Language Log

Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon in the New Yorker of 22 September, p. 61: woman speaking on the phone, saying

You never write, you never call, you never fax, you never e-mail, you never text, you never page.

Six verbs here, all referring to means of communication. Such verbs have a certain amount of fame for English syntacticians, because some of them represent a clear island of regularity in what looks at first glance to be a sea of idiosyncrasy.

Comments on Mark Liberman's Left Dislocation posting drifted for a while into the vexed question of how to express possession when two (or more, though I'll restrict myself to two here) conjoined possessor NPs are involved. For the coordination of a 1sg (pronominal) possessor NP with a 3sg non-pronominal possessor NP, commenters came up with five possibilities (to which I can add many more from my files and from web searches).

Some people weren't comfortable with any of the alternatives, but some had a very clear preference for one of them, and different people's preferences were different. This is not an uncommon sort of variation, occurring what principle for connecting semantics to morphosyntactic form should apply. (What verb form to use with the subject either you or I: am, are, or is?) Different people opt for different solutions, and some people "opt out", rejecting all the solutions whenever possible, choosing instead some quite different formulation of the intended meaning.

I'll sidle up to the particular case the commenters were looking at by first considering some (apparently) much simpler cases.

Two recent sightings of superlative swingest 'most powerful in swinging an election'. From The Field on 3 October, about the state of Ohio:

And so it is a turnout war, plain and simple, in this swingest of swing states with a whopping 20 Electoral Votes.

And from the Daily Show on 7 October, in a report by "senior polling analyst" John Oliver (described here) on

the swingest of the swing voters

namely the stupid. There are also some instances of the alternative most swing, as in this story about the Not-So-Straight Talk Express (going from Massachusetts to Ohio to campaign for Barack Obama), quoting one of the organizers, Marc Solomon:

"It was the make-or-break state, and we lost Ohio last time. It’s the chance to go to the quintessential, most swing state and make a difference," said Solomon.

"It's essential that we take action to both support the banking system as a whole — as well as being ready to intervene in particular cases when it's necessary to do so", said the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling to reporters yesterday. Ungrammatically, I think.

Forget the fact that to both support is an instance of the so-called "split infinitive": modifiers have been placed between to and the verb in an infinitival clause, by good writers, throughout the history of English. (Those who jump on them as "errors" don't know as much about English grammar as they would like you to think they do.) No, it's the fact that the both never gets its correlated and. For me, the construction both X as well as Y (for any phrases X and Y), though common in unplanned speech, is not syntactically well formed. Particularly not when X is a plain-form (bare infinitive) verb phrase and Y is a gerund-participial verb phrase. That is (to invent a shorter case of the same sort), *to both survive as well as flourishing seems to me like an error of sentence planning, where what was intended was to both survive and flourish.

Of course, there could be people who differ, and see no slip in the Chancellor's remark. (Recall the surprising number of commenters on this post of mine who judged my ungrammatical example to be grammatical — though in that case I was able to determined that the original writer of the sentence agreed with me.) Not every expert user of Standard English has exactly the same judgments of grammaticality as every other user. But even a man who finds both support … as well as being ready ungrammatical may blurt it out when speaking under conditions of extreme stress.

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky notes

Semifreddo's sweet baguette, which has a big circle on it. The center of the circle says "NO TRANS FATS", and the circle itself says "NEVER HAD" at the top and "NEVER WILL" at the bottom.

No trans fats is a NP conveying something like 'There are no trans fats in this [referring to the food the label is attached to, that is, to Semifreddo's sweet baguettes in general]' or 'This has no trans fats in it'. The other two expressions are subjectless, with a referent supplied from context (once again, Semifreddo's sweet baguette). The point of special interest here is at the other end of these two expressions: had and will with nothing following.

Never will is unproblematic in this context: this is just Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), with the missing VP complement of the auxiliary will interpreted as 'have any trans fats' (the no–any alternation is a side point of interest). But never had presents a little puzzle.

