Foreshadowing via conjunction

There is a film called Willy's Wonderland, starring Nicolas Cage, and it is bizarre and wonderful. You should watch it. Cage has to spend the night in a disused family amusement animatronic kids' party type place, working as a cleaner in order to pay off the bill for fixing his car. The man who makes this deal with him says something along the lines of, 

'You walk out of that building in the morning and I'll have your car waiting for you.'

I've written before about conjunctions ('and') working as a conditional, in my post about the instruction(?) Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you. There, I noted that you could interpret the whole sentence as a statement of fact, that you shouldn't touch the actors and, independently, they also will not touch you, but that in fact we interpret it as a conditional: if you don't touch the actors, they won't touch you. 

In the line from this film, the same is true. Either the man was saying to Nicolas Cage that he'd be able to leave in the morning and when he did so his car would be ready, or, very much foreshadowing what was to come, that there is a possibility that he might not walk out in the morning but that if he did, his car would be waiting. 

I felt like the intonation gives us a clue as to which it is, but I lack the technical skills to show you how it goes on this blog. It's something like this, though: in the conditional interpretation, we get rising intonation to the end of the first clause and then falling on the second one, whereas on the statement of facts interpretation, they're both falling, and similar to each other. 

(Yes, this could also be a threat, as noted in that other post as well. Context would have made that really weird – who offers to fix your car as a threat?)

Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you

The 'normal' way of making a conditional in English is with an 'if'-clause:

If you hurry up, we'll be in time for the train.
We'll be in time for the train if you hurry up. 

There are plenty of others too, of course (As long as you keep walking, we'll be in time for the train) and of course -- isn't it always -- it's much more complicated than this, but there's also a cool way of doing conditionals with and and or.

Consider this warning, which I saw at Dreamland in Margate at their Screamland Hallowe'en thing a couple of years ago:

Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you.

Poster for 'Screamland' in Margate

You could interpret that as an instruction combined with a simple statement of fact: the instruction is not to touch the actors, and the statement is a reassurance that they won't touch you, independent of the instruction. That might in fact be what is intended here, because even if you do touch the actors, they're probably still not supposed to touch the visitors.

But we're funny things, humans, always looking for connections, patterns, reasons, and causes. Those two things being joined makes us want to think that there is some meaningful link between them. It's like if someone says The car is making a funny noise and Jen borrowed it yesterday. You can be pretty sure they're blaming Jen for the funny noise the car is making, and not just telling you two unrelated facts about the car.

Generally, in an and sentence, both bits are the same type: both statements, for instance, in which case they must both be true (so for the sentence about the car to be true, it must be true that it's making a funny noise and that Jen borrowed it -- notice that the inferred link that Jen was to blame does not have to be true). Or they might both be instructions, in which case you're expected to obey both (at the same time or in order), as in Sit down and shut up. Our example sentence, about the actors, is a mix of an instruction and a statement. So we might be expected to obey the instruction and for the statement to be true. I don't know about you but I don't really know where I stand right now, as there is no obvious link between my obedience and objective truth.

It would make so much more sense if, say, the truth of the statement was conditional on me obeying the instruction. So if I don't touch the actors (obey the instruction), then it will be true that they don't touch me. And all of a sudden, we have a conditional like the 'if'-clause type I mentioned right at the top, but with and instead.

Can we do it with or, a disjunction? Well, yes we can, but it comes out as a warning or threat rather than a deal or an agreement.

Don't bother the tigers, or they'll attack you. 

Now, we still have to obey the instruction but if we don't, then the second part will be true: a punishment, rather than a reward for our obedience.

We can even do it with neither at all, just so long as it is a proper threat and not just a warning:

Touch my stuff, I'll beat you up. 

Now the instruction is an elliptical conditional. There's probably an understood 'If you' at the beginning, or else the link between the parts is the same as with and: if the first part is 'obeyed' (the person does carry out the action), then the second part is true.

You and your family's best interests

There's been a leaflet sent round lately about the EU referendum happening in the UK. The government has sent this leaflet to all households, setting out the case for remaining in the European Union. Here's how it puts it:

The Government believes it is in you and your family's best interests that the UK remains in the European Union.

