You jerk!

Last night I was upset and yelled at a friend:

1. Don't do that, you jerk!

This got me thinking about the idea that pronouns are Determiner heads with some kind of NP ellipsis, which has been proposed in Elbourne 2002 (and earlier). In other words, maybe sentence 1 is the D with the NP complement, but no ellipsis.  Elbourne 2002 discusses things like this in section 2.1.2, and he provides the following data from Postal 1966:

1. we Americans
2. us linguists
3. you Communists
4. (dialectally) them guys, (Scots) they Sassenachs
5. You troops will embark but the other troops will remain.
6. We Americans distrust you Europeans.

The general idea is that pronouns like 'we', 'us', 'you' and maybe 'them'/'they' are determiners just like 'the'/'these'.  (Postal 1966 gives reasons why these are not vocatives or appositives, some of which are summarized in Elbourne.)  In normal contexts, then, when you say "You are tall", there is ellipsis of the NP complement of 'you'.

I like this analysis.

But then I got to thinking more... why does standard American English only allow 'you(pl)' and 'we'/'us' to be used in this way?  Note that 'you(sg)' like I mentioned earlier can only be used in when 'you NP' is some kind of vocative (like in example 1).  Consider the paradigm below:

7. * I linguist am fun.
   * John likes me linguist.
8. * You linguist are fun.
   * John likes you linguist.
9. * She linguist is fun.
   * John likes me her linguist.
10. We linguists are fun.
    John likes us linguists.
11. You linguists are fun.
    John likes you linguists.
12. % They linguists are fun.
    % John likes them linguists.

Only a small portion of Ds behave in the way this kind of analysis would allow.  So, what bars 8-10 for everyone, and 13 for some dialects?  Weirdly, the dialects that allow "they NP" and "them NP" seem to be mutually exclusive (as far as I know).  It might be tempting to think that having a component of 'you' in your pronoun is a requirement, assuming that 'we' = 'you' + 'I'.  However, English 'we' can be exclusive -- example 11 above can be said when it means "Mary and me", excluding the addressee.  But even if 'you' were a necessary component, what would that mean?  That 'you' is the only D with an NP complement?

I'm sure the data might get even more complex if we look closer, and I suspect Postal did in his 1966 paper.  However, that's not readily findable online (and I don't have time to look this up in the library right now), and even if he had the generalizations to describe the data patterns in 8-13, he probably doesn't give an analysis that fits in modern linguistic theory.

So here are our generalizations on English pronouns with NP complements:

• Generalization 1: Singular 'you' can have an NP complement, but only when it is vocative.
• Generalization 2: Only plural pronouns allow an NP complement in argument positions.
• Generalization 3: Standard dialects only allow first and second pronouns to have NP complements.
• Generalization 4: Dialects may allow third person pronouns to have NP complements, depending on the case of the pronoun.

This leads to a bigger picture generalization:

• Big Generalization: UG provides a way for pronouns to have NP complements, but may be sensitive to the pronoun's case/number/person features.

I don't have any hypotheses right now explaining these generalizations, but maybe I'll come back to this some day.  Does anyone out there have some ideas?

If I were you, I'd do yourself a favor and shower.

I was reading a blog today and came across a sentence that the author felt ambiguous about (at least, so I infer, based on his writing):

If I were you (don't worry, I'm not), I'd do yourself (myself?) a favor download it

It's clear that the author was joking (based on the first parenthetical), but it doesn't seem entirely infelicitous to use either one.  So I did a little Google research, and searched some strings, the results of which are below:

• 47 hits: "you i'd do myself a favor" or "you i would do myself a favor"
• 24 hits: "you i'd do yourself a favor" or "you i would do yourself a favor"

While it's clear that people prefer "myself" in these situations, it's also clear that it is a grammatical utterance to say something like "If I were you, I'd do yourself a favor..."  But I wonder if there are any meaning differences, or other ways in which the choice of  "myself"/"yourself" affects the structure/binding.

What are your judgments? Do you have any thoughts about the distinction between the sentence with "myself" and the sentence with "yourself"?

california vowels

just saw this on tv. the vowels are so delightfully californian. the "no!" around 1:42 is just priceless.

both easy to share and not easy to share

burger king has a new ad campaign.
     (1)  BK minis are easy to share.  But that doesn't mean they're easy to share.

of course, using at-first-sight-ungrammatical/infelicitous slogans (perhaps to shock you into paying attention?) isn't anything new (campbell's "soup that eats like a meal" comes to mind).  but this seems dangerously close to the kind of ling-101-semantics-lecture level of contradiction that should be impossible for any speaker.

so why isn't it so bad?  it seems to me to be a case of two kinds of implicit arguments. they way i believe we're meant to interpret the slogan as (2), where i've put the interpretation of the implicit argument in square brackets:
     (2)  a. BK minis are easy [one] to share.
           b. But that doesn't mean they're easy [you] to share. 

that is, (2a) is a generic statement about the by-design nature of the product small and sharable -- for anyone.  but (2b) is a specific statement about the actual state of affairs for you, the listener.  the being-advertised-to.

perhaps this distinction between the two implicit arguments in (2a) and (2b) is clearer in a variation of (1), as in (3): 
     (3)   I know BK minis supposed to be easy [one] to share.  But that dosn't mean they were easy [me] to share when I bought them yesterday.

