Language Log

From the headline desk at Language Log Plaza

Here at the headline desk at LLP, we don't write headlines, we analyze 'em.  The latest headline episode began on Wednesday with Ben Zimmer's puzzlement at the following head on a Reuters story:


At least that was the head here at the time.  What you get at that site now is


and a somewhat rewritten story.  In the interim, Barbara Partee found the rewritten story with yet another head:


These two are entirely ordinary as headlines, but the original is remarkable.  We gathered around the water cooler and I delivered a long lecture trying to assimilate the "say kill" head to some other remarkable heads I looked at back in 2005 (which I'll get to in a little while), while Heidi Harley speculated that it was just an editing error.  Then Barbara and Ben found some more heads like the first, most of them on Reuters stories, and we were obliged to find some sort of analysis for them.


So, some hits.  From Barbara:


Ben then searched on Factiva for {"say find"} and found 31 heads, all but one from Reuters, e.g.:


At this point the water cooler crowd proposed that that the headlines are of the form:


which is almost an ordinary headline, except that the finite complement of say is missing a subject:


In this analysis, both the main clause, with say, and the complement clause, with find, are in the "headline present", interpreted as present, present perfect, or past, depending on the context.  There's nothing unusual about that.  But subject omission in a complement clause (though attested) is rare in English, even in registers where subject omission in main clauses is commonplace, as in:


The subject-omission proposal is supported by headlines with 3sg present finds in the complement (just in case you thought kill and find in the earlier examples were base-form, rather than present-tense, verbs):


and by headlines with past-tense found in the complement:


This particular headline formula seems to be mostly a Reuterism, but it has a robust life on that news service.   Subject omission in complement clauses lives!

Now to the odd headlines from 2005, all of them reported by Ron Hardin on the newsgroup sci.lang (and many of them  commented on by me on the American Dialect Society mailing list at the time).  All but one were from AP wire stories Hardin found in the Washington Post:


These are all of the form:


The other headline came from the Scientific American; it has a reduced predicate, found 'is found':


The interpretation of such examples is along the lines of:


(Notice how different this is from the "say find" headlines, where the initial NP serves as the subject of a form of SAY.)

Your first inclination is probably to try to relate the Hardin headlines to garden-variety headlines like


and, yes, the infinitival-passive headline formula exemplified here no doubt played a role in the creation of the Hardin formula, but there's no way to see the Hardin pattern as simply a telegraphic version of the infinitival-passive pattern (which is itself quite close to ordinary English).  The Hardin pattern is, in effect, a construction of its own, restricted to headlines (and possibly to just a few headline writers).

I'd argue, in fact, that in general it's a mistake to see "telegraphic" or "truncated" patterns as literally reductions of fuller versions, whatever the history of the "abbreviated" versions.  Once the shorter versions are out there, they can pick up new meanings and discourse functions and can undergo syntactic change.  But that's a topic for another day.

Also for another day is the use of Taliban in the original example.  It's a "zero plural" there, functioning as a plural NP syntactically but (in English) lacking an overt mark of plurality.  In addition, Taliban is also used as a mass noun by some people (so that it functions as a singular NP syntactically), and some people have Taliban "doubly categorized", sometimes used as a count plural and sometimes as a mass singular.  These wrinkles in English morphosyntax belong in a follow-up to my posting "Plural, mass, collective".

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Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 28, 2007 08:55 PM