This Language Log post talks about a sentence of of Stephen Fry's:

quote:

It so happens that more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than they are by sharks.

Geoff Pullum asserts that this is an ungrammatical sentence. Now I've read the post and the comments and I can't figure out what's ungrammatical about it. It's easily understandable, but it shouldn't be, says Pullum. But why?

Interesting, goofy. He says:

quote:

If you really think that More people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than they are by sharks can mean "New Yorkers bite more people every year than sharks do", then I have to say that I think you're mistaken, and to begin seeing that you should ask yourself what they refers to.

I thought the sentence meant New Yorkers bite more people than sharks do. If not, what does it mean?

That's what I think it means too. Pullum doesn't actually explain what the problem is supposed to be.

quote:

It so happens that more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than they are by sharks.

As he says it is perfectly understandable but shouldn't be.

The problem is the "they"

More people
...........are bitten
.....................by New Yorkers
than
.... are (bitten)
.....................by sharks.

works fine but adding that superfluous "they" gives

More people
...........are bitten
.....................by New Yorkers
than
....they
...........are (bitten)
.....................by sharks.

Now the two halves of the sentence are grammatically mismatched. It is still understandable though because we can easily guess what they mean.

I think it's merely awkward, not ungrammatical and would clean it up thusly:

"...every year, more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers than by sharks."

WM

When did biting New Yorkers become a problem?

quote:

Originally posted by wordmatic:
I think it's merely awkward, not ungrammatical and would clean it up thusly:

"...every year, more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers than by sharks."

WM

Yes that's a much better sentence. Wondering: if you just take out the errant 'they', is the sentence 'grammatically correct'? (More people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than are by sharks'). It doesn't sound as clean, but does it parse?

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
Now the two halves of the sentence are grammatically mismatched.

But what exactly, in syntactic terms, is the problem? Why is the presence of they ungrammatical? Is it something to do with what they is referring to?

Boy, to me each sentence says the same thing. That is quibbling, in my opinion.

goofy, am I crazy? I thought Pullum was a descriptivist. That sounds very prescriptive to me.

quote:

Originally posted by goofy:

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
Now the two halves of the sentence are grammatically mismatched.

But what exactly, in syntactic terms, is the problem? Why is the presence of they ungrammatical? Is it something to do with what they is referring to?

Precisely. The only possible antecedent for "they" is "more people" but that refers to the people bitten by New Yorkers. So putting the noun phrase back in instead of the pronoun the sentence comes out as gibberish

More people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than people bitten by New Yorkers are by sharks.

This is clearly a nonsense sentence, but if what other noun phrase substitution could you possibly make?

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
goofy, am I crazy? I thought Pullum was a descriptivist. That sounds very prescriptive to me.

It isn't; Pullum is saying the sentence doesn't conform to the rules of descriptive English grammar (I think). Current descriptions of English do not include this data. And so the fact that we all understand the sentence is a something that has to be explained. As he says, "Linguists do not understand this phenomenon. But they are keeping it under observation."

Pullum is an expert in descriptive English grammar. I'm sure he knows what he's talking about, but I don't understand which rule this sentence is violating.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:

More people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than people bitten by New Yorkers are by sharks.

This is clearly a nonsense sentence, but if what other noun phrase substitution could you possibly make?

If the antecedent of "they" is "more people" then we have:

quote:

More people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than more people are bitten by sharks.

That doesn't make sense, so the antecedent of "they" must be just "people", not "more people":

quote:

More people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than people are bitten by sharks.

Why does that not work?

Actually, I might begin to see the problem, but I'm not sure I can explain it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

The problem is that the "they" doesn't refer to the "people" in the first half of the sentence (i.e those bitten by New Yorkers) it refers to a different group of people (i.e. those bitten by sharks)

It's not a proper antecedent because it DOESN'T refer to anything in the first part of the sentence.

IT's like writing

More people like dogs than they like cats.

