Article-article article abstract
Below is a conference abstract for a paper that grew, in part, out of
material I was preparing for Language Log. The paper was
scheduled to be given at the American Dialect Society meetings in
January, but because of sickness I wasn't able to give it then. I
then started expanding the abstract into a posting for Language Log,
but of course it's been ballooning. So here's the abstract as a
promissory note.
Article-article article:
Faithfulness meets Well-Formedness (again)
Case 1. Some proper names in English begin with an article:
The Simpsons. Proper names
can be used as prenominal modifiers --
Macbeth performance -- but then
these nominals need a determiner to serve as full NPs:
a/the/this Macbeth performance.
What happens when we put these two things together:
a The Simpsons show (preserving
both articles) or
a Simpsons show
(suppressing one article to fit the syntactic patterns of English)?
Case 2. Some quantity modifiers in English begin with the article
a:
a lot. Quantity modifiers can
modify comparatives --
much bigger
-- and the combinations can modify nouns --
much bigger dog -- but the
resulting nominals need a determiner to serve as full NPs:
a/the/this much bigger dog.
What happens when we put these two things together:
an a lot bigger dog (preserving
both articles), or
a lot bigger dog
(suppressing one article)?
In both cases, Faithfulness (Faith: preserve the form of the proper
name or quantity modifier) conflicts with Well-Formedness (WF: make
things fit the syntax of the language). When Faith meets WF,
there are several possible outcomes: stalemate (neither resolution
acceptable), resolution in favor of one or the other alternative,
variation (both resolutions acceptable).
For article + article, pretty much everything goes, but it's not
chaotic. In general, WF usually wins, but all possibilities are
attested; the two cases are not entirely parallel; and the choices
depend a lot on the particular items involved and the contexts they're
in.
I relate these two conflicts between Faith and WF to a large number of
other cases, involving the conventions of punctuation, capitalization,
and spelling; the treatment of taboo vocabulary; "semantic" vs.
"grammatical" determination in agreement; assignment of nouns to Count
vs. Mass; and much more.
Appendix: Faith vs. WF on Language Log:
1/29/06:
Dubious quotation marks
4/9/07:
Ducky identity
8/1/07:
Cousin of eggcorn
8/12/07:
e e cummings and his iPod: Faith vs. WF again
9/21/07:
Punctuational hypercorrection
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 23, 2008 10:26 AM