Prosody and anaphora (again)
From Ken Belson, "At I.B.M., a Vacation Anytime, Or Maybe No Vacation
at All",
NYT 8/31/07, p. 1:
"If leadership never takes time off,
people will be skeptical whether they can," said Kim Stattner of Hewitt
Associates, a human resources consultant. "There is a potential
for a domino effect."
On first reading, I took
they
to refer to the company's leadership: never taking time off suggests
that they aren't in fact able to do so, that they're compelled to
work. On reflection, and taking into account the following
allusion to a domino effect, it became clear to me that Stattner was
saying that employees ("people") would be reluctant to take time
off. My first reading comes from taking the pronoun
they to have the ordinary prosody
of anaphoric pronouns: unaccented. What Stattner actually said,
however, surely had a contrastive accent on
they, a prosody that's not
represented in any way in the
Times
report.
There are ways to represent this prosody. For example, in a
Zits cartoon I
reproduced
here on May 12, a contrastive accent is indicated by bold-faced
italics:
Jeremy's mother: I trust Hector.
Hector is a Good Boy.
["Good Boy" is in italic script, suggesting yet another special prosody]
Hector objects to Jeremy: I don't call her names.
But the
Times (like
newspapers in general) is very sparing indeed with special fonts within
the body of stories or editorial pieces (a number of readers have
suggested to me that this allows for material to be sent electronically
as plain ascii text). A while back, I
posted
on another
NYT piece
where a special font would have been useful to represent contrastive
accent:
Reducing unintended pregnancy is the
key -- half of pregnancies are unintended, and 4 in 10 of them end in
abortion.
To get the intended interpretation here,
them must be read with contrastive
accent, which is not represented in the text as printed. In this
case,
these or
those would have done the trick,
but in the vacation story the writer was pretty much stuck with the
words Stattner uttered; the only good alternative is to shift from
direct quotation to a less direct representation of Stattner's words --
something like:
Kim Stattner of Hewitt Associates, a
human resources consultant, observed that if leadership never takes
time off, people will be skeptical whether they themselves can.
Probably the writer didn't see the problem here: as in the abortion
story, the writer no doubt heard the words in his head with contrastive
accent, and didn't see that what was on the page could very easily be
read otherwise.
[Addendum 9/2/07: A correspondent writes to say that the -s on "takes" indicates that "they" cannot refer to the leadership. As we've pointed out several times here on Language Log, the facts of usage are that a great many speakers allow "they" to be anaphoric to a collective noun -- that is, to refer to the members of an entity introduced into the discourse via a collective noun like "leadership" -- and that this possibility is available even when, as here, the collective noun has singular number agreement. For such speakers (I am one, and Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum are others), the unintended interpretation, with apparently unaccented "they" referring to the leadership, is easily and immediately available.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 1, 2007 12:07 PM