Noncompositional

Yesterday on one of my favorite shows, Good Eats, I heard an interesting coordinate structure out of the host’s mouth. The topic of the episode was mayonnaise, and Alton was discussing the properties of emulsions:

How can there be so many opposing forces crammed together, and yet still be stable?

Not to infringe on the territory of those interested in coordination, but notice that the second part, after the and yet is non-finite, so this looks to be a coordination of verb phrases or perhaps TPs, if you believe in sanitary syntactic structure (compare it to in one city there can be a lot of student-oriented stores and still be good places for families, or how can there be unity and still be diversity).¹

However, expletive there cannot be followed by an adjective: *there was still (very) stable. So how is the second phrase licensed? The above sentence does sound a bit weird (weird enough for my pay-attention-to-this-construction alarm to go off). But it gets about ten million times worse if you rearrange the conjuncts: *how can there still be stable even when there are so many opposing forces? A sort of off-the-cuff analysis would be to say that this is really coordination of clauses, and that there is a missing subject in the second “clause”:

…and yet the emulsion still be stable?

But that is pretty darned degraded. I did manage to find cases like

He argues that a person could be morally responsible for a particular action and yet it still be true that that person could not have done otherwise

where the subject, actually an expletive it is realized in the right location (for more parallelism, just imagine that the first conjunct is also a there be construction). But then there is the question of why you have non-finite be in the right conjunct: if they are both top-level (utterance-level) clauses, then (AFAIK) they should both have finite verbs. So you’d have to say that some auxiliary (and I dare you to tell me which one) is also omitted.

My tentative guess is that this is a syntactic blend (call it a performance error if you like, but my feeling is that it is the sort of semi-grammaticalized “error” that should be accounted for even by those who think the competence-performance distinction is worthwhile). Say, a blend of (how can) this emulsion have so many opposing forces crammed together (in it) and still be stable with how can there be so many opposing forces crammed together (in this emulsion). And of course the there be construction and the have construction are very similar semantically, so taking the syntax licensed by one (have) but using the actual form of the other is more likely.

(to clarify: they have missiles pointed at them is paraphrasable as there are missiles pointed at them; the first sort of means “missiles are pointed at them; this is related to them”)

1: Note also the lovely speech-act construction not to VP, but [stuff], which also involves some coordination of unlike types. It’s pretty specialized: it’s really strange to rearrange the conjuncts (seems rather obvious why); also, you would probably have a hard time leaving out the not; but you can use just instead.