A lovely contrast

[tahnan]

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?"

Comments

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Neat.

K has been getting on my case for sloppy word usage recently. Do you have any idea how irritating it is to have one's semantics corrected by a seven year old?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

No--but I suspect my parents do....

[colorwheel.livejournal.com]

Excellent cocktail-party explanation. I'm still trying to form one for the thesis I finished last December. Just two days ago an eager young grad student wanted me to explain why gender is queer. People are very ready to understand that a certain character has queer gender, but that's old hat. It's gender itself that's queer, which affects every character and person and ... oh, sorry. Past two sentences already, and you're not even at a cocktail party. Sigh.

Ah, word games

[speaks.livejournal.com]

Hamlet, in love with his daughter, the old man thinks.

Orphan.

Frequently?

Frequently what?

Often?

[navrins]

I like linguistics discussion when conducted in English. I don't know much linguistics terminology, though.

I'd say the first sentence is ambiguous - it could mean he yelled at either of you. (If it were spoken it would probably be clear by inflection, - "the RESPONSIBLE person" is clearly her; "the reSPONsible PERson" is clearly you; other possibilities are still ambiguous.) But the latter is very clear that he yelled at you.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there is an ambiguity. There're clearer examples--pretend for a moment that "invisible" just means "not visible," and consider "the visible stars" (which is ambiguous between those that can be seen generally, and those that can be seen tonight) and "the stars visible" (which is only the latter). So you can see it with--

The invisible stars visible include Spica. (No good: it means that Spica is a star that can be seen tonight, but it can't be seen from earth.)
The visible stars invisible include Spica. (Fine: it means that Spica can't be seen, but it's a visible star.)

The visible invisible stars include Spica. (No good.)
The invisible visible stars include Spica. (Fine.)

Basically, the adjective close to the noun is a permanent-state adjective, and an adjective after a noun is never close enough to a noun to qualify. So there is ambiguity, and it is possible to disambiguate, but we start to get into subtleties and you lose the really cool sharp contrast.

Anyway. :-)