Following up on Geoff Pullum's post about "too complex to avoid judgment", I checked Google for patterns such as "no * is too * to avoid" and "no * is too * to ignore". I find that the "incorrect" interpretations of phrases instantiating these templates far outnumber the "correct" interpretations. I've put "correct" and "incorrect" in scare quotes because if we this were a matter of word meaning, we good descriptive linguists would say that the speech community had simply changed its mind about what the word means, thereby changing the word meaning and making the "incorrect" usage ipso facto "correct".
It's not clear to me what the right analysis is here. One story says that this is a matter of logic, which can't be changed by voting, and that the predominance of wrong usages is to be explained by psychological arguments. Another story says that the language is changing, whether syntactically (English starting to revert to negative concord, which the vernacular has never abandoned?) or semantically (does no in the determiner of a subject NP have some unexplored interpretive possibilities?) or by developing a "construction" with a non-compositional meaning. As a simple phonetician, I'll leave these questions to the professionals, but the first sort of explanation seems more plausible to me, though the second would be more fun.
Here are some details.The pattern "no * is too * to avoid" gets 54 ghits. Most but not all the examples seem to count the negatives wrong:
[N]o executive is too prominant (sic) to avoid the long arm of the law
No one is too young to avoid being tempted
No business is too small to avoid or ignore protecting itself from another business using its name, product, service or invention.
No sacrifice is too great to avoid total destruction in Gehenna.
The seven "sacrifice" cases all seem to be variants of the same religious document, which asserts that "No sacrifice is too great to avoid total destruction in Gehenna." I read this as a "correct" calculation of the meaning: "to avoid total destruction, no sacrifice is too great." Note that in this case, unlike in most of the "wrong" ones, the sacrifice is neither doing the avoiding nor being avoided. There are a few other "correct" usages, but the "wrong" ones far outnumber them.
The pattern "no * is too * to ignore" has 50 ghits, mostly details, errors, issues, advantages etc. that are too small to ignore:
Five Star Events believes no detail is too small to ignore
Kelly... said that in the playoffs no advantage is too small to ignore
No error is too small to ignore - I want to make the second edition perfect!
One writer seems to have gotten his wires more seriously crossed, misplacing "seem" as well as losing track of his negatives:
Everything I seem to have done I have done well in, and no detail is too small to ignore.
Eliminating a few things that don't belong in the output of Michael Leuchtenburg's snowclone_google.pl program, we get as "wrong" examples:
no detail is too small to ignore: 7
no error is too small to ignore: 3
no conflict is too distant to ignore: 2
no issue is too small to ignore: 2
no advantage is too small to ignore: 2
no point is too small to ignore: 1
no profit is too small to ignore: 1
no contribution is too small to ignore: 1
no skill is too small to ignore: 1
no mission is too small to ignore: 1
no amount is too small to ignore: 1
no detail is too minor to ignore: 1
I've eliminated a differently-parsed example that is not relevant: "the problem of no-shows is too costly to ignore". There are only two cases where the literal meaning is (I think!) the intended meaning. However, these examples seem to be sarcastic, which makes me worry about whether I've analyzed them correctlyf:
No blemish is too hard to hide,. No problem is too big to ignore,. As long as you don’t hear complaints,. Why should you care?
Of course, the muted outrage and lack of debate over these lies and prevarications merely adds to the sense that no lie is too big to ignore.
It occurs to me that the mistakes (if that's what they are) may be caused by a sort of constructional resonance. What the writers really want to say seems to be something like "no X is so Y that we (normatively or habitually) Z it", or "no X is so Y that it (normatively or habitually) Zs". However, they can't quite figure out how to frame that in an idiomatic way with the pieces that come to hand, and as their mental generation process is fiddling with the fragments, everything kind of slips into the familiar and similar frame of phrases like "the box is too heavy to lift" or "Kim is too drunk to drive", in the form "no X is too Y to Z". In this solution, the interaction of negation, scalar direction and infinitival control doesn't work out right, but it's hard to calculate these things, and so the result passes muster.
Posted by Mark Liberman at February 21, 2004 08:51 AM