Noncompositional

Back in December, Chris posted on a particular use of which, exemplified by the following sentence:

Proulx’s short story contains graphic, vulgar and explicit pornographic language of homosexual sex between the two cowboys, which some who saw the movie, say remains faithful to the short story.

I just realized that this is a ridiculous sentence, and so the comment I left on the original post misses the point. I’ll return to the point later, but for the current exposition, I will alter the sentence to:

Brokeback Mountain contains graphic, vulgar, and explicit pornographic language of homosexual sex between the two cowboys, which some critics say remains faithful to the short story.

I suggested (having mis-read the first sentence as the altered second one) that the proposition expressed by the first half of the sentence, namely Brokeback mountain…cowboys was the antecedent of the which, similar to cases like I went on a double date, which was a really bad idea. An important thing to keep track of is: what exactly are the possible denotations of story (including content/product metonymy), and exactly what sort of things can remain faithful to what other sort of things.

A cursory Google search reveals that, unhelpfully, authors can remain faithful to stories, spirits can remain faithful to essences, and hearts can remain faithful to heart-capturing women. There are, however, many examples of movies remaining faithful to TV shows, and plots remaining faithful to originals (and authors remaining faithful to movies, and all sorts of mixed-up stuff, really). Okay, so we could say that the graphic sex of the movie remains faithful to the original short story. However, this anchors the sex to a particular movie. Undetermined sex doesn’t work: *graphic sex remains faithful to the original (short story (’s content)). In other words, only particular instances of graphic sex (i.e., that portrayed in a particular movie) can “remain faithful” to something else. So we’ve got a slight problem, as Chris points out.

Now, he doesn’t like a sentence like [the fact that it contains sex] remains faithful to the original. I agree that this is borderline unacceptable – basically, it’s completely understandable but deserves a big copy-editor’s mark of death. But this isn’t a test, I think, of whether it’s proper to say that the entire proposition is the subject of remain. One shouldn’t let idiosyncrasies of the English word fact get in the way of one’s (always-impeccable) intuitions. My intuitions say that basically, the “sentence” Brokeback Mountain contains … cowboys, conceived as some sort of abstract entity, is what is faithful to the short story. Or, if you like, that Brokeback Mountain contains … cowboys is what remains faithful. It’s just a small tweak in the brain that lets you do this (can’t you feel the little neural twinge when you read the sentence?)

Little did I know at the time of writing that Chris Potts had written an article on the topic, called The lexical semantics of parenthetical-as and appositive-which (Syntax 5(1)). He has another article, but only on as, in NLLT (20). In these articles, he goes over the syntax and semantics of these two constructions. But I think he misses the good parts. I’ll just give some small tidbits now, leaving more for later. (an as-parenthetical is present in It contains graphic sex, as you predicted it would.

First, consider his denotations for as and which. Basically, they’re partial identity functions – identity functions, because they don’t change the semantics of the sentence as a whole, and partial, because they add presuppositions to sentence. The only difference is that as takes a proposition as a complement, and returns a partial identity function on propositions, while which must combine with an nominalized proposition, and returns a partial identity function on nominalized propositions.

But note this quote (NLLT, p. 653): “I characterize the contribution of As-clauses as a conventional implicature rather than a presupposition.” A sentence like Syntax is hard, as Chomsky told us it would be implicates that all interlocutors are aware that “Chomsky told us it would be hard.” This may be true (though some might argue that it really is presupposition, and that seeming violations of this require pragmatic accommodation), but then shouldn’t its denotation be different from that of which? It seems to me that as is used more often to “remind” the hearer that some fact is relevant, whereas which is not specified – it can be used as a reminder, or it can be used (as it was in the Brokeback sentence above) to introduce new, and topical, information. Ideally, this would be captured in the lexical entries of these words.

Second, note that you can’t replace the Brokeback sentence’s which with an as. Consider the following sentences:

• The DNA samples were indeed contaminated, as you said _ must be the case.
• The DNA samples were indeed contaminated, which you said _ must be the case.

I’m not sure if these counter-exemplify his denotations (and yes, I used modals, which are good for screwing things up), but they at least hint that something like The movie contains … sex between cowboys, as some critics say _ remains faithful to the story should be acceptable. But to me, this seems like a very bad sentence. I don’t know if it’s “ungrammatical,” whatever that means with words like these. I’d rather like to say that it seems odd (to me, anyway) because the as-clause is used here to introduce information that advances the discourse, which doesn’t fit its profile as a “reminding” word. (Consider the fact that “which by the way” gets 1.7 million ghits, while “as by the way” gets 17,000). Thus Potts was probably a bit too hasty when he said that “[as-]clauses can be used to provide new information without the need for accommodation.”

In general, I think Potts’ treatment of these parentheticals treated the semantics and pragmatics too shallowly, relying on syntactic and semantic combinatorial properties to guide the analysis. I’ll write up a longer post on what I thought of that style of analysis, and how one might go about taking a different tack.

(And I mean, come on, who in their right mind would ignore sentences like these:the only thing that clinton did productivly…was two things, one got more ass than i did on a regular basis, which who cares, everyone in power does…and two…follow reagan and bushs plans of economics to a tee)

I’ll also write something on the original sentence from Chris’ post, which is truly, truly ugly.