The antecedent for "they" isn't "people" it's the implied group of people who like dogs. The group of people who like cats has never been mentioned but THAT is the group the "they" is indicating and that's why there's a problem. The correct antecedent doesn't exist so it becomes necessary to attach it to something else and nothing else is present that makes sense.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
The problem is that the "they" doesn't refer to the "people" in the first half of the sentence (i.e those bitten by New Yorkers) it refers to a different group of people (i.e. those bitten by sharks)

But those could be the same people. It's not the same as your dogs and cats example, because the people who like dogs are not the same as the people who like cats. But the people who are bitten by New Yorkers could the same people as the people who are bitten by sharks.

I would be curious to know whether this sentence by the now-forgotten Stephen Fry was spoken or written. If it was spoken, say, during a television interview, I'm sure it got a big laugh from the audience. [later edit: and now that I've gone and watched the little video, I see that it is from a BBC comedy quiz show.] Nobody could fail to understand what he meant. Parallel construction be damned; ambiguous antecedents be damned--let the man fire off his one-liner!

My friends who are actual New Yorkers are not prone to biting at all, but it makes for a funny joke based on a cold hearted stereotype.

Big Fry Fan Wordmatic

quote:

Originally posted by wordmatic:
I would be curious to know whether this sentence by the now-forgotten Stephen Fry was spoken or written.

Spoken, you can watch the video

I'm left wondering how many of the sharks are themselves New Yorkers.

quote:

Originally posted by goofy:

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
The problem is that the "they" doesn't refer to the "people" in the first half of the sentence (i.e those bitten by New Yorkers) it refers to a different group of people (i.e. those bitten by sharks)

But those could be the same people. It's not the same as your dogs and cats example, because the people who like dogs are not the same as the people who like cats. But the people who are bitten by New Yorkers could the same people as the people who are bitten by sharks.

quote:

Originally posted by wordmatic:
I would be curious to know whether this sentence by the now-forgotten Stephen Fry was spoken or written. If it was spoken, say, during a television interview, I'm sure it got a big laugh from the audience. [later edit: and now that I've gone and watched the little video, I see that it is from a BBC comedy quiz show.] Nobody could fail to understand what he meant. Parallel construction be damned; ambiguous antecedents be damned--let the man fire off his one-liner!

My friends who are actual New Yorkers are not prone to biting at all, but it makes for a funny joke based on a cold hearted stereotype.

Big Fry Fan Wordmatic

I watched it. I always watch it. I love the show and I laughed. Doesn't mean I can't engage in a post facto analysis of the grammar. Fry himself is a grammar buff.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:

It's an important diffence, isn't it? What am I missing? Argghg

I've only seen a few episodes of QI, but I didn't like the show, because I feel like they're telling me that I'm mistaken about certain things, by appealing to specialist vocabulary. For instance in the first episode, we're told that we're wrong if we think Earth has one moon - Earth has two moons, because scientists consider this other satellite to be a moon, under a certain definition of "moon".

The show has spawned a book, "The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong", and Zwicky's review of the book exactly explains the problem I had with the show.

Check the animation in this article to see how the "moon" coincides with Earth's orbit.

quote:

"Linguists do not understand this phenomenon. But they are keeping it under observation."

Oh, come now. At least from all the discussions here, if people understand the sentence, it is acceptable. So this twisting and turning that Bob has done to prove that it's gibberish is a prescriptivist's view, in my opinion.

It all makes me wonder if so-called descriptivists aren't really prescriptivists. I have wondered that before, but more than ever now.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
I watched it. I always watch it. I love the show and I laughed. Doesn't mean I can't engage in a post facto analysis of the grammar. Fry himself is a grammar buff.

My point was that the awkwardly spouted sentence was intended as entertainment and succeeded as such, just as this discussion re: grammar vs. mere syntactical ineptitude is entertainment, of sorts, to geeks like us!

WM

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Oh, come now. At least from all the discussions here, if people understand the sentence, it is acceptable.

Its acceptability is not the point. The point is that linguists can't explain why it is understandable.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
It all makes me wonder if so-called descriptivists aren't really prescriptivists. I have wondered that before, but more than ever now.

Prescriptivist complain, and linguists explain. But linguists can't explain this.

But all sorts of sentences with grammar mistakes are understandable. There's no hard and fast connection between the two things, is there?

