponding count uses meaning 'variety of N' (as in three fine wines), from a piece by Andrew Pollack ("The Promise and Power of RNA"), in the 11 November Science Times section of the NYT. It's all about RNA.

RNA is clearly a mass noun for a long part of the article. But then we get to the hard fact that there are lots of different types of RNA, and count uses (referring to varieties of RNA) blossom, often alternating with mass uses.

The Guardian interviewed Dan Everett while he was in the UK recently for lectures in Edinburgh and London, and has published a piece about Dan and the Pirahã. The Language Log fan who was the first to point it out to us (thanks, Rachele) asks about its example of recursion. It says:

Chomsky … recently refined his theory to argue that recursion — the linguistic practice of inserting phrases inside others – was the cornerstone of all languages. (An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read, "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".)

Is that recursion? Well, unfortunately the matter isn't clear. Let me explain.

It's time once again for our semi-regular feature, "Mr. Payack Bamboozles the Media." Paul J.J. Payack, as Language Log readers know, is the assiduously self-promoting president of the Global Language Monitor who has managed to hoodwink unsuspecting journalists on a range of pseudoscientific claims, most notably the number of words in the English language. (He now claims we're 2,248 words away from the millionth word, a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs.) During the U.S. presidential election season, he's attracted media attention for "linguistic analysis" of key debates and speeches. Last month, CNN trumpeted his findings about the Biden/Palin vice-presidential debate: Palin spoke at a tenth-grade level and Biden at an eighth-grade level, and Palin used passives to deflect responsibility. That nonsense went unremarked here (except briefly in the comments), but Payack's latest round of flapdoodle, pegged to Barack Obama's victory speech on election night, is deserving of mention, even if it helps to fuel his cynical promotional machine.

Although I posted on this on ADS-L earlier today, I thought that maybe in honor of the U.S. elections on Tuesday it would be entertaining to post a version of it here. The usage in question is the verbs early/absentee vote (not vote early/absentee).

The most recent guide to "punctuation, grammar, and style" (quotation from the subtitle) to come across my desk is Jan Venolia's Write Right! (4th edition, 2001). "Over 500,000 copies sold", the cover exclaims — but still I'd overlooked it until Wednesday (when I found it for sale at my local carwash, of all places, along with books about cooking, pets, parenting, travel, and advice for businesspeople — a category I'm still trying to wrap my mind around).

The field of books offering to help people improve their writing on the job or at school is crowded, and some of them seem to sell well. But their treatments of English grammar are almost all seriously flawed and not especially helpful. Write Right! is better than some of its competitors, but it really starts out on the wrong foot, in its discussion of what nouns are and how you can tell which words are nouns. (Like most of these advice books, Write Right! begins with the parts of speech, nouns first.)

As a bonus, I'll tack on a wonderful bit about English "subjunctives" that readers couldn't possibly understand unless they already knew what the passage was talking about.

The Tesco supermarket company defines its values by a slogan that, as my American undergraduate student Denise Wood pointed out to me yesterday, simply doesn't seem (to her or to me) grammatical:

British students seem inclined to accept this phrase — possibly because they've been seeing it on bags and till slips for years (Tesco is still a mostly UK company). But there seems to be an isogloss here (a boundary between dialects determined by the use of some particular word or phrase), with me and Denise on one side and possibly (we don't know yet) most British speakers on the other. What does seem clear is that this is not a productive or extensible pattern. You just can't get away with other noun phrases formed, like every little, from a determinative and an adjective. You really can't say *Every big is desirable, or *Each generous gets us closer to the goal. The phrase every little, considered as a noun phrase, has to be some kind of special sui generis construction. It's not just a regular normal deployment of determinative and adjective.

At some time in the middle 1970s, Deirdre Wilson and I noticed that we had never seen the past participle of the verb stride anywhere. In fact we didn't even know what it was. When you stride off, what is it that you've done? How would it be described? Have you strided? Have you strode? Have you stroded? Have you stridden? Have you strodden? We realized that we hadn't a clue. None of them sounded familiar or even mildly acceptable to us as native speakers. And this odd gap had some potential for theoretical significance. Let me explain why. And then I'll tell you how the world's most distinguished English grammarian stumbled across a real-life sentence that seemed to clear up the mystery. And I'll fill in a bit of subsequently discovered history as well. But first, before you read on, write down what you think is the correct form for the past participle of stride in English as spoken by you.

Today I had both lunch and dinner at the Eagle and Child Pub in Oxford. And on both occasions, I was puzzled by a couplet printed on the menu:

Famous for the
scribes who wrote
on leaving left
a kindly note

(At least according to the scrawl on the scrap of paper in my pocket, that's exactly how it reads, with no additional punctuation or other clues to construal.)