Diacritiques

Il est toujours intéressant d’observer ce qu’il est possible de déduire d’une erreur. Cette boutique sur Portobello Road (où il y a les célèbres marchés en plein air d’antiquités et de vêtements) possède trois ou quatre petits panneaux écrits à la main indiquant les prix de leurs differents modèles de « scalf » :

Aucun locuteur rhotique, c’est-à-dire parlant une variété (un dialecte) dans lequel le R dans le mot scarf se prononce (ce qui est le cas de la plupart des Américains, par exemple), aurait choisi cet orthographe.

Imagine A (male) shot and killed B. In addition, some days earlier, A tried to pull off an Internet scam. This situation could be bundled into one sentence like this:

• A tried to pull off an Internet scam just days before he shot and killed B.

But as long as A isn’t convicted and sentenced, the press aren’t supposed to employ this sort of plain language. Which is entirely proper, given that the journalists are unlikely to have been eyewitnesses of the sad events. In come the hedges. At Newsforge, the result is:

• Suspected murderer Neil Entwistle was trying to sell OpenOffice.org on auction Web site eBay just days before he allegedly shot and killed his wife and infant child.#[1]

This sentence, however, throws my logic module into a loop. The words suspected and allegedly point to Mr Entwistle’s potential innocence. But if he is innocent, he tricked (shouldn’t there be an “allegedly” here, too?) people into buying free software just days before he — did nothing else in particular. The reader is being left hanging out in the air.

It’s got something to do with allegedly functioning as a sentence adverb. Its scope extends beyond just the verb shot (you don’t “allegedly shoot” someone) . The last part of the sentence means “it has been alleged that + [Subject] + [Predicate]”. And the alleging itself took place long (not “just”) after he made questionable use of eBay, if that’s what he did.

A possible way out of the confusion would have been to pack the entire allegation bit into the first part of the sentence: N. E., who is suspected of shooting his wife and infant child, was trying to sell … just days before the killing took place.

French goes about hedges differently. There are adverbs, of course, but most importantly, the verb is changed to the conditional#[2]. But it is quite impossible to translate the Newsforge writer’s construction very closely: avant que (before, if followed by a finite verb) forces you to employ the subjunctive mood, and your verb forms go haywire. Nominalising the verb won’t help: “avant d’avoir tué” has no trace of a hedge. But you can replace it with a noun. The press would definitely use the conditional for try to sell … on eBay as well and probably come up with something along the lines of Accusé du meurtre de son épouse et de leur enfant, N. E. aurait essayé de vendre… juste quelques jours avant la tuerie.

[Spell-check didn’t know: nominalising (huh — but it’s a new installation; suggestion: criminalising); anarthrous (suggestion: arthrograms).]

Notes: [1]: Note the two anarthrous noun phrases. [2]: In the French-speaking world, entire mailing lists have gone up in flame-wars over the question whether the conditionnel is a tense or a mood. Naively, I’d have opted for “mood” without batting an eye, but some syntactic uses of the conditional do indeed complicated matters slightly.

First my apologies for being such a spotty blogger lately. Offline life is intruding even more than it used to and makes sustained online activities a bit hard at the moment. But I will be back: with everything on my to-blog list, there is no lack of topics.

In the meantime, let me just quickly point out a very strange relative clause I’ve just come across. It’s originally from a site called Straight Talk Radio, which I understand belongs to a homophobic, fundamentalist Christian radio show made in USA. This is what they have to say about Brokeback Mountain, the recent film about the love between two cowboys, after a short story by Annie Proulx [link invalid — see alternatives at the end of this post (emphasis in the original):

Proulx’s short story contains graphic, vulgar and explicit pornographic language of homosexual sex between the two cowboys, which some who saw the movie, say remains faithful to the short story.

This radio show doesn’t seem to have permalinks to their programs, but Pandagon, where I first saw the sentence, does.

The problem is, what is the antecedent of the relative pronoun which? If you look at the stripped down relative clause

• which some […] say remains faithful to the short story — or even shorter: –
• which […] remains faithful to the short story

you’d expect the antecedent to be the movie. Given that the program is about the movie (it is titled America: Beware of ‘Brokeback Mountain’), this assumption seems reasonable. But this putative antecedent is nowhere to be found in the main clause. So if it isn’t the movie, what could it be? Three noun phrases are candidates for the position: Proulx’s short story, graphic, vulgar and explicit pornographic language and homosexual sex. (There’s a fourth, the two cowboys, but you’d expect who, not which, and a plural agreement of the verb in the relative clause. So we can leave this one aside at once.)

The first, Proulx’s short story, is farthest away from the relative clause, and furthermore doesn’t make any sense at all (Proulx’s short story remains faithful to the short story : a tautology). But neither do the other two because the main, or matrix clause talks about the short story only, and when it mentions graphic, vulgar and explicit pornographic language of homosexual sex it is understood that it means in the short story.

So, what now? I’ve read complaints about which becoming, for inexperienced writer, some sort of universal relative pronoun or universal linking word, to be employed when unsure how to connect two clauses. Maybe that’s the case here.

As for the dire warnings, I don’t know yet if I’m going to watch Brokeback Mountain when it comes over to Europe, but I did enjoy the short story. It works for me: it talks about feelings and desire, and does contain two short sex scenes, depicted in stark, economic language. As always, it is best to make up one’s own mind.

[Update, 2005/12/17: Apparently, the New Yorker has taken the story offline. I’m looking for another link to it. Further update: There’s a html version and a .pdf file available. If these links prove ephemeral, a Google search will help, if necessary via the “Cache” links. ]

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