to be clear, the second sentence cannot involve a "I" controlling a PRO (there is no c-command in this case).  it seems that this context just facilitates a generic interpretation in the first sentence, and a specific one in the second.

these implicit arguments would seem to be what are generally put under the umbrella of PROarb.  that is, a PRO-like silent category that can have arbitrary reference.  what i think (1) shows is that PROarb can come in two different flavors: generic or specific.  does that mean that we need two different lexical items, PROarb-gen and PROarb-spec?  or, does semantics/pragmatics distinguish the two in the relevant way so that (1) is not a contradiction?

i don't know much about the PROarb literature.  but this is my i-don't-know-much-about-this-topic-but-i'll-speculate-about-it-anyway answer.  as always: thoughts?

stativity and modality

thanks to a language log post, which pointed out the irony in the following headline, a question i've had before (but haven't done any research on) is once again on my radar.

of course, what is being pointed out is that "you can't belong in Britain" is ungrammatical.  what's being taken for granted is why that should be.

to me, this seems to be a problem with 'can' and statives. the examples in (1) are all ungrammatical, but the examples in (2) are just fine:
    (1)  a. *You can't belong in Britain if you don't speak English.
         b. *He can't know Marie - they've never met.
         c. *They can't like milk if they're vegan.
         d. *I can't possibly care about what happened at work.
    (2)  a.  You won't/might not/couldn't belong in Britain if you don't speak English.
         b.  He won't/might not/couldn't know Marie - they've never met.
         c.  They won't/might not/couldn't like milk if they're vegan.
         d.  I won't/might not/couldn't possibly care about what happened at work.

why (1) should be out is not straightforward, and i have struggled with trying to explain it to non-native speakers learning english.  moreover, it's not as simple as "stative verbs cannot appear with 'can'" because sometimes 'can' with a stative verb is possible:
    (3)  a.  You can't have personal belongings as a monk.
         b.  Four people can't live in a one-bedroom apartment.

though i can't quite put my finger on what the analysis would be, i have a feeling it's related to the fact that stative verbs often get a generic/habitual interpretation when in the present tense.

...thoughts?

'singular they'

when facebook doesn't know the gender of one of its users, it "panics" when it needs to refer to them with a pronoun.  what to do?  "he/she"?  "this person"?  well, what facebook does is use the pronoun otherwise used for third person plural.

this is actually a reasonable choice. if you go back to the first sentence of this post, you'll see that's actually what i did as well (without even thinking).  people have been using they/them/their in these situations for quite some time[1], as randall munroe points out in an old xkcd:

indeed --there are situations in which they/them/their is often the only felicitous option.  for example, if you're driving down the highway, and you notice someone's taillight is out, (1b) or (1c) would seem to indicate something about the speaker's knowledge/beliefs on the gender of the driver, whereas (1a) remains happily agnostic about the issue of gender:
     (1)  a.  That person probably doesn't know their taillight is out.
          b.  That person probably doesn't know his taillight is out.
          c.  That person probably doesn't know her taillight is out.

but! can you just use they/them/their as "gender-free" (or even "number free" -- "No matter whether 1 student takes the class or 20 students take the class, they'll be surprised") in any situation you like?

this seems to be the assumption facebook makes (or, if they're not assuming so, they're willfully ignoring grammar and using "they" as in a "it's the best option we've got" way).  for example, i have a friend, shannon (even this person's name is ungendered!) who prefers that facebook not know his/her gender.  whenever shannon changes profile pictures, facebook reports it as:
     (2)  Shannon changed their profile picture. 
then, when i read this, i do a double-take.  it doesn't seem felicitous.  but why not?  if "they" were really gender/number-free, (2) should be, in principle, grammatical.  similarly, (3a) should be as grammatical as (3b):
     (3)  a. #Matthew₁ is a good student. They₁ always do their₁ homework.
          b.  [Sara and Jane]₁ are good students. They₁ always do their₁ homeworks. 

perhaps, then, (2) and (3a) *are* grammatical -- in the narrowest sense.  they are ruled out for independent pragmatic reasons: "you have the information that matthew is male, so you should use the appropriately gendered pronoun".

or maybe they are ungrammatical for reasons of grammatical features: "the gender/number-free they is additionally marked as indefinite".  this has been proposed by Pinker [2],  but it raises a new question.  how many "they"s are there?  is there one with features [3rd, pl, def] and another with the features [3rd, indef]?  alternatively, could it be that there is exactly one "they" whose features are [3rd] and its being infelicitous in (2) and (3a) is a non-featural (perhaps pragmatic) one?

one last alternative.  perhaps this has to do with grammatical plurality.  that is, 'they' really is [3rd, pl] in cases like (1a), and it's just that grammatical plurality would be the elsewhere case, and singular is used only when the speaker believes there is exactly 1. for example, in the phrase "___ books" i can use literally any number, except "1". i could use "1.4", "0", "232", etc.  and when i ask the question of "how many", you have to use the plural noun, as in "how many books".  this is the case even if i am biased into thinking there is actually only 1 (for example if i only see the outline of 1 book in your shopping bag), i cannot ask "how many book".

the main question we're left to chew on: why does 'they' get used in situations like (1a) and what restricts it against appearing in (3a)?  is it the issue pragmatic, lexico-featural, or part of the larger issue of plurality?