Your modifier’s misplaced, but mine’s fine

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of David Foster Wallace, but truth be told, my antipathy for his work is less about his writing specifically and more about what I consider a fault of a genre, spanning other well-regarded authors such as Don DeLillo and Dave Eggers, who are very smart people obsessed with writing about mundanity in an self-important tone, all the while stressing that a self-important tone is hardly necessary because, really, what we’re talking about is just the mundanity of life; but then again, the mundanity of life is what it’s all about, right?, and there’s so much going on under the surface that we really ought to be paying attention to but no one ever does, and as a result we find it nearly impossible to understand each other because we fail to pick up on the cues we need — so what we ought to do is look at the events of our lives and analyze them and propose explanations for why others act the way they do, even as we know that all such analysis is doomed from the get-go by the fact that we are each of us impenetrable shells to everyone else, even as no one knows and no one can know what goes on inside the black-box of another’s head, and even as trying to understand others will only get us closer to the curse of the human condition, the knowledge that none of us will ever truly know another.*

I find this genre (which may be “hysterical realism“, but I’m not sure) to be infuriating. I usually say that it’s in part because its writing style is impenetrable, and in part because it’s ironic and sincere at the same time but wants its irony to be taken as sincerity. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s more that it’s close enough to my own writing style and philosophy for the writing to speak to me, and yet just different enough for me to feel like they’re doing it wrong.**

I’ve tried reading a few of the other authors’ stuff, but I’ve never read any of DFW’s — excepting the generally terrible essay “Tense Present” that pretty much every language blogger loves or loathes and one misguided grammar worksheet from his time as a professor. I wanted to give him a fair shake, since many people I whose opinions I respect find him worth a read. The chance to do so finally presented itself when, at the end of last quarter, I found a box of free books that the bookstore had apparently decided against buying back.

Nestled amongst sociology textbooks, I found McCain’s Promise, a nice short DFW book that arose from his Rolling Stone article on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. I quickly realized why this one wasn’t bought back, as it’s filled with pink highlighter and insightful margin notes like “Major fish bowl (sorority)”.***

All the same, it’s been a great read, and I have to apologize for having pre-judged DFW’s writing from his grammar discussions. Writing about a frantic campaign trail excursion fits his legato writing style well, and he’s capable of stating something that you sort of know you ought to care about in a way that makes you realize exactly why it matters and why you need to do something about it as soon as you can. His final section, talking about leadership, is stirring and may have slightly changed how I interact with people.

But, gosh, if the man just can’t go a hundred pages without saying something dumb about grammar. Worse, it’s in the midst of the second-best part of the book, a fascinating analysis of the turning point of McCain’s campaign. He’s talking about the day where Bush goaded McCain into going negative, turning the perception of McCain from the principled anti-candidate to just another mudslinging win-at-all-costs candidate. (Which became an even greater turning point due to the ripples from it we saw in McCain’s 2008 campaign.) I’m reading along, almost skimming at points because I’m so excited about what he’s going to say next, when I slam into this barrier of a sentence:

” […] and then on Wednesday AM on TV at the Embassy Suites in Charleston there’s now an even more aggressive ad that [senior strategist] Murphy’s gotten McCain to let him run, which new ad accuses Bush of unilaterally violating the handshake-agreement and going Negative and then shows a nighttime shot of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.’s famous facade with its palisade of blatantly ejaculatory fountains in the foreground and says ‘Can America afford another politician in the White House that we can’t trust?,’ about which nobody mentions the grammatical problems but Frank C. says that the shot of the White House is really going low with the knife, and that if McCain loses South Carolina it may very well be because of this ad […]” (boldface mine, italics his)

I can’t see a grammar problem in that italicized question at all, let alone the multiple problems that DFW implies.**** The only thing I’ve managed to come up with is that DFW’s claiming the modifier’s misplaced, and that the relative clause that we can’t trust seems not to modify the clearly intended antecedent politician but rather the absurd White House. And if that’s the case, he’s just being an idiot. Here’s the (simplified) tree-diagram for the end of the question:

Politician has two modifiers, each of which has to be trailing (in the White House politician is awful), so one of them is going to have to be separated from politician. But the beauty of human language syntax is that there are long-distance dependencies, connections that can span over intervening material. In the tree above, the relative clause attaches to a noun phrase headed by politician, successfully modifying politician as the ad’s writer intended. The same string of words could also have a different structure, where the RC attaches to the lower White House noun phrase, but pragmatics tell us pretty strongly that there is little chance of this being a correct parse.

