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May 14, 2008
Calling All Grammarians
Ladies and gentlemen, I can't resist. One of the real joys of learning the structure of an intellectual system is that you can say sensible things about it that go far beyond the terms you're taught in school. Consider the following sentences:
I see dogs.
I kick dogs.
I breed dogs.
I buy dogs.
I like dogs.
Subject, verb, object, right? All verbs in the active voice, right? Anyone up for a discussion of the real relations here among the subject, the verb, and the object? Let's not be fooled by the form. Consider the following sentences, identical in form:
That lion looks ready to eat.
That pizza looks ready to eat.
I know, it doesn't have anything to do with theology, or politics, or culture. But it likes me well ...
Posted by Anthony Esolen at 06:34 PM | Permalink
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"That pizza looks ready to eat."
I don't know, Tony. To be eaten by a pizza--what an inglorious fate!
Posted by: Bill R | May 14, 2008 6:40:50 PM
All I can say is that I hope there is a different relationship between the subject, the verb and the object between #2 on your list and #3 or else #3 and #5 have a relationship which . . . well let's just say that it is a subject to which I object.
Posted by: GL | May 14, 2008 6:46:36 PM
Yum, roasted lion!
Posted by: Kyralessa | May 14, 2008 7:07:17 PM
Ok, not a pro, but I'd take a shot. The issue is context and the phrase "ready to eat." It is descriptive of appearance. In the case of the lion, we know that the lion is a carnivore and, as a consequence, the context is set that he be the eater. Therefore, "ready to eat" is interpreted to mean that the lion is prepared to engage in the act of eating.
On the other hand (yes, there was a hand out there; I just didn't tell you about it), a pizza is an time that we are accustomed to eac and as a consequence we interpret "ready to eat" to meat that the pizza is ready to be eaten (presumably not by the lion unless it's a meat lover's pizza.)
Do I pass, Doc? Will there be any extra credit? I am prepared to appeal to the dean if I have to!
Posted by: Bobby Neal Winters | May 14, 2008 7:59:52 PM
The difference is in the subjects--animate verses inanimate. Intuitively, the only kinds of subjects that can actively take food, chew, and swallow it are animate. A pizza can only be eaten, and that intuition is carried over when pizza is used as the grammatical subject of the sentence; it is still understood to be the semantic object of the verb.
Posted by: Megan | May 14, 2008 8:05:43 PM
Yes, but what about a pig?
That pig is ready to eat ...
Posted by: Tony Esolen | May 14, 2008 8:30:21 PM
Okay, I'll bite.
(Unless it's better to change both the verb, and the tense too, and say "Okay, Tony hooked.")
I see dogs - seems interchangeable with "dogs are seen by me" in terms of voice, or perhaps mood. If it were "I observe dogs," then I am actually doing something, so the inversion of that one would change the voice from active to passive. As it is, however, the inversion does not seem to change the mood, so I guess the voice is not active.
I kick dogs - this one I think is the real SVO in the active voice.
I breed dogs - I call it passive. The active would be "Dogs do it because of me."
I buy dogs - I guess dogs is not the object, but an adverbial modifier. The main verb is "I buy" in the active voice.
I like dogs - going out on a limb here ... I wager that "like dogs" is the intransitive verb.
Alright Dr. Esolen. What's my batting average?
Posted by: Clifford Simon | May 14, 2008 8:46:44 PM
Ah, well that depends upon whether by "pig" one is referring to the carnitas at Bennys restaurant or one of my coworkers (even myself) on this night of one of our infamous birthday pot-luck dinners.
Kamilla
Posted by: Kamilla | May 14, 2008 8:48:49 PM
Hogs eat.
We eat pork.
That is the difference (English versus Norman French) ;-)
Posted by: labrialumn | May 14, 2008 8:54:27 PM
This seems like the sort of thing that other languages have developed inflections to deal with. I imagine that it's one of the things that makes English difficult for non-natives to learn.
