Missing PREP - redux

Thu Apr 10 14:38:16 UTC 2008

On Apr 9, 2008, at 9:48 PM, i wrote:

> ... the puzzling examples we've been
> looking at have not a gap but a relativizer *within the relative
> clause*.  we started with things like
>  anyone _0_ you think _who_ might be interested (A)

now pattern (A) with "I think":

I really appreciate the amount of time you have devoted to me and I
will certainly recommend you to anyone I think who would benefit from
your services. ...
www.kirisw.co.uk/page_1166536696834.html

and then two with "I think" punctuated as a parenthetical outside the
relative clause:

However, it's not posted under my current username, nor any username
known to anyone (I think) who reads this. Why? Well, I lost the
password of the old one ...
coinin.livejournal.com/13485.html

Sep 24, 2007 ... It’s obvious to anyone, I think, who’s done more than
a handful of medium-sized sites that too many of your bugs are caused
by browser ...
www.theodicius.net/archives/2007/09/24/css-rese

>
> and randy has now added the pattern of
>  anyone _that_ you think _who_ might be interested (B)

(B) with "I think":

Ever little thing that I read on here like this lady's story I e-mail
this to Michael Moore and oprah. or to anyone that I think who might
have a pool in ...
www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/11/6273_walmart_sues_br.html

Randy Alexander said:

> I can't see it as  "to anyone, you think, who might be interested",
> but rather "to anyone who you think might be interested", where "who"
> and "you think" are switched around.  At least that was my initial
> reaction.

to get a transposition the elements involved have to be production
units that are in some way parallel; people don't just transpose any
old strings of words.  at first glance, "who" and "you think" don't
really seem parallel.  but it's possible to see them as competitors
for the first constituent of the relative clause modifying "anyone" --
if "you think" is seen as some sort of clause-initial modifier
(otherwise, it's not a constituent at all); this might have been what
i was groping towards when i suggested that "i think" was some sort of
parenthetical.

another transposition proposal, also suggested by randy, is that
speakers are taking the gap within the relative clause to be a kind of
pronoun (a zero anaphor) and are transposing this covert  pronoun with
the overt anaphoric pronoun "who".  the result, pattern A, has a zero
that looks like the zero of zero-marked relatives.  two problems: (a)
the zero of zero-marked relatives doesn't act much like a pronoun;
instead, these relatives are similar to zero-marked complements
(versus "that" complements), and have either a zero complementizer or
simply no explicit mark of subordination (there's a good bit of
theoretical wrangling in this).  and (b) there are the patterns, like
(B), with two explicit relativizers, and it's hard to see them as
resulting from transposition.

on the other hand, you could see transposition (of either sort) giving
rise to pattern (A), with 0 ... "who", which then serves as a model
for all the other non-standard relativizations.  patterns (A)-(F) then
would all be instances of a double-relativizer construction
   R1 ... R2 (where R1 is one of {0, "that", "who"} and R2 is one of
{"that", "who"}, with R1 introducing the relative clause and R2 inside
it, in the position of the relativized NP

(standard relative clauses have 0 where these non-standard variants
have R2.)

Ron Butters has suggested that the original example, of pattern (A),
was just a speech error.  now, such things could arise as inadvertent
slips.  but that doesn't mean that all similar occurrences are
inadvertent slips; if the result of the slip looks like a reasonable
pattern to other speakers (its parts are especially clearly marked,
it's brief, whatever), they can adopt it as a construction in their
grammars, and they will tell you that they're just saying what they
meant to say (even if other people don't find these things acceptable).

this is the scenario i've suggested for the WH+"that" construction
(which a number of people find perfectly acceptable, maybe even
preferable to the standard variant with 0 instead of "that") and for
the GoToGo construction (again, a number of people -- i am one -- find
GoToGo perfectly acceptable).  on Language Log, we've piled up a bunch
of other examples, in which it looks like some puzzling examples
probably originated in some kind of production error but have now
propagated to become systematic for some speakers.

in the case at hand, Damien Hall's original informant not only
produced an (A) example but judged it to be acceptable, indeed
preferable to some other alternatives.  it would be nice to have other
people who find (some or all of) the various types of non-standard
relatives unproblematic.

as i said in my last posting, there are a lot of details to look at
here.  i've looked at different relativizers, and now subject "I" as
well as "you" (but not other subjects), and at a very small number of
alternatives to "anyone" as the head modified by the relative clause
("someone", "people"), but all the examples i've looked at so far have
the present-tense verb "think" (which is, maybe relevantly, the
prototypical parenthetical verb), and my attempts to find other verbs
("suppose", "imagine", etc.) haven't turned up anything.  nor have i
looked at "which" as a relativizer in these non-standard patterns.

the header on this posting, by the way, reflects damien's original
suggestion that the (A) pattern arises from preposition dropping, from
   (A') ... to anyone you think of who might be interested
but damien's informant rejected (A'), so preposition dropping has,
well, dropped out of the conversation.  but it still might have made
some contribution to the development of the (A) pattern.

arnold

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