Denotation switching
Mark Liberman
puzzles
over this passage from a story on the Ig Nobels:
The winners are discretely contacted
beforehand to give them an opportunity to decline. It is a testament to
the growing prestige of the event that very few turn down the offer and
agree to attend at their own expense.
One way of characterizing what the problem is here is that turning down
the offer is predicated of some small number of winners, denoted by
"very few" -- call this small class of downturners
T -- but the writer's intention is
to convey that agreeing to attend at their own expense is predicated of
the
COMPLEMENT OF T,
not
T: it's the people who
don't turn down the offer who agree to attend at their own
expense. You just can't do this by conjoining the VPs "turn down
the offer" and "agree to attend at their own expense" with the shared
subject NP "very few", because "very few" must be understood as
simultaneously denoting
T and
~
T -- a straightforward
violation of what I called, in
an
earlier posting on failures of parallelism in reduced coordination,
the Factor Constancy condition: in factorable coordination, the factor
must have the same semantics in combination with each of the conjuncts.
That's not quite the end of things, however. In similar examples
involving not coordination but anaphora (zero or overt), it's much
easier to get away with this sort of denotation switching. Here's
an instance I brought up on the American Dialect Society mailing list
back in May, from the
Palo Alto
Daily News ("City OKs university land deal" by Jason Green) of
5/4/05, p. 74:
Although touted by university officials
and city staff as a historic deal, not everyone was in favor of the
agreement, including council member Yoriko Kishimoto. Of the six
council members eligible to vote on the Mayfield agreement, Kishimoto
cast the sole "no" vote.
In the first sentence from the
PADN,
the inclusion of council member Yoriko Kishimoto is predicated of some
group not overtly mentioned in the phrase "including council member
Yoriko Kishimoto". This is zero anaphora. So we search for
an appropriate discourse referent for the anaphor, if possible one
recently mentioned in the discourse. Well, the subject of the
main clause of that first sentence is "not everyone", which predicates
less-than-universality (within the universe of relevant people) of the
class of those in favor of the agreement, and so indirectly introduces
this class -- call it
F -- as
a discourse reference. Could
F
be the discourse referent that the zero anaphor picks up?
No: the writer's intention is clearly to convey that Kishimoto is
included in ~
F (the class of
people opposed to the agreement), not in
F. Still, the sentence isn't
so bad (though it was troublesome enough for me that I reflected
on it). ADS-L posters ranged from those who found it plainly
ungrammatical to those who had little problem with it.
At this point, as so often happens on ADS-L, Larry Horn stepped in to
tell us that there's actually some literature about this phenomenon:
If anyone is really interested in this
from a theoretical/empirical direction, there have been a number of
publications by Linda Moxey and Tony Sanford, including their book Communicating Quantities (1993), on
what they call "Comp-set" as opposed to "Ref-set" reference, i.e. cases
in which the reference is to the complement of the set specified ("Few
of the students passed, because they [= the ones who didn't] hadn't
taken the test seriously" vs. "Many of the students passed, because
they [=/= the ones who didn't]...).
Horn's example of Comp-set reference involves an overt anaphor, "they",
but the Kishimoto sentence shows that the same thing is possible
with zero anaphors, at least for some people.
Still another zero-anaphor example, again from
PADN (Health column, "Fall of
Atkins diet traced", 9/15/05, p. 45):
Although studies showed the diet helped
followers lose weight -- and quickly -- the Atkins dropout rate was
high. Few managed to stay on the diet for an entire year,
complaining that, eventually, even an unlimited amount of steak and
eggs can become boring. Others suffered unpleasant side effects...
Here, the complainers are (presumably) the many who didn't manage to
stay on the diet, not the few who did. The same is true of a
version with an overt anaphor:
Few managed to stay on the diet for an
entire year; they complained that, eventually, even an unlimited amount
of steak and eggs can become boring.
To sum up: Comp-set reference is possible, for at least some speakers
in some contexts, for both overt and zero anaphors, but not
(apparently) in (reduced) coordination. It's not customary to
think of coordination as being in any way like anaphora, so this
difference between the two domains is scarcely a surprise. But
you
COULD think of reduced coordination as being akin
to zero anaphora, with the factor constituent overt with one conjunct
but zero with the other, so that "saw Kim and Sandy" would have a
structure like:
[saw Kim] [and ___ Sandy]
(where the underline marks the position of an omitted V, which is
interpreted as picking up the reference of the preceding V
"saw"). In case you're tempted by this proposal, the
unavailability of Comp-set reference in reduced coordination should
make you think twice.
But I'm not done yet. Ok, maybe reduced coordination isn't really
much like zero anaphora, but it might be like another class of
omitted-constituent constructions, namely those involving "functional
control" (rather than anaphoric control), as in "Kim wants to leave",
with a structure like:
[Kim] [wants [to ___ leave] ]
Just such a proposal was made to me, very tentatively, by Paul Postal
in e-mail following my
Language
Log posting of 6/10/05, on "WTF coordinate questions" like:
Are you like most Americans, and don't
always eat as you should?
Have you written a thesis, but have no idea what to do next?
There's a lot to work out about this idea, and I'm still playing with
it, though I have to say that my thinking about these WTF coordinate
questions has led me away from anything resembling functional control
and towards still another class of omitted-constituent constructions,
namely Initially Reduced Questions like:
Have no idea what to do next? 'Do you
have no idea about what to do next?'
Anxious about your exams? 'Are you anxious about your exams?'
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 8, 2005 03:00 PM