Or to put it another way

But all sorts sentences with grammar mistakes is understandable. There aren't no hard and fast connection among the two things, innit?

It's not being prescriptivist to say that the mismatched halves of the sentence make it ungrammatical without stopping people understanding it, any more than it would be to pick apart the multiple errors in the second one above - which is nevertheless still understandable.

In fact the standard prescriptivist attack on those of us who prefer a descriptive model is to say that we believe "anything goes".
We don't. We just believe that the grammar of a language is defined by how the language is actually used rather than a set of arbitrary rules someone made up a hundred years or more ago.

The superfluous "they" instantly grates with most native speakers because it's NOT part of standard usage. Standard usage likes to match the parts of a sentence.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
The superfluous "they" instantly grates with most native speakers because it's NOT part of standard usage. Standard usage likes to match the parts of a sentence.

I don't think it does instantly grate with native speakers. At first glance it seems like there's nothing wrong with it, and it only seems problematic once you think about it carefully. At least, it didn't seem to grate with Fry and his panel, and people I tell the sentence to don't notice anything wrong with it until I point it out. Anyway I think the details about this kind of sentence - how many people like it, how many people don't like it, under what conditions do people like it, etc. - are still up in the air.

And it's not really about standard vs non-standard. We can still explain usages that are non-standard. But we can't explain this.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

Perhaps "they" would have seemed grating to more people a few years back, but with the shift to common usage of "they" in place of "him/her" or "one," it seems innocuous to most. Still, that doesn't quite get to the point. Oh, well, if mathematics can have paradoxes, why can't grammar?

I just think Fry got a little lost in the sentence and ended up adding the superfluous "they". Even a literary giant like Fry (or Homer) nods. Or, to quote Hannah Montana,
Everybody makes mistakes... Everybody has those days... Everybody knows what I'm talkin' 'bout...

Nobody's...Perfect!

quote:

Originally posted by arnie:
I just think Fry got a little lost in the sentence and ended up adding the superfluous "they".

So do I. My analysis of the grammar should not be taken as any kind of criticism of anybody.

I am a little concerned that you've taken to quoting Hannah Montana, though.

Speaking of Fry and his panel, of the three men there, Fry was the only one I could understand at all. The others were speaking a dialect of English to which my ears are not yet tuned. Bob, I do take your point, but am wavering on the idea of whether it's actually ungrammatical, or, still, just awkward.

WM

One would be Alan Davies because he's on every show. Do you know who the others were? I can't check for myself because YouTube doesn't work in China

quote:

At around 30 seconds in, you can hear and watch Stephen Fry (he of the unbearably prissy recent BBC language program Fry's Planet Word) say: It so happens that more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than they are by sharks.

I do not agree that the programme was "unbearably prissy" (or that it should be called a "program" - but that's another matter). It was not intended for learned linguists; it was intended for the general public and as such was written at a fairly basic level.

I recall we did discuss this here when the programme was actually running.

They were Johnny Vegas (very husky Lancashire accent, hard to be understood by the natives, let alone those not from these shores), David Mitchell (rather posh Home Counties version of RP), Rob Brydon (Welsh Valleys) and Alan Davies (Estuary English).

Johnny Vegas, eh? I can never understand the bloke myself. Mainly because he always seems to be drunk.

quote:

The point is that linguists can't explain why it is understandable.

I think there have been some excellent explanations right here in this thread, so I don't buy that explanation. I think descriptivists often spend so much time explicating sentences (or analyzing words like "which" and "that") to prove that the prescriptivists are wrong that they sometimes move to what they see as the dark side. After all, linguists, like Wordcrafters, love words and language so it makes sense that they might get a little prescriptive at times. I don't judge them for it, but I wish now and then they'd admit it.

To me, this complaint by Pullum is the perfect example.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:

quote:

The point is that linguists can't explain why it is understandable.

I think there have been some excellent explanations right here in this thread, so I don't buy that explanation.

Where are these explanations? I haven't seen any. Bob has tried to explain why the sentence is ungrammatical, but I haven't seen any explanations as to why we understand it.