For the sake of argument, we could swap the RC and PP, but we’re still going to have ambiguity; if it’s another politician that we can’t trust in the White House, there’s the unintended meaning that we specifically can’t trust the politician to be in the White House — as though Bush would be a trustworthy senator or governor but suddenly scheming as a president.

Actually, there were two untrustworthy periods for the White House: when it was burnt in 1814 by the invading British (pictured above), and in Truman's time, when it was almost completely rebuilt due to poor maintenance in previous years.

In fact, although the difference in these last two meanings is subtle, I’d say that’s the only possible ambiguity, not the one Wallace suggests. The ambiguity between an untrustworthy politician and an untrustworthy building is illusory; only a structural engineer is likely to meaningfully distrust a building. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible to have a politician who’s good at one position but not another; I often think of Taft here, who I was taught in school was a bad president but a great Supreme Court Justice.

But the key point here is that if even if this truly was a problem, it’s a problem that DFW himself commits a few pages later. Discussing the people at McCain’s town hall meetings, he refers to one group as:

“[…] ancient vets in Legion caps who call McCain ‘Lieutenant’ […]”

The relative clause is of course supposed to modify ancient vets, but due to the interceding prepositional phrase, it’s conceivable that it could modify Legion caps instead. Of course that’s absurd. Even in hysterical realism, caps don’t talk. But I don’t see any more absurdity in talking caps than in untrustworthy presidential mansions. It’s beyond me why one has grammatical problems and the other doesn’t.

Neither of these is ambiguous. Sure, the possibility exists that they could be ambiguous in the right context, and likewise the possibility exists that an inattentive reader might briefly be tripped up by these sentences. (In fact, I was briefly tripped up by the latter, but only because the former primed my brain to analyze later sentences.) But a child could read these sentences and tell you that it’s the politician who’s untrusted and the vets who’re calling McCain “Lieutenant”.

The problem is that these supposed ambiguities are often in the eye of the beholder; DFW presumably found nothing wrong with his sentence, because he knew what he intended, and that knowledge makes it difficult to see the structural ambiguity. But as merely a consumer of the McCain ad’s sentence, DFW has no foreknowledge of its meaning, and thus the structural ambiguity becomes detectable.

In the end, calling attention to a syntactic ambiguity that is rendered unambiguous by semantics just feels petty and snotty, the educational equivalent of name dropping, an “oh of course I know this thing that a professional writer doesn’t”. But it’s a weird thing for DFW to make a point of in this essay, as he spends much of the rest of it slagging the veteran reporters (“The Twelve Monkeys”) for being a bunch of pompous and insular snobs slavishly concerned with appearances and looking down their noses at everyone else. DFW sets himself up as the people’s champion, gushing over the minor insights of the audio-video crew in a show of underclass solidarity, only to go out of his way to remind the reader that he is only a tourist in Bluecollarburg, that he belongs with The Twelve Monkeys, if only they’d have a thirteenth.

Summary: Sometimes a noun phrase has two modifiers following it. If one ordering is less ambiguous than the other, you should probably use the less ambiguous one, assuming both orderings sound okay. But you only have to worry about real ambiguities, not ones that require mental gymnastics to misinterpret.

—
*: I’m following Wallace’s style here, and will be profusely footnoting as a minor homage.

**: Having gone to a Dr. Seuss exhibition at a La Jolla gallery the other night, I can’t help but draw parallels to the situation of his “The Butter Battle Book“. Likewise, sports and college rivalries.

***: I’m not being entirely sarcastic, as the notes were insightful into the mind of the modern American undergraduate. I’m skewing the sample by choosing that note as my example; many of the notes were clear attempts to map what DFW was talking about into the reader’s own life in a way that I expect brought her a deeper appreciation of the text. If I were doing the same, a subsequent reader would probably find “like converting a 4th & long” and “cf. obscure song from the 90s” and no doubt make snarky remarks about my intellectual depth as well.

****: I asked you on Twitter about this, and all the responses seemed to agree that the problem, such as it is, has to rest on an attachment ambiguity or that/who(m) choice. I’m going to focus on attachment ambiguity here because the “people need who(m)” claim is obviously untrue, and it’s something that many others have already discussed. Thanks to everyone for your help!

