Risky RNR
From Daily News and Analysis (of India), 9/10/06, the
beginning of
a story on the interrogation of an Osama bin Ladin aide:
[1] NEW YORK: CIA interrogators stripped naked and played earsplitting
music to Abu Zubaydah, the first henchman of Osama bin Laden
captured by US after the September 11 attacks there five years ago,
according to a media report.
Several things have gone entertainingly wrong in the bolded
coordination: the constituents aren't parallel in their syntax, since
the shared object NP "Abu Zubaydah" is factored out of the middle of
"stripped ___ naked" but from the end of "played earsplitting music to
___" (this is a kind of WTF coordination, a topic last discussed in
these pages
here);
partly as a result, the first conjunct is most easily interpretable as
intransitive (rather than the intended transitive), with the
interrogators themselves stripping naked; and partly as a result of the
reduced coordination (in this case, the construction traditionally
called Right Node Raising, or RNR for short), the reader is invited to see the stripping
and music playing as part of a single event, with the stripping as
prelude to the music. Melissa Bollbach, who sent me the
quotation, was moved to wonder "whether they gave him a lap dance too",
adding that she guessed "it depends where they draw the secret line of
approval for torture methods."
You can see how the writer got into this mess. And it turns out
that simple fixes won't do; fairly major reformulation is called for.
It's important that this is the very beginning of the story. The
writer has to identify the newsworthy event -- CIA interrogators
stripped Abu Zubaydah naked and (also) played earsplitting music to him
-- and the principal participant(s) in it: Abu Zubaydah was the first
henchman of Osama bin Laden captured by (the) US after the September 11
attacks there five years ago. Just saying these two things in two
sentences doesn't really work, no matter which order you put them in; the
identification of Abu Zubaydah is subsidiary material, and should be in
some kind of subordinate structure.
So we try to slot the identification in after the first mention of the
man:
[2] CIA interrogators stripped Abu
Zubaydah, the first henchman of Osama bin Laden captured by (the) US
after the September 11 attacks there five years ago, naked and played
earsplitting music to him.
This is prosodically rotten, with the very short constituent "naked"
marooned after the very long parenthetical.
How about putting "Abu Zubaydah" (with its accompanying parenthetical)
after "naked"? This is marginally possible, because English
allows long, complex, and heavy direct objects to be located later in
their VP, rather than immediately after their verb; the construction is
sometimes called Heavy NP Shift. There are two problems.
One, parentheticals don't usually count much towards heaviness for the
purposes of Heavy NP Shift, so [3] is only as good as "CIA
interrogators stripped naked Abu Zubaydah", which is not very good at
all. And two, we now have "naked Abu Zubaydah" as a possible
constituent in [3] (even a plausible one, given the fact that Heavy NP
Shift is a pretty rare phenomenon, even in the formal writing that is
its natural home); this is a nasty potential ambiguity. So [3] is
worse than [2].
[3] CIA interrogators stripped naked
Abu Zubaydah, the first henchman of Osama
bin Laden captured by (the) US after the September 11 attacks there
five years ago, and played earsplitting music to him
Better idea: let's hold the long parenthetical off to the end.
But this gives a personal pronoun with a parenthetical attached to it,
a very awkward construction: the pronoun wants to be unaccented because
it's anaphoric, but it also wants to be accented, to serve as the host
for the parenthetical:
[4] CIA interrogators stripped Abu
Zubaydah naked and played earsplitting music to him, the first henchman
of Osama
bin Laden captured by (the) US after the September 11 attacks there
five years ago.
Ok, let's also hold "Abu Zubaydah" off, and use a pronoun with
"stripped naked": cataphora. Cataphora within a clause is
marginal at best; the smoothest examples of cataphora have the pronoun
in a subordinate clause ("While he was in school, Albert was not a
stellar student"). In the CIA sentence, the reader is likely to
be puzzled by the "him": just who is this person?
[5] CIA interrogators stripped him
naked and played earsplitting music to Abu Zubaydah, the first henchman
of Osama
bin Laden captured by (the) US after the September 11 attacks there
five years ago.
