more astounding coordination

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005 15:43:43 -0800, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

>from David Fenton, on soc.motss, 11/9/05:
>-----
>Oberlin has legacies.
>
>Were I to have a child and sent the child to Oberlin, she would be a
>legacy.
>-----
>
>that counterfactual clause almost got past me, and then i had what
>the Language Loggers call a WTF experience and realized that its two
>parts were not a matched pair, the first part being an inverted
>counterfactual clause, the second the VP of an ordinary counfactual
>(with "if": "if I sent the child to Oberlin").  the full
>counterfactual certainly could not have been
>    *were I to have a child and sent I the child to Oberlin
>    *were I to have a child and did I send the child to Oberlin
>and even an uninverted second conjunct  (with a subject) is not
>perfect, though it's a lot better than these:
>    ?were I to have a child and I sent the child to Oberlin.  (1)
>
>to get fully parallel conjuncts, you need to use the ordinary
>counterfactual in the first conjunct:
>     if I were to have and child and (I) sent the child to Oberlin.

One option you didn't mention:

   were I to have a child and send the child to Oberlin

That would be parallel ("were I to have" + "were I to send"). Were I to
construct such a sentence and try to say it, that's how it would turn out.


--Ben Zimmer