WH-movement of the week
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…or maybe of the year, since it comes from an article dated 11/11/2020 — Erik Engheim, "PC Users in Denial About Apple Silicon Performance" [emphasis added]:
- The M1 in contrast contains:
16-core Neural Engine. Which make machine learning tasks such as image and text recognition, various video and photo editing tasks up to 15x faster by Apple’s claims. […] - 8-core GPU at 2.6TFLOPS which makes it faster than any other integrated GPU by a large margin.
- Fabric, which we don’t know what is for yet.
- Secure Enclave and specialized AES encryption hardware. This allows encryption to be done without wasting CPU cycles.
In transformational terms, the core propositional progression is
Fabric is for what?
We don't know what Fabric is for __.
Fabric, which we don't know what __ is for __.
I think I remember from syntax class that crossed bindings are seen as problematical:
And that article seems to be the only hit on the web for "which we don't know what is for"…
But we're descriptivists, right? So whatever…
Y said,
July 18, 2021 @ 3:49 pm
It looks like an unsuccessful hybrid of "Fabric, which we don’t know what *it* is for" and "We don't know what fabric is for". Does Construction Grammar have an easy explanation for this kind of phenomenon?
Ross Presser said,
July 18, 2021 @ 4:36 pm
I would have been so uncomfortable with that bullet point that I would find myself forced to rephrase it: "Fabric, something we don't yet know the intended purpose of."
Gregory Kusnick said,
July 18, 2021 @ 4:42 pm
I probably would have gone with "Fabric, whatever that's good for".
Robot Therapist said,
July 18, 2021 @ 5:09 pm
"Fabric, whose purpose we don't yet know". (I'm comfortable with using "who" in this way).
Bathrobe said,
July 18, 2021 @ 5:10 pm
I’m with Y on this one. A resumption pronoun would make the sentence far more acceptable, and understandable.
Bathrobe said,
July 18, 2021 @ 5:12 pm
Autocorrect again. That should have been “resumptive pronoun”.
David Marjanović said,
July 18, 2021 @ 5:43 pm
"Fabric, of which we don't know what it is for yet"?
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 5:52 pm
"Fabric, purpose unknown." ?
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 5:53 pm
Fabric with unknown purpose… ?
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:20 pm
What about "Fabric, purpose (as yet?) unknown"?
Matt Sayler said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:22 pm
Does this construction stem from a form more normal in Swedish?
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:25 pm
I'm a bit non-plussed that some small comments I've left here in the last many minutes seem not to show up… Those comments were not obnoxious, and, while not profound, had a tiny bit of content. Is it the case that comments not meeting some thresh-hold of "sufficient content" are blocked? Please advise.
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:25 pm
I'm a bit non-plussed that some small comments I've left here in the last many minutes seem not to show up… Those comments were not obnoxious, and, while not profound, had a tiny bit of content. Is it the case that comments not meeting some thresh-hold of "sufficient content" are blocked? Please advise.
Also getting "duplicate comment" objections. Is the site having problems?
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:29 pm
… hm, and, now, although my previous comment asking about procedures and possible technical problems with the site appeared briefly, it's gone now, too.
It's not that I leave comments on this site very often, but I'd not want you to needlessly lose other peoples' comments due to software issues.
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:30 pm
… hm, and, now, although my previous comment asking about procedures and possible technical problems with the site appeared briefly, it's gone now, too.
It's not that I leave comments on this site very often, but I'd not want you to needlessly lose other peoples' comments due to software issues.
(Another "duplicate comment" error msg from your software…)
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:34 pm
One more time: my question about the site's function did appear for a few moments, but now is gone, as all my previous actual topical comments, as well as questions about software function.
If anyone would care to email me to explain… that would be great…
Paul Garrett said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:40 pm
If y'all have time there, could anyone please explain to me (email is fine) why none of my comments (innocuous as they are) show up, nor my questions why they're not showing up? I'd really like to fancy that I meet a low bar for civility and sense… Please do advise. Thanks. -pg
[(myl) The site uses an inscrutable comment-spam prevention filter called "Akismet", which decided for its own unknown black-box reasons to classify your comments as spam. I don't check the spam trap very often, so they languished there until I noticed your complaint.
