Language Log

Early last week, Hillary Clinton had a bit of pronoun trouble, as Daffy Duck would say. The AP reported:

"All the kitchen table issues that everybody talks to me about are ones that the next president can actually do something about," Clinton said Sunday night, "if he actually cares about it."

The word hung in the air only for a moment.

"More likely, if she cares about it," she added.

Tonight after her overwhelming victory in the Kentucky primary, Clinton made sure she didn't repeat her mistake. She told supporters:

And that's why I'm going to keep making our case until we have a nominee, whoever she may be.

My colleague Tom Bever felt he had really hit the big time today when he learned that one of his example sentences had made it into the funny pages. Admittedly, it was in the linguistically hypersophisticated Dinosaur Comics (as usual, click on the image to see it full-size):

For a brief introduction to the example, try the Wikipedia article on garden-path sentences¹, or for a rather more thorough discussion, Chapter 1, section 4.2 of this on-line introductory neuropsychology coursebook, in which Tom is referred to as 'a famous psycholinguist'. [Aside to Tom: It's true! Big time! Quick, ask for a raise — my finder's fee is a mere 10%.]

Back on 9 March, Daniel Schorr peeved on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday about five of what he viewed as media sins against English, the last of which was:

Finally, the commonly used "protest of" some action — wrong. To protest is to proclaim or announce, as methinks thou dost protest too much. What you mean is to protest against.

It's not at all clear what usage Schorr was ranting about here: transitive uses of the verb protest (as in to protest the war, discussed in my posting on approve); intransitive uses of this verb with the (oblique) object marked by the preposition of rather than against (protested of the war); or uses of the derived nominal protest (accented on the first syllable) with the complement marked by of rather than against (a protest of the war). At first, I thought he was talking about the nominal protest of — because he referred specifically to "protest of", and the verbal protest of was new to me (in fact, I find it unacceptable). But then his later references to the word were clearly, in context, to a verb.

So now I'll discuss all three.

William Safire has taken up (in his column in the NYT Magazine of 11 May) the knotty question of whether political candidates should say they approve some message or approve of it. This caught my eye because I've been thinking recently about "diathesis alternations" in general (see here and here), and in particular about alternations in English between direct objects (no preposition) and oblique objects (marked by a preposition). I have an unfortunately large file of cases, in most of which the oblique, intransitive, construction is historically older (with the direct, transitive, construction a more recent innovation). But for approve, the oblique variant is the innovation; the first OED dates are ca. 1380 for the direct, 1658 for the oblique (with P on at first, later supplanted by of).

Safire tells us to lose the of. There are at least five things worth commenting on here.

From the blog "Stuff White People Like", a 12 May posting on "Grammar" that begins:

White people love rules. It explains why so they get upset when people cut in line, why they tip so religiously and why they become lawyers. But without a doubt, the rule system that white people love the most is grammar. It is in their blood not only to use perfect grammar but also to spend significant portions of time pointing out the errors of others.

During a recent meeting with a grad student about research, the student produced if whether or not at the beginning of a subordinate clause where either if or whether or not (but not the two together) would have been appropriate. I  didn't catch the preceding context in detail, but I did notice the expression, and afterwards I googled on it.

And, of course, pulled up quite a few (legitimate-looking) examples. I have an idea about why people might have hit on this doubly-marked subordination (which I don't recall having come across before, and which seems to have escaped the notice of usage complainers; if it came by them, they probably just thought it was a slip of the tongue).

It's often impossible to tell the difference between reduced him and reduced them. In particular, I can't tell whether John Edwards said "I just voted for him on Tuesday, so…" — meaning Barack Obama — or "I just voted for them on Tuesday, so…" — i.e. sex-neutral them, meaning either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, he's not saying which.

Mark Halperin can't tell either, but he asks the question ("Did Edwards Tip His Hand?", 5/9/2008). You should listen to the whole Q&A before you decide for yourself.

Geoff Pullum's wonderful example of the perils of trying to avoid split infinitives: it can lead to a straightforwardedly ungrammatical result. Simplifying the original to make the point clearer, the entirely unproblematic

(1) Rockefeller has pledged $100 million to dramatically increase learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates

was incorrected to the entirely problematic

(2) Rockefeller has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates.

I intend to post later on other aspects of the phenomenon, but here I want to say a few words about the "nonintervention constraint" violated in (2): in English, nothing can intervene between a verb and its direct object (unless the direct object is long, complex, or "heavy"). I want to say these few words because I think the constraint — which I'll refer to as *V+X+DO (yes, extraordinarily clunky, but I have at the moment no better alternative) — is a beautiful piece of English syntax.