This is a follow-up to my syntax quiz from Sunday. Kai von Fintel was the first to correctly note that it was a trick question: swallow hard is probably intransitive in the relevant McCain quote, and so this is (probably) neither an instance of a parasitic gap nor of "across-the-board movement, coupled with right node raising out of a coordinate structure". There were various good attempts by others to show that it is actually an example of one or the other, though, of course under the assumption that swallow hard is, or at least could be, transitive (one reader even urged me not to concede defeat — even though I hadn't, I had only admitted to planting a trick question). Thanks to those commenters who accepted that the 'intransitive camp' had a point but that they'd like to give the quiz a go on the terms that I laid out.

In today's lead story in the New York Times ("Breakthrough Reached in Negotiations on Bailout"), John McCain is quoted as saying on ABC's "This Week":

This is something that all of us will swallow hard and go forward with.

A recent xkcd cartoon looked back to the time when Pluto was demoted from being called a planet to being called a dwarf planet (where dwarf planets don't count as planets):

We posted extensively here on various aspects of the story. Today I'm going to return to the status of the expression dwarf planet.

A couple of days ago, Jim Bisso sent me a question:

I've been embattled by a bunch of peevologists over the grammaticality of sentences of the sort: "my mother(,) she is a good person". I have pointed out that many kinds of apposition are not only acceptable but flow from the pens of some of our finest writers, but they are having none of that. Somehow a construction like "we the people of the United States etc." is okay, but reverse the order of Pron + NP to NP + Pron and sparks start to fly. I say it's simply a stylistic matter and not a syntactic one, but who am I? What say you? (Do you know any monographs that I might delve into to fuel my argument?)

Executive summary: This construction goes back to Old English, and is still widely used in spoken English and in some regional varieties ; but its use in formal written English has been decreasing since about 1500, and is now either informal or archaic.

Arnold Zwicky recently wrote about the word once in an important post on what he calls "temporary potential ambiguity" (a very useful concept indeed). His target was the strange practice among prescriptivists of deprecating what he calls the "subordinator" use of once, by which he means the use where it is immediately followed by a clause complement, as in Once you've finished the report, bring it to me immediately. The prescriptivists object to that, but don't seem to mind the others at all. I want to refine Arnold's analysis a bit — in a way that only strengthens his general point. He says there are three main uses of once. I put the number at five well-established different uses. And interestingly, if I'm right about them, this word has been completely misanalyzed by all grammarians so far.

The simple version of the traditional position is that once is an adverb, and in the objectionable use it's a subordinating conjunction. I claim all of this is wrong. Neither the traditional grammarians nor the usage purists have managed to get anything right about this multi-talented word.

Annie Wagner, in an unusual tribute to the late David Foster Wallace, asked about "a grammatical quirk the man just couldn’t quit". She quotes from a review she wrote several years ago:

Everything is the first volume in the “Great Discoveries” series, through which the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, intends to “bring new voices to the telling of stories of scientific achievement.” Which goal, as DFW’s habitual syntax would have it, is somewhat suspicious.

From the character Morton (played by Robert Wagner) in the 2005 movie The Fallen Ones:

(1) We have a lot of earth to move and maintain structural integrity.

The sentence has have used in two different ways in the conjuncts: with a NP object in the first conjunct, with a VP complement in the second (where it's apparently the obligative have of We have to maintain structural integrity). This is formally similar to the GoToGo construction of

(2) She's going to San Francisco and talk on firewalls.

(which has go used in two different ways in the conjuncts: as a motion verb, with a directional complement, in the first conjunct, but as a prospective quasi-modal, with a VP complement,  in the second conjunct). Because of this parallel, I'll call the configuration in (1) HaveToHave. 

At least twice here on Language Log, we've looked at combinations of negation and exclusion that might be seen as overnegation (exclusion being a covert negative).