Noncompositional

The discerning (= awake) reader may have observed that the previous post on Spoonerisms was actually a bit of an accident. The original intent was to make a small comment on a couple of lines in a particular Simpsons episode and be done with it. But as luck would have it, after reading the Wikipedia article on the little buggers I got to wondering about Spoonerisms in Japanese, and one thing led to another, and here we are. So this time, short and sweet (or so my intention goes)

In the same episode mentioned in the above-linked post, Homer, upon entering Sprawl-Mart, is in awe at the splendor that is consumer choice, and exclaims:

So many things, and so many things of each thing.

Here we have three tokens of thing, with two unambiguous uses and one possibly ambiguous. In the first half of the utterance, when Homer says so many things, it’s not clear whether he means that there are many items in the store (as in, the floorspace is huge, and full of shelves packed with products), or that there are many, say, brands in the store, offering viturally endless choice regarding which brand of ranch-cheese-barbeque-onion-and-(bleah)-guacamole tortilla chip to buy. Maybe he means both. I could certainly believe that the writers intended or anticipated listeners to have simultaneous interpretations. However, in the second half of the utterance the different meanings are clear, with things of each thing mirroring tokens of each type. But can thing really mean both ‘token’ and ‘type?’

Of course, the reason this caught my attention was that I usually don’t hear both uses of thing in the same phrase like that. Separately, as in how many things are in the box and how many of each thing are in the box, the ‘item’ and ‘type’ interpretations can come through, but in combination some odd things (ahem) seem to happen. On the other hand, phrases like four things (cf. copies) of each book and nine things (cf. instances) of that lemma seem odd. Perhaps this is due to the specificity of copy and instance, or the lack of specificity of thing (i.e., becuase it’s so polysemous it’s avoided when possible), or both. On the other hand, maybe thing has to have a meaning (one among many, to be sure) like ‘individuable physical object,’ rather than ‘token (of a type).’ The fact remains, though, that the sentence is interpretable as being like “tokens of types,” so if the (so-called) pure semantics of thing don’t give us the right interpretation, then it has to be some combination of the semantics, the construction it’s in (N of NP), analogy to other constructions, knowledge about the scene presented, the other thing, this thing, two other things, and possibly some important thing I’ve forgotten.

None of this changes the fact, though, that Homer’s line is indeed a thing of beauty.

[update, 06.29: Further consideration, and some conversation, made me realize that it's not exactly clear what level of category is being referred to in the various uses of thing in Homer's utterance. In fact, regarding things of each thing, my original interpretation was something like 'so many [bags of chips, ...] of each [brand of chips, ...].’ However, some of my friends thought it was more likely that these represented slightly higher-level categories, like brands of chips and chips. I may well agree with that interpretation. This makes the first thing even more muddled. I think I’ll have to stop thinking about these things for a while.]