Posted by: Ethan C. | May 14, 2008 9:49:01 PM
The implied meaning of the sentence about the pizza is "That pizza looks ready to be eaten" "Eat" is a passive verb even though it doesn't take the usual form of a passive verb.
Posted by: Judy K. Warner | May 14, 2008 10:05:55 PM
I have an undergraduate degree in Linguistics, which makes me at least somewhat qualified to respond to this. Contrary to what other commenters have suggested, none of these sentences are passive, and inflectional languages are not necessary any clearer. Animate v. inanimate is very close, however.
The differences of nuance in the first set of sentences has to do with what linguists call thematic relation. Subject and object (more properly nominative and accusative) are syntactic relations in a sentence, while thematic relation has to do with semantics, i.e. the meaning that the various syntactic structures convey. Different verbs assign different thematic relations to their subjects and their objects. These assignments are somewhat arbitrary, but not completely: as a rule, the role with greater agency is assigned to the subject.
Alas, I can't remember the names given to the thematic relations well enough to classify the sentences given above. The basic explanation is simply that each verb is assigning a different pair of roles to its subject and its object. Thus the syntactic relationships are the same, but the semantic relationships are not.
The last pair of sentences illustrate a related feature of English syntax. All languages have ways of switching up the syntax of their thematic roles. In English, the most well-known such transformation is the passive, which moves the agent into a prepositional phrase and promotes the object into subject position. Another transformation is the unaccusative, which most people have never heard of. The unaccusative likewise promotes the object to subject position, but it requires no transformation of the verb and does not permit you to express the agent. Examples:
Transitive => Unaccusative
The sun melts the ice. => The ice melts.
The ball broke the window. => The window broke.
So in the sentence The lion looks ready to eat, to eat is the infinitive of the transitive verb eat, as in The lion will eat you. In the sentence The pizza looks ready to eat, to eat is the infinitive of the unaccusative verb eat, as in This pizza eats like a dream.
References:
Unaccusative verbs
Thematic relations
Theta roles
Posted by: JS Bangs | May 15, 2008 1:08:20 AM
The difference between "The lion is ready to eat" and "the pizza is ready to eat" lies in the interplay between "ready" and "to eat." "Ready" can indicate that the noun it modifies is ready to do some action, or to receive some action. "Ready to kill, the lion pounced." "Ready to be killed, the troops marched off to battle." And it can even be used both ways in the same sentence "Ready to kill or be killed, the soldiers...".
The infinitive that follows ready (or other similar words like eager) answers the question "ready with respect to what action".
And in our sentence, the action is eating. The infinitive specifies the action, but does not clearly specify voice. (In most other situations the infinitive is active, and I'm not sure why it can be here passive.) And so we are left to determine whether the noun modified by ready is ready to undertake the action, or to receive the action.
Another similar example (taking advantage of the ambiguity of "ready"): "The grounds crew has done a good job protecting the diamond, and the infield is finally ready to play; the scheduled starters, however, having already warmed up before the rains, are no longer ready to play."
At least that's the most sense I can get at this hour.
I'm not sure about differences between the dogs statements, I think "like" and "see" may be different, because in neither case does anything happen to the dog, and thus "dog" is a bit more adverbial.
Posted by: Matthew N. Petersen | May 15, 2008 1:33:13 AM
>>At least that's the most sense I can get at this hour.
Ah. Time flies like an arrow. :)
Posted by: DGP | May 15, 2008 5:24:41 AM
and fruit flies like a banana
Posted by: tdunbar | May 15, 2008 6:27:45 AM
Amusingly relevant:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/99-grammar/
Posted by: Joseph | May 15, 2008 8:29:24 AM
A less technical version of what I said in my previous post:
There is no strict relationship between grammar (syntax) and meaning (semantics). The same syntax can express many different meanings, and the same meaning can be encoded in multiple syntactic constructions. So in all of the dog sentences, the grammatical relationship between subject and object is exactly the same. All of the sentences are straightforward SVO; contrary to a few other commenters, I insist that there is nothing adverbial or passive about any of them. However, different verbs imply different semantic relationships between their subjects and objects.
