"Wonder"

[tahnan]

For those who (somehow) didn't know, a central question of my dissertation is the well-established fact that "wonder" doesn't take concealed questions, i.e. I know the time is fine, but I wonder the time is awful. And then this happens:

I wonder the degree to which [Gen. David Petraeus's] public image is a product of his actual competence and how much of it is a product of very shrewd management of said image?
—Chris Hayes, The Rachel Maddow Show, August 16

I know that there's such a thing as a speech error, that it's not the case that "everything is correct"; and yet Hayes didn't get lost in his sentence (as in the example Pullum discusses in the aforelinked page), nor did he especially seem to stumble over the words.

I know linguistics makes sense, that there's a very real phenomenon and that it's describable scientifically...it's just that sometimes, I wonder.

Comments

[logophage]

I don't know how these things work, but would this be your cue to write a letter to the editor of Journal of Incredibly Clever Linguistic Cleverness noting the incident and offering thought-provoking speculation about its implications?

[tablesaw]

Doesn't sound at all off to me, I may have even written it at some point.

I guess the rephrasing would be "I wonder to what degree his public image . . . ." Maybe the "the degree to which" is close enough that I don't notice it.

[tahnan]

Right: "to what degree"; or "how much", as in the second half of the conjunct.

It struck me the moment Hayes said it, which is why I even thought to go to the transcript today to get the exact wording, but I think it's pretty well-established that linguists working on a phenomenon become hypersensitive to its use. So I don't think it stood out for me because I thought "wait that wasn't a sentence", just because I heard "wonder the" and a few overworked neurons went "ping!". (At this point, I have so much judgment fatigue that I can't tell whether I think the sentence is grammatical or not, though it's clearly perfectly comprehensible.)

[logophage]

By me, it reads as typically stilted bureaucracy-speak, i.e. not wrong per se but not what I'd ever consider saying myself. However, reading is not hearing and I don't know if I'd have blinked at it had I been watching the show.