A friend mentioned on facebook that he was disappointed that despite the £9m spent on this leaflet, it contained this grammatical error. I begged to differ: this is stylistic variation, not a mistake.

He argued that it should be your and your family's best interests, as both conjuncts should be possessive. This is right, as you should be able to leave either out and it still be grammatical.

But there's two complicating factors here. The first is that the possessive your is kind of already a combination of you plus 's, so perhaps the 's is redundant. I don't actually think this is the case, because I think there's another reason why it's OK to say you. 

It's to do with the nature of 's. This is what we call a clitic, which means that it's phonologically dependent (has to attach to) another word, but is not as tightly linked to the word as a suffix like the plural s. While the plural suffix can only attach to countable nouns, the possessive can attach to a much wider range of things. The only requirement is that the noun it refers to be within the phrase it attaches to. This means that we can have phrases like the following, where the possessive attaches to something other than the possessor, and sometimes not even a noun:

The woman with the long hair's dog
The guy I was talking to's friend
The girl dressed in blue's mother

It's a little more complicated with coordination, of course, as we have to have the 's referring to both conjuncts. But I think that's OK. Language Log have discussed this before, and examples like this are all right:

I and my friend's work (a bit clumsy in my opinion, but not bad)
Me and my friend's work (perfectly well-formed)

So, unusually, I'm with the government on this one, both in terms of their grammar in in staying in the EU.

I'm a linguist however I correct mistakes

I teach, among other things, first-year syntax seminars. I've found that this year's cohort are pretty good at knowing the basic parts of speech but one of the things we do at degree level is learn how to identify nouns, verbs and so on based on their behaviour and question mis-classifications. The other day, I said English really only has three conjunctions: and, or and but. (Actually this isn't totally accurate but those are the common ones, I think. Note that I'm only referring to what are sometimes called 'coordinating conjunctions' - subordinating ones are another thing.) One of my students asked whether however isn't a conjunction as well.

This is an excellent question. And as with most excellent questions, the answer is 'yes and no'. I was suddenly, in a 9am seminar, suffering from severe tiredness, faced with the descriptivist academician's paradox.

This is one of the things that is mentioned time and again when lecturers compare notes on common writing mistakes in student essays: however used as a conjunction. Here's an example:

This argument is very persuasive, however I believe the premise is false. 

This sentence could be written perfectly grammatically with but instead of however as follows:

This argument is very persuasive, but I believe the premise is false. 

With however, it's a comma splice and at best, clumsy, and at worst confusing. If you're desperate to use the word however, because you're keen to use polysyllabic words wherever you can, the following is acceptable:

 This argument is very persuasive; however, I believe the premise is false.

 So far, this is not linguistics so much as standard essay-marker's griping. The linguistics comes now. As linguists, we are descriptive, no matter how prescriptive we are as essay-markers. For that reason, we apply writing rules in what I think is a more sensible manner than many other subjects do (in my former life as a writing tutor I heard of history lecturers with flat-out bans on completely innocuous things for no discernible reason). We allow things that others might outlaw as long as it's done well. Lately, for instance, I've noticed that I no longer care about contracted forms in essays, as long as the apostrophes are correct and the style is otherwise formal and reads well - correcting this might lead to stilted, lumpy writing. We allow first-person pronouns (why on earth not?) as long as students don't use them to say things like 'I believe' (cf. my example above). Passive voice is perfectly fine as long as it's not used to pad out the essay with extra words.

So what of however? It all depends. Is the error in my example above a punctuation error, in which case it most definitely is an error and deserves the red pen, or is it a reflection of a change in language which will be permitted before long? The only way we could check would be to listen to the intonation. Is there a semicolon break preceding it and a comma break following it in speech? If so, it's wrongly punctuated. If not, perhaps I'll have to learn to live with it. Unfortunately, this isn't really a feature of everyday speech: it's formal style, and formal style is highly influenced by written style. If that written style is wrong to start with, we have a chicken and egg problem on our hands.

A lovely instance of involuntary code-switching due to L1 (first language) influence on this LanguageLog post:

Biagio intends to write in English, because LanguageLog is an English-Language-medium blog. They use the Italian conjunction e 'and', presumably because it occurs between two Italian words and the instinct was just too strong to overcome the (conscious?) act of writing in English.