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While watching the Daily Show, a commercial came on. Here is the construction:

"...When the Hawk of Achill took a barrel of John Jameson's whiskey, well that was another matter. But Jameson was generous, the Hawk, greedy, very greedy..."

The issue is "Jameson was generous, the hawk greedy." There is no verb in the second construction, and we are asked to fill in the verb from context. This is a no-no in a generative description of English grammar.

Are these sentences acceptable English?

  1. "The doctor put his gown on the table; the nurse, on the cabinet."
  2. "The soldier eats his bread with cheese; the general, with caviar."
  3. "The soldier eats his bread with cheese; the general, his pita with olives"
  4. "The bum sleeps in the streets; the oil magnate comfortably, without snoring, in a bed with sheets."
  5. "The maid spreads the sheet on the bed; my kitchen knife butter on the bread."
  6. "He pitted the two contestents in battle; she, a date"
  7. "He drove a car; she, a point home."
  8. "The surgeon walks to surgery, quickly, and without thinking about all the patients that he lost over the years; John, on the beach."

Is there a discussion of the rules for mystery implicit verbs? Has anyone encountered an implicit verb construction in a newspaper context?

tchrist
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Ron Maimon
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    This sort of verb ellipsis is very commonly discussed in the linguistic literature, and is by no means forbidden by generative grammar. – JSBձոգչ Mar 09 '12 at 19:41
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    This kind of suppletion is fairly common, though it is not always possible (not in all of your examples). Where the verb to be supplied is used with a different meaning, it is called syllepsis or zeugma, and it is not standard, but a rhetorical joke that is also not infrequent. // Why do you say that "This is a no-no in a generative description of English grammar"? Where did you read that? – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Mar 09 '12 at 19:42
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    @Cerberus is correct here (+1) except in characterizing it as a rhetorical joke. There are different kinds of zeugma, of which syllepsis is only one example. See this answer for a view of the distinction between the two. The Jameson ad that furnishes the OP's first example is not an attempt at a joke, but a use of ellipsis for rhetorical effect. – Robusto Mar 09 '12 at 20:06
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    Too many commas in your example, otherwise all somewhat acceptable (in 1, did the nurse put her gown on the cabinet or did the doctor put the nurse on the cabinet>, I can't make sense out of 6) – Mitch Mar 09 '12 at 21:22
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    See also: my answer about syllepsis at this related question – nohat Mar 09 '12 at 23:37
  • @JSBᾶngs: If you post a link to an article or book (hopefully freely available) on this stuff, I will accept this as the answer. Verb ellipsis is something I don't know how to formally handle. – Ron Maimon Mar 09 '12 at 23:55
  • @Mitch: He pitted the two contestents, she pitted a date. It is using the same verb in two completely different senses, so it sounds like the Groucho Marx joke in one of the answers. But it's the same construction. I wanted to know if the verb could change meaning inbetween the two sentence halves. – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 00:19
  • @Cerberus: The reason I said that is not because I read it, but because I saw that the result of this construction can be non-context free. John ate an apple; the cow, the flowers on the lawn; the Mammoth holding the pineapple, the last plate of brie I put out for the guests; the rabid Chihuahua, the Mexican jumping bean which was featured in the best movie made in 2003. This construction requires binding the verb to subjects and objects far away, and so requires a "store" and "restore" of the verb context as you scan. It doesn't have a real parse tree without the verbs restored. – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 00:24
  • @Cerberus: This is also a much easier example of the non-context-freeness of natural language than the Swiss-German nonsense people trot out whenever you bring up BNF in a natural language context. English grammar, disallowing stuff like this, is a straightforward BNF thing (if you order the adjective and adverb phrases correctly for making a tree, which seems to be recommended style). It is not too difficult to fix, but it requires a fix. I don't think it appears in the New York Times. – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 00:26
  • @RonMaimon: Hmm I didn't understand most of what you said. What is BNF? I agree that distance and context matter. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Mar 10 '12 at 00:35
  • @Cerberus: BNF is "Bacchus normal form" or "Baccus Naur form" or some permutation of the spelling and names. This is how you present a context free grammar in a way a computer can understand. It makes units from smaller subunits in a merging way, so that neighboring units clump together to make a tree structure that tells you what verb did what to what subject and what objects. The BNF only works for context free grammars, and it doesn't work for these examples. That bugs me, because 99% of English grammar can be completely described by a simple BNF you can write down. – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 00:41
  • Ron, my comment was not an answer, but the most highly upvoted answer may be pretty close to what you're looking for. You may also be interested in this: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32447/is-there-an-ebnf-that-covers-all-of-english – JSBձոգչ Mar 10 '12 at 01:27
  • @JSBᾶngs: No, the most highly upvoted answer is pointing to a superficially similar but formally entirely different idea of joining verb arguments with "and" (or adjectives, or adverbs), so you say "I walked to the car, to the store, and to the beach." This is no problem at all for generative grammar. The problem is when the verb is implicit and the next stuff is on both sides. I cannot accept the answer, and it should not be upvoted, it misses the whole point. J.R.'s answer is good, I might accept it, but I'll look for refs too. – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 03:51
  • @JSBᾶngs: I am glad this answer is linked--- I will put a reasonably complete EBNF there for English. It is galling that linguists are deluded enough to think that this cannot be produced. – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 04:08
  • To get a truly complete EBNF for English you need some kind of context. Otherwise, as you're finding out, you'll end up including nonsense sentences or missing valid sentences. – Alex Mar 10 '12 at 22:40
  • @Alex: This is sort of correct, but "context" in "context free" is not exactly what you would intuitively mean by "context" in an informal sense (although in the examples of the missing verb, the two notions are the same, this is the reason for the name). Context free grammar (as you possibly know, but then this is for the benefit of others) is a tree-parsable sentence where all components which are joined together are next to each other. All good-style English sentences are made by a context free BNF, and this excludes all nonsense sentences (you get double-if's and too-deep center-recursion) – Ron Maimon Mar 11 '12 at 06:39
  • In the version I saw the line is, "Where the Hawk was greedy, Jameson was generous." –  Nov 21 '12 at 00:00

