Language Log

« previous post | next post »

With respect to a piece of political spam from John McCain that included the sentence "You will also have an exclusive opportunity to … ask questions to one of my top advisors", Graham commented

Is "ask questions TO somebody" good American English? It reads very oddly to this Brit.

Well, "ask questions to somebody" sounds odd to me as well. And this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ will confirm that oddity quantitatively, as well as suggesting some further research into the population genetics of prepositions.

But first, let's establish that "ask questions to X" is out there, in the U.K. as well the U.S. Thus the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club News that invites you to "Ask Questions to Chris Waddle" seems to be about as British as they come. And a recent article in the Birmingham Post quotes a radio station manager to the effect that “It’s about empowering people and getting them in the position to feel they can ask questions to councillors rather than thinking that they come out of prepackaged boxes.”

This construction is often associated with situations where someone — typically someone in authority — is, as the saying goes, "taking questions". Thus the current hits from Google News include these:

…we're being given a unique opportunity to have you, our readers, ask questions to the panelists.
…entertainment shows that allow your members from all over the world to interact live with and ask questions to their favorite celebrities…
…announced that they will enable the public to ask questions to The V Foundation for Cancer Research's prestigious scientific forum…
The first 1000 online viewers to enter the discussion will have the opportunity to ask questions to the speakers…We went on a tour of the different facilities available at the club and had an opportunity to ask questions to the staff in charge on how they operate…

But it's used in other situations as well:

So, maybe I'll ask questions to my fiction writing friend list members (wow that's a long title).
…it's easy for me to ask questions to my fellow classmates/friends…
Many parents ask questions to kids with an “ideal” answer that parents think children should say.
When we ask questions to ourselves like “What can I do right now that is productive?” …
You can ask questions to your casino dealer live during the game.
today, my brother and i are going on a road trip up to black canyon city. we will eat pie, ask questions to locals, take video footage, and find jack swilling's house.

OK, here are some numbers from the searchable corpora that Mark Davies has made available at BYU:

		[ask] q's to X			[ask] q's of X			P(of|X=Qee)
	MW	N	X=Qee	P(X=Qee)	N	X=Qee	P(X=Qee)
COCA	360	48	8		181	171
BNC	100	13	0		36	33
Time	100	4	0		26	25
Total	560	65	8	0.12	243	229	0.94	0.97

Note that we can't just search for "ask questions to" or "ask questions of" and accept the resulting counts as correct, because of things like:

They ask questions to explore each other's perspectives…
…the students may begin to ask questions to which the educator does not know the answers…
…please remember to ask questions of your own.
it does not necessarily mean that he or she will never ask questions of fact.

So I've quickly checked all the hits to see whether X (in "[ask] questions to X" or "[ask] questions of X") is the questionee or not.

In a total of 65 hits for the search string {[ask] questions to}, there were only 8 examples where the object of "to" was in fact the questionee:

…don't have all these nurses and doctors to ask questions to…
We were told we would be able to ask questions to Lisa and Rachael.
All they do is ask questions to these women, where Rilya Wilson is.
We would be willing to, of course, attend the hearing and ask questions to Mr. Estrada…
I was sent to LA on the red carpet for the Emmys to ask questions to all these celebrities.
…36% found the program was MOST beneficial in helping them improve their skills in asking questions to students in class…
…every day she huffed its slope, asking questions to herself.
…one study found that teachers asked questions to males 80% more often than to females…

8 examples in 560 million words means that this pattern is not a very common one. In fact, it's rare enough that I don't think that we can conclude anything for sure from the fact that all the hits were in the COCA ("Corpus of Contemporary American English") section — nearly all of those were in informal discourse, either in transcripts of speech or in journalistic quotations, and there's just a lot more of all that stuff in COCA than in BNC or in the Time Magazine corpus.

In contrast, out of 243 hits for {[ask] questions of}, 229 had the object of "of" as the questionee.

Probably the most useful way to summarize this is to observe that out of 229+8=237 cases where someone used an expression of the form "[ask] questions <preposition>", 229/237=97% of the prepositions were "of" rather than "to". (I guess there is some small possibility of other prepositions — "for", "at", etc. — but never mind that for now…)

So this confirms Graham's intuition that "'ask questions TO somebody' … reads very oddly".

But this also illustrates an interesting fact about preposition usage, which is that the dominant (and semi-arbitrary) patterns are nearly always speckled by low-frequency pockets of contrarian usage. In a post long ago and far away ("Verbs and prepositions", 3/23/2004), I wrote:

These norms about [verb-preposition] complementation have a lot of interesting practical and theoretical properties. They're syntactically and semantically quasi-regular, for one thing — a mixture of predictability and idiosyncrasy, and therefore presumably a mixture of "figure it out" and "look it up" strategies. They're somewhat variable across individuals, dialects and times. And they're relatively easy to study by string-search methods — such searches don't in themselves produce reliable counts, because of the variable structure of the results, but they yield samples that can be humanly checked to produce accurate rates. One of the things that I've come to realize is that there is more low-level variation in the "meme pool" for such constructions than one might think. Actually, anyone who grades student papers will have learned this — college students, even quite literate ones, often produce unexpected verb/preposition combinations.

For all these reasons, verb/preposition (and noun/preposition) combinations should provide a good domain in which to study what you might call the population memetics of grammar. And having accurate statistics for complementation would be useful for parsing purposes, anyway.

That post observed that the dominant pattern "to be eligible for X" has a sprinkling of contrarian uses "to be eligible of X", and the dominant pattern "to sentence someone to <a term of imprisonment>" competes with lower-frequency "to sentence someone for <a term of imprisonment>".

In earlier posts, I worried about the usage "[worry] of" vs. "[worry] about" ("Don't worry of it", 3/9/2004; "Why worry of it?", 3/14/2004), and "bored of" vs. "bored with" ("Bored of", 3/25/2004). Over the years, we've discussed some other examples of this type as well:

"A stubborn survival", 4/19/2004
"In or under", 10/28/2005
"Pulling (to) within: the paper trail", 5/15/2006
"In or on? Experience the power of splash screens", 12/16/2007
"At that second, on that day, in that year", 12/17/2007
"Dimensions, metaphors, and prepositions", 12/16/2007
"The meaning mining business", 12/18/2007

There are some common threads in this complication business of preposition choice, which is a major issue for language learners. There are complex layers of regularities and sub-regularities in associated meanings and forms; among the plausible alternatives, one tends to win out in each situation, though it's hard to predict how finely the cases will be subdivided (e.g. "At that second, on that day, in that year"); the winner's victory is rarely complete, with the losing choices clinging to life in regional or cultural niches, or springing up occasionally by spontaneous mutation; and every once in a while, one of the minority variants breaks out and takes over, or at least becomes much more common for a while.

It's easy to see this through the lens of population genetics, especially if we add the generalization that interacting populations of "linear learners", in the absence of other constraints, tend to settle naturally on random shared patterns of belief. (See "The 'lexical contract': modeling the emergence of word pronunciations", 9/22/2000; "Rats beat Yalies: doing better by getting less information?", 12/11/2005; "The Invisible Academy: nonlinear effects of linear learning", 5/24/2005.)

Now that large text corpora with decent temporal, geographic, and demographic metadata are increasingly becoming available, we should be able to study the dynamics of the prepositional "meme pool" in enough detail to make "population memetics" a genuine area of research, at least in the case of language.

August 7, 2008 @ 9:18 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under prepositions

Permalink