"Everyone knows each other", said someone on BBC Radio 4 this morning, speaking about some tight-knit community. And instantly I saw that this was the key to a definitive argument against the logic of the opponents of singular they. I wonder if I can make you see how awesomely beautiful the insight is.

The -s suffix on the present-tense verb knows tells us that the subject is morphosyntactically singular. That is, it counts as singular for purposes of subject-verb agreement. But each other, famously, requires a semantically plural subject. That is why They know each other is grammatical and *He knows each other is not. From this and nothing else it follows that semantic plurality and morphosyntactic singularity are compatible in English. No prescriptivist has suggested that there is something grammatically wrong with Everyone knows each other. But because of that, the logical objection to singular they just collapses. Everyone knows themselves has no grammatically relevant property that isn't already instantiated by Everyone knows each other.

Yesterday on ADS-L, Doug Harris noted a surprise (boldfaced below) in a piece by TVNewser columnist Gail Shister:

With "CBS Evening News" on life support, Katie Couric should walk away.

Now.

So says Emily Rooney, former executive producer of "ABC World News Tonight," among others.

"She should do it sooner than later. I'd do it now," says Rooney, media critic for Boston's WGBH. "What's she waiting for? Will it getter better after the election? After the inauguration? Of course not.

(I'll post on "sooner than later" on another occasion.)

Was this just an inadvertent slip, with the -er of the comparative better anticipated on the preceding verb get (perhaps facilitated by the rhyme of get and bet-)? Almost surely not; Harris got 21,300 raw webhits for {"getter better"}, and even granting that there are many duplicates and that some might be slips, there are still many examples remaining that look like people are saying and writing just what they intend to. It looks like a new idiom — new to me and possibly to the usage literature, and possibly recent.

Jeremy Hawker wrote:

Where it says, at the bottom, Comments are closed, shouldn't that be Comments IS closed?

It's the category "Comments" that is closed, and there is only one.

I'm not sure, myself — but I can guarantee that if it said "Comments is closed", some people would complain about that choice too. I pointed this out to Jeremy, who suggested a punctuational solution: "Comments" is closed. But that one would run afoul of Evan "Funk" Davies  at The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks (or whoever has taken over that franchise).

Appealing to norma loquendi (blogandi?), I see that {"comments are closed"} gets 10.9 million Google hits, whereas {"comments is closed"} gets only 1,030.

Anyhow, comments is open.

In the Metro, a free newspaper that I often pick up in Edinburgh, there is an entertainment gossip page called Guilty Pleasures, which of course I never look at. Perhaps the most poisonous of the regular features is a couple of square inches, buried amongst the candid paparazzi shots of heiresses' breasts and film stars' bellies, under the title News from the Molehill, which I certainly never look at. It has a very particular and routinized syntactic form.

The piece always begins with a wh-phrase, usually of the form which + Adjective + Noun, the noun being something like actor, celebrity, TV personality, or singer. That wh-phrase is then used as the hook on which to hang a bizarre gossip item. Further references to the unknown individual with definite noun phrases are used to supply enough clues to get you guessing as to who it might be referring to. I quote one such item below in its entirety. (They are known in journalism as "blind items", Grant Barrett tells me.) I offer it for your scrutiny not so that you can start guessing who is being talked about, but because the piece, which unusually conceals the sex as well as the identity of the unknown gossip target, uses a striking series of singular they forms. In my judgment it goes outside the bounds of ordinary Standard English: the piece is basically ungrammatical for me.

Which paranoid celebrity has become so obsessed with their portrayal in the media they are going to extreme lengths to control their perception? The increasingly reclusive singer now personally rummages through their own bins in case they've thrown out anything that would give an insight into their private life…

A couple of days ago, Andrew Mueller at the Guardian tossed some bleeding gobbets into the crowd of ravening peevologists ("Linguistic pedants of the world unite", 4/14/2008). His point of departure:

For centuries, travellers have crossed America to explore it, conquer it, settle it, exploit it and study it. Now, a small but righteous crew are traversing America in order to edit it. Jeff Deck, and his friends at the Typo Eradication Advancement League (Teal), are spending three months driving from San Francisco, California, to Somerville, Massachusetts, on a mission to correct every misspelled, poorly punctuated, sloppily phrased item of signage they encounter en route. Equipped with marker pens, stickers and white-out, they are seeking to scourge America's landscape of floating apostrophes, logic-defying syntax and other manifestations of laziness and/or illiteracy.