Noncompositional

A post by Geoff Pullum at LL a few days ago pointed readers to an article in the Boston Globe by Jan Freeman which itself was about a (negative) review of The Da Vinci Code in Newsweek by David Ansen (available here). In particular, Freeman and Pullum make fun of Ansen’s chosen headline, “Thou shalt not like it.”

The phrase thou shalt not blah is, I assume, mostly known via the popular rendering of the Ten Commandmants, and so it might seem to some an odd choice for a review headline. After all, reviews are about saying either what one personally thought, what one thinks others will think, or both. They are not about telling people what they must think (unless one is cynical). Regarding this, Pullum writes:

Thou shalt is of course a prohibition. They wanted to express a prediction about your reaction, not forbid a positive one. Surely they knew the difference.

Freeman similarly says that

What it says, in modern English, is “You Will Not Like It.” But in their rush to add a bit of Biblical-historical decoration, the writers lost their grip on grammar; what they meant to say was “Thou Wilt Not Like It.”" [...] After all, anyone who’s heard of the Ten Commandments knows that they are orders. Different traditions may count them differently and interpret them differently and translate them differently. But whether the English words are “Thou shalt not,” “Thou mayest not,” “You must not,” or just “Do not,” these utterances have never been mistaken for statements about what will or won’t happen. Those shalts are verbs of obligation, not prediction.

She notes (in the part omitted above) that some of the subtleties of shall and will have been lost in American speech for a long while now, and so using shalt contrary to those nuances of meaning is not at issue. What is at issue, she says, is that the generally recognized and commonly known meaning of (archaic) shall (with a second-person subject) is that of obligation, not prediction (IOW, root/deontic modality, not epistemic modality). This is thus “a severe case of Ye Olde Gift Shoppe syndrome, the delusion that since nobody speaks Elizabethan English anymore, you can invent cute archaisms just by sticking obsolete verb endings and pronouns into your prose at random, like currants in a plum pudding.” In one sense I have to agree with her (and Pullum’s) opinions regarding the headline: thou shalt not blah is pretty strongly, if not entirely, a command. However, I don’t think that this is necessarily a problem for the headline. I can imagine, reading the headline, that it is a sort of “lost” commandment, a command from the almighty one that no one should enjoy the heretical film. This can of course have any amount of ironic or sarcastic shading the reader desires. It also needn’t be a “literal” commandment. Instead, the language would merely borrow from the archaic form of the commandments, thus evoking them without being one of them. This makes it a prime candidate for a (perhaps unsuccessful) blend whereby the phrase thou shalt not is a nod towards the religious controversy while the shalt, treated as a modern (and ambiguous) shall, allows the headline to carry an epistemic meaning, which is appropriate for a movie review. However, it could be quite a stretch to think that this is exactly what Ansen had in mind. In all likelihood, it was chosen because it sounded good, it made a sort of sense as long as you didn’t think about it too much. And like many such linguistic choices, you have to think about it before you realize why it only makes sense if you don’t think about it. At the same time, one might wish to find out exactly how true the claim about the meaning of (archaic) shall is. A quick check of the OED reveals that, indeed, shall with a second-person subject was rarely used to talk simply about future events. The two examples of thou/w shalt not are (i) one of the Ten Commandments, and (ii) something that is not exactly a prohibition but a sort of determination that one will make sure something is the case: Followe me no further; I say thou shalt not haue them. However, there is definition 9, given below with two of the examples:

In the idiomatic use of the future to denote what ordinarily or occasionally occurs under specified conditions, shall was formerly the usual auxiliary. In the second and third persons, this is now somewhat formal or rhetorical; ordinary language substitutes will or may. Often in antithetic statements coupled by an adversative conjunction or by and with adversative force. c1449 PECOCK Repr. I. xx. 119 Thou schalt not fynde expresseli in Holi Scripture that the Newe Testament schulde be write in Englisch tunge to lay men. 1597 MORLEY Introd. Mus. Annot., You shall not finde one side in all the booke without some grosse errour or other.

So there was in fact a non-modern use of shall, in the frame you shall not which was not a command or hortative, but rather a statement about future (or perhaps generic, though not prescribed) events. It’s perhaps not directly relevant to the headline, given the entrenchment of the form and meaning of the commandments. It does, however, argue against the claim that archaic uses of thou shalt not should only be commands, and further allows a purely archaic reading of the headline that still allows the blending interpretation.