Most of what Akismet traps is genuinely spam, and the current cumulative total of blocked comments is 22,473,845.]
Bob Moore said,
July 18, 2021 @ 6:53 pm
@Bathrobe: I agree the resumptive pronoun makes it more understandable, but resumptive pronouns, like crossing dependencies, are also supposedly ungrammatical in English.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 18, 2021 @ 7:19 pm
If you peruse other writings by Erik Engheim that can be easily googled up, they often have some phrasings that seem very vaguely unidiomatic in an ESLish sort of way even if you can't say they cross the line into actual WTF ungrammaticality. But do enough of those and you're statistically likely to eventually cross the line into actual WTF ungrammaticality on one or more occasions. None of which is to disparage Mr. Engheim, who is likely to be one of several million Scandinavians whose ESL is notably better than the fluency-in-a-Scandinavian-L2 of all but a few thousand (few hundred?) L1 Anglophones. But in terms of "But we're descriptivists, right" it still seems relevant to note that this is probably not a sentence typed by a native-speaker Anglophone.
Michael Watts said,
July 18, 2021 @ 8:35 pm
My analysis is similar to the other commenters: "Fabric, which we don't know what is for" is not even acceptable to whoever wrote it. It arose from trying and failing to correct the gapless relative construction "Fabric, which we don't know what it's for", which is also ungrammatical, but much less bad than the gapped version.
It's quite common for a sentence to be only partially revised, resulting in something that is ungrammatical to everyone involved including the author.
Assuming with J.W. Brewer that the author is not a native speaker, this analysis would be basically the same, except that the author isn't able to make judgments about what is or isn't acceptable, so a lack of attention during revision is no longer required by the hypothesis.
lawrie said,
July 18, 2021 @ 8:37 pm
Fabric, whose purpose is as yet unknown.
Michael Watts said,
July 18, 2021 @ 8:37 pm
What's that "of" doing? I don't see anything in the sentence that would license an "of" to appear. You'd need something like "Fabric, of which we do not yet know the purpose."
Viseguy said,
July 18, 2021 @ 9:56 pm
This much, we know: the M1 contains Fabric. Further our author sayeth not.
Bloix said,
July 19, 2021 @ 1:31 am
As discussed here 17 years ago, Patrick O’Brian’s lower-deck characters, and especially Captain Aubrey’s steward Killick, use a version of the which construction regularly. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000118.html
Perhaps comparing the O'Brian examples with this one might reveal something.
Bathrobe said,
July 19, 2021 @ 1:41 am
As Bob Moore said, resumptive pronouns are supposedly ungrammatical in English. That is, of course, 'standard English'. If we're talking of nonstandard English (excluded by English grammars but still arguably 'English'), try the following LL page:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005022.html
Aristotle Pagaltzis said,
July 19, 2021 @ 11:01 am
But that ends up sounding stilted. “Fabric, which we don't know the purpose of yet” maybe? That seems grammatical to me, at least.
Stephen Hart said,
July 19, 2021 @ 11:35 am
Viseguy said,
This much, we know: the M1 contains Fabric. Further our author sayeth not.
I wonder if "Fabric" is a mistranslation. In what sense would a system on a chip contain fabric?
DMcCunney said,
July 19, 2021 @ 11:43 am
What's Fabric?
While there are few niche market outliers, there are two principal computer architectures used today – Intel x86, and ARM. Intel makes chips as well as designing them. ARM just creates designs that others license.
If you have a desktop PC or a laptop, you are using an x86 CPU design made by Intel or AMD. If you have a tablet or a smartphone, you have an ARM architecture CPU under the hood.
Apple caused consternation in the market years back when they chose to drop the PowerPC architecture (designed by IBM and Motorola) used in Macs and use Intel instead. Apple stated the reason was that they had reached limits in how fast a PowerPC architecture device could run, and Intel CPUs were faster. They caused consternation again when they decided to switch to ARM with Apple Silicon.
A trend in development is SoC – system on a chip. Components get progressively smaller, and space in devices is at a premium, so current devices use designs where the CPU, the GPU used for graphics rendering, fast cache memory and other things are all on the same die and are implemented in a single chip.
