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From: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Singular/ Plural determiners in coordinate NPs
Message-ID: <2188@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Jul-85 19:48:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.2188
Posted: Wed Jul 24 19:48:48 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Jul-85 07:20:59 EDT
References: <177@bcsaic.UUCP>
Reply-To: lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall)
Organization: System Development Corp. R+D, Santa Monica
Lines: 168
Keywords: linguistics syntax noun phrases determiners

In article <177@bcsaic.UUCP> michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell) writes:
> OK, you linguists--here's your chance!
> Consider the NP "the king and queen." This NP must be plural, as we see from
> agreement with the verb:
> (1) The king and queen are/ *is...

First blood.  Almost anything can happen in normal language, given the
proper *semantic* context.  For example:

Q: Did you see the king carrying the bishop around piggyback?
A: The king and queen is who I saw.

The singlular/plural distinction can become quite mushy in real life.  This
plays havoc with transformational grammarians who are infected with "binary
madness", but that's the breaks.

> Nevertheless, the determiner must be singular:
> (2) This/ *These king and queen...

This is certainly true.  I think there may be some "pressure" exerted by
the fact that the listener who has heard "These king and queen..." has
already analyzed "king" and "queen" as nouns functioning as adjectives,
as in "These king and queen mattresses...".

In other words, if "these A and B" were admitted to the language there
would be much more possibility of "garden pathalogical" noun phrases.

> Similar coordinated nouns with obligatorily singular determiners are the
> following:
> (3) A/ *0 husband and wife should love each other.
>     This/ *These boy and girl are in love.
>     This/ *desk and chair need to go over there.
>     This/ *these day and night have already lasted too long for me.
> The fact that the plural determiner with the coordinated singular nouns is
> definitely out would seem to imply that the structure cannot be:
> (4) [  Det [ Noun "and" Noun]]
>      NP     N
> since the N formed from the coordinated Nouns would presumably be plural (as
> is the resulting NP), and the examples of (2-3) with plural determiners would
> therefore be acceptable (and those with singular determiners would be
> unacceptable).
> 
> First question: what rules out this structure? i.e. why can't Ns be coordinated?
> It would seem that verbs can be coordinated, provided their subcategorization
> restrictions are the same (e.g. "I saw and heard a flying saucer"). (Or is
> this some sort of gapping construction?)  Likewise with adjectives ("the
> yellow and green gorph"), prepositions ("I looked both under and behind the
> gorph") and complementizers ("John whispered that Bill had left and Mary had
> stayed"). And if you believe that nouns can have subcategorized complements, 
> we have "the destruction and rebuilding of the city," where the nouns both
> seem to be in the scope of the subcatagorized(?) PP.
> 
> At the same time, there seem to be examples of coordinated nouns that cannot 
> take either a singular determiner or a plural determiner (although they 
> happily take a determiner which is indeterminate as to plurality). Examples:
> (5) ?*This/ *These/ The book and magazine are quite old.
>     *This/ *These/ The idea and presentation are both quite boring.
>     *This/ *These/ The apple and orange are good to eat.
>     ?*This/ *These/ The computer and screwdriver are for sale.
>     *This/ *These/ The story and movie are quite different. 
> (I would say something "semanticky" is going on here--e.g. "This apple and
> orange are good to eat together" sounds much better to me.) 

You bet something semanticky is going on here.  It's called real language. :-)
Now, the main problem with what you're trying to do with the "structure" is
that the traditional transformation representation of structure is totally
inadequate to describe what's really going on inside someone's head.  There
is no way to differentiate between an item's form and its function, between
what it looks like and how it is being used.

Case in point.  You claim [noun "and" noun] is plural by virtue of its
agreement with the verb.  I prefer to think that the *form* of it is
plural, but that its *function* can be either singular or plural, and can
in fact be both singular and plural in the same sentence.  Whether a
given sentence sounds okay to us depends on two things: have we heard
something like it before, and can we make sense of it?  (The two are not
unrelated.)  

English is not too particular about whether the noun phrase functioning
as the subject of the sentence is singular or plural:

    This kind of people are always complaining.
    A majority are in favor of it.

I'm sure you can come up with scads of examples.

(As an interesting sidelight, in Greek, neuter plural subjects almost always
take a singular verb:  "The trees is green".  The more I think about it,
the more I think 95% of all syntax is idiom.  We speak by analogy with
what we have heard, not by doing 50 layers of transformation on a linear
string of symbols.)

With regard to the "this" sentences in (5), they are wrong only in their
semantic isolation.  Whether or not they can be made to sound right depends
entirely on whether you can give them a context in which "this" can perform
its proper function, namely deixis, or "pointing out".  (For those of you
listening in, deixis is just the Greek work for 'pointing'.)  In other
words, the nouns A and B must be in a context where they can be used to
indicate the basic unity of A and B.

From (5) above:

    *This apple and orange are good to eat.

but, with proper mental context:

    See these two piles of fruit?
    This apple and orange are good to eat, but that apple and orange are not.

Note that there need be nothing inherent in the relationship between noun A
and noun B--the sentence can always *create* the relationship of unity:

    This telephone and baboon go together.
    This A and B go together.

So to answer your first question: there's no reason A and B can't be
coordinated.  In fact, the deictic nature of "this" requires you to consider
them coordinated, at some level or other.

> Second question: why the difference between the two sets--those that take
> singular determiners when coordinated (3), and those that don't (5)? Is it 
> something to do with whether the thing represented by the coordinate nouns 
> somehow forms a unit (in some gestalt(?) sense)? (If so, we should expect
> quite a bit of difference in acceptability judgements about the examples in
> (3) and (5).) Further examples of NPs like those in (3) and (5) are welcome.

That's right on the money, by my lights.

> Third question: if we have indeed ruled out the structure in (4), then it
> would seem the only alternative structure is the following:
> (6) [  [  Det N] "and" [  N]]
>      NP N?              N?
> (I put the question marks after the N labels on the inner brackets so as to 
> not pin myself down on the question of the number of bar-levels in NP.) If 
> this is the correct structure (and I welcome alternatives), then how does 
> the determiner get associated with the second noun? (I take it as clear that 
> the second noun in the examples of (2-3) is within the scope of the determiner.)Some kind of scoping/ movement rule, like with quantifiers?

Rules, shmules.  We say it like that because we're used to hearing it like
that.  Neurons are too slow to waste on a rule-based von Neuman approach.

What I'm interested in is the mixed NPs:

a)     This hammer and screwdriver are mine.
b)    ?These nails and glue are mine.
c)    *This nails and glue are mine.
d)    ?This hammer and nails are mine.
e)    *?These hammer and nails are mine.
f)    *These hammer and screwdriver are mine.

The fact that (b) and (d) are at all acceptable, and (c) and (e) are not, I
attribute to analogical influence with the uncoordinated phrases
"These nails" and "This hammer".  Let's see, what's the rule that says
things which are closer tend to govern?  (e) is ever so slightly acceptable
because of analogy with "these nails".  (f) is a double loser in terms of
analogy.  (a) is a double winner, and that may be why we use (a) instead of
(f).

Note that this is basically a syntactic argument, and as such more or
less unrelated with the semantic argument I proffered earlier.  The
syntactic argument explains why (a) sounds like something we've heard
before.  The semantic argument explains how we can make sense of (a).

Does this sound like something you've heard before?	:-)
Does this make sense?					:-)

Larry Wall
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