One for the Fellowship of the Gapless Relative
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According to Michael Goldstein, writing one of the opinion pieces in the NYT's 9/22/2009 symposium on "National Academic Standards: The First Test":
The politics has changed. All governors now recognize a problem: incentives to set low passing scores. Currently, a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th grade reading test that, if he lived in Massachusetts and took our version, he would fail.
You could add a resumptive pronoun: "a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th grade reading test that, if he lived in Massachusetts and took our version [of it], he would fail".
For some background, read "Ask Language Log: Gapless Relatives" and "More gapless relatives", 10/14/2007. This case is especially interesting because it might alternatively be construed as having a gap after fail, though that would seem to make the sentence self-refuting.
Please note that the Fellowship of the Gapless Relative, like the Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct, is devoted to celebrating the glories of English syntax through contemplation of especially interesting examples of certain constructions, not to censuring any particular choices that speakers and writers may make.
Andy Hollandbeck said,
September 23, 2009 @ 9:45 am
What's up with the first sentence? I would expect either "The politics have changed" or "Politics has changed." But "The politics has changed" just sounds like blatant subject-verb disagreement. Is there an explanation in which "The politics has changed" is grammatical?
Spell Me Jeff said,
September 23, 2009 @ 10:18 am
Well, call me confused. I get the "problem." It's the explanations that elude me, yours and Zwicky's. Are they more than ad hoc? Are you saying that structures like this can be parsed in a logical fashion?
I'm not asking for a recapitulation. Nor am I asking for a proscription.
I'm reminded of misplaced modifiers, which, if parsed logically, lead to sentences that don't "make sense," despite the fact that non-logical human minds are capable of deriving sense from them quite easily.
Does the gapless relative fall into the same category: structures that make sense in spite of themselves?
seidenberg said,
September 23, 2009 @ 10:37 am
I used to have a gapless relative but she got that fixed.
rpsms said,
September 23, 2009 @ 10:52 am
The quotation reads like an edited transcript of a speech rather than a purposefully-composed document.
Dictated?
Matthew H said,
September 23, 2009 @ 11:07 am
I don't see the gapless relative? Surely this is a gapped object relative:
a 4th grade reading test that,.., he would fail _.
Andrew said,
September 23, 2009 @ 12:23 pm
I can see that you could read 'fail' as intransitive, in which case it would be a gapless relative, but it seems more natural to me to read it as transitive, in which case we have a perfectly staightforward relative, 'a test that he would fail'. I cannot see how this would make the sentence self-refuting.
Nathan Myers said,
September 23, 2009 @ 12:35 pm
Is this really a case of "counterfactuals are funny"?
Russell said,
September 23, 2009 @ 12:45 pm
You might be able to do without a gapless relative analysis with a certain analysis of the denotation of NPs. To paraphrase the sentence in question with a PP instead of an if-clause:
Currently, a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th grade reading test that he would fail in Massachusetts.
Since these tests in different states correspond to each other, an indefinite NP like "a 4th grade reading test" can be the test in one state wrt to "pass" and in another state wrt "fail," getting rid of the self-refutation. It so happens that the two phrases that tell you you're in one two different places shows up as an NP-internal modifier in one case and a VP modifier in another.
Russell said,
September 23, 2009 @ 1:09 pm
To add: it could still be a gapless relative, especially if this is un- or mostly unscripted speech, with the non-gapless parse coincidentally possible.
And the point about the possibility of an 'of it' is quite interesting, and I have wondered in the past: how often these "relatives" occur when the argument position of the gap is precisely where a word allows null complementation (in this case, "version" permits omission of its complement with definite interpretation: "you like his cheesecake? you should try my version!").
Bill Walderman said,
September 23, 2009 @ 1:10 pm
"I cannot see how this would make the sentence self-refuting."
On its face, the sentence seems to say that if the kid living in Alabama were to take the Massachusetts version of the test, he would fail the Alabama version.
To avoid the problem, the sentence would have to be rewritten: "Currently, a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th grade reading test but, if he lived in Massachusetts and took our version, he would fail it."
Jerry Friedman said,
September 23, 2009 @ 1:25 pm
For less of a change and maybe less of an improvement, you can replace "that" with "although".
"Currently, a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th-grade reading test although, if he lived in Massachusetts and took our version, he would fail."
(I couldn't resist adding a hyphen.)
Russell said,
September 23, 2009 @ 1:28 pm
I failed a test in July that I passed in October.
The only difference being that in this example, the two tests are identical but for being administered in different months (actually, the precise problems could be different, but they're both the SAT, say). In the original, they two tests are related by both being 4th grade reading tests.
Granted, "I failed a test in biology that I passed in literature" sounds ridiculous (even if they're both SAT subject tests); maybe chalk it up to what we consider to be crucial identifying aspects of a test test (or maybe the good old argument/adjunct distinction).
fs said,
September 23, 2009 @ 2:14 pm
My instinct would have been to write that sentence as
Don't you need to have a version of something in this sense?
Actually, are "double-gapped" relatives even acceptable? "It was a pastime that had I indulged in would have cost me greatly". Does that sound odd?
Simon Cauchi said,
September 23, 2009 @ 3:26 pm
"It was a pastime that had I indulged in would have cost me greatly". Does that sound odd?
Yes. You need "it" after "in".