4 Answers4

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I don't know where you get the idea this is a no-no.

It's a textbook example of Conjunction Reduction, a staple of the generative stable of rules since around 1963.

And it's badly punctuated in the transcript; there should be a semicolon after generous, to indicate full stop intonation. That may have confused you. It was spoken, not written, to start with.

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John Lawler
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  • Thanks! It's a no-no because of the particular way I construct my parse trees--- I center them around the verbs. So new arguments coming later in a separate context require copying the verb context, which is not part of the context free grammar I am using to generate sentences. It's similar to the "did" ambiguity I asked about here: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/60105/can-you-decide-grammaticality-from-the-sentence-alone . – Ron Maimon Mar 09 '12 at 23:48
  • Um, I spoke too soon. The examples you gave of "conjunction reduction" are all reducing verb-argument phrases, adverb-like phrases, or adjective-like phrases, all of which are dead easy to do (you just add a recursive rule ADVERB -> ADVERB and ADVERB and likewise for the rest). It is much more difficult to do a reduction on verbs, because they are framed by recursive stuff on both sides, so this causes non-context-freeness in the grammar in general. I take back the thanks--- your answer is no good (I was going to accept it). – Ron Maimon Mar 09 '12 at 23:51
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    Are reducing arguments the opposite of oxidizing arguments? I'm afraid I don't understand your comments, and I'm also afraid the way you wanna draw your parse trees is, as always, your responsibiity. And non-context-freeness in the grammar is your requirement, not a property of "the grammar". – John Lawler Mar 09 '12 at 23:56
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    Sorry --- reducing an argument is taking "I took the boxes from the plane and the from the trunk of my car to the house" and merging "from the plane and from the trunk of my car" into one structure. It's easy, because they occur next to each other. Even when they are separated, as in, "I took the boxes from the plane to the house and from the trunk to the church", they respect the tree structure of the sentence, so you can make a parse tree. For the Jameson commercial, you can't make a tree, because "Hawk" and "Greedy" attach on opposite sides of "was". – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 00:11
  • Just to be clearer: merging arguments into one is the basic operation in a context-free grammar, and when you have Subject1 Verb Object1; Subject2 Object2; Subject3 Object3; Subject4 Object4 sentences, where you are supposed to fill in the verb from the previous context, the grammar is not context free. You need to store the verb, and restore it inbetween the subjects and the objects to make a context free sentence. This is possible, but I wanted to know if it was grammatical, or if this type of thing appears in the New York Times. I don't think it does. – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 00:13
  • Context freeness is very important, and the whole point of the question is whether this occurs. You say "yes, it is the same as blah blah blah", and it is completely different from blah blah blah. Blah blah blah occurs in the NYT, is included in all context-free descriptions of language. This commercial business is weird, might not appear in newspapers and cannot be described by a context free construction. – Ron Maimon Mar 10 '12 at 03:53
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As others have said, there's nothing wrong with the construct of sentence in the ad. It reads gruffly, which works well in the context of the ad. Your sentences, meanwhile, are more of a mixed bag:

