Danny Dyer should be held account for it

Danny Dyer was briefly everyone's favourite wideboy again last week when he called David Cameron a 'twat' on telly, twice. Here's a link to the Guardian's round-up of the twitter response, with video.

As well as his well-chosen epithet, he also said this:

“How comes he can scuttle off? He called all this on. Where is he? He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up, yeah, where is the geezer? I think he should be held account for it.”

He repeated that phrase: he should be held account for it. If you've been paying attention to my research interests lately, you'll know that I collect missing prepositions. The most frequently omitted preposition, by far, is to in a directional sense with a familiar location: I'm going to the pub, for instance. (The article the is also omitted; that's not relevant today.) Now, this phrase of Danny Dyer's is normally held to account. He skipped the to. Might this be the same kind of thing?

I think not, partly because this to doesn't have the same characteristics as the commonly-omitted kind. While it is a preposition, it's part of an idiom and doesn't have any directional meaning. It just holds the whole thing together. You can function perfectly well without it without losing any meaning, as demonstrated by Danny himself. The other thing that to my mind makes it more likely that this is a simple speech error is the existence of the basically synonymous phrase held accountable. Then, the to isn't present at all, so it's a straightforward process to mix the two up and come out with held account.

Picking up your litter is dangerous

Right, here's the other post I promised yesterday. The other litter-related sign I saw said this:

Picking up your litter puts road workers' lives at risk. 

This time, it's not ellipsis that causes the ambiguity, as it was in my previous post. Rather, it's a choice between two people who are doing the picking up:

You picking up your litter puts road workers' lives at risk.
Them [road workers] picking up your litter puts road workers' lives at risk.

And also unlike yesterday, it's clear which one is meant here. There's not any obvious way that you picking up your own litter puts anyone else's life at risk; it's a good thing and you should do it. On the other hand, a road worker having to dash out into the traffic to pick up your crisp packet is a danger to that person.

This is another example of ambiguity in the reference of a pronoun, just like yesterday. But in this case, it's the invisible pronoun that linguists call 'PRO' (pronounced 'big pro', to distinguish it from 'little pro', which is a similar but different invisible pronoun). It's the subject of the clause picking up your litter, which has a gerund form of the verb in it (the -ing form). When you have that, you can have a subject which isn't pronounced (PRO) and gets its meaning (reference) from something else in the surrounding discourse context.

If something is the topic of the sentence, that's likely to be what's assumed to be the meaning of PRO, but other things are also relevant, like where the other possible referents are in the sentence, and what kinds of things they are (e.g. litter is not a likely candidate to be picking itself up here, for many reasons!). Shameless plug: you can read some actual research by me and my colleague Vikki (mostly her) here, on a related subject, and we cite a load of previous research that you can look up if you like.

In my sign, the road workers are the topic (well, their lives are, but you also need to be an animate creature to pick up litter). 'You', the reader, are also an option, because your litter is in there too. It's also closer in the sentence to the PRO that needs a meaning, which counts for something, but a strong combination of the road workers being both the topic and the more sensible meaning ensures that no one would read it and think that PRO meant you. Except me. I thought that. That's why I wrote this whole blog post about it.

Let's go Fuckoffee

I went to London last week and walked past this coffee shop, which I had heard of because it pops up on google maps. It's called Fuckoffee. (Incidentally, I've cropped out a woman wearing the same yellow leather jacket that I've got - she can fuckoffee an' all.)

The name is obviously intended to capture attention by incorporating a swearword. It works - I haven't heard of any other random coffee shops in London. But it's also a clever pun that only works if you have the exact non-standard thing that I'm researching right now: a missing preposition!

If you have the standard version of what I'm talking about, you'd say

Let's go to Costa 

or

Let's go to Fuckoffee

when you were suggesting coffee places to go to. But if you have this non-standard form, which is found in London and in various other UK places, it means you can miss out the preposition to when you're talking about certain locations or institutions, such as a familiar coffee shop. So you might say

Let's go Costa

or

Let's go Fuckoffee

which, for most people with a native London dialect, will sound exactly like Let's go for coffee.