In the new M1 Apple Silicon, Apple licensed the most recent ARM architecture design, and has been making its own proprietary modifications to it. "Fabric" is Apple's name for the interconnect layer that allows all of the various components in the SoC design to communicate with each other and with other parts of the system.
A broader implication with Apple Silicon is that the deign is powerful enough to potentially *replace* Intel in things like desktop and laptop PCs, and the server farms run by outfits like Google and Facebook. The industry is all agog about the prospects.
Mikko Perttunen said,
July 19, 2021 @ 12:07 pm
Fabric indeed refers to the interconnect on a System on Chip — one can think of network of wires connecting various components like processors and memory. It's not an Apple-specific term but is an established term for this kind of thing.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 19, 2021 @ 12:10 pm
You can boil it down further to "Fabric, whose purpose we don't yet know." Or "don't know yet," which may or may not have some slight nuance of difference in semantic focus. You could also swap in "function" or "role" or some other such word for "purpose."
Daniel Barkalow said,
July 19, 2021 @ 2:14 pm
I think I've heard speakers who use this construction. I think it works by having "what X is for" as an idiom meaning "the use/purpose of X" rather than only having "X is for Y" and WH-movement. I'd guess the author is fine with "Fabric, which we don't know what is for" but would reject "Fabric, which we don't know which application is for".
Ellen K. said,
July 19, 2021 @ 3:35 pm
@Paul Garrett, all your several comments are showing up now. Or so I assume. As for what was happening so you couldn't see your comments, two possibilities come to mind. One, some kind of spam filtering that held your comments back, but now they've been let through. Or your browser giving you a cached copy of the webpage from before you submitted your comment.
Jerry Packard said,
July 19, 2021 @ 5:02 pm
If you pay attention to everyday speech, or do spoken corpus analysis, you will see that the use of resumptive pronouns is very common, even though prescriptive grammarians tag them as ungrammatical.
Rachael Churchill said,
July 19, 2021 @ 5:27 pm
It vaguely annoys me that this sort of construction is not grammatical. I feel like it should be.
The example I usually use is "*There's a symbol that I don't know what means." Obviously you could rephrase it to "There's a symbol and I don't know what it means" or "There's a symbol whose meaning I don't know", but I just feel like "a symbol that I don't know what means" should be grammatical in the same way that other gapped constructions are.
Also consider "There's a drink I don't know who ordered", which is parallel in construction, but somehow sounds OK to me.
Adam Kao said,
July 19, 2021 @ 6:54 pm
When I saw this I didn't even notice anything unusual, I'm surprised to see so many object to it. I think Daniel Barkalow explains it. "We don't know what Fabric is for yet" => "Fabric, which we don't know what is for yet"
rosie said,
July 21, 2021 @ 3:53 am
Informal: "Fabric. We don't know what it's for yet."
More formal: "Fabric, where we don't know what it's for yet."
You don't *have* to use a relative clause.
Batchman said,
July 21, 2021 @ 11:56 am
When my daughter was very young she would frequently say to me, "I want to show you something that I don't know what it is." Once I tried to correct her but was unable to come up with a grammatical equivalent, at least not without recasting the sentence with vocabulary way beyond her level at the time, e.g. "I want to show you something the identity of which is unknown to me."
As far as Fabric, how about applying the usual transformation to avoid terminal prepositions:
Fabric, for which we don't know what it is (yet).
Not much better, is it.
Michael Watts said,
July 22, 2021 @ 1:25 pm
That isn't the usual transformation, it's just nonsense. "Fabric, for which…" requires Fabric to be the object of "for". But "Fabric" is not grammatically related to "for" in the phrase "what is Fabric for?". The object of "for" in that construction is the purpose, not the entity whose purpose is in question: "Fabric is for making textiles".
Terpomo said,
July 24, 2021 @ 1:55 pm
I might have said "fabric, about which we don't know what it's for yet" but now I have it written out in front of me I think I might be influenced by Esperanto here; I'm not even 100% sure if it's grammatical in English, though in Esperanto it would be ("teksaĵo, pri kiu ni ankoraŭ ne scias por kio ĝi utilas")