More gapless relatives
Mark Liberman has just
posted
about this instance of a gapless relative in (non-standard) English:
How can we provide a service that the
consumer goes, "Wow, you really made this easier for me"?
As it turns out, non-standard English has (at least) three types of
gapless relatives, two with pronouns instead of gaps, and the type
above, with neither a gap nor a pronoun.
The example above has a NP of the form
a
service that the
consumer goes X
(where the head is italicized and the relative clause bolded).
There's no gap in the relative clause corresponding to the head, nor is
there any pronoun performing that function. The head picks out a
type of thing (in this case, a service), and the relative clause gives
us characterizing details about the particular instance of this type;
the example above is roughly paraphrasable as "the sort of service such
that the consumer goes X".
This is not an especially convincing example of a gapless relative,
since it might be analyzed as merely missing a preposition, that is as
a truncated version of
a
service that the
consumer goes X about
(Recall our discussion of missing prepositions in a series of
postings that
began
in 2005 and
picked
up again this year.)
But it's not hard to find other examples that don't submit so easily to
this analysis. Here, for example, is Peggy Noonan in the
Wall Street Journal, as reported to
the newsgroup sci.lang by Ron Hardin on 6/29/06 (italicization and
bolding as above):
Frank Rich is running around with his
antiwar screeds as if it's 1968 and he's an idealist with a beard, as
opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come
out.
A version with explicit anaphora to
his
ears is just as problematic as the original:
a guy
who if he pierced his ears gravy would
come out of them
The pronouns
he and
his in the subordinate clause
if he pierced his ears aren't
relevant here, as you can see from recastings with
such that:
a guy
such that if he pierced his ears gravy
would come out (of them)
(which is clunky but standard English) and with a gapped relative:
a guy
who if he pierced his ears ___ would
have gravy coming out of them
(which is also standard).
One more, from radio station KFJC's Robert Emmett, on the
Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show
of 3/12/05:
There are films that you are lucky that you don't have to
sit through the whole thing.
I'll call these
NoPro gapless
relatives, to distinguish them from gapless relatives with "resumptive
pronouns" in them. Resumptives are pronouns that function in
relative clauses much like gaps do in English. They are
incredibly common in the languages of the world; often they are just
the ordinary personal pronouns put to this special purpose. This
is the case in non-standard English usage, as in the resumptive variant
of the last ear-piercing relative above:
a guy
who if he pierced his ears he would
have gravy coming out of them
I'll call this sort of example, where the resumptive is in alternation
with a gap, a
ResPrince
gapless relative --
Res for
resumptive,
Prince for Ellen Prince, who's
studied them (see her 1990 article "Syntax and discourse: a look at
resumptive pronouns", in BLS 16.482-97). Another example, a
paraphrase of Michael Moore speaking in his movie
Fahrenheit 9/11, as discussed on
the OutIL mailing list in October 2004:
Iraq, a
country that it has never
attacked us, that it has never
threatened us...
The gapped variant is fine (and standard):
Iraq, a
country that ___ has never
attacked us, that ___ has
never threatened us...
Still another example, from a
NYT
op-ed piece by Peter Guralnick on 8/11/07:
Or, as Jake Hess, the incomparable head
singer for the Statesmen Quartet and one of Elvis's lifelong
influences, pointed out: "Elvis was one
of those artists, when he sang
a song, he just seemed to live every word of it..."
This one has the extra complication that the relative clause is a "zero
relative", with no relativizer, and also a "subject relative", in which
the relativized element within the relative clause functions as the
subject there. Subject zero relatives like "There was a farmer
had a dog" are non-standard (though they do occur). Eliminating
that non-standard feature still leaves us with a non-standard ResPrince
case:
one
of those artists who/that, when he sang a song, he just seemed
to live every word of it
The gapped version is possible, and standard:
one
of those artists who/that, when he sang a song, ___ just seemed
to live every word of it
Prince wrote in e-mail at the time that in her 1990 article she
argued that [these resumptives] occur
in either nonrestrictives or else (this kind of) restrictives with an
indefinite head -- the two kinds of relatives where the relevant entity
is evoked by the head alone. (I.e. where the hearer can retrieve or
create the discourse entity as soon as the head is uttered, without
having to wait for the relative clause, as one has to with definite
head restrictives.)
She noted that such resumptives are perfectly standard in Yiddish,
though they're non-standard in English.
The ResPrince examples differ from another use of resumptives in
English -- to serve in place of gaps in positions from which
"extraction" is barred, as in this example from an interview on NPR's
Morning Edition on 3/19/07 (the
interviewee is talking about Wal-Mart):
They have a billion dollars of inventory that they don't know where it is.
Extraction from inside adverbial subordinate clauses is generally
barred (in the technical terminology of syntax, adverbial subordinate
clauses are
islands for
extraction):
*They have a billion dollars of inventory that they don't know where ___ is.
Resumptives are non-standard, but in such cases they're much better
than their gapped counterparts, which people usually find
incomprehensible, or at least very hard to comprehend. I'll call
this sort of example a
ResIsland
gapless relative.
A problem in analyzing the data: there are some examples that have a
pronoun in the relative clause which is anaphoric to the head of the
clause but where there can be some doubt that this pronoun is actually
resumptive; these might really be (still more) NoPro cases rather than
ResIsland cases. Here's Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye, quoted in
the
New Yorker of 3/14/05, p.
132:
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you
wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you
could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
There's a fair amount of irrelevant detail here. In particular,
the second conjunct in the coordinate object of
wish is beside the point.
Also, the
it in the
subordinate
when-clause is
not the issue here. Eliminating this stuff leaves:
a book
that you wish the author that wrote it
was a terrific friend of yours
The question is now what the status of the remaining
it (referring to the book)
is. Is it a resumptive pronoun, or just an ordinary anaphoric
pronoun? Certainly the pronoun is not omissible:
*a
book that you wish the author
that wrote ___ was a terrific friend of yours
But is that because something has been extracted from inside a relative
clause (another kind of island), or because pronoun arguments are not
normally omissible in English, as in the example below?
Here's a recent book. *I
wrote. [meaning 'I wrote it']
Maybe the
it is incidental to
the matter, as would be suggested by the fact that the relative clause
(with head
the author) that
it's in can be removed, leaving us with a pretty clear NoPro case:
a book
that you wish the author was a
terrific friend of yours
So maybe the original Caulfield
example is a NoPro case too.
I have a few more of these.
A final note: once again, non-standard usage in English reflects
syntactic patterns that are standard in other languages. NoPro
relatives are like relative types in (among other languages) Japanese
and Korean; ResPrince relatives are like a relative type in (at least)
Yiddish; and ResIsland relatives involve resumptive pronouns of a very
ordinary sort -- deployed in English to allow expression of meanings
that can't be easily expressed by gapped relatives, which are subject
to constraints on extraction, while pronouns are not.
Non-standard (and regional and social) varieties are languages, period,
and can be expected to exhibit phenomena found in varieties (standard
or non-standard) of other languages. As a result of this fact,
studying a range of non-standard (etc.) varieties of one language can
provide a rich set of data -- not unlike those derived from typological
studies of the ordinary sort and fieldwork on little-known languages --
about what languages can be like. This is a commonplace among
linguists, but it's not always appreciated by other people.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 14, 2007 04:02 PM