VPE on the edge
Our very own John McWhorter wrote the following
yesterday:
And yet NOO is not "slang" -- it's
grammar. One could write a whole paper on it (and, as it happens, one
is!).
No doubt John knew just what he was doing here: producing an instance
of so-called Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) -- in "one is ___" -- where the
missing material is to be understood as "writing a whole paper on it"
(a present participle VP), even though the antecedent is "write a whole
paper on it" (a base-form VP). I think many readers would have a
moment (up to a few centiseconds, maybe) of pause while they worked
that one out, and possibly they would have had a small spike in their
P600
ERP
responses (but nothing special for N400), indicating that they were
noting a syntactic surprise. He was playing with us, making us do
a little bit of interpretive work and, maybe, giving us some enjoyment
in the process.
[Added 12/29/06: Several readers note that part of the surprise effect is in the shift from truly generic
one to the pseudo-generic
one that refers to the speaker.]
Two things here: what counts as a legitimate VPE (some things are
definitely on the edge); and how to draw the line between creative
language use that stretches the boundaries of grammar a bit and plain
unacceptability (again, there are things on the edge).
Background about VPE: this is an English construction in which the
complement of an auxiliary verb (a modal,
BE, or
perfect
HAVE, plus a few other things for some
speakers) or infinitival
TO is omitted:
(1) I can't juggle knives, but Dmitri can ___.
(2) I'm not going, but Dmitri is
___.
(3) I was attacked by the wolves, but Dmitri wasn't ___.
(4) I'll be unhappy, and Dmitri will be
___, too.
(5) I've finished my work, and Dmitri has
___, too.
(6) I don't want to eat the sashimi, but Dmitri wants to ___.
(The "remainder" elements are bold-faced here, and the missing
complements are indicated by underscores.)
Though the construction is usually known as Verb Phrase Ellipsis
(sometimes Verb Phrase Deletion), the omitted phrase is not always a
VP. In (4), it's an AdjP. "VPE" isn't a bad name, but it
doesn't tell you everything. The slogan is: Labels Are Not
Definitions.
VPE requires a linguistic antecedent -- it's not enough that the
appropriate verbal semantics be "in the air" -- but it doesn't require
that the omitted complement match the antecedent perfectly.
Infinitival
TO as remainder will have an omitted
bare-form VP, but the antecedent can have a different non-finite form:
[present participial antecedent]
Stanford University and the city of Palo Alto are opening up their joint meetings to
the public for the first time in three decades "because there's no
reason not to ___,"...
or a finite form:
[finite antecedent] Mercedes ranks high for dependability but
not as high as it used to ___.
(The head verbs in the antecedent phrases are italicized here.)
Various other mismatches between the omitted phrase and its antecedent
are possible. But some mismatches are edgy, and John McWhorter's
-- present participial omitted VP, base-form antecedent VP -- is one of
them. Here's a parallel example that I copied into a file because
I lingered over it for a slice of a moment:
"We cannot allow energy to divide Europe as Communism once
did," José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president,
told The Financial Times. But it is
___. (Thomas L. Friedman, "The Really Cold War", op-ed piece in
the NYT, 10/25/06, p. A19)
It's not hard to collect even more extreme mismatches, which some
people judge to be acceptable, while others do not. Here's one
Ron Hardin reported on in the newsgroup sci.lang on 9/28/06, from an
NYT editorial:
Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but
President Bush chose not to ___.
Here the antecedent is passive, while the omitted VP is active ("try
and convict those men").
Even further out -- well over the line, for me -- is this one:
Domagk, for his part, believed that he
had run his tests flawlessly. Almost every time they tested an
azo dye with a sulfa side chain, it killed strep; almost every time it did not ___, the effect [of killing strep] was absent
or greatly reduced. (Thomas Hager, The Demon Under the Microscope
(Harmony Books, 2006), p. 174)
Here the antecedent VP isn't explicit, but is suggested by the
prepositional phrase "with a sulfa side chain": "have a sulfa side
chain".
My response to most of the imperfectly matching VPE examples, however,
is that they are either straightforwardly acceptable (and so escape
notice unless I'm specifically looking for such examples) or edgy in
their syntax but interpretable -- much like novel verbings:
Roughly 20 percent of men sexing other
men and catching syphilis indicated only oral sex exposure. (Instinct magazine, December 2004)
I really gangbustered to get it [the project report] out. (Overheard by
Tyler Schnoebelen, March 2005)
Updating my web site to reflect new movie scripts, DVDs and musical
score CDs that the studios have freebied me with ... (Ken Rudolph on
soc.motss, February 2002)
(plus an enormous number based on proper names: the verbs
Bork,
Winona,
Martha Stewart, (
James)
Frey,
Wal-Mart, etc.)
Novel verbings are all over the place; people invent them all the
time. Some critics object to those that have become widespread,
like
access and
dialogue, but as far as I can tell
the objections are really about the tone of these words (they are
administrativese or pretentious, or in the case of
consequence 'punish', euphemistic)
rather than about morphological conversion itself. Otherwise,
verbings are just part of the artistry of everyday language, and like
other artistry, require a bit of work by the audience. They
frustrate the audience's expectation for a split second; resolving the
surprise can then provide pleasure. (For the record, I found John
McWhorter's VPE sentence satisfying.)
But: writing advice routinely counsels against surprising your
audience, against making your readers work. Interpretation is
supposed to be seamless and smooth. It is, of course, only too
easy to find sentences that require far too much work, even in their
context; we comment here fairly often on various sorts of ineptness
that make the reader's task onerous. Still, there ought to be
room for a certain amount of artistry in all sorts of writing; people
shouldn't have to wait until they get their Fine Writer Certificate to
play with some of the available effects.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 28, 2006 09:03 PM