The soldier eats his bread with cheese, the general, with caviar.

I have no problem with this one, although, as John and JLG said, a semi-colon should be used after the word cheese.

He drove a car, she, a point home.

This one reads like a clever pun. I'm reminded of Groucho Marx: "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

"The surgeon walks to surgery, quickly, and without thinking about all the patients that he lost over the years, John on the beach."

Um, no. It's not wrong per se, but it reads as if you were trying to deliberately stretch the rules. It reads awkward, because the two parts clash as unrelated. Just because you can write this way, doesn't mean you should.

"The doctor put his gown on the table, the nurse, on the cabinet."

Wait... the doctor put the nurse on the cabinet? Then what happened? (This reminds me of some of those humorous newspaper headlines, like "4-H Girls Win Prizes for Fat Calves").

J.R.
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Verb ellipsis is something I don't know how to formally handle.

The whole point of an ellipsis is that it requires you to guess what the author omitted. I think the guesswork is going to make it hard to concoct formal rules. Sure, in some cases the guess is obvious, but in others there could be many valid possibilities.

Having a sentence where the meaning is unclear is not grammatically incorrect. It could be done deliberately for humorous or stylistic effect. Of course, it could also just be flat out poor writing.

Consider what was (presumably) omitted in some of the examples, shown in bold below:

"Jameson was generous; the Hawk was greedy, very greedy." (omitted verb)

"The soldier eats his bread with cheese; the general eats his bread with caviar." (omitted verb + object)

"He pitted the two contestants in battle; she pitted the two contestants in a date." (omitted verb + object + preposition) *

  • Actually this might not be the right interpretation but it is AN interpretation that still illustrates the point.

As you can see... the more you omit about the sentence, the more someone has to trip over themselves trying to fill in the blanks, and the more ambiguity you introduce.

"The maid spreads the sheet on the bed; my kitchen knife spreads butter on the bread."

The fact that the verb is used in completely different contexts makes it sound completely unnatural. Again, it's not grammatically incorrect, just weird (unless it's being used as a pun or something).

"The surgeon walks to surgery, quickly, and without thinking about all the patients that he lost over the years; John walks on the beach."

This one isn't particularly confusing, since only the verb was omitted, but the inclusion of all the other words makes it sound awkward. The two phrases of the sentence lost their parallelism.

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Lynn
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Do you notice how every one of your examples differs from the ad copy? The ad copy contains a linking verb [was], but the verbs in your examples are not linking verbs. Because most of the verbs in your examples (pitted, eat, drove, etc.) take an object, some of your examples end up being nonsensical. In fact, most would be considered runon sentences even if they made sense.

I know this was a transcription of a televised ad, but as John said the comma between "generous" and "the Hawk" should be a semicolon.

JLG
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  • Yes, exactly, that's why I gave them--- each one tests a different idea about when this construction is allowed. If I knew which were ok, and which are not, I can figure out the general rule. – Ron Maimon Mar 09 '12 at 23:48