Garden path of the day
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This NYT link text needed a second reading for me to break the initial prepositional phrase after "Bruce Springsteen", and start the main-clause subject conjunction with "Bob Dylan":
Like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices.
This is a case where spoken prosody could make the structure clear. But it's interesting that none of the stronger-than-comma punctuation marks has a chance here: colon, semicolon, dash, …
The obligatory screenshot:
The context ought to help, especially for people who already know about Springsteen's catalog sale. But it didn't save me from a double take.
champacs said,
December 20, 2021 @ 8:04 am
This BBC headline yesterday took me a couple of reads to figure out:
"Monkey offered cocaine and flushed down loo recovering"
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-wales-59667079
unekdoud said,
December 20, 2021 @ 10:00 am
Just imagine this mixed with the Lastname, Firstname convention.
Robert Coren said,
December 20, 2021 @ 10:17 am
I got garden-pathed the other day by a headline quoted on Facebook: "France outlaws discredited conversion therapy". The meaning is actually pretty obvious, but for some reason I first read "outlaws" a a noun, and thought that it meant that criminals in France had cast discredit on the therapy.
Alexander Browne said,
December 20, 2021 @ 10:30 am
Rober Coren — Funny to me that your example headline is only confusing if reading it as headlinese, with "France outlaws" instead of "French outlaws". If headlines used adjectives normally, then it'd be more clear!
Jerry Friedman said,
December 20, 2021 @ 10:58 am
Earlier this month someone proposed in alt.usage.english that the semicolon should be used in such sentences. The consensus was that, as Prof. Liberman said, no punctuation has a chance, and when written, the sentence needs to be changed. (In this case, rewriting it would be a good opportunity to delete "all".)
Cervantes said,
December 20, 2021 @ 11:38 am
Right, a good writer would have "Bruce Springsteen has sold the rights to his music for an eye-popping price, as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have also done." That's not only clearer, it puts the emphasis where it belongs, on what's new.
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2021 @ 12:25 pm
I think, Cervantes, that a good writer would have written "Bruce Springsteen has sold the rights to his music for an eye-popping price, as have Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and [many] others." …
Cervantes said,
December 20, 2021 @ 12:39 pm
I don't see that it makes much difference. It saves one word.
Cervantes said,
December 20, 2021 @ 1:28 pm
BTW, I see it's been rewritten. New version: "Like Bruce Springsteen, major artists including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Tina Turner have sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices. " The problem with that is that it is not asserting what is actually the news.
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2021 @ 1:43 pm
Two words, not one, Cervantes — "also" and "done". Both redundant, IMHO. But the primary difference is in the style, not in the word count.
David N. Evans said,
December 20, 2021 @ 3:16 pm
This issue interests me greatly. Given the garden-path-free viability of the sentence in spoken English, shouldn't there be a way of punctuating the sentence in written English? You can revise the sentence to make it presentable, sure. Suppose, however, that you had to quote somebody who had used the sentence in spoken English. What would you do? Is there any reason why the semicolon should not be a viable solution there?
A. Like Bruce Springsteen; Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices.
I'd like to compare that (potential) use of the semicolon to the use of it that we find in (admittedly rare) cases in which a semicolon is used to separate successive subordinate clauses at the beginning of a sentence, as in these lines from Thomas Gray's "Ellegy":
"For thee, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say, . . ."
The semicolon clarifies that the "if"-clause is not nested within the relative clause, but is an adjunct of the main clause, just as it would be if the sentence read: "Haply some hoary-headed swain may say . . . if . . . some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate." This can happen in far more mundane examples, of course, such as "Although we can't join you Sunday morning, when we have church; we will be sure to come and visit" (versus: "Although we can't join you Sunday morning; when we have church, we will be sure to come and visit"). The second version gives the same meaning as this: "Although we can't join you Sunday morning, we will be sure to come and visit when we have church."
Given the recent celebrated reanalysis (by Pullum and others) of many adverbial subordinate clauses as prepositional phrases, it would seem that, if the use of the semicolon in sentences like the above is viable, it should also be viable with what traditionalists regard as prepositional phrases. In other words, my use of the semicolon in (A) need not be considered syntactically different from its use in the Thomas Gray example or in the mudane example I gave about not being able to do something on Sunday.
