circumlocution

Steven Pinker explains why we use veiled language when everyone knows what is really meant

explaining anti-causatives to non-linguists

A (non-linguist) friend of mine sent me a question yesterday.  He asked why the sentence in (1) is not acceptable for him:

1. We use a methodology we have evolved over the past 15 years.

First of all, even my friend who asked the question knew it was a problem with the verb "evolved".  He said he thought it was because 'evolve' is a "reflexive verb" -- not a bad guess for a non-linguist, and in fact a label that some grammarians may use -- but he also said that he didn't know how that answered his question or what a reflexive verb would be.

So, I asked a few other conveniently near-by people for their judgments.  Of the 3 additional people I consulted, only 1 (that is, 1 out of 5 speakers who gave a judgment) accepted it.

Seeing as the problem centered around 'evolve', I decided to consult the Oxford English Dictionary, to see what usages are attested for the verb.  In fact, the definition listed as 6a says 'evolve' is a transitive verb, meaning: "[...] to develop (an idea, theory, or system). Also intr."  Note that its intransitive usage is labeled as an "also" -- almost an afterthought.  This is strange because it's pretty much the only usage I have for that verb.

ANYWAY, I decided to write back to my non-linguist friend with an appropriately assuming-nothing explanation, and then today I thought I'd post that explanation here.  Enjoy!

Many verbs have as their subject a thing that is actively doing something or experiencing some mental process.  So in "Jack ate vegetables" Jack is actively doing something, and in "Jack likes music" Jack is experiencing some mental process.  These are called active (as opposed to, say, passive) transitive verbs.

Not all active verbs have an object.  In a sentence like "Jack danced" Jack is still actively doing something, and in "Jack thought", Jack is still experiencing some mental process.  These are called active intransitive verbs.

Some verbs do other things with their subjects.  So consider "John broke the vase" -- here 'break' is behaving like a normal active transitive verb (like 'eat').  But now the sentence "The vase broke" might seem strange -- 'break' is not behaving like an active intransitive verb (like 'dance').  Instead, the object of breaking ("the vase") can be put where subjects go in the sentence, but it doesn't mean the vase did any active breaking of things.  There are *a lot* of different names for this kind of verb.  I'll call a verb like 'break' a verb that exhibits an active-anticausative alternation. (If you're interested, you can read more here)  So, 'break' is an active transitive verb in "John broke the vase", and it's an anticausative intransitive verb in "the vase broke".  (Some grammarians may call this a 'reflexive usage' because in many Romance languages, the same word ['se' in French/Spanish and 'si' in Italian] is used to both make reflexive sentences like "John hit himself" and anticausative sentences like "the vase broke".)

There are lots of verbs that have this active-anticausative alternation in English (break, burn, grow, close, open, harden, inflate, melt, sink, etc, etc.).  But not all verbs do this -- consider "John ate vegetables" and "Vegetables ate."  The second sentence doesn't make sense -- even though "The vase broke" does make sense.  Some verbs allow this alternation, and others don't.

Which verbs allow this alternation is, in some senses, random.  It is not something inherently derived from logic or anything -- but it is just something that gets memorized.  (This point is shown by the fact that young children often make mistakes in this regard -- for example, they think "I danced the clown" is fine and means "I made the clown dance".  This is [partially] because there is no logical reason to assume that it should be impossible.)  Some dialects of English allow you to say "The toy boat floated" and "John floated the toy boat".  Personally, in my dialect, only the former sentence -- with the anticausative intransitive usage of 'float' -- is a possible sentence.

This is what's at the core of the "evolve" sentence.  For many speakers (myself included), only the anticausative intransitive 'evolve' is possible (as in "My position on the matter evolved"), and the active transitive usage is *not* acceptable for me (as in "I have evolved my position on the matter", which I find to be a strange sentence).  However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, there is a definition of 'evolve' that allows an active transitive usage.  Their definition 6a says "transitive [...] to develop (an idea, theory, or system). Also intr."

The way I would explain this is that there are some differences in different dialects of English -- some allow a transitive usage of 'evolve' and others don't.  Based on the sources of the real-world examples given in the OED, I would guess that this usage of 'evolve' may be something possible in British dialects.  In other words, "we use a methodology we have evolved over the past 15 years" is unacceptable to you and me (as speakers of whatever dialect we share) because we cannot say "we have evolved a methodology" -- because 'evolve' is only an anticausative intransitive verb in our dialect.

This is meant in no way to indicate that either dialect is "more right" -- quite the contrary.  All I mean to show is that what we call "English" is actually a collection of different grammatical systems that are similar enough to be called the same language.  The ways in which the dialects differ are arbitrary.  (Consider the fact that in British English you can say "Have you a new car?" whereas in American English you must say "Do you have a new car?".  Why this is can be explained, but it's, again, entirely arbitrary.)

In summary, the verb 'evolve' has different usages depending on what dialect you speak -- and not everyone accepts all logically-possible usages in their dialects.

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?