Noncompositional

The recent break in posting will, I’m afraid, likely continue for about a week, as I gear up for a couple of presentations at the ICCG. In the meantime, the assignment is to think about the word say. Outside of quotative inversion, I can think of at least two constructions where say acts exceptionally: one imparts say with an otherwise-unseen valency, and in the other, say imparts upon the construction an external distribution that is otherwise illicit.

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)?

What are the restrictions, if any, on the “[noun (phrase)] [conjunction] [clause]” when it has a conditional interpretation? The most commonly cited illustration of this construction is one more step and I’ll shoot. IIRC, the CGEL describes this construction as a fragment plus clause, with various (pragmatically-derived/enriched) interpretations, not all of them conditional. But it seems like some very particular noun phrase must be in the first slot in order to get the right interpretation.

In particular, it seems that any NP that contains “set-modification” words works: more, another, additional, less, fewer. These can of course be modified with numbers. And, just plain enumerated sets are mostly fine, though they are interpreted as having a meaning of “more”: (just) three hybrids and I’ll be satisfied (e.g., someone wanting to see three more hybrids drive by before going on to do something else).

Some things definitely don’t work. You can’t say a lot of illicit magazines and I’ll punish them to describe a situation where you promise to punish someone if it is discovered that they were hiding a bunch of Playboy magazines. It seems really strange, though barely possible, to out of the blue say Noam Chomsky, or I’m outta there if you want to say that you’ll only attend a lecture if Chomsky is the lecturer (or the topic, or present in the audience, etc). This works if Noam Chomsky is an answer to a question, in which case it evokes the entire omitted proposition; then the conjunction would be between like types (Who do you want it to be? –(I want it to be) Noam Chomsky, or I’m outta there. Though, now that I think of it, this isn’t your straightforward conjunction either; it means something like NC had better be there, otherwise I’m outta there.)

I think the title says it all: He’s a professional figurer outerer for this type of problem. Hey, as long as we’re showing parallelism by duplicating agenting -er, we may as well have paralellism in number of syllables and qualities of rimes.

On a side note, I think it’s almost a truism that searches that get fewer ghit are more interesting.

Part of journalistic writing involves a use of the word to that means roughly ‘will.’ For instance, a recent Chicago Tribune headline reads Major urban areas to get Homeland Security grants, and the Guardian reports that Oxford colleges to keep control of admissions. This is possibly an extension of the “scheduled to” meaning of (be) to, but it often has a distinct meaning in headlines.

This can appear within speech act verbs, like this recent Bloomberg headline Inco Indonesia Says Fire to Crimp Weekly Output by 1 Mln Pounds.

New, another fact about headlines is that if the matrix and immediately subordinate subject are identical, then the second mention is optionally omitted, resulting in: headlines like Iran says will not negotiate on uranium enrichment. Sometimes this results in headlines that I find a bit odd, like India’s United Breweries says wants to keep Taittinger jobs.

How about when the special to is the main predicator in the subordinate clause? Well, the result is this headline that I saw today: Sun Micro says to cut up to 5,000 jobs. The unfortunate thing is that say to already has its own idiomatic meaning (‘tell/suggest to someone that they blah’), which results in a very strange headline indeed. Some more examples: KDDI says to offer Sony Walkman phone in Japan, Shanda says to develop online game with Disney, Pacific Ethanol Says to Build Oregon Fuel Plant. These all involve say, mostly because that’s what the initial headline had, but also because it’s easy to search for.

What’s interesting is that it’s totally unclear how one should read a headline like this. If you use “normal” intonation, it sounds like the ’suggest’ meaning. One possibility is to put a pretty big pause between say and to, sort of like there were a colon there. But this still sounds undeniably odd. It’s probably best to do what some organizations did and kill the say, as in Sun to cut up to 5,000 positions.

But now you can read all sorts of normal headlines as having rather funny meanings: consider Dept. of Homeland Security Says to Stop Using IE and Tsunami expert says to expect the unexpected.

My apologies to those who happened upon the site today and were met with a database error message. The problem has miraculously resolved itself and will hopefully not come back (though I’m fairly sure what the cause is, and if it does come back it may be a few hours after I notice it before it is fixed).

Until next time, consider why preposition-deletion should be licenced in the same locations as NPIs are:

Do you have the faintest / any idea who that guy was? I have no idea who that guy was. *I’ve got an idea who that guy was. I’ve got an idea of who that guy was. ?I’ve got some idea who that guy was.

(Before anyone tries to give me counterexamples: don’t worry, I’ve already found about 30 of them in the BNC. This, however, dwarfs the 1000 or so that are under negation or in otherwise nonveridical contexts (or however you like to talk about NPI licensing.))

Yet another installment in the series where I observe grammar letting people talk about what they’re talking about.

Last week (or so) on a show on the Food Network about how people make it in the food industry/service world, a coffeeshop owner was being interviewed on how he got his business started. He said, paraphrasing,

I didn’t originally want a coffee shop. What I really wanted was to have a place that sold really nice, gourmet sandwiches and salads that by the way had great coffee.

I can’t recall exactly the prosody on the by the way, but it didn’t have so-called “comma intonation” – that is, it wasn’t marked off from the rest of the sentence with a pause and a compression of frequency. There might have been some prosodic setting-off, including some extra umph on the “way.” In any case, even though the guy is not quoting any particular person, directly or indirectly, he inserts a discourse marker like “by the way” to evoke the idea that this was how people would be talking about his store. Or, perhaps he’s done yet another leap and quasi-un-grammaticalized the marker “by the way” to mean ‘as a minor/side point.’ (I don’t know what to call the change of discourse marker > semantic-ful adverbial)

Next, consider again.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about scales lately: scales that come packaged with gradable adjectives, those that are pragmatically constructed, the ones that tell you that you weigh too much. This morning I was thinking about a particular construction that talks about (for lack of a better term) sufficiency with respect to scales. The basic form is [A as N is, X], where A is an adjective (phrase), N is a noun (phrase), and X is some clause.

• Rich as she is, she can buy anything he wants.
• Rich as she is, she still probably couldn’t afford a house in this part of town
• Short as he is, he could still pass for a child / he could use his student ID card for the rest of his life.
• Short as he is, he would never pass for an elementary school student.

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