A lovely contrast

By and large I suspect that people's eyes glaze over when I talk about linguistics, but the following contrast (adapted from Bolinger's 1970-something paper) is so sharp, and so lovely, that I feel it must be shared.

leighjen, my partner, as many of you may know, is a regular Girl Scout: she's polite, law-abiding, she doesn't forget things, she fulfills obligations. And many of you know that I'm, well, a little more haphazard, and a little klutzy.

So imagine that we're supposed to be taking a couple of boxes of props to the theatre, and while she's taking hers inside and putting it exactly where it belongs, I end up getting lost, tripping, spilling the props everywhere, losing half of them and ruining the other half.

Now: what does each of the following sentences express?

• When he found out some props had been ruined, the director yelled at the responsible person.
• When he found out some props had been ruined, the director yelled at the person responsible.

Isn't that cool? (In case you're not a native speaker of English: the first sentence means that the director yelled at Leighjen; the second means that he yelled at me.)

(And relevant to some current research: setting aside a reading where the director is interested in meeting someone, and instead concentrating on the reading where the director wants information:

• GOOD: The director wanted to know the person responsible (so the stage manager told him it was me).
• BAD: The director wanted to know the responsible person (so the stage manager told him it was Leighjen).

I now have a good pair of sentences to pull out at cocktail parties when people ask, "So what is it exactly that you're working on?"