{"id":1831,"date":"2009-10-20T07:58:06","date_gmt":"2009-10-20T11:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1831"},"modified":"2009-10-20T08:09:18","modified_gmt":"2009-10-20T12:09:18","slug":"the-united-states-as-a-subject-at-the-supreme-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1831","title":{"rendered":"\"The United States\" as a subject at the Supreme Court"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an earlier post, I observed that the phrase \"the United States\" — regardless of whether it is treated as singular or plural — seems to have become more likely, over time, to occur in subject position (\"The United States as a subject<\/a>\", 10\/6\/2009).\u00a0 My (admittedly slim) evidence for this hypothesis came from some searches in newspaper archives, where the process of gathering data is painfully slow, because I was forced to search interactively via a web interface, and to check out the grammatical status of hits by wearing out my eyes on the article images that are returned.<\/p>\n

Historians may find this complaint churlish, since they're used to an even more painful process. Traditionally, scholars have needed to travel to the local of a physical archive, and to read every dusty document as a whole in order to find the relevant pages.\u00a0 (Well, maybe in recent years the process might involve reading dusty microfiche cards in some slightly more convenient location.)\u00a0 All I have to do is to open a web browser, run a text search to find the relevant articles, and examine the page images that are returned!<\/p>\n

But yes, I'm still complaining.<\/p>\n

That's because it's easy to speed the process up by several more orders of magnitude. Say that there are a thousand hits a year for each of 100 years, and it takes me a minute to scan each article returned for the characteristics of interest to me (here the grammatical role of the phrase \"the united states\"). That's 100,000 minutes, or 208 8-hour days, or about a person-year of work.<\/p>\n

With full access to the underlying texts, a trivial program can pull out the relevant sentences or paragraphs (which already saves a lot of time).\u00a0 A slightly less trivial program can categorize most if not all of the instances automatically, with an error rate that's likely to be better than that of human annotators doing the same tiresome task. And then, if I want to ask the same question about other words and phrases (e.g. France, Great Britain, Spain), or a related question about the same phrase (how does the distribution of prepositional uses change — of X, to X, by X, etc.?), this requires only a small change to the program and a little computer time, not another year of tiresome labor.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I haven't yet managed to get my hands on the underlying text for any 19th-century newspaper archives.\u00a0 But thanks to Jerry Goldman of oyez.org and Tim Stanley of justia.com, I recently got a nearly-complete archive of U.S. Supreme court opinions (and other related documents) in html form. After a bit of hacking, I wound up with 30,846 dated text files, from 1759 to 2005. (The documents in this collection from before 1789 are of course from other American courts. Those after 2005 are in a different format, which I haven't processed yet.)<\/p>\n

The plan is to parse the collection, so that the correlations among grammatical and political histories can be conveniently explored.\u00a0 Meanwhile, I decided to try a few small explorations where I classify the grammatical role of hits by hand, to evaluate both the plausibility of my grammatico-historical hypothesis\u00a0 and the quality of my text preparation.\u00a0 Note that this is already much less tiresome than reading web-archive hits, since I need only look at the relevant bits, which I present to myself in a \"keyword in context\" array that is relatively easy on the eyes.<\/p>\n

So how does the United-States-as-subject hypothesis fare in the SCOTUS texts?<\/p>\n

I started by checking out the 26 texts dated 1800, in which \"the United States\" occurs in 55 sentences (at least as my sentence-division algorithm judged things). One of these instances is in (conjoined) subject position, for a rate of 1.8 per 100 sentences:<\/p>\n

4\u00a0 37<\/a>: The United States and the French republic are in a qualified state of hostility.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 39 texts dated 1810, \"the United States\" occurs in 144 sentences, of which 5 were in subject position, for a rate of 3.5 subjects per 100 sentences. For example:<\/p>\n

10\u00a0 53<\/a>: The States of Virginia and Maryland having, in the year 1789, offered to the United States a cession of territory ten miles square for the permanent seat of government, the United States, by the Act of Congress of 16 July, 1790, vol. 1, p. 132, entitled \"An act for establishing the temporary and permanent seat of the government of the United States,\" accepted the same and authorized the President to appoint certain commissioners for the purpose of carrying the act into effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1850, in 164 texts there were 1495 sentences containing \"the United States\".\u00a0 I checked a random sample of 100 of these sentences, and found 7 instances of the phrase in subject position, for example:<\/p>\n

49\u00a0 451<\/a>: Admitting that anything had occurred as you state, has not the United States received the same amount there from its land as it has elsewhere?<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1900, in 232 texts there were 2154 sentences containing \"the United States\", and in a random sample of 100, I found 7 subjects, e.g.<\/p>\n

179\u00a0 494<\/a>: And as the United States does not complain of the decree in favor of the latter Indians awarding to each 160 acres of land, the only question that remains to be considered arises on the appeal of the Wichita and Affiliated Bands — namely whether the court below erred in not decreeing those Indians to be entitled to the proceeds of the sale of such of the lands in question as may be left after making the allotments in severalty required by the act of Congress.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1950, in 102 texts there were 750 sentences containing \"the United States\", and in a random sample of 100, I found 12 subjects, e.g.<\/p>\n

340 54<\/a>: Standard answered that the United States, as insurer of the tanker, would, in view of the nature of the collision, have to reimburse Standard for any loss it sustained in the suit.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2000, in 85 texts there were 658 sentences containing \"the United States\", and in a random sample of 100, I found 19 subjects, e.g.<\/p>\n

529\u00a0 89<\/a>: The United States did not participate in these cases until appeal, and resolution of the litigation would benefit from the development of a full record by all interested parties.<\/span><\/p>\n

So the results from this rather sketchy sample are consistent with the hypothesis:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
YEAR<\/strong><\/td>\nRate per 100<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1800<\/td>\n\n
1.8<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1810<\/td>\n\n
3.5<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1850<\/td>\n\n
7<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1900<\/td>\n\n
7<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1950<\/td>\n\n
12<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2000<\/td>\n\n
19<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

(The \"rates\" represent the number of instances of \"the United States\" as the subject of a tensed clause, divided by the number of sentences in which this phrase occurs, all multiplied by 100. In the years 1850 through 2000, I checked a random sample of 100 such sentences — obviously a different random sample would have a different result. This being a Breakfast Experiment\u2122, accuracy took second place to velocity.)<\/p>\n

Of course, even if more complete and careful evidence continues to validate the hypothesis, this leaves open many alternative explanations. Perhaps, over time, the federal government has been doing more and more things that would naturally be described by referring to it in subject position. Perhaps the court has gradually shifted from longer and more specific phrases (e.g. \"the government of the United States\" or \"the Solicitor General of the United States\") to plain \"the United States\". Or perhaps, as I suggested in my earlier post, there's been an increasing tendency, even among careful legal thinkers and writers, to exhibit the grammatical consequences of considering \"the United States\" to be a quasi-animate agent.<\/p>\n

My guess is that all of these explanations are likely to be simultaneously true, to some extent. Luckily, it's easy to imagine ways to test them — if you've got access to the full text archive.\u00a0 And if everyone has access to the same text archive, then others can check, challenge or extend my results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an earlier post, I observed that the phrase \"the United States\" — regardless of whether it is treated as singular or plural — seems to have become more likely, over time, to occur in subject position (\"The United States as a subject\", 10\/6\/2009).\u00a0 My (admittedly slim) evidence for this hypothesis came from some searches […]<\/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":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831","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=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}