Noncompositional

First, yes, I still exist. Moving on…

I was on an airplane the other day, and as one person was about to stow a bag in the overhead compartment his cotraveler gave him a glance, to which he responded, “do you need something out of this bag?”

The sequence “need+NP+PP” potentially has two parses. The first is so-called raising to object: I need you far away from me, I need another flower pot in my garden. In this case what you need is for some state of affairs to hold: “you are far away from me,” “another flower pot is in my garden.” The other parse involves simply an NP complement, with that NP containing the PP: I need the book on that bookshelf, Do you need the cup in my hand? These are paraphrasable with relative clauses; the book that’s on the shelf, the cup that’s in my hand.

When I first heard do you need something out of this bag, it really sounded like the second parse (and I still think that’s what it is). It seems like the guy was asking if his friend needed an item that was in that bag, not if she needed it to be the case that some item ended up outside the bag. That is, he could have said, “Do you need something from this bag?”

Put another way, I find it unlikely that he was asking, “Do you need some (particular) thing to be outside the bag?” especially since what’s involved is ending up holding or using that item, not just it being outside (to keep it safe from tumbling around in the overhead compartment, e.g. Not to say that he couldn’t have said what he said and meant the raising-to-object interpretation; I just think he didn’t.

So the question then becomes: when/why can you use “out of the bag” as a nominal modifier like that? If you say “something is out of the bag,” it ain’t inside it! In general it seems like “N out of Y” can mean “N that is outside of Y, or that could contextually-saliently end up outside of Y.” (I’m talking only of physical things: I haven’t thought about plotlines that look like they’re right out of Star Trek). So you can say “something out of this bag must have gotten left behind when we were in security.”

This generalization will no doubt founder upon the massive amount of data I haven’t considered. Thankfully, I have a lot of free time to figure this out…