Unexpected adverbials

Liliane Haegeman has been here at Kent all week on an Erasmus teaching mobility visit. She's been giving four seminars on adverbial clauses, including among other things the difference between what she calls 'central' and 'peripheral' adverbial clauses. Central adverbials modify the event itself, so in this case the 'while' clause tells you the time during which the main event happened:

I took out the rubbish [while you were watching telly] 

Peripheral adverbials, meanwhile, don't tell us about event time or anything like that, but are more about the relation between the clauses or speaker attitude. In this case, the 'while' clause gives a contrastive or concessive meaning: 

I’m quite active, [while he is a total slob] 

These clauses have various properties that distinguish them. One of these properties is the tense of the verb. Central adverbial clauses (e.g. expressing time) have the same tense as the main verb, or if they don't, they're interpreted as doing so. Here, there is a future marker 'will' in the main clause, and the 'while' clause has present tense 'watch', but it's interpreted as happening at the same time as the main clause.

I'll take the rubbish out [while you watch telly]

A peripheral (e.g. contrastive) adverbial with different tenses is interpreted as being two different times:

I was fortunate to get full funding for my degree, [while he has to borrow a student loan]

The 'full funding' happened in the past (with past tense 'was') and the 'borrowing' is now (present tense 'has').

All of the above is paraphrasing what Liliane told us in the first seminar. She also said this this is something that you specifically have to tell learners of English, that they have to use present tense in this kind of clause. 'If' clauses are the same, in that they have two meanings:

If you don't understand this part, you won't be able to follow tomorrow's seminar. [if = condition]

If you didn't understand, why didn't you raise your hand and ask? [if = assumed background]

The conditional one is the one where the tense should be present even if the main clause is future, as it is here. Then, at the end of the seminar, Liliane was talking about the following one the next day, and she said this:

Even if you won't come back to the class, you have the handout. 

For this to be a normal conditional, it needs to be present tense 'Even if you don't come back'. But Liliane used the future tense marker 'won't', and then all of a sudden it was forced into the assumed background interpretation: 'Even though I understand it's the case that you won't come back...' where the implication was that she knew that we wouldn't return, and so she had given us the handout, when in fact the meaning was that she thought we would but if we didn't, we had the handout.

Another example of the same thing is a little more complicated because you need to know about Dutch word order. Dutch has 'V2', which means that the finite verb is the second constituent in the clause. So it can look like English, where you have the subject, then the verb, then the object, or it can be some other part of the sentence before the verb, like the object or an adverbial clause like the ones we just talked about. Now here's the thing: only the central adverbials can be this first element before the verb. If it's the other kind, then it doesn't 'count' and you need something else to be there, like the subject. Look at this, where the verb is in bold (example from the seminar handout):

Dutch: [Als het je interesseert,] er zal in Parijs ook een vacature zijn.
Word-for-word: If it you interests, there will in Paris also a vacancy be.
Idiomatically: 'If you are interested, in Paris there is also a vacancy.'

The 'if' clause is the kind that gives you background info, that doesn't count, so you have something else (the subject 'there') before the verb 'zal', which is now the third constituent. If you swap the order and have 'Als... zal er...', namely 'if... will there' where the 'if' clause is the one element before the verb in normal second position, it magically gets forced into the interpretation where the 'if' clause is a real conditional - the vacancy only exists if you're interested in it!

(NB: I've massively over-simplified this, and much of the week was spent learning how lots of this has interesting exceptions, and I've conflated two types of clause, etc etc. I've also paraphrased Liliane's work to write this, so consider this a citation.) 

Ladies of science

The suffix -ist is added to a base to make a word that means 'someone who does something related to...', so an exorcist exorcises. It can mean someone who holds some belief system, so a Darwinist follows Darwin. And it can mean someone who practises some art or profession, so an etymologist studies etymology.

-ist is also helpfully gender-neutral, so it's never run into the same problems as -er/-(e)ress pairings like waiter/waitress, actor/actress. I learnt the other day that it was in fact invented specifically to refer to a woman, Mary Somerville, joint first female member of the Royal Academy, because she couldn't be called a 'man of science'.

Caption from exhibit at Turner Contemporary, saying that 'scientist' was first used to describe Mary Somerville

I'm pleased they went with this and not 'lady of science' or something.

Vaguely relatedly, there's a really nice essay by Laurie Bauer on why linguists are not called linguisticians, with some interesting insights on the connotations of each suffix (-ician was 'trivialising' at the time the words were being coined).

Toilet flushing instructions and recursive binary Merge

Spotted in the Duke of Cumberland loos in Whitstable this weekend, this instruction on how to flush the toilet:

Press hard
Both buttons

I interpret this as two instructions:

PRESS HARD. BOTH BUTTONS. 

You could read it as a single instruction ('Press hard both buttons') but it's awkward in English. It would be normal in, say, Spanish, but in English a more idiomatic word order is 'Press both buttons hard', or verb (press) – object (both buttons) – adverb (hard).

The way that this is broken down into two phrases can be seen as support for the idea that syntax comprises a series of operations of recursive binary Merge. That's a technical way of saying that sentences are formed by combining two elements at a time, and combining the resulting component with a new element, still two at a time.

So, for example, we might think of a sentence like Birds eat seeds as being formed as follows:

eat + seeds --> eat seeds
birds + eat seeds --> birds eat seeds

Our loo-flushing example is a little bit more complicated. We don't have a subject, because it's an instruction so there is an implicit 'you' as the presser of the buttons. We definitely want to say that both buttons is a unit (a 'constituent'), which seems intuitively right (there are also ways to test this kind of thing). Then we want to say that Press both buttons is a constituent, with the verb press combining with its object both buttons. Then we would combine that whole phrase press both buttons with the adverb hard, telling us how the action of pressing both buttons should be performed. This makes more sense than saying that the verb press combines with a constituent both buttons hard, which doesn't seem intuitively right. Adverbs tell us how verbs are done, not what nouns are like. So now we have this structure:

both + buttons --> both buttons
press + both buttons --> press both buttons
press both buttons + hard --> press both buttons hard

The fact that the adverb refers to the verb, and not to the noun, also tells us why we get the broken-up instructions in the photo. The adverb, as I said, refers to the verb. We interpret it as referring to the whole verb phrase press both buttons as the thing that has to be done in a hard manner, but in fact it's really the pressing that is to be hard. The whole phrase involves the three levels of recursive Merge (recombining constituents) shown above, giving a final nested structure like this:

[3 [2 press [1 both buttons 1] 2] hard 3]

If we want to make it much simpler, one way of doing that is to remove the recursive part of the operation, and have things combine just once. This means, if you assume that Merge is binary (that things can only combine two at a time and not three or more), that the maximum number of words you can have in an utterance is two. And that's exactly what is happening in the photo: two pairs of words (both buttons; press hard), and their juxtaposition is what tells us that one applies to the other rather than their syntactic combination.