Apart from the semicolon, I see three other potential candidates (illustrated below): the line-break use of the slash (absent a verse quotation), sentence-initial parentheses, or the archaic comma-dash combo (found, for example, in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his contemporaries):
B. Like Bruce Springsteen, / Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices.
C. (Like Bruce Springsteen) Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices.
D. Like Bruce Springsteen,— Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices.
Philip Taylor said,
December 20, 2021 @ 4:02 pm
To be honest, I don't feel happy with any of those. How about a variant on the C approach —
E. Like Bruce Springsteen, (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices).
I don't think I would ever willingly write in that style, but given the task in hand it seems to be the best that I can do.
Randy Hudson said,
December 20, 2021 @ 4:37 pm
My quick fix would be to start the sentence with "Like Bruce Springsteen did,".
John Swindle said,
December 20, 2021 @ 6:14 pm
If we're quoting we do have to find a way to punctuate. We could choose to use an attribution as punctuation: "'Like Bruce Springsteen,' the New York Times picture caption says, 'Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, and others have all sold rights to their works for eye-popping prices.'"
On the other hand if we were the New York Times and/or were writing our own account of the matter we wouldn't have to write that way. The Times has already changed the picture caption online.
chris said,
December 20, 2021 @ 8:13 pm
Wouldn't the sentence be made clearer and lose its garden-path tendency simply by deleting "Like"?
Gregory Kusnick said,
December 20, 2021 @ 10:49 pm
Semicolon doesn't work in this case because "like" is a verb. So "Like Bruce Springsteen;" reads like an instruction to the reader — a nonsensical instruction in context but it takes rereading to figure that out.
David N. Evans said,
December 21, 2021 @ 3:25 am
"Like" is not a verb here; it means "similarly to."
John Swindle said,
December 21, 2021 @ 5:03 am
@chris; Yes.
Jerry Friedman said,
December 21, 2021 @ 8:55 am
Randy Hudson: I think that in the NYT, that would have to be "As Bruce Springsteen did,".
chris: Deleting the "like" would remove the nuance that the story is about Bruce Springsteen, and the other songwriters are mentioned only as background.
Linda Seebach said,
December 21, 2021 @ 9:37 am
Bruce Springsteen isn't the only superstar who has sold the rights to his music for an eye-popping sum. He has just joined the likes of Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Tina Turner in that exclusive club.
No one will know it's a solution to a pesky punctuation problem, it sounds as if you meant to do it that way.
Or Bruce Springsteen has just been admitted to a very exclusive club. Like . . .. he has sold . . .
Gregory Kusnick said,
December 21, 2021 @ 10:26 am
David, my point is that a naive reader doesn't know what "like" is supposed to mean here, and the non-standard use of semicolon makes the verb reading more plausible. So the semicolon doesn't really solve the garden-path problem; it just replaces it with a different sort of ambiguity that takes some effort to puzzle out.
David N. Evans said,
December 21, 2021 @ 2:00 pm
Thanks, Gregory, for the clarification. I thought that that might be what you had in mind but wasn't sure. I believe that most semanticists consider it abnormal, if not ungrammatical, for stative verbs to be used in the imperative. Nevertheless, the garden path you have envisioned for the version with the semicolon version does seem conceivable.
What if we kept the semicolon and replaced "Like" with "Similarly to"? ("Similarly to Bruce Springsteen; Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices.") Does the semicolon still seem wrong? Here are several other similar sentences, three of which I have already proposed elsewhere.
"On ice cream; hot fudge, caramel, and whipped cream are delicious."
"Under John; Tony, Bill, and Steve will surely be more productive at work."
"Among the cans; shoes, golfballs, and books were found."
"Beneath the boxes; newspapers, magazines, and file folders are concealed."
It is my belief that there is nothing wrong with any of those sentences in spoken English. As Professor Liberman says about the rock-star example, "spoken prosody could make the structure clear." I believe that spoken prosody not only can do so, but does do so quite easily. Shouldn't there be a way of punctuating such sentences in written English?
