Dowd brings in another rarity
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It was December 2009 when the intrepid syntactic explorer Andrew Dowd, hacking his way through virgin grammatical jungle, came upon this astonishing specimen:
In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.
And now, after a further half a year out in the field, he has found another one on this website:
there were more artists breaking on their own, with no technology, than they are now, with technology
Another spectacular case of an utterance that we understand without any real trouble, despite a dawning realization, if we ever look back at it, that it couldn't possibly be claimed to have the right syntax to say what we (wrongly) thought it said.
Nobody knows what is going on with these strange syntacticosemantic creatures. We get them into the lab and lay them out and bring in the psycholinguists to take a look, and they just say, "What. The. Fuck." (there's actually a Language Log post categorization "WTF"). What we do know is that we are lucky to have brave privately-funded lone explorers like Andrew Dowd hunting through impenetrable grammatical forest to discover new rare specimens of this sort. Thank you, Andrew.
fs said,
July 15, 2010 @ 3:11 am
This one, unlike the first, can be easily "fixed" by replacing "they" with "there". Typo?
Stephen Nicholson said,
July 15, 2010 @ 4:01 am
Not being a linguist, I have trouble figuring out what's wrong with it. Are you saying that the sentence is so fucked up that linguists can't even begin to figure out what's wrong?
If so, that's kind of cool.
fs said,
July 15, 2010 @ 4:20 am
Stephen: An attempt at a simple explanation: the "more ~ than ~" doesn't contrast two things as it should. Normally you'd have something like "I have more aunts than uncles", comparing the number of aunts I have with the number of uncles. In the 2009 sentence, the writer starts off leading you to believe that he is going to make a statement about the X in "X people found Mr. Bush's ads negative" being greater than some Y. But that Y shows up in "they found Mr. Kerry's ads negative [to Y degree]", which doesn't match up, since Y is a degree of finding things to be negative and X is a number of people. The clear message, however, is that more people found Mr. bush's ads negative than found Mr. Kerry's ads negative. Similarly, today's sentence is clearly meant to tell us that there were more artists breaking [out] on their own, without technology, than are breaking out now, with technology.
Aaron Toivo said,
July 15, 2010 @ 5:14 am
I dare say more of us understand these than don't, or at least understand more of them than not.
Nathan Myers said,
July 15, 2010 @ 5:44 am
I didn't understand the second sentence until it fs explained it. I had guesses, but no real sense that any of them were right.
Aaron Toivo said,
July 15, 2010 @ 5:44 am
Oh, and google "more of them than not" and it'll get you thousands of examples.
–
It's yet another sad day in America. But these days, there seems to be more of them than not. (link)
–
I am not crazy about the National Debt, but since I have been voting for the last 40 years +/-, we have had more of them than not and this country is still standing. —look at the full context for this one, there is NO possible antecedent for 'them'. (link)
–
Replacing 'not' with 'don't' gets only two hits, but one of them is excellent:
Some women do go for the sleazy shit – more of them than don’t I suspect. (link)
Aaron Toivo said,
July 15, 2010 @ 5:52 am
I attempted to post some further examples I googled. Did the software refuse to accept it because one contained the phrase "sl**zy s**t"? Or because there were links to the originals? Or did my post just vanish into the ether? I got no warning or anything.
[(myl) Your earlier comment wound up in the spam trap. Why? There's no saying — Akismet is an adaptive statistical classifier. It's a good thing that we use it, because it's caught 262,530 spam comments so far, typically 100-200 per day. I clean it out a couple of time a day, looking over the contents for things that are obviously not spam — I find one or two once a week or so. The alternative to using it would be to have more than half of all comments be long lists of porn sites, phamaceutical ads, etc.]
With asterisks, that particular example was:
Some women do go for the sl**zy s**t – more of them than don’t I suspect.
The other examples you can find by googling "more of them than not" (with quotes).
[(myl) The examples are elliptical enough that it's hard to tell, but unless I'm missing something, this doesn't seem to be an example of the kind that Andrew Dowd found.]
David Barry said,
July 15, 2010 @ 7:54 am
I was surprised when I compared the two sentences to see that the construction is almost the same. The first sentence feels perfectly fine to me and requires careful study before I see what's "wrong"; the second one sounds ungrammatical immediately.
Dhananjay said,
July 15, 2010 @ 8:18 am
I'm reminded of gapless relative clauses with resumptive pronouns.
Consider the following sentences, based on GKP's first example:
(1) More people found Bush's ads negative than Kerry's.
(2) More people found Bush's ads negative than did Kerry's.
(3?) More people found Bush's ads negative than they did Kerry's.
(4) People found Bush's ads negative more than they did Kerry's.
In (1) "than" links two objects of the VP "found ~ negative". In (2) "than" links two VPs. In (3) "than" appears to be linking two sentences, but if so, we are left with a puzzle about the referent of "they". If "they" and "more people" co-refer, then we seem to get the wrong sense. It seems like "they" has to refer not to the domain of "people" picked out by the quantifier "more", but to the domain of "people" (in this case, Minnesotans and Michiganders). So the right gloss on (3) seems to be something like (4). But (4) is a bit awkward – we usually need something like "more often", quantifying over events, rather than just "more". So that might be a reason in favor of (3).
kenny said,
July 15, 2010 @ 9:18 am
Now those sentences sounded really wrong to me on the first read-through, and it was immediately obvious what was wrong. But this isn't so different from the phenomenon that I see frequently, people putting "only" not immediately in front of what it modifies, but some distance in front of, with context providing the intended semantics.
