The Hourglass

I was shopping the other day at a department store and wandered into one shop which carries a lot of American country goods: things like quilts, decorative covers for kitchen appliances, and that kind of stuff. Although this was in Japan, most of the stuff seemed to have been imported directly from the US (or at least diverted enroute from China…) and had labels entirely in English. I noticed a small package of reusable stickers—you know, the kind that you can put on windows—that had roses on them. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the following description:

For me, this sentence is ungrammatical. While there are some (e.g., peevologists and peevebloggers) who would take this as evidence of waning educational standards and thereby bemoan the pitiable state of the education system, that's not my interest. For me, it's much more interesting to try to figure out why the writer wrote the sentence this way. So let's walk through a couple of possibilities here.

First is the possibility that (be) stuck is being used as an adjectival passive to mean that it is possible that the labels may be in a state in which they are immovable (i.e., they can get stuck). If so, then we have a case of syllepsis, which has recently become an occasional topic of discussion on Language Log (see zeugma on Wikipedia for further info). Syllepsis occurs when coordinated constituents are not parallel to each other. In other words, in this case, while stuck is an adjectival phrase, pulled off easily is a verb phrase.

Syllepsis is—theoretically speaking—ungrammatical: Most syntactic theories rule it out (are there any that don't?). However, it is rather different from other sorts of ungrammaticality in that good writers use syllepsis on occasion, apparently for humorous effect. Follow the links above to Language Log and Wikipedia for many examples. However, in the current case, it sure doesn't seem like syllepsis was the author's intention. If so, I fail to see the humor…

So another possibility is that the writer intended that the meaning of the sentence convey the reusability of the stickers—that they may be affixed and subsequently removed with ease. This meaning seems far more plausible as package labeling: This feature of the stickers would certainly attract the attention of those who have ever tried to peel the "leading brand" of stickers off the windows—they get stuck forever!

This, though, is where things start to get a little messy. If this is the intended meaning, then stuck must be used as a verb which requires three arguments: an agent, a theme, and a location as follows.

1. John stuck the label on the window.
   agent = John; theme = label; location = window
2. These labels can be stuck or pulled off easily.

In the present case, the writer uses the passive voice, so there's not need to specify the agent. That leaves two arguments. The theme gets specified in the subject position as labels. So the question is what happens to the location and then the preposition on. My guess here is that the writer confused the adjectival passive form (which requires only the theme) and the regular verb form. Thus, a location argument (e.g., on windows/glass surfaces) was not written. This confusion might have been facilitated by the desire to write in that genre of labelling language in which terseness is highly valued and noun-phrase ellipsis (i.e., null arguments) is perfectly acceptable.

If this is the case, then it is plausible to ask why the writer did not face similar confusion with pull off. The reason for this, I conjecture, is that there is no adjectival passive be pulled to cause such a confusion.

There is however, one question which bothers me. I am surprised that this mistake was made at all. I take it that the minimally corrected version of this sentence should be with the simple addition of the preposition on as in (3).

3. These labels can be stuck on and pulled off easily.

Personally, I find this significantly better. Furthermore, I feel like the elided noun-phrases in both constituents (stuck on Ø and pulled off Ø) kind of support each other. That is, if there was no coordination, I think I'd be less likely to elide the noun phrase: These labels can be stuck on surfaces easily or These labels can be pulled off surfaces easily. Now why is that? Does ellipsis somehow facilitate ellipsis? Could it be that once you start eliding, you can't stop? Interesting questions, but I'll have to explore them in a later post.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 16:29 and is filed under Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Syntax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.