Opening Parliament and deliver a speech
Back on 11/5/07, I caught this on
BBC
News on NPR:
Queen Elizabeth will be opening the
British Parliament ... and deliver a
speech.
I balked. It sounded to me like a GoToGo sentence --
I'm going to the library and study for
my test.
in that it seemed to have a present participial VP (
opening the British Parliament,
going to the library) paired in
coordination with a base-form VP (
deliver
a speech,
study for my test),
when only the first structure would be licensed by the relevant head V,
(apparently)
be. But
the cases differ: the details aren't quite the same (GoToGo mostly has
going to, or at least some
present-participial motion verb plus infinitival
to, while the QE example seems to
have no such restriction on its first conjunct); and for me (and some
others), the GoToGo examples are just fine, while the QE example struck
me as bizarre.
Then I saw that the QE example had a acceptable parsing, though not
one that was easy to discern.
This is the parsing in which the VP is
[ will ] [ [ be opening the
British Parliament ] and [ deliver a speech ] ]
that is, as a reduced variant of
[ will [ be opening the British
Parliament ] ] and [ will [ deliver a speech ] ]
from which the shared head
will
can be "factored out". The result is a coordination of two
base-form VPs (
be opening the British
Parliament,
deliver a speech),
so what's the problem?
Well, two problems. The first, and more subtle, is that though
both VPs in this analysis are in the base form, and so are in some
sense parallel, they are different internally:
be opening the British Parliament
is a progressive VP,
deliver a speech
an unmarked-aspect VP. Now though it would be lunatic to require
in general that conjuncts be internally parallel (see my extended
attack on this idea
here),
sometimes the internal composition of the conjuncts does make a
difference. The trick is to figure out when and how.
I'm a linguist, so I play with the variables and see what
happens. First, I note that other progressive+plain examples are
also dubious:
I must be going soon and deliver a
speech.
I have been going to Paris and gone to Vienna as well.
but that the reverse ordering is much less jarring:
I will deliver a speech in Antwerp and
be going to Brussels soon after.
I have gone to Vienna and been going to Paris as well.
I've jiggled the context a bit to improve these, but the important
points are (a) that it's incredibly hard to improve the
progressive+plain examples much by jiggling the context, and (b) the
reordered versions are hugely better than the originals.
Similarly, compare the original QE example with this (improved) variant:
Queen Elizabeth will open the British
Parliament ... and then be delivering a
speech.
So, yes, ceteris paribus, we'd often prefer parallel conjuncts to be
parallel internally.
BUT there's something else
going on.
The extra thing is a processing strategy, an analogue to what's known
in the trade as Low Attachment: when a modifier follows a modified XP
ending in an XP, the default is to interpret the modifier as attached
to the structurally lower of the two XPs. So, for example,
confronted with a NP of the form
NP1 [ P NP2 ] [ P NP3 ]
without any information about the content of these expressions, most
people will take [ P NP3 ] as modifying NP2 rather than NP1, that is as
having the structure
NP1 [ P [ NP2 [ P NP3 ] ]
rather than
[ NP1 [ P NP2 ] ] [ P NP3 ]
Advice manuals warn you against high-attachment structures, telling you
that modifiers
MUST be next to the things they modify,
and they supply what they take to be dire examples, like this one from
Richard
Lederer:
An ethnically diverse crowd of about 50
gathered at the Falkirk Mansion in San Rafael yesterday for a speakout
against hate crimes organized by the Marin County Human Rights
Roundtable.
(Lederer understands the sentence to be saying that it was it hate
crimes, rather than the speakout against them, that the Rountable
organized.)
But in the real world, low attachment is not a rule but a (default)
preference, and context and real-world knowledge often favor high
attachment (as indeed they should in Lederer's example). Compare
the low-attachment
an inventory of errors that were
printed in the NYT
with the indisputably high-attachment
an inventory of errors that was larger
than any previously published
I have a pile of high-attachment examples, and so do other
people. Most such examples pass by without notice, because their
interpretation is clear in context. There is no grammatical rule
here.
Back to the original case, involving coordination (rather than
modification). The
be going to
segment in the QE example can be parsed as
be followed by a coordination:
[ will ] [ be [ [ going to ... ]
and [ deliver a speech ] ] ]
(a kind of low attachment for
deliver
a speech), or it can be parsed with
be going to as the beginning of the
first conjunct:
[ will ] [ [ be going to ... ]
and [ deliver a speech ] ]
(a kind of high attachment for
deliver
a speech).
The first is the analysis I gave to the QE sentence at first, without
reflection. For whatever reason (psycholinguists, to your labs!),
we very much prefer low attachment here -- but it just won't fly,
because of the non-parallel conjuncts. High attachment hard to
get, low attachment not parallel.
The reason reordering the conjuncts improves things so much is that in
the reordered coordinations there is no choice in the parsing of the
be going to... segment, since it's in
the second, and final, conjunct, which has to be taken, as a whole, to
be in coordination with
deliver a
speech. Any residual problems with the reordered
coordinations presumably have to do with the semantics and pragmatics
of progressive aspect and unmarked aspect.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 16, 2007 04:57 PM