So "dogs" is semantically different in each of the sentences, though the syntax is exactly the same. Trying to discover a syntactic difference to account for this is madness.
Posted by: JS Bangs | May 15, 2008 8:31:18 AM
JS,
I cross-posted with you. By calling dogs more adverbial I was trying to get at the thematic relation. (I haven't heard that word before.) It seems that in sentences like "I kick dogs" the object receives the action of the verb, but thematically (though not gramatically) the object qualifies the verb in sentences like "I like dogs". Maybe I'm still talking nonsense, but I meant something like: In sentences like "I kick dogs" the verb expresses an action from the subject to the object. But in sentences like "I like dogs" the verb expresses a state of the subject and the semantic object takes on something of an adverbial role, qualifying the verb.
Posted by: Matthew N .Petersen | May 15, 2008 9:36:39 AM
Matthew: That's right. In "I kick dogs", the dogs are what's called Patient, as the direct recipients of the action. In "I like dogs", the dogs are (I think) Source and the subject is Experiencer. Your word "adverbial" confused me, but your explanation gets it right.
Posted by: JS Bangs | May 15, 2008 10:01:36 AM
"That pizza looks ready to be eaten. Which is indeed providential, because the nearby lion appears to be just as prepared to eat. I hope he likes pizza, for I am entirely unprepared to be eaten..."
Posted by: Joe Long | May 15, 2008 10:14:03 AM
JS,
The unaccusative! I learn something new every day.
What do you say of the sentence "I breed dogs"? It really means "I cause dogs to breed"; although the subject causes them to breed in a certain way favorable to himself. I agree that all the verbs in those sentences are in what we'd have to call active voice. But in this sentence the object of the verb is also, in a sense, the reflexive agent of the verb: the dogs are the ones breeding.
How close is the unaccusative from what other languages call the middle voice?
I wash cars. (Active)
Those cars have been washed. (Passive)
I wash. (Middle)
Stop (that thief)! (Active)
Stop! (Middle)
I saw her peel the orange. (Active)
I saw her at the window, peeling. (Middle)
Posted by: Tony Esolen | May 15, 2008 10:43:51 AM
This reminds me of a pair of sentences I made based on an ambiguity in English syntax:
The woman sold the boy an ice cream cone.
The woman sold the boy to the slave trader.
You don't know which part of speech (direct or indirect object) the boy is until you get to the end. Even worse if you do something like this:
The beautiful woman, with the seemingly pleasant smile, sold the cute, little boy, whose face would seen appear on billboards all across the nation, ...
Posted by: Robert | May 15, 2008 12:49:28 PM
Oh, Robert, that's cruel! I need to do lots more of that with my students . . . :)
Posted by: Beth | May 15, 2008 12:53:44 PM
Mr. Esolen: "breed" is a funny verb. It exists in an intransitive form, which is an implied reflexive: "The dogs breed (among themselves)". The transitive form is, as you said, causative, but since the intransitive is also reflexive, the interpretation becomes doubly complex. Even more interesting, "breed" forces a collective interpretation on its direct object. You can't, for example, quantify the object: *I breed six dogs.
The first example is a property of all causatives in English, I think. You see much of the same behavior in transitive grow ("I grow beets") or marry ("I married the couple on Saturday"). Grow also requires a collective object.
Middle voice: The English unaccusative is often expressed with the middle voice, in languages that have such a thing. In Romance languages the reflexive verbs do much the same thing.
But none of your examples seem to be middle (or unaccusative) to me. Rather, they seem to be ordinary transitives with the object suppressed. Middle/unaccusative would be the following:
She peeled the orange. (Active)
The orange was peeled. (Passive)
The orange peeled easily. (Middle/unaccusative)
(For whatever reason, English unaccusatives especially like to be paired with adverbs of manner.)