I get the feeling you think we should just say "Well clearly people understand it, so it's fine, let's stop worrying about it." But that's the "anything goes" viewpoint, which is not descriptivism.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

Well, isn't it novel that we have to explain why we understand sentences? That, in itself, doesn't make sense to me. Everyone here understood it, Pullum understood it, so what's the problem? And I disagree with you that it's the "anything goes" viewpoint. It's just logical, to me, that we should explain why we don't understand sentences, but not why we do. That seems a waste of precious time.

However, to answer your question, probably Bob answered it best in his May 9th, 8:36 am, response.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Well, isn't it novel that we have to explain why we understand sentences? That, in itself, doesn't make sense to me. Everyone here understood it, Pullum understood it, so what's the problem?

As I've already said, AIUI the problem is that the sentence doesn't conform to the rules of English grammar, and yet people produce and comprehend it without noticing. It's not like like other grammatical errors. If Fry had said "More people in the word is bitten by New Yorkers..." then it would be immediately noticeable that he had made a mistake, and maybe he would have corrected himself. But with the sentence he actually did say, it seems that people didn't notice anything wrong with it.

This isn't a problem for you or me, but it is something that has to be explained if you want to create an accurate model of how English works.

quote:

And I disagree with you that it's the "anything goes" viewpoint. It's just logical, to me, that we should explain why we don't understand sentences, but not why we do. That seems a waste of precious time.

They're both important. They're both part of explaining how language works.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
However, to answer your question, probably Bob answered it best in his May 9th, 8:36 am, response.

Do you mean this one? He did not explain why the sentence is understandable and produceable.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

quote:

Originally posted by goofy:
Do you mean this one? He did not explain why the sentence is understandable and produceable.

Kalleh is probably referring to

quote:

But all sorts of sentences with grammar mistakes are understandable. There's no hard and fast connection between the two things, is there?

I agree though. This isn't an explanation, simply an observation.
If you want a suggestion on how we understand these things I can come up with a few theories but that's all they are.

Perhaps there is an iterative process going on. It's possible that our "software" makes a best guess at the meaning then checks it for logical validity, refines, checks, refines, checks etc until it reaches a satisfactory state.

Perhaps the process is more predictive. Perhaps at the point

"It so happens that more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than" we instinctively complete the concept of the sentence though as yet we don't know whether the final word will be sharks, dogs or mosquitoes. The final word "sharks" merely completes the idea and the intervening ones are irrelevant.

Perhaps it's a signal-to-noise issue.

Maybe we analyse the sentence by removing all the noise.

It so happens that more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than they are by sharks.
Then the superfluous word just becomes part of the noise.

These are just a few thoughts off the top of my head. I'm sure that proper linguists will have more data and better theories.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

Where does linguistics end brain science begin? It seems to me that this question has gone beyond linguistics to the realm of psycholinguistics. As the ex-sister-in-law of a psycholinguist, let me tell you that I could not even comprehend the first sentence of the man's Ph.D. thesis. If I cannot understand the understandings of a scholar in this area, I will also never understand the rest of this conversation--but go for it!

Wordmatic

Where does linguistics end brain science begin?

Probably not an easy question to answer. In the past 30 - 40 years, an interdisciplinary field of study, called cognitive science, has emerged. I would guess that psycholinguistics as well as neurolinguistics (which a friend of mine has taught and calls facetiously "language on the brain") are in this intersection between linguistics and other branches of knowledge.

let me tell you that I could not even comprehend the first sentence of the man's Ph.D. thesis.

I am more than sure there are a bunch of PhD dissertation that I could not understand. Now, if your brother-in-law's committee could not understand it, there might be a problem. I would have to see the sentence in question (and most probably its context), but could you tell it was an English sentence? There are many English sentences which I can parse grammatically and syntactically, which I cannot comprehend or understand.

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
Perhaps it's a signal-to-noise issue.
Maybe we analyse the sentence by removing all the noise.

It so happens that more people in the world are bitten by New Yorkers every year than they are by sharks.
Then the superfluous word just becomes part of the noise.

This is how my mind works. In the background I pick up a grammatical error but discard it as more noise, having already figured out the meaning.

quote:

As I've already said, AIUI the problem is that the sentence doesn't conform to the rules of English grammar, and yet people produce and comprehend it without noticing.

