Noncompositional

Consider the sentence: I just had the weirdest dream. This is the sort of assertion that the speaker gets privileged access to. Like so-called psych-predicates and other internal experience adjectives like hot and cold, only the person who dreamed can “really” know that she had a such-and-such type of dream, if it was scary or not, and so on. Anyone else who claims to have that knowledge is either running on hearsay, or in some sort of special situation where they get to either control the mental state of someone else (a hypnotist saying: “you feel very hot”) or a person acting as a conduit for others’ communications (a teacher reading aloud his pupil’s writing samples as she collects them: “Suzie is happy that her parents are home again, Ralph is anxious to …”).

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Just a short one here. While doing research on the light verb suru in Japanese, I found a paper by a Hiroyuki Ura. He has a paper published in the Journal of Japanese Linguistics in 1993, which has to have one of the most unfortunate titles I’ve ever seen:

Extraction of Doo and its implications

Ouch. Okay, actually it should be The extraction of Doo and its implications, so that everyone knows that the “doo” is the adverb written どう, ‘how.’ But still, the first time I saw it cited the typeface distinction wasn’t made, so I had some trouble figuring out just what was going on.

In an earlier post I pondered the felicity of phrases like tying run and go-ahead run in various situations in a baseball game. T. Carter replied, confirming that just about all the factors you might expect play a role: who is on base, up to bat, how each got there, and how late in the game it is.

It was pointed out to me that this final factor, which I originally conceived as lateness in the game, is better thought of as crucialness for the game. Thus in post-season games, where each run counts that much more, one is more likely to heard phrases like and now the go-ahead run is at the plate! This seems like an entirely reasonable observation. In fact, the whole point behind using phrases like these is that they frame the person on base/at bat not just as a person playing the game (no matter how effective a player they may be), but as the potential effector of a game-dynamics-changing play. It ratchets up the tension, gets the listener involved, makes the game more exciting. I’d be curious to know if coaches use phrases like this. My account would predict that they wouldn’t, first because there is no “audience” that must be excited into watching the game (the players are no doubt as focused as they’ll get), and second because wouldn’t that jinx the at-bat? Then again, I could be wrong, and maybe it’s common to slap a guy up onto the field with a “all right [name], you can put us back in the lead, just focus on the ball” or some such thing.

Once upon a time, in a faraway place, there was a class of words in English called “the verb.” Verbs lived happily among the nouns - they were the glue that held the nouns together in relationships of love, hate, giving and taking, reading and writing. And verbs were clever fellows. They each know how many nouns they could bring together. Read knew it could bring a reader and a text together, and bestow was well aware that it could combine a giver, a receiver, and a transferred item. It was a happy life.

But one day, some government officials noticed that the verbs were picky in certain ways. They noticed this because they kept very detailed records on the behavioral patterns of various verbs. For instance, they noticed that sprinkle would only work with paricular types of themes, and a family of verbs ominously named kill could combine with all sorts of things, like temporal durations, reactions, and their old standby - living things. But mysteriously there were some very regular patterns in the pickiness among verbs for what some observers called the “subject.” They noticed that families of verbs like kill had members that were very picky about their “internal arguments,” but never had disagreements about their subjects.

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A sentence:

The manager knows if the night shift waiter has left or if the cook has left or if the greeter has left.

another sentence:

The manager knows whether the night shift waiter has left or whether the cook has left or whether the greeter has left.

Two possible readings: (1) The manager knows three facts, each relating to one person, namely, if they left or not; (2) The manager knows just one thing, about just one person, namely, if that one person left or not.

Which readings go with which sentences? I originally though that one of the sentences could have both readings, but the other one could only have one (or at least strongly preferred only one), but I lost that intuition straightaway.

In future installments look for: why I think an innocent little paragraph in Chris Kennedy and Louise McNally’s article on gradable predicates argues against little v, and some exposition on the interpretation of 3sg pronouns and why they’re simpler than some people might think.