{"id":974,"date":"2009-01-04T09:36:53","date_gmt":"2009-01-04T14:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=974"},"modified":"2009-01-04T16:25:55","modified_gmt":"2009-01-04T21:25:55","slug":"ballots-for-which-one-or-more-candidates-do-not-agree-were-wrongfully-rejected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=974","title":{"rendered":"Ballots for which one or more candidates do not agree were wrongfully rejected"},"content":{"rendered":"

A set of previously-rejected absentee ballots in the Minnesota senatorial election have now been counted. Some background on the process that led to this event can be found in the affidavit of Tony P. Trimble (12-31-08)<\/a>, which includes as Exhibit A \"Rules for Processing Improperly Rejected Absentee Ballots for US Senators<\/a>\", which in turn includes point 15:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There are a couple of linguistically interesting things about this crucial provision of the protocol. The first one is an unexpected \"for\":<\/p>\n

… the candidates' representatives will forward to the local election officials a list of all additional rejected absentee ballots for <\/strong>which both candidates' representatives now agree were wrongfully rejected. <\/span><\/p>\n

(There's also an interesting use of \"now\" to mean \"at that time\", but never mind that.)\u00a0 The following sentence repeats the extra \"for\", confirming that the first one wasn't a typographical error. But in addition, this sentence wraps its meaning in a baffling tangle of quantifiers, negatives, lexical ambiguities, and phrasal interconnections:<\/p>\n

At the same time, they shall forward to the local election officials a list of all rejected absentee ballots for which one or more candidates' representative(s) do not agree were wrongfully rejected. <\/span><\/p>\n

Apparently the process defined by this protocol took place as scheduled. According to yesterday evening's post by Nate Silver<\/a>, there were 952 rejected absentee ballots that both candidates agreed should be counted, out of 1346 rejected absentee ballots altogether. This mutually-agreed-on subset was duly counted, adding 176 votes to challenger Al Franken's lead over incumbent Norm Coleman.<\/p>\n

But I sincerely hope that the legality of this process doesn't depend on it being in compliance with the protocol specified in section 15 of Appendix A to Mr. Trimble's affidavit of 12-31-08. At least, I wouldn't want to be in the position of having to verify that some particular list was in fact \"a list of all rejected absentee ballots for which one or more candidates' representative(s) do not agree were wrongfully rejected<\/span>\", even though (as I understand it) this list was relevant only by virtue of being the list of ballots that would NOT be counted at this stage.<\/p>\n

[Hat tip: Jonathan Weinberg]<\/p>\n

[Update: Perhaps the problem is not an extraneous \"for\", but rather a missing \"they\".\u00a0 A search for similar phrases turned up this item<\/a>, with a relative clause starting \"the ballots for which …\", and a resumptive pronoun a couple of levels down in the modifying sentence:<\/p>\n

\"Today we are sending a letter to all 87 counties asking them that \u2026 the ballots for which there is no legal justification for them not being counted be opened and counted,\" said Franken attorney Marc Elias in a conference call Friday.<\/span><\/p>\n

So maybe the phrase under discussion was originally something like<\/p>\n

… a list of all rejected absentee ballots for which one or more candidates' representative(s) do not agree that they were wrongfully rejected.<\/span><\/p>\n

rather than<\/p>\n

… a list of all rejected absentee ballots which one or more candidates' representative(s) do not agree were wrongfully rejected.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both of these seem to me to be grammatical, if awkward; while the original is well outside the boundaries of my personal version of English:<\/p>\n

… a list of all rejected absentee ballots for which one or more candidates' representative(s) do not agree were wrongfully rejected.<\/span><\/p>\n

I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to impose some abstract conscious belief about proper relative clause structure. Jonathan Weinberg sent this in as a possible case of mis-negation, but I got stuck on an intuitive WTF reaction to the \"for which\".\u00a0 I can explain my reaction in terms of an explicit syntactic and semantic analysis, but the reaction preceded the analysis. ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A set of previously-rejected absentee ballots in the Minnesota senatorial election have now been counted. Some background on the process that led to this event can be found in the affidavit of Tony P. Trimble (12-31-08), which includes as Exhibit A \"Rules for Processing Improperly Rejected Absentee Ballots for US Senators\", which in turn includes […]<\/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":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-the-law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974","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=974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}