John Swindle said,
December 21, 2021 @ 6:54 pm
@Jerry Friedman: Regarding your response to chris, it's a caption for a photo of Bruce Springsteen. The photo already puts Springsteen in the foreground.
John Swindle said,
December 21, 2021 @ 7:01 pm
David N. Evans said "Shouldn't there be a way of punctuating such sentences in written English?"
Using an existing convention that would be considered improper in this context, we could say "LIKE BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Paul Simon and others have all sold popcorn."
David N. Evans said,
December 21, 2021 @ 8:21 pm
John Swindle, your suggestion is interesting. I think that putting some, but not all, words in all caps usually signals HEAVY stress; however, that is not the way I hear such fronted prepositional phrases when they are followed by a compound serial subject.
I simply hear a slightly longer pause at the divide between the fronted prepositional phrase and the first of the noun phrases in the compound serial subject than I hear between the noun phrases composing the compound serial subject.
Prosodically, doesn't the semicolon indicate a slightly longer pause than that indicated by a comma? The only other convention I can think of for indicating this is ellipsis points, in a now-uncommon usage. I think I prefer the version with the semicolon.
"Like Bruce Springsteen. . . Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Paul Simon and others are millionaires."
Philip Taylor said,
December 22, 2021 @ 6:53 am
Caps-and-small caps ? Almost certainly impossible to replicate here, but for TeX speakers :
John Swindle said,
December 22, 2021 @ 7:07 am
@Philip Taylor: Yes.
Haamu said,
December 22, 2021 @ 10:18 am
As long as we're inventing stuff that won't catch on, my suggested typographical convention is a double comma:
In informal writing, we already have the convention of doubling punctuation marks to intensify their effect. (We do!! Don't we??) If a comma is a pause, a double comma is an intensified pause, without the sense of separation afforded by a semicolon.
Gregory Kusnick said,
December 22, 2021 @ 10:41 am
Double comma works better than semicolon for me, since there's no interference from other conventional meanings.
But the difference in prosody, as I read it, is not just a longer pause after "Springsteen". The other three names get the same di-dah-dit rhythm as "and others", and so would Springsteen in the garden-path reading in which he's part of that list. In the correct reading, he gets a different rhythm, with equal stress on "like", "Bruce", and "Spring".
Jonathan Smith said,
December 22, 2021 @ 1:20 pm
The important point is comma in lists ("serial"/"enumerative" application) vs. to separate clauses, no? Written Chinese (and others?) provides two separate marks here (dunhao vs. douhao):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation#Punctuation_marks
To imitate in English, simply
Like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan/Paul Simon/Tina Turner and others
or literally borrow dunhao:
Like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan、Paul Simon、Tina Turner and others
David N. Evans said,
December 22, 2021 @ 3:00 pm
Interestingly, in "The King's English" (1906), the Fowler brothers gave their authorization for commas to "convert into semicolons" when the presence of other commas in the syntactic neighborhood require that the comma in question make known its more "dignified office." I think that the point they make (see below) can be seen to apply to cases like the one we are dealing with, in which a comma must evolve to obviate its superordinate syntactic status.
They take the sentence "When ambition asserts the monstrous doctrine of millions made for individuals, is not the good man indignant?" and add a nonrestrictive appositive within the "when"-clause. Consequently, the comma before the main clause converts into a semicolon: "When ambition asserts the monstrous doctrine of millions madefor individuals, their playthings, to be demolished at their caprice; is not the good man indignant?"
The Fowler brothers comment on the conversion as follows: "The semicolon is doing now exactly what the comma did before; but, as commas have intruded into the clause to do the humble yet necessary work of marking two appositions, the original comma has to dignify its relatively more important office by converting itself into a semicolon" (p. 232). Can't we apply their remarks to our introductory prepositional phrase followed by a serial subject?
Laser Ray said,
December 24, 2021 @ 2:59 pm
not only that, I'm just miffed that the nyt doesn't use the oxford comma
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.html
Joyce Melton said,
December 25, 2021 @ 6:24 am
Colons are used to introduce lists. There is a list; why not use a colon?