What other ways are there to hold "Abu Zubaydah" off to the end of the
clause? Well, instead of a pronoun object we could have an
omitted object: reduced coordination (of the RNR type,
specifically). Doing this mechanically, merely omitting the
object, gives us the disaster that is [1].
The easiest fix for the WTF problem in [1] would be to replace
"stripped naked" with a simple verb, like "stripped" or
"undressed". Aside from the fact that these aren't nearly as
vivid as "stripped naked", they have the same spurious intransitive
reading as [1]:
[6] CIA interrogators stripped/undressed and played earsplitting music
to Abu Zubaydah,
the first henchman of Osama bin Laden captured by (the) US after the
September 11 attacks there five years ago.
Another lexical fix would be to supply a verb construction that's
parallel in form to "played earsplitting music to"; the choices aren't
as vivid as "strip naked", but maybe we can live with that. While
we're at it, we could fix the one-event implicature of [1] by adding a
clarifying adverb:
[7] CIA interrogators removed the
clothes from and also played earsplitting music to Abu Zubaydah,
the first henchman of Osama bin Laden captured by (the) US after the
September 11 attacks there five years ago.
Now, finally, we have something that's grammatical and introduces no
problematic ambiguity or unintended implicature. Still, it's
scarcely splendid. RNR just isn't an easy construction to
process; [7] is mighty clunky.
A relatively minimal fix is to re-cast the sentence as a passive, with
"Abu Zubaydah" as subject:
[8] Abu Zubaydah,
the first henchman of Osama bin Laden captured by (the) US after the
September 11 attacks there five years ago, was stripped naked by CIA
interrogators and also had earsplitting music played to him.
I know, I know, you're saying
Avoid
Passive, and in this case that makes sense, because [8] suggests
that the article is going to be about Abu Zubaydah (because "Abu Zubaydah" is the subject of [8]), whereas in fact
it's about the actions of the CIA interrogators; Abu Zubaydah just
happens to be the guy they got to practice their methods on.
Another tack: get "Abu Zubaydah" into a subordinate structure, as in
something like:
[9] CIA operatives/agents
interrogating Abu Zubaydah,
the first henchman of Osama bin Laden captured by (the) US after the
September 11 attacks there five years ago, stripped him naked and also
played earsplitting music to him.
This one's pretty good. Good enough that we can now see a defect
in all the versions so far: stripping him naked and playing
earsplitting music to him are merely presented as two actions, without
any indication of what connects them. In fact, the headline that
eventually got attached to the article makes the connection explicit: "CIA used
harsh questioning methods on Osamu aide". Stripping him naked and
playing earsplitting music to him are two instances of harsh
questioning methods. Let's bring that out in the text:
[10] CIA interrogators used harsh
questioning methods on Abu Zubaydah,
the first henchman of Osama bin Laden captured by (the) US after the
September 11 attacks there five years ago, stripping him naked and also
playing earsplitting music to him.
There are other possible variants, but at least we're now in pretty
good territory, grammatically, stylistically, and rhetorically.
One final reflection: all this discussion has been about one sentence,
and then only certain aspects of it. Getting this first sentence
formulated involved vast numbers of decisions and choices on the
writer's part: what to focus the article on, what information to put in
and what to leave out, what words to use, what syntactic constructions
to use, and on and on. As soon as you realize the magnitude of
the task, you see that almost all of this performance has to be
unconscious, even automatic. No one could possibly weigh all of
the alternatives at each point, much less consider them in all possible
combinations. Instead, for the most part the writing just happens
(if you're a practiced writer, of course).
It's a lot like speaking, in fact, even though you have more time to
reflect on your productions in writing than in speaking. Nobody
has enough time to reflect on more than a tiny part of the task.
Which is part of the reason why usage advisers so frequently violate
their own (explicitly formulated) rules. When they're writing,
they're mostly on automatic pilot, just like the rest of us, and their
internalized grammars get to do their stuff.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 13, 2006 01:59 PM