People that need people II: the subject-object distinction

Okay, it’s been a while, but at last here’s the second half from the earlier post about the use of that as a human-referring relative pronoun (HRRP). The issue before us is determining whether it’s all right to say something like:

(1) Everyone that knows me likes me

The point of contention is not whether this is too egotistical to be said, but rather whether the relative pronoun that is too demeaning to the humans composing everyone.  Are we required to revise (1) to

(1′) Everyone who knows me likes me ?

In the last post, historical usage revealed that it was historically common to use that as a relative pronoun with people.  (In fact, who wasn’t even a relative pronoun until the 15th century.)  However, history also showed that the behavior of relative pronouns is constantly changing.  So the question is a bit different in this post; we need to know whether the “people need who” rule is valid now, even if it wasn’t valid before.  And with that, we turn to the great repository of language that the world has ever known: the Internet.  I ran some quick Google searches, and here’re the results:*

	X = who	X = that	X = whom
The people X I know	1700	438000	5990
The people X I saw	172	738	64
The man X I know	63	43400	43
The man X I saw	241	19600	18800
The people X know me	93700	36300	18
The people X saw me	2010	63	2

(The man X knows/saw me is omitted because of insufficient attestations.)  The high-level summary is that sometimes who is preferred to that, and sometimes it’s the other way around. On occasion, whom asserts itself as well, although it’s never the most popular form.  Okay, that’s great!  Now we know that that is an acceptable HRRP, just as it has been throughout history (see previous post).  So, prescriptivists, would you mind terribly dropping the claim that who is for people and that is not?  Much obliged.

But what’s more interesting is that there is a clear pattern to the usages. Note that that is most common when the relative clause contains a subject (I) but no object, and least common when the relative clause contains an object (me) but no subject. Who runs the other way, appearing mostly with the know/saw me clauses. If you’ll permit a bit of terminology, this shows people prefer that in Object-Extracted Relative Clauses (ORCs) and prefer who in Subject-Extracted Relative Clauses (SRCs).

(A relative clause can be thought of as a sentence turned inside out; one noun phrase is moved from its position inside the sentence to a position of prominence before everything else. If the subject is extracted, you get something like The man ate the fish -> The man that ___ ate the fish. If the object is extracted, you get something like The man ate the fish -> The fish that the man ate ___. The former is an SRC, and the latter is an ORC.)

This same result, the SRC-ORC distinction, pops up for different verbs (I tested pass as well) and different pronouns (they know/know them worked too). (Unfortunately, I couldn’t test to see if longer NPs in the relative clauses worked the same due to the limitations of online searches, but I’m willing to bet that the same is true for non-pronominal or long NPs.)

What we’re seeing here is that both who and that are acceptable as HRRPs, despite what prescriptivists say. But the interesting thing is that different contexts prefer one or the other.  I’ve got a conjecture about this: who is preferred in simpler contexts, and that in more complicated ones. In a psycholinguistic sense, it’s plausible that who is more complex than that, because that is the default relative pronoun. You have to check when you use who that you’re referring to a person (or other sentient being), but you don’t have to do that with that. When you’re working with a more cognitively taxing context, it’s costly to expend still more effort to use who than to settle for the default that.

There’s been a ton of psycholinguistic research that shows that ORCs are harder to produce and comprehend than SRCs are, so that might explain the differential deployment of who and that. I don’t know. But following on Florian Jaeger and Roger Levy’s work on that-omission being tied to processing and production difficulty, this strikes me as a potentially interesting conjecture. Of course, testing that would require corpus annotation, a controlled study, and all that jazz that I decided to take a break from after my comps paper. So it goes.

Summary: That is a perfectly fine relative pronoun, even for people. In fact, in many contexts, that is more common as a human-referring relative pronoun than who. (“The people that I know”, for instance, is more common than “the people who(m) I know”.) Interestingly, that seems to be more common for more difficult relative clauses.

—

*: Google uses heuristics to guess how many webpages use a string, so the estimated number of results shown on the first page is often inflated. By clicking a few pages of results down (I went to page 10), you get a substantially more accurate estimate. For instance, Google claimed there were “about 3,090” hits for the man whom I know at first, but when I attempted to access its tenth page of results, it recanted and claimed that there were actually only 43 results. WOW. So all of the numbers reported above are from the tenth, or last, page of results. Even then, these should be treated as highly variable estimates; a difference should be at least an order or two of magnitude before it is trusted.

