More WTF coordinate questions
Today's find in the world of WTF coordinate questions is
(1) Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks
English?
This is the title of a book by war reporter Edward Behr that was
mentioned on NPR yesterday morning. It's a quote from a British
television reporter who Behr observed looking for interviewees in a
Congo airport in the 1960s. Appallingly callous, but my topic
today isn't the morals of journalists, but the twists of coordination
in English.
We've been here
before,
though with a slightly less complicated example:
(2) Are you like most Americans, and
don't always eat as you should?
The slight complication in (1) is that it's missing an initial
auxiliary verb (
has) -- but
casual variants of English yes-no questions lacking an initial
auxiliary are common and have been much studied. In fact, what
the television reporter said is quoted in a number of places, including
Brewer's Famous Quotations
(Nigel Rees, 2006), as having been
(3) Has anyone here been raped and
speaks English?
Examples like (2) and (3) aren't nearly as bad as the failures of
superficial parallelism in them -- a clause with subject-auxiliary
inversion conjoined with a finite VP -- might lead you to expect, and
they present serious problems for a reduction analysis of coordination,
in which shared material in parallel positions is "factored out".
[A couple more examples from real life: from Paul Kay on 9/13/06, a
television commercial for the over-the-counter sleeping medicine
Lunesta, noted 9/11/06:
Do you wake
up in the night and can't go back to sleep? And from
Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky on 2/14/08, a notice at Kepler's book
store in Menlo Park CA:
Do you like
to knit but are looking for a meaningful project?]
Here's the problem: leaving out many important details, examples like
(2) and (3) appear to have something like the structure
Aux Su [ Complement-of-Aux Conj VP ]
but Complement-of-Aux here (
like most
Americans in (2),
been raped
in (3)) is non-finite (not even necessarily a verb phrase), while VP
here (
don't always eat as you should
in
(2),
speaks English in (3))
is finite, and these are not parallel. Worse, though Aux + Su
here is
interpreted as combining with Complement-of-Aux (
are you like most Americans in (2),
has anyone here been raped in
(3)), only Su (
most Americans
in (2),
anyone here in (3)),
and not Aux + Su, is interpreted as combining with VP, since Aux is
incompatible with the initial auxiliary (*
are don't always eat as you should
in (2), *
has speaks English in (3)).
Such examples resist ordinary "reduced conjunction" analysis.
Instead, as I observed back in 2005, things like (2) and (3) seem to be
simply the yes-no question counterparts to declaratives like
(2') You are like most Americans, and
don't eat as you should.
(3') Someone here has been raped and speaks English.
(which have ordinary conjoined VPs). As I said then,
Semantically, this is just right.
And pragmatically: coordinating the
VPs conveys that [VP Conj VP] taken together are to be understood as
characterizing a single state. But there's a syntactic problem:
[examples like (2) and (3)] have the inversion associated with yes-no
questions only in
the first clause. It's as if the syntax follows the
semantics/pragmatics in treating [VP Conj VP] as a unitary constituent,
with the first V as its head.
In a
later
posting I returned briefly to these WTF coordinate questions and
alluded briefly to three alternative analyses for them, all of which
treat them as involving a coordination of some constituent with an
ELLIPTICAL
subpart, rather than as being "reductions" of coordinations of full
clauses. (I owe these ideas to Language Log and ADS-L readers who
wrote me about my first posting and to colleagues at Stanford who
commented on a presentation I gave in August 2005.) All would
treat simpler coordinations like
saw
Kim and Sandy as [
saw Kim]
and [Ø
Sandy] (or, better, [
saw Kim]
[
and [Ø
Sandy]], but I'll put aside the
question of where conjunctions fit into these structures), but via
different formal mechanisms:
Idea 1: the Ø is an instance of
zero anaphora, as in Verb Phrase Ellipsis (They told me to go, but I didn't want to
Ø).
Idea 2: the Ø is an instance of "functional control", as in Kim wants Ø to leave.
Idea 3: the Ø is part of an Initially Reduced Question, as in
(1) vs. (3) (cf: Ø Sandy gone
yet?).
There are knotty technical questions here. I bring these three
ideas up only to demonstrate that there are alternatives to the
reduction idea. A little more on this below. But first, a
note that standard assumptions about constituency might also be called
into question. The usual assumption about (3') is that it has a
coordinate VP:
[ Someone here ] [ [ has been raped ]
and [ speaks English ] ]
But once the possibility of ellipsis comes into play, we can entertain
the possibility that (3') has instead a structure that fits better with
(3), something like:
[ [ Someone here ] [ has been raped ] ]
and [ Ø speaks English ] ]
(something along these lines has been proposed by John Beavers and Ivan
Sag in a 2004 paper, "Coordinate ellipsis and apparent non-constituent
coordination",
Proceedings of the
HPSG04 Conference).
A final remark on "deletion", "omission", "reduction" and similar turns
of phrase. These terms, which strongly suggest an analysis in
which one construction is secondary and is in some way derived from
another, primary, construction via various formal operations, can be
deeply misleading. (The terms are useful, maybe necessary, but in
the end they're just terms, not claims to truth or any kind of
analysis.) Even when the historical sequence seems clear, my
current position is that once the variants are out there, they are just
variants; they will share elements of their structures, true, but
they'll have their own details and uses and lexical idiosyncrasies and
the like. Each should be described on its own. We should
take seriously the idea that "reduced coordinations" are not just full
coordinations with some pieces left out, but might be constructions in
their own right.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 29, 2008 11:57 PM