Repetitions

On Monday Nancy Friedman offered this awkward example to me:

“One of the things that you always want to be for, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, is that you want everyone who’s eligible to vote to vote.” – Steve Schmidt, McCain strategist in 2008 (link)

There’s nothing syntactically wrong with this sentence, but the repetition of to vote might give you a moment’s pause. Nevertheless, the first to vote is an ordinary infinitival complement of be eligible (They are eligible to vote), in a relative clause modifying everyone (Everyone who’s eligible to vote is coming), and the second to vote is an ordinary infinitival complement of want in combination with a direct object of that verb (We want everyone to vote), and to vote to vote is merely part of what you get when you put these pieces together in ordinary ways.

Repetitions like this one — repetitions I’ll call Toto examples (Totos for short), after to vote to vote and in recognition of the passing feeling of oddness that they can produce (“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”) — are quite common, though a careful stylist might want to avoid some of them as distracting. But then there are syntactic constructions that specifically call for repetitions of constituents. And still other configurations that you’d expect to be acceptable — more Toto examples — that are nevertheless just ungrammatical (for some speakers).

Annals of cataphora

From the Economist of 12/3/11, p. 43, in “Marijuana in California and Colorado: Highs and laws” [the magazine is fond of jokey titles], after a long first paragraph about medical marijuana boom in Colorado:

While it is allowed in some form in 16 states and Washington, DC, Colorado is the leader in trying to make medicinal pot a legitimate business.

Now, (medical) marijuana is highly topical when this sentence comes along in the discourse. so that’s almost surely the referent of the subject pronoun it in the initial subordinate clause. Nevertheless, I expected this pronoun to be cataphoric, preferably with its referent picked up by the subject of the main clause — but that’s Colorado (where Colorado is paired with 16 states and the District of Columbia), and not a NP referring to marijuana. So I had a brief moment of unfulfilled expectation that wasn’t ironed out until medicinal pot came along, embedded within the main clause.

My reaction to this explicit pronoun subject it is much like many people’s reaction to zero subjects in initial sentence adverbials, in initial SPARs (subjectless predcative adjuncts requiring a referent for the missing subject). Sometimes the referent is given right there in the preceding context, but still we expect the zero to be cataphoric, preferably to the subject of the main clause.

Take my wife

I recently came across a reference to the Henny Youngman “take my wife” joke, which turns on the ambiguity of that phrase, with two very different uses of take, one of them very restricted in its syntax and discourse function, the other free in both respects.

Old recipes IV: George Leonard Herter

Now for some really old recipes (see here, here, and here) — like the Virgin Mary’s recipe for spinach. As relayed by George Leonard Herter is his magnificent Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices.

To come: a couple of recipes from Herter; background on the man and his work; and some remarks on cohesion vs. coherence in texts, Herter’s writing being fine on the cohesion front but often laughably deficient on the coherence front.

Two remarks on reversals

Following up on my “Reversed CLEAR verbs” posting (with a section on reversed substitute): a remark on motivations for reversal in CLEAR verbs, plus a remark on the spread of reversed substitute in American English: not just sport(s), but also food.

Viewpoint reflexive?

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky points me to an interview with Bradford W. Parkinson, the chief architect of GPS, which contains the remarkable sentence

It was hurting themselves.

with an instance of themselves that flagrantly fails to satisfy the Clause-Mate Condition on reflexives in English, requiring that

Reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must belong to the same clause. (link; the sense of belong to here is explained in this posting)

But “untriggered reflexives” also occur in English, and there’s considerable variation from speaker to speaker as to which of these are acceptable. Even with context, Parkinson’s sentence is unacceptable to many speakers, but it does fit into a class of cases that some speakers accept: viewpoint, or perspectival, reflexives.

Notes from school

Last week’s notes from my grand-daughter’s school included this report from a student in the middle school:

In L.A [Language Arts -- what used to be called English] we had a lesson on how to organize a story with a follow-up question: Do people make decisions with his head or her heart.

Now, people is plural, used for generic reference, so the standard pronoun anaphoric to it is they (their in the possessive): with their head or (with) their heart. Why go with singular his or her instead?

Two possible factors. One, people doesn’t look plural; it doesn’t have a plural suffix. And two, peevish objections to “singular they“, even with generic antecedents — Everybody thinks either with their head or (with) their heart — have led people to be suspicious of anaphoric they with generic antecedents, even when these are in fact plural. The proscription against singular they has contaminated ordinary anaphoric usage. (For other cases of proscriptions contaminating perfectly innocent constructions, see here.)

Unfree variation again

Announcement of a talk at Stanford this coming Tuesday, with abstract:

Investigating a Syntactic Analysis:  Revisiting Raising-to-Subject
Scott Grimm, Stanford University

Verbs such as “seem’” or “appear’” allow an alternation between infinitival and finite sentential complements.  An example typical of those considered in the literature is given in (1) (Davies and Dubinsky 2004).

(1a) Barnett seemed to understand the formula.
(1b) It seemed that Barnett understood the formula.

The standard treatment in generative syntax of this alternation is the raising-to-subject analysis [Subject-to-Subject Raising, or SSR], which is introduced to account for the observation that the surface subject of (1a) is taken to be the subject of the embedded verb (‘understand’), a relation that is established in different ways in different syntactic theories.   In the instantiation which gives this phenomenon its name, the subject of the embedded verb “raises” to become the subject of the matrix verb.

This analysis assumes that (1a) and (1b) are meaning-equivalent and claims that the choice of infinitival or finite sentential complementation is a syntactic matter.  Much recent work in syntax has shown that comparable alternations are influenced by a variety of semantic, pragmatic, and/or usage factors.  For instance, the dative alternation has been shown to be affected by syntactic weight and animacy (Bresnan et al. 2007), as well as information structure constraints (Snyder 2003).

Based on an examination of corpus data, I show that the two constructions in (1a) and (1b) can also be distinguished once a broader array of examples are systematically evaluated. The two constructions manifest significant distributional asymmetries in terms of (i) their information structure preferences and (ii) whether they align with statements based on direct, i.e. experiential, evidence, or indirect evidence, e.g. inferences…

Drifting as far as

This comment from musician Les Claypool caught my ear on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday:

(1) It’s a wonderful place to be, as far as a creative person.

This is an instance of verbless topic-restricting as far as (AsFarAs for short, labeled “prepositional as far as” in MWDEU), but one drifting some from its earlier uses and now serving as a more general restrictor — in (1), with as far as a creative person roughly paraphrasable as for a creative person, restricting the applicability of the assertion in it’s a wonderful place to be.

Disregarding context

From an earlier posting on danglerology, a promissory note:

[this example] illustrates that the acceptability of such sentences depends not merely on their internal syntactic structure, but also on their place in a larger discourse. (For a later posting: why so many people have thought otherwise.)

Consider:

(1) After writing a book, it seems that Harry is at loose ends.

(1) has no overt subject for the predicate writing a book, and such sentence adjuncts require that the referent of this subject be supplied (they are SPARs, in my terminology); a general principle, the Subject Rule, says that this referent is supplied by the subject of the main clause (the clause the adjunct modifies). But what’s the status of the Subject Rule?