Language Log

Linguistics goes out to dinner

Barbara and I dined last night with her brothers and their combined families at EVOO, on Beacon Street in Somerville, near where (until the end of June) we live. (The restaurant name, by the way, is an acronym, from the initials of Extra Virgin Olive Oil.) Excellent as always. And, linguistics being everywhere, I had the pleasure of noting that one item on the list of specials for May 26 was described using one of the most complex and varied naturally-occurring nominal premodifier constructions I have seen in quite a while:

Garlicky Pork Sausage Stuffed Crisp Fried Maryland Soft Shell Crab

(I omit here the rest of the phrase, which dealt with the accompaniments of Potato Gnocchi, Pesto, Orange Segments, Shaved Fennel and Roaster Pepper Aioli; you may be interested in them, but right now I am interested only in the above nominal constituent.)

The ten words of this syntactically composed phrase yield a fantastically large number of possible parses (the number can be computed using the formula for Catalan numbers, but I am not going to compute it, because if I simply fail to do so, someone with better computational skills will email me with the number later, and will then get their name mentioned on Language Log). If I parse the whole thing correctly, and I think I do, then

• the noun pork is used as an attributive modifier of sausage;
• the adjective garlicky is used as an attributive modifier of the nominal pork sausage;
• the nominal garlicky pork sausage is incorporated (with instrumental meaning) into the complex adjective headed by stuffed;
• garlicky pork sausage stuffed is used as an attributive modifier of the nominal constituent formed by all the subsequent words;
• crisp modifies fried to form a complex adjective;
• the complex adjective crisp fried is used as an attributive modifier of the nominal constituent formed by all the subsequent words;
• the proper noun Maryland is used as an attributive modifier of the nominal constituent formed by all the subsequent words;
• the adjective soft is used as an attributive modifier of the noun shell;
• the nominal soft shell is used as an attributive modifier in a (lexicalized) the nominal constituent whose head is the noun crab.

Thus there are four stacked attributive modifiers of crab. It's not at all unusual to have four modifiers of one noun, of course (my phrase "most complex and varied naturally-occurring nominal premodifier constructions" above has three, counting "nominal premodifier" as one, and I could doubtless have tossed in another one without anyone raising an eyebrow). But the variety and internal complexity of these four caught my syntactician's eye; proceeding from the innermost to the outermost, they are soft shell, Maryland, crisp fried, and garlicky pork sausage stuffed. Three of them are syntactically complex, and each of those has a quite different structure from all of the others. The bracketing of the whole thing is like this:

[ [ [ [ Garlicky] [ [ Pork ] [ Sausage ] ] ] [ Stuffed ] ] [ [ [ Crisp ] [ Fried ] ] [ [ Maryland ] [ [ [ Soft ] [ Shell ] ] [ Crab ] ] ] ] ]

I took all that in at a glance, pocketed a copy of the specials menu so I could explain all this later to you, and turned to a very enjoyable dinner. Linguistics is everywhere. It will even go out to a family dinner with you, and enliven the experience. Linguistics is your friend. Linguistics is like family.

Steve Jones points out that a few hyphens would reduce the ambiguity a lot, and that's true; but the menu was printed with none. Putting hyphens in the right places for optimal parsing is your homework exercise for today.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at May 27, 2006 10:50 AM