Mr Punch said,
July 15, 2010 @ 9:27 am
"[P]eople found Mr Bush's ads negative more often than than they did Mr Kerry's."
"[A]rtists were more often breaking on their own then, with no technology, than they are now, with technology."
The problem appears to be that the subject in each sentence is not fixed. When we recast the sentences to make the subjects the same group of people, doing things more or less often (which is equivalent in common parlance if not in statistics class) the issue is easily resolved.
Geoff Nunberg said,
July 15, 2010 @ 9:41 am
While we're on the subject of comparative/superlative (is there a single term for that?) monsters, Jeff Pelletier, then at U of Alberta, once told me about descriptions of Edmonton as the "largest most northerly city in North America." Turns out people have used the same phrase, with other domains of comparison, of other cities, as well.
MJ said,
July 15, 2010 @ 11:49 am
@fs
And I think the first one could be fixed by revising along the lines of the second one, although it is wordy:
There were more people who found Bush’s ads to be negative than there were people who found Kerry’s ads to be negative.
Tracy said,
July 15, 2010 @ 1:36 pm
Does the "they" in the first sentence count as a resumptive pronoun?
Mr Fnortner said,
July 15, 2010 @ 2:03 pm
From the peanut gallery: The first sentence, fully expanded, could be "…more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than those who found Mr Kerry's ads negative."
Using "did" for "found ads negative" (common enough in English), we have "…more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than those who did Mr Kerry's."
So far, so good. Now substitute "they" for "those who" and you have "…more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's."
Herein is the problem. "They" is not a semantically equivalent substitute for "those who." It points us back to the first "more people" and makes us think the same people are opining again. Syntactically, "they" conflates two pronouns with different roles into one. A better substitute for "those who" might be "whoever" which allows us a different antecedent and an implicit double pronoun: "…more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than whoever did Mr Kerry's." Still not a great sentence, but more acceptable, I think.
I believe the subject sentence is the product of an inarticulate writer rather than being an emerging form.
Faldone said,
July 15, 2010 @ 4:58 pm
Following up on Mr Fnorter's suggestions I would propose a rewriting of the first sentence, as written, as "Of those people who found Mr Bush's ads negative only some found Mr Kerry's ads negative."
fs said,
July 15, 2010 @ 5:06 pm
I wonder if I am alone in finding "than did Mr. Kerry's" considerably more comfortable than "than those who did Mr. Kerry's". I find the latter similar to such sentences as "My collection consists of more books than those arrayed before you", i.e. an inclusion rather than a contrast. Faldone's ruminations seem to confirm this, though I doubt the original intention of the sentence was to restrict itself to the description of people who found Mr. Bush's ads negative.
Toni Brandys said,
July 15, 2010 @ 6:21 pm
English is not my mother tongue, but the topic is so interesting that I dare to participate.
I am considering these alternatives:
a) People found Mr Bush's ads more negative than Mr Kerry's
b) More people found negative Mr Bush's ads than Mr Kerry's.
Option a) is semantically different to the original, I suspect.
Option b) sounds pretty good to me, but I am not sure if it's grammatically correct.
to find [adj] [something]
Ellen K. said,
July 15, 2010 @ 8:10 pm
The 2nd example, I had to read in context for it to make sense. In context, the meaning was quite clear. Pulled out of context, I found it confusing.
Jonathan said,
July 15, 2010 @ 9:39 pm
David, is it perhaps because a needed correction from "they" to "there" (or "they are" to "do") is more obvious than a correction which simply drops the "they"?
Will said,
July 16, 2010 @ 1:28 am
@Faldone, your suggested rewriting is grammatical but doesn't really work because it changes the meaning of the sentence.
"More people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's."
not grammatical, but i think the intended meaning is something like: the number of people who found Mr Bush's ads negative is greater than the number of people who found Mr Kerry's ads negative. it's talking about numbers, not sets.
"Of those people who found Mr Bush's ads negative only some found Mr Kerry's ads negative."
this means something more like: in the set up people who found Mr Bush's ads negative, there exists at least one person who did not find Mr Kerry's ads negative. so it's talking about sets, not numbers.
these different meanings don't really correlate in a way that makes sense to me.
Will said,
July 16, 2010 @ 1:34 am
then again, since the original sentence is ungrammatical, and somewhat open to interpretation, it's very possible that your rewriting correlates with a possible reading that i'm merely not seeing.
Eric said,
July 16, 2010 @ 4:13 am
@toni: I'm totally with you. I'd say as a minor point: put "negative" after "ads" in your (b) and you'll get the same effect w/ better fluency. But I have to report, based just on introspection, fluency, and old-school grammatical categories:
In comfortable English, "than ___" triggers a retrospective response in the hearer. Rather like "ut" in Latin, or "de" in Greek (as in "men…de…"). So upon hearing "than ___," you quickly go searching back for something–usually a comparative adj.–to make sense of what is to follow "than." But in JKP's #1 (which is the stranger of the two, I think), you are sent back…looking for some antecedent to "than ___" … and there is just none that work(s).
A big problem, too, is the poor performance of "they" as an anaphoric pronoun. It has serious problems when it must refer back to a comparative antecedent (here, "people [who] found…")
Toni Brandys said,
July 16, 2010 @ 5:53 pm
@Eric: OK, I get it. Your option sounds much better. It never occured to me the minor point, very interesting the 'retrospective response'.Thank you very much!
K said,
July 19, 2010 @ 7:13 am
Would there be anything wrong with the first example if the "they" was eliminated?
"In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than did Mr Kerry's" sounds perfectly all right to my ear.