August 25, 2007
Liquid syntax
Bruce Lin took a picture of this sign on a coin-operated video game machine in a pub in Cambridge, UK, and sent in a link. His first thought was that this is a case of syllepsis, but then he wasn't sure. I don't think that it's an example of syllepsis in the classical sense, though it does share the trait of coordinating items that aren't strictly parallel. In any case, we can certainly count it as an example of the broader category of WTF coordination. But as Bruce observes, it's hard to classify this one, because "the wording doesn't fully make sense", even if we give the sign-maker a pass on coordinating unlike items.
If the sign read
DO NOT BRING LIQUIDS TO,
OR PLACE LIQUIDS ON,
THIS MACHINE
then it would be a standard example of what linguists call "right node raising". This term was coined because in place of a structure like this (in tree form)
we get one with a single copy of the noun phrase "this machine" -- on the right -- which is not embedded as nodes 5 and 8 inside the two prepositional phrases 4 and 7, but instead is placed as node 9, raising it to a higher level in the structure, parallel to the disjunction "bring liquids to __ or place liquids on __" .
But to get Bruce's pub sign, we've somehow got to get rid of the first copy of "liquids". And I can't figure out what made the sign writer think that this was a plausible thing to do. Maybe too many liquids brought to, and placed in, his or her mouth. (If you have another theory -- or better yet, some more data -- please let me know.)
I have to admit, though, the sign writer's solution is a lot better than flushing the second copy of "liquids". In other words, I'm claiming that the choice
DO NOT BRING TO, OR PLACE LIQUIDS ON, THIS MACHINE
though flagrantly ungrammatical, is somewhat easier to make sense of than
DO NOT BRING LIQUIDS TO, OR PLACE ON, THIS MACHINE
Well, maybe not. Of course, something like
NO LIQUIDS NEAR THIS MACHINE!
or just plain
NO LIQUIDS!
would actually be grammatical, and would leave space for
OR ELSE!
or some more specific threat.
But signs are tough.
[Update -- Kilian Hekhuis suggests that the sign might have started out as one of the kinds of incompletely-parallel coordination that we've batted back and forth with Neal Whitman. Then the writer "fixed" it.
In reply to your article "liquid syntax", I think it may be likely the sign-writer originally had created a sign saying "do not bring or place liquids on this machine" (in analogy to, say, "do not prepare or eat food here"), then realized 'bring' needed a different preposition than 'on', and stuck 'to' after it, yielding "do not bring to or place liquids on this machine", perhaps regarding 'to' and 'on' as parts of the verbs instead of the prepositional phrases 'to the machine' and 'on the machine' (analogous to e.g. "prepare and finish up your food").
]
Posted by Mark Liberman at August 25, 2007 07:12 AM