Posted by: JS Bangs | May 15, 2008 2:24:57 PM
An amusing story of how people actually use grammar --
A few years ago the week after Christmas, I went to a family gathering in a park, where I was to meet a lady whom I'd heard about for a long time, but never met before. She had likewise heard about me for a long time, but never met me before.
Now the first problem, of course, was that I'm a man, and she's a woman. All you who've ever tried to send a message from Mars to Venus, you all know about that, I'm sure. :)
But secondly my lady friend was born deaf. Primarily she signs. Academics have much discussed the linguistis of American Sign Langage as a language in its own right; to make a long story short, people born deaf are not exposed to (spoken) English as much as hearing people are, despite living where the de-facto national language is English. Now I sign a little too, so we immediately hit it off with a combination of speaking, signing, and lip-reading.
First thing out of her mouth was, "Hi. Nice to meet you."
Then she asked matter-of-factly, "How did you Christmas party?"
I said, "What??"
I asked her to repeat it about three times, because I was sure I had heard something wrong, or at any rate didn't understand what I had heard. At last, she realized (or so she thought) what the problem was. And so she remedied that for me...
... by saying it again really, really slowly. "How ... did ... you ... Christmas ... party?"
At this point I was baffled out of my wits.
Well ladies and gentlemen, want to solve the puzzle? Here's the solution. The verb is "Christmas party" plus the helping-verb "did." She just wanted to ask how I Christmas partied, that's all!
I succeeded to understand her, just when it was too late. :)
Posted by: Clifford Simon | May 15, 2008 3:07:49 PM
JS,
In the sentence, "I saw her by the window, peeling," the "peeling" refers to the woman or the clothes, and so is reflexive, as in the middle voice "I stopped" (meaning: I stopped myself, I stopped what I was doing). Such verbs in Greek are usually found in the middle voice.
What do you make of the sentence, "I like dogs"? In most languages, you'd express the idea quite differently -- "Dogs are pleasing to me" or some such thing. "Liking" is not a thing you can do to an object; it is instead something that an object does for you.
Posted by: Tony Esolen | May 15, 2008 5:36:40 PM
Hebrew -- "She found favor in his eyes."
Posted by: Judy K. Warner | May 15, 2008 6:23:32 PM
I came home one day to find my Polish roommate curled up in the big chair. I remarked, "You look comfortable!" My comment made her laugh uproariously. It took a while to figure out why. She knew the English word "comfortable": like comfortable shoes, a comfortable couch, a comfortable ride. In that sense, if I tell her she looks comfortable, she thinks I might be about to sit on her.
I had never noticed those two very different senses of the same word.
Posted by: Abigail | May 15, 2008 7:27:59 PM
I've often thought about the different senses of the word "my".
My name.
My car.
My hand.
My idea.
My God.
My father.
My son.
My country.
My heritage.
My DNA.
My dog.
Can "my" mean something different with every word you use after it?
Posted by: Mike Kriskey | May 16, 2008 12:07:35 AM
The house burned up.
No, the house burned down.
That's because it was made of flammable materials.
No, it was made of inflammable materials.
Anyway, it was really cool.
No, it was really hot.
Posted by: Michael D. Harmon | May 16, 2008 10:38:31 AM
JS,
How can "eat" be an unaccusative? The Wikipedia article says the unaccusative is a subset of intransitive. But "eat" is a transitive verb. And I can't think of any times "eat" is used as a finite verb as an unaccusative.
Matt
Posted by: Matthew N .Petersen | May 17, 2008 12:48:05 PM
I don't know a thing about the unaccusative, but "eat" can be intransitive: When you have eaten, we will go to the zoo.
Posted by: Beth | May 17, 2008 2:14:03 PM
I'm sorry I'm late for the fun, but if anyone wants a really monstrous example of multiple uses for a single word, consider "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." As it happens, that's a perfectly grammatical English sentence.
Posted by: Jim Kalb | May 20, 2008 8:50:35 PM
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