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zeugmata and idioms and linguistigeekery
Jan. 11th, 2004 11:47 amSo there have been a couple of really good posts lately on Neil Gaiman's blog about zeugma, which is the literary device of coordinating two phrases in somewhat unexpected ways, such as He put out the lights and the cat. Most zeugmata (the plural, as passed on by Jed Hartman) get coordinated around verbs, but they can also be the objects of prepositions, and Jed gives many examples of adjectival zeugma.
On Jed's list, there are many examples which sound weird to me, e.g. "He aimed to please and at the target", "She bled from the cut and me dry", et al. I won't give the huge explanation here, but the linguists among you who have already looked at Jed's list have probably figured out that it's a coordination problem: things that are coordinated must be (1) constituents, and (2) constituents of the same type.
This got me to thinking about idioms. Normally, we consider idioms to be syntactic atoms; you can't really interpose an adjunct into an idiom and have it make any sense (?"as cool as a French cucumber") unless the adjunct is actually modifying the head of the idiom (in "She let the cat unwittingly out of the bag", unwittingly modifies let; we know this because the only other place it could really go is before let. I suppose you could say "Unwittingly, she let the cat out of the bag," but point being, it definitely doesn't adjoin to anything below the head in the idiom.) But from the sentences below, it appears that zeugma can break idioms:
1a. He let the cat inside and out of the bag.
b. *He let the cat drown and out of the bag.
2a. She gave him inspiration and enough rope to hang himself.
b. She gave him enough rope to hang the plants and himself.
(1b) fails because it tries to coordinate constituents of different types, but all the others seem to work. As the examples in (2) show, it's even possible to break the idiom at different places (though I wonder whether the preferred reading of (2b) is more compositional than idiomatic). It could perhaps also be said that "let the cat out of the bag" and "give him enough rope to hang himself" are more figurative than idiomatic; anyone got some examples of idioms which don't have a compositional reading at all?
On Jed's list, there are many examples which sound weird to me, e.g. "He aimed to please and at the target", "She bled from the cut and me dry", et al. I won't give the huge explanation here, but the linguists among you who have already looked at Jed's list have probably figured out that it's a coordination problem: things that are coordinated must be (1) constituents, and (2) constituents of the same type.
This got me to thinking about idioms. Normally, we consider idioms to be syntactic atoms; you can't really interpose an adjunct into an idiom and have it make any sense (?"as cool as a French cucumber") unless the adjunct is actually modifying the head of the idiom (in "She let the cat unwittingly out of the bag", unwittingly modifies let; we know this because the only other place it could really go is before let. I suppose you could say "Unwittingly, she let the cat out of the bag," but point being, it definitely doesn't adjoin to anything below the head in the idiom.) But from the sentences below, it appears that zeugma can break idioms:
1a. He let the cat inside and out of the bag.
b. *He let the cat drown and out of the bag.
2a. She gave him inspiration and enough rope to hang himself.
b. She gave him enough rope to hang the plants and himself.
(1b) fails because it tries to coordinate constituents of different types, but all the others seem to work. As the examples in (2) show, it's even possible to break the idiom at different places (though I wonder whether the preferred reading of (2b) is more compositional than idiomatic). It could perhaps also be said that "let the cat out of the bag" and "give him enough rope to hang himself" are more figurative than idiomatic; anyone got some examples of idioms which don't have a compositional reading at all?
