let's give people things. or things to people.

17 October 2003 - 11:31 am

most of you are so not going to care, but this is the kind of thing i'm reading about today, in pursuit of my degree. Consider the following two sentences:

(1) Bob gave the book to Mary.
(2) Bob gave Mary the book.

either one is fine, right? the postverbal order is optional. you can either give something to someone or give someone something. either way. it's all good. but now, consider the following sentences, which are also about giving things to people.

(3) Nixon's behavior gave Mailer an idea for a book.*
(4) Nixon's behavior gave an idea for a book to Mailor.
*these sentences, and sentence (5), are from keiran snyder's phd dissertation in linguistics from the university of pennsylvania.

in (3), it's nixon's behavior, just who he is, that inspires mailer to write his novel. in (4), however, the reader gets the sense that nixon's behavior thinks up the idea for the novel and gives it explicitly to mailer. of course, this requires that nixon's behavior be animate and capable of thinking and giving, which of course it's not. so most people think that sentence (4) is infelicitous.

now, i think that this fact on it's own is interesting. what is it about these seemingly optional word orders that can affect our reading of the sentence so much? in one, the "giver" can be inanimate, and it's fine. but change the word order around just a bit, in a way that makes very little difference in other contexts (see (1) and (2)), and you get this crazy reading where nixon's behavior is a living, thinking, giving thing! damn, language is cool.

to make the whole thing even cooler, check this out:

(5) Nixon's behavior gave an idea for a book to every journalist living in New York City in the 1970s.

now, we've got the same word order that we had in (4), when nixon's behavior was an animate thing, but suddenly, it's not animate anymore! in (5), readers generally think the sentence is fine the way it is, there's no weirdness of thinking behavior. what happened? all we did was add some weight (linguistic weight, that is, more syllables) to the second noun phrase (the recipient, or the someone who's being given something). just by adding more weight, we've made it okay to have this word order.

turns out, this is just one example of how a seemingly optional thing about english (whether to put the someone or the something first postverbally in a 'give' sentence) is not quite as optional as we thought. the structure of the sentence carries meaning of its own. in this case, the "give something to someone" structure carries the meaning that the 'giver' (in this case, nixon's behavior) has to be animate. but, that this meaning can be overridden by another fact about english (and most other languages), that 'heavier' phrases (that is, ones with more syllables) tend to come later in the sentence than 'lighter' phrases. heaviness and lightness determined relatively, for each individual sentence.

there are other examples using this construction of how one structure conveys meaning the other doesn't. i'll just let you ponder over them:

the "give someone something" structure implies that the someone actually *receives* the something (6 is judged by native speakers to be fine, but 7 is weird):

(6) I baked a cake for my sister but I gave it to my mother.
(7) ??I baked my sister a cake but I gave it to my mother.

the "give someone something" structure requires the someone to be a possible possessor (8 is fine, 9 is ungrammatical, unless you read NY to be shorthand for something like "the NY office of our publishing company")

(8) I sent a book to NY.
(9) *I sent NY a book. (the * means ungrammatical)

with "teach", the "give someone something" structure implies that learning took place (in (10), the students may or may not have learned, but in (11) the implication is that they did, which makes the continuation weird):

(10) I taught psychology to my class (but they didn't learn it).
(11) I taught my class psychology (*but they didn't learn it).

i think this stuff is really cool. look how much we get from language, over and above the words used! and we don't even notice that we're getting it!