Just as a side comment to Ed's note on the NP Accessibility Hierarchy,
I've had quite a number of students in the past few years tell me that
examples of "OCOMP" relatives with initial than" ("than whom no one is
smarter") are "ungrammatical." I'm obviously not sure *why* this is
happening, but I have a some guesses (not necessarily mutually
exclusive):
(1) OCOMP relatives are rare because they're hard, and since they're
rare, students frequently haven't encountered enough of them to
establish a sense of "okayness."
(2) English is "losing" OCOMP relatives, which it previously had.
(3) (Really iffy) OCOMP relatives were consciously developed by analogy
to other relatives, and English never really "had" them in any
significant sense. What my students have lost the illusion (developed
from seeing examples in print) that it was a "normal" part of the
language.
As the NPAH would suggest, what they sometimes *do* when faced with a
situation that could be resolved with an OCOMP is to use a resumptive
pronoun (That's the guy who I'm taller than he is).
They also use "That's the guy that I'm taller than," and I suspect this
involves treating "than" as a preposition.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 10:45 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Meaningful Mistake?
John,
All of your suggestions are interesting and would lead to useful class
discussion. Let me suggest another take on the sentence, though. There
is a construct in linguistic called the Noun Phrase Accessibility
Hierarchy, developed in the 70s by Keenan and Comrie. It's basically a
Gutman scale, for you stats hounds, of grammatical positions in which
noun phrases can occur:
Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Object of a Preposition >
Possessive > Object of a Comparative Particle
There is more than one version of this in the literature, but the
overall structure stands. The point of it is if that we can extract, or
refer to, NPs in a particular position, we can do so with all those
above it in the hierarchy. An example is relativization:
Subject: The woman who/that/?0 met me at the airport
DO: The woman whom/that/0 I met at the airport
IO: The woman whom/that/0 I told about the accident
OP: The woman whom/that/0 I talked to about the accident
Poss: The woman whose/*thats/*0 brother met me at the airport
OCP: The women smarter than whom/*that/*0 few men are
Notice that wh-words work well down through Possessives. "That" and 0
stop at OP.
The hierarchy can be extended to other constructions in which we tend to
find resumptive pronouns, as in
The guy that if you see _him_ you should run the other way
Here _him_ is object of a subordinate clause within a relative clause, a
position we can't normally relativize on, and so when English speakers
feel compelled to do so they stick in a resumptive pronoun.
Your case differs from these in that it seems adverbial, rather than
nominal, but that would also put it farther down in the hierarchy, and
the adverbial marking is simply omitted in conversational English. The
sentence might feel more correct if it ended with "if you suffer from
it." But in speech we do find lower levels of accessibility in use, and
they seem to work, because speech has more redundancy to it than
writing.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
[log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Dews-Alexander
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: July 24, 2008 5:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Meaningful Mistake?
I want to throw a sentence to the members of this listserv and see what
comes back!
When I teach composition or linguistics, I like to stress the relevance
of analyzing "mistakes" (clear deviations from Standard Written English
and/or outright ungrammatical utterances) in order to find the meaning
behind them. In nearly all instances of speech or writing, we are
attempting to convey meaning. When something comes out wrong, there is
still a meaningful force behind it, and, sometimes, we can puzzle out
what meanings were trying to break through. If we can figure out what we
were trying to say, it is a lot easier to try again!
I recently ran across an utterance that piqued my nerdy interest. Here
it is:
"They can help you a lot. There's not a sleeping disorder out there that
they can't vastly improve the quality of your life."
The speaker is participating in a documentary about sleeping disorders.
He is a narcoleptic, and English is his first language. When he says
"they," he is referring to sleep specialists and other such medical
professionals.
Do you think that this is just a mistake that happens in live speech
because his "filter" couldn't keep up with his rate of speech? Or is
there meaning here that can be analyzed by those interested in such
things? Would it be going too far to suggest that he may be "forcing"
agency front and center in the clause "that they can't vastly improve
the quality of your life"? Did he realize half way through that he
wanted the emphasis to be on the doctors, not the disorder? Is there an
ellipsed "by treating" or some other extension at the end of the
sentence that he thinks is understood?
I'd love to hear any comments on what happened here. Thanks!
John Alexander
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