People that need people I: a history of that/who

The thing about people is that we are very proud of being better than non-people.  Perhaps the best example of this was the famous line from The Elephant Man, where the physically deformed but mentally capable elephant man has been corned by an angry mob and cries out: “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” While his first statement is not technically true, as humans are in fact animals, the key point remains — we think of ourselves as more than mere animals, and by gum, we’re proud of that.  This belief in human exceptionalism is commonly used as evidence against evolution (“I am not a monkey!”), and it also leads to a common grammar complaint:

“People who (not that) use that incorrectly drive me batty.”

See, there are three different relative pronouns you can use to introduce a relative clause:

(1a) The house that I grew up in
(1b) The pinecone which fell from the tree onto my head
(1c) The calligrapher who ruined my last birthday

At issue here is whether that would be acceptable as the relative pronoun in (1c).

Why wouldn’t that be okay?  Well, the relative clause is modifying calligrapher, which is (almost certainly) a human.  The problem is that people don’t take kindly to being referred to as thats.  Think of the indignation with which Obama supporters met McCain’s “that one” remark and you get the idea of how much people don’t like to be thats.  (Inanimate objects do not exhibit the same ire at being referred to as whos, though that may be because no one would use who as a relative pronoun for an inanimate object.)  So here’s the question: is that an acceptable HRRP (human-referring relative pronoun)?

Unlike the anti-evolution argument, which relatively few people find compelling, a wide range of people believe that it’s wrong to use that as a HRRP. And not just fringe people, either. For instance, you’ll note that Alfred Hitchcock called his movie The Man Who Knew Too Much, and that Oliver Sacks titled his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Yet there remain those who freely use that as a HRRP. I’m thinking here of The People That Time Forgot, a largely forgotten sci-fi movie, and All The Man That I Need, a largely forgotten Whitney Houston song. (It is worth noting here that the who-titled objects listed here have been more successful than the that-titled ones, so if you are naming an artistic enterprise, it appears you would be well-served to follow the prescriptivists’ advice and use who with humans.)

But what of the grammar? Is it fair to be driven batty by the title of All the Man That I Need, rather than by the triteness of the lyrics? The answer, as it turns out, is complicated.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate; the answer is simple: probably not.  But the evidence for this is a bit more complex.  I’ll address the issue in three separate posts.  The current post looks at the history of the that/who battle, the next will look at situations where one or the other is preferred in modern usage, and the last will investigate the thorny issue of non-human animates.

So let’s start in on the historical evidence. According to the MWDEU, that was the first relative pronoun on the scene, existing at least since Middle English. Which came next, followed by who(m); both already existed in the language, but only began to be used as relative pronouns in the 14th and 15th centuries. The three relative pronouns were more or less interchangeable in the early days. Then, in the 17th century, that fell into disrepute and was ousted from literary usage.  That returned from its exile eventually, but things were never the same between the three.  The biggest change from our perspective is that the usurpers who and whom claimed they were the rightful HRRPs, that humans no longer were within that‘s domain. These pretenders to the throne were supported by many 18th century grammarians, who sought to return that to ignominy.

Against the grammarians, that fought valiantly and eventually returned triumphantly to its place as the default relative pronoun and once again became an acceptable HRRP.  However, remnants of the grammarians’ crusade ripple through to the present day.  MWDEU cites carryover from this period as a possible source of the “apparently common, yet unfounded, notion” that that is not an acceptable HRRP.

This history tells us a few things.  The first is that relative pronouns have been in flux throughout Modern English, and so we can’t look too far back in history for evidence of standard usage for relative pronouns.  The second is that you can’t say that logic dictates that who must be the HRRP, since who wasn’t even an option till the 15th century, didn’t rise to prominence until the 17th, and hasn’t managed to fully supplant that.  Humans don’t historically require who, that much is clear.  But given the incessant changes in relative pronoun behavior over the years, could it be that nowadays humans do require who?

As it turns out, the modern truth about HRRPs is somewhat more subtle that one might expect, and just might illustrate an interesting psycholinguistic point.  I’ll address this issue in the next post.

Summary: Historically, there’s no problem with using that in a relative clause modifying a person.