Some careful thought and it would have been clearer
My original thoughts about set-comparisons being important for the NP-and/or-Clause construction were not quite as…accurate as they could have been. Certainly setting up comparisons of quantity makes the construction very good, there are other uses, as became clear to me after some conversations with colleagues. Comparative adjectives aren’t quite as good, but they can squeeze by: a raunchier title and a lot more people would have bought this book. Plain quantities work, as I mentioned last time, but they don’t necessarily have to involve an implicit comparison with an actualized state-of-affairs: 20 sentences and our proposal should fit on one 8 1/2-by-11 page. Finally, some plain, no-quantity, no-explicit-comparison NPs work: a successful book under his belt and he would have been hired for sure. Interesting thing about this last one: what exactly are the possible interpretations of the NP? Does “he” have to be the author of the book? Is there any other possible relation: the book is about him, the book mentions him, he sells the book, …? A glowing biography and no one would dare to question her authority (where she is the topic of the biography)?
Comments(2)
I think in your latter examples they can be interpreted many ways depending upon the context (as I tell my students, context is prince consort [grammar is queen]). If we’re talking about someone trying to be hired as an editor, the “successful book” would have been one he edited; the “glowing biography” could be about her in one context, and by her in another.
One problem with trying to analyze sentences like these is that they aren’t produced in a vacuum – they’re part of discourse, and pragmatics will play a huge role in their interpretation.
Ah, yes, of course I agree that these sorts of constructions are not the sort that are properly analyzed without context. But sometimes there is a limit that a construction imposes on the range of situations in which it can be used, and I was wondering if any existed for this one.
To pull a random example that I have no expertise on at all, noun compounds in English have very vague interpretations. “Photography store” could be a place that sells photographs, equipment for making them, or storing/enjoying/selling them, or probably that just has a lot of photographs all over the place. But in a context of talking about stores that hate certain things (like a restaurant that absolutely will not have laminated menus or hang photographs of famous people who’ve visited them), I’m not entirely sure that “(that) photography store (on Main St.)” could mean ‘that store that abhors anything to do with photography.’
But don’t make me do a corpus search. I might end up proving myself wrong. =)