Language Log

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:


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:


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].


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:


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?


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]:


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:


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:


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:


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:


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.

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Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 13, 2006 01:59 PM