More risky RNR
Ben Zimmer ran across this puzzling coordination on the website for the
University of Chicago's Workshop for the Anthropology of Latin America
and the Caribbean, at the very beginning of an
announcement for a workshop (on responding to the movie
Apocalypto) this Wednesday:
Do, and if so, how should academics
engage with popular culture?
This would appear to be a reduced coordination, of the sort known in
the syntax literature as Right Node Raising (RNR). The unreduced
version would be:
Do academics engage with popular
culture, and if so, how should they engage with popular culture?
RNR is versatile, but not versatile enough to treat a yes-no question
and a
WH question as equivalent structures.
RNR (
last
discussed here back in August) allows for coordinations of
the form
[ X Z
] and/or [ Y Z ]
(where Z is a constituent, but X and Y are not both constituents) to
have the right constituent Z "factored out", giving
[ [ X ___ ] and/or [ Y ___ ] ] Z
So, for the coordination of VPs
[ bring liquids to this machine ] or [ place liquids on
this machine ]
we get the RNR version
[ [ bring liquids to ___ ] or [ place liquids on ___ ]
] [ this machine ]
(where
bring liquids to and
place liquids on are not
constituents), which is the VP in
Do not bring liquids to, or place
liquids on, this machine.
This is an acceptable reduced coordination. (It's the acceptable
version of the damaged RNR "Do not bring to, or place liquids on, this
machine" in the August posting.)
On to academics engaging with popular culture. The unreduced
version seems to have the form
[ do academics
engage with popular culture ] and [ how should academics engage with
popular culture ]
(omitting the
if so, which is
important for the meaning but not crucial for the structure). So
X is the inverted auxiliary
do;
Y is the fronted
WH word
how in combination with the
inverted
auxiliary
should (a combination
that is certainly not a syntactic constituent); and
Z is apparently a
base-form clause,
academics engage
with popular culture. If so, then the badness of the RNR
version
[ [ do ___ ] and [ how should ___ ] ]
[ academics engage with popular
culture ]
is mysterious.
But there might be an explanation. The English Subject-Auxiliary
Inversion (SAI) construction has been the focus of quite a lot of
literature over many years, and one of the issues surrounding it is the
question of what the structure of inverted clauses is. There are
three possibilities (assuming that constituent structures are
continuous):
(1) two-part: Aux + base-form clause
(consisting of Subj + complement of Aux)
i.e., [ do ] [ [ academics ] [engage with popular culture
] ]
(2) two-part: Aux and Subj together in a constituent + complement of Aux
i.e., [ do academics ] [ engage with popular culture ]
(3) three-part: Aux + Subj + complement of Aux
i.e., [ do ] [ academics ] [engage with popular
culture ]
Theoretical considerations have figured very prominently in the
literature on the structure of SAI clauses. Within some
theoretical frameworks, only structure (1) -- the one I assumed at
first in my discussion of the popular culture example -- is
possible. In other frameworks, what the correct structure is is
an empirical question, and many writers have opted for structure (3)
(which is, in fact, my choice). The evidence in favor of
structure (2) -- with Aux + Subj as a constituent of some novel type --
isn't zero, but it's not very compelling, so the matter pretty much
comes down to a choice between (1) and (3).
And now RNR is relevant. With structure (1), we have no obvious
explanation for the problem in our original example. But with
structure (3), we have an immediate explanation: the "factored"
material, in bold face, does not constitute a single syntactic
constituent; instead, it's just two constituents in sequence, and the
conditions for RNR are not satisfied.
Some other, invented, examples that seem to me as bad as the original:
Will, and if so, when will, you finish
the project?
How do, in fact, do, you work
long hours?
(It hadn't occurred to me when I started writing up this one odd
example that it might bear on the analysis of SAI. This is an
example of how "little" Language Log postings can turn into something
more substantial.)
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 6, 2007 03:39 PM