{"id":1391,"date":"2009-05-01T07:15:56","date_gmt":"2009-05-01T11:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1391"},"modified":"2009-05-01T07:48:13","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T11:48:13","slug":"matrix-verbs-as-ghostly-adverbials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1391","title":{"rendered":"Matrix verbs as \"ghostly adverbials\"?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, fev at Headsup: The Blog featured an unusual referential tangle (\"March of the pronouns<\/a>\", 4\/24\/2009):<\/p>\n

A 30-year-old Pontiac man is in the Oakland County Jail and facing felony charges after authorities said he rammed a man\u2019s car after finding his wife in the backseat with him.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Beyond the amusing combinatorics of reference (two possible antecedents each for his<\/em> and him<\/em>, plus the question of whose backseat it was), fev notes that<\/p>\n

\"Authorities said\" isn't really<\/span> part of the subordinate clause. It's acting like the British \"claim quotes\" — sort of a ghostly sentence adverb, reminding us that there's some sort of privileged source to which (or whom) the otherwise potentially libelous assertion can be pinned.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In this particular example, it's possible that the authorities issued a statement before the guy went to jail, and it's likely that \"facing felony charges\" involves something that could be construed as an authoritative statement early in the process. But in general, I think that fev is right: there are matrix sentence frames that indicate how you know something, or how you feel about it, while being otherwise transparent to the semantic relationships expressed by the structures around them.<\/p>\n

Courtesy of a search of newspaper archives, here are a couple of examples of \"authorities said\" in after-clauses where it's almost certain that the authorities told the story long after the events whose chronological order is being explained:<\/p>\n

A man was tased at SeaWorld on Tuesday afternoon after authorities said he failed to pay admission and fought with security personnel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Three children were drowned tonight in the Scudog River after authorities said their mother, identified as a Mrs. Wallace, tossed them into the swirling waters and then leaped in after them.<\/span><\/p>\n

But these examples might also be analyzed as parentheticals without the punctuation, since there is no that<\/em>: \"A man was tased at SeaWorld … after (authorities said) he failed to pay admission …\"<\/p>\n

And it's somewhat suspicious, or at least disappointing, that a search of the\u00a0 Proquest Historical Newspaper archives turns up no instances of the string \"after authorities said that\", although there are 58 instances of \"after authorities said\".<\/p>\n

It's easy to find examples where a matrix sentence frame is used as if it were a modal or epistemological adverbial of some sort. But some of these are cases where the matrix might actually be a parenthetical (as in the case of the \"authorities said\" examples above), and some of them are cases where logic can be restored by treating a subordinate clause as within the scope of the matrix verb, as if by shifting the order of clauses:<\/p>\n

Unless it's shipped soon, I'm afraid that I'll have to cancel my order. (= I'm afraid that [I'll have to cancel my order unless it's shipped soon].)
\nIf there's a swine flu pandemic, she says that hundreds of millions will die. (= She says that [hundreds of millions will die if there's a swine flu pandemic].)<\/span><\/p>\n

Can anyone find a genuine example where neither of these dodges will work?<\/p>\n

This might be a sentence of the form \"X after police said that Y\", where it's clear that X and Y both took place long before police said anything about the matter. Or it might be \"X, because I'm afraid that Y\", where the relationship between X and Y is entirely independent of my emotional states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, fev at Headsup: The Blog featured an unusual referential tangle (\"March of the pronouns\", 4\/24\/2009): A 30-year-old Pontiac man is in the Oakland County Jail and facing felony charges after authorities said he rammed a man\u2019s car after finding his wife in the backseat with him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-the-media","category-semantics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}