I did get that; no need to repeat it. The problem is, I don't agree. Geoffrey Pullum is an amazing linguist, and I so enjoy reading his Language Log. Yet, sometimes I don't agree with him...or other linguists. This is one of those times; he is reminding me of a presciptivist in this one particular post. Not a big deal in the scheme of linguistics.

Alright then, neither you nor Bob thought Bob's post explained it. I liked first this:

quote:

It's not being prescriptivist to say that the mismatched halves of the sentence make it ungrammatical without stopping people understanding it, any more than it would be to pick apart the multiple errors in the second one above - which is nevertheless still understandable.

And then this:

quote:

The superfluous "they" instantly grates with most native speakers because it's NOT part of standard usage. Standard usage likes to match the parts of a sentence.

However, I now like Bethree's simple analysis even better.

quote:

The superfluous "they" instantly grates with most native speakers because it's NOT part of standard usage.

But it doesn't instantly grate with most native speakers, that's the point. Isn't it?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

I didn't see that was the point, goofy. I think the sentence was incredibly awkward, particularly with that dangling "they," but people understand what it means.

I suppose, though, I can understand the experts' interest in learning why it works. I just don't think the reason is very complicated. Ah, well. But then I am not a linguists. Surely I know from nursing and medicine that the "experts" can find complexity in just about anything.

Much of the difference is that between the spoken and the written word. When listening to someone, we are accustomed to hearing the occasional filler word, redundancy or similar mistake and tend to filter out errors, just concentrating on getting the gist of what is said.

When reading we are more likely to notice errors - I expect if we were to see a transcript most people would spot the extra 'they'.

quote:

Originally posted by zmježd:
Where does linguistics end brain science begin?
I am more than sure there are a bunch of PhD dissertation that I could not understand. Now, if your brother-in-law's committee could not understand it, there might be a problem. I would have to see the sentence in question (and most probably its context), but could you tell it was an English sentence? There are many English sentences which I can parse grammatically and syntactically, which I cannot comprehend or understand.

My brother-in-laws committee could understand what he wrote, apparently, since he was awarded his Ph.D. Yes, I could tell it was an English sentence. It was just an unintelligible English sentence, and you are quite right: the world is full of those.

Wordmatic

I think the sentence was incredibly awkward, particularly with that dangling "they," but people understand what it means.

Awkward and ungrammatical are not the same thing. Not understandable and ungrammatical are not the same thing. That being said, the sentence was not grammatical in standard General American English. Some (not all) linguists are interested in syntax, that is, how to formally describe a way (mechanism, method) to generate all grammatical sentences in a given language. This may seem like a trivial and uninteresting endeavor to some, but it is neither. It's non-trivial because many have worked on it or perused the results of others' labors. It may be uninteresting to non-linguists (who specialize in syntactic theory), as are many academic endeavors, and you are welcome to your opinion.

Yes, I could tell it was an English sentence.

This is an amazing ability that speakers have. Because of how language is constructed, we can tolerate a lot of noise in the message before a sentence is not understandable. Also, it shows that syntactic felicity (or the grammaticality of a sentence) has only partially to do with our ability to understand what the sentence means.

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Much of the difference is that between the spoken and the written word.

That makes a lot of sense.

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This may seem like a trivial and uninteresting endeavor to some, but it is neither.

That sounds pretty declarative. I suppose the same declarative sentence could be said about sports: "That a basketball player gets a triple double may seem like a trivial and uninteresting endeavor to some, but it is neither." Don't people have their opinions on whether something is "trivial and uninteresting?" By the way, I have thoroughly enjoyed this thread, so I guess I'd have to be one who doesn't call this "trivial or uninteresting." [I know, goofy, I'm changing my story.]

I suppose I have said my piece on this one. Truly, I was just providing a different viewpoint and was not trying to be argumentative (or just plain stupid). I am not a linguist so that's probably why I am perplexed that so much analysis has been done by such venerable people on one sentence that is bound to never be repeated. I suppose, however, I focus on things that others find odd.