I’d like to report a case of zeugma
I participate in a weekly syntax reading group (though my participation is decidedly less frequently than weekly). This semester our desired topics all ended up starting with the letter A: adverbials, argument structure, adjuncts. After several weeks of readings, we were reaching a point where we felt satisfied with our coverage of material, and were thinking about what to read for the next meeting. Someone suggested we should move on to the Bs, which immediately brought up binding, and so we moved on to the Cs (control? case?). Then someone suggested that we instead just go for the Zs, at which point the only possible suggestion was zeugma.
We then got sidetracked into a little discussion of exactly what zeugma was, and an example was brought up that was sited at a campus health facility. It went something like
Please do not place or take away anything in this box
Nice. This might actually be a good argument for undergraduate syntax students for seeing exactly why the structure of this sentence is…well, strange. And of course also an example of the sort of thing that, while unexpected if you’re a syntactician, is basically understandable (maybe we can find out how long the sign has been there, and how often its message is misunderstood).
The next step is, as someone suggested at the meeting, to call of the facility and say, “I’d like to report a very serious case of zeugma.”
[Yes, yes, this is not a typical case of "zeugma" as (I think) most linguists understand it; there isn't any lexical ambiguity with both meanings realized by different conjuncts, nor have two incompatible valences of a single verb been combined into a single clause. But I think we can expand our definitions a bit, can we not?]
I’d tag it as zeugma. At first, instead of looking for a single word having two meanings or categorizations, we can just give the entire PP two categorizations, looking at it from a categorial grammar standpoint. First categorization: The meaning for take away anything in this box could be adjectival or adverbial, and I’d assign it the category NP\NP or (VP/NP)(VP/NP) depending on what meaning is intended. Second categorization: For place anything in this box, where the PP is a complement to place, you can categorize the PP as an oblique-marked NP, or as one of the previous categories, just as long as you make sure the category for place calls for the appropriate category as a complement.
Now, a revision: You can still pin this all on one word’s having multiple categorizations (and therefore multiple meanings), by giving in the category X/NP and Y/NP, where X and Y are whatever categories you settle on for the PP as a whole for its two meanings.
Ah, cool idea. I hadn’t thought to place it on the (inverse) selectional properties of the PP. Though I don’t know exactly the “meaning” consequences for either choice - would they mean different things due to some inherent semantics of the various categories, or would they “eventually” mean different things due to semantic composition, which would follow syntactic composition?
I’m also confused by “(VP/NP)(VP/NP).” Should there be a \ in there? (I freely admit that any ability I have to read CG notation is completely by analogy to H/GPSG.)