A listener named Korgan Rivera writes:
I’ve been listening to Grammar Girl for a long time, but … can’t recall this question being answered before. In sentences like “What’s wrong with you, you idiot?” or “You genius! You’ve solved it!” what is the word ‘you’ doing in these sentences? [in the You idiot! and You genius! parts]
This is a great question, and Korgan’s right: We haven’t answered it. For the rest of this episode, for the examples of this construction, I’m going to use the word wazzock, which is a British English word Ben Zimmer mentioned earlier this year in an episode of the Lexicon Valley podcast. In that episode, lexicographer Zimmer quotes an article from The Guardian, which says that wazzock is “one of a number of faintly limp insults that are more often used ironically than in serious,” and that it can “be used on the telly without frightening your gran.”
We need a word to refer to expressions like you wazzock. There isn’t a settled terminology for them yet, so I’m going to call them evaluative phrases. The question of what you is doing in these evaluative phrases is actually two questions:
First is the more specific question of what part of speech you is, and second is the more general question of exactly what kind of thing an evaluative phrase is. Is it a sentence, an interjection, or what?
‘You’ Is Usually a Pronoun
So let’s start with the part of speech for you. Even if you don’t know a lot about grammar, chances are good that you recognize you as a pronoun, more specifically a personal pronoun, just like I, me, he, him, she, her, them, and they. So it may surprise you to learn that according to some linguists, not only is you doing an unusual job in phrases like you wazzock,; it’s actually not even a pronoun! What?!
‘You’ Can Also Be a Determiner
What is it, then? Well, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language argues that it’s in the same category as words such as the definite articles a and the, and words such as this, that, every, and some. Syntacticians call these words determiners. There are different categories of determiners; for example, the and a are articles, and this and that are demonstrative determiners. You is a personal determiner. The only other personal determiners in English are we and us, as in We snails have to stick together and Everybody loves us aardvarks.
If you’re a longtime listener, I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking, “But Grammar Girl, in episode 288, you said that in compound nouns such as gumball, gum isn’t an adjective; it’s a noun that modifies another noun. So why can’t we just say that you, we, and us are pronouns that are acting like determiners?” This is a good point. On the other hand, in a sentence like Aardvark booked the flight, we don’t say that book is a noun that is acting like a verb; we say that it actually is a verb. So what’s the difference? Why can’t we just say that the you in you wazzock is still a pronoun, even though it happens to be doing the job of a determiner?
The truth is that it’s not always an easy call to make. We say the gum in gumball is a noun because aside from modifying the word ball, it doesn’t have any of the other properties that a typical adjective has. We can’t talk about gumballs, gummer balls, and the gummest balls of all. We don’t stand in front of a candy rack and say, “Let’s see, I’m in the mood for something gum.” But it’s safe to say that book is truly a verb because it can to everything the typical verb can do. You can put it in any tense you want to; we put it in the past tense in Aardvark booked the flight. You can also turn it into a gerund or present participle by adding the suffix -ing. Aardvark is booking the flight.
How Do Determiners Behave?
With that in mind, there are two reasons to call you, we, and us determiners when they introduce nouns. First, they actually behave in at least two ways like a subset of determiners called definite determiners. For one thing, as the Cambridge Grammar notes, definite determiners can come right after the word all. So you can say all the zombies, all those zombies, and all my zombies. And so can the words you, we, and us: You can also say all you zombies, all we zombies, and all us zombies.
Here’s the second way that you, we, and us pattern like definite determiners. If a noun phrase begins with many of, some of, all of, or some other determiner followed by of, the next word had better be a definite determiner. It can’t just be a plural noun: Phrases like *all of zombies are not grammatical. But phrases like all of the zombies, some of these zombies, and a few of my zombies are fine, as are many of you zombies and a few of us zombies.
The second reason to call you, we, and us determiners when they introduce nouns is a theoretical consideration. If we say that personal pronouns in general can act as determiners, then we have to have extra rules to say why the only ones that actually do it are you, we, and us. On the other hand, if we just say that you, we, and us got reinterpreted somewhere along the way so that they’re now determiners in addition to being pronouns, we don’t have to explain why this never happened to the other pronouns. It just didn’t, and that’s all there is to it, just like not every noun has gotten turned into a verb. Other pronouns could conceivably join the club, and maybe they will someday. In fact, the pronoun them has done just that, in non-standard dialects where phrases such as Look at all them ducks are grammatical.
However, the Cambridge Grammar overlooks some differences between you and the other personal determiners. First of all, you wazzock can stand alone as a complete thought. In fact, you can’t use it as a subject or an object in a sentence. A sentence like *You wazzock need to grow up is ungrammatical. So is *I told you wazzock to leave. This pattern is flipped when we consider we and us. Unlike you wazzock, phrases like we snails or us aardvarks can’t stand alone, unless they’re answering a question. And whereas you wazzock can’t be the subject or object of a sentence, we snails or us aardvarks must be, as in We snails have to stick together or Everybody loves us aardvarks. Meanwhile, plural you can go either way. You wazzocks! is grammatical all by itself, and so is the sentence You wazzocks need to grow up. So it looks like the personal determiners are all plural: we, us, and plural you. As for the you in evaluative phrases, it can be singular or plural.
Another difference between you, we, and us as personal determiners and the you in evaluative phrases involves that test involving the word all that we talked about earlier. Let’s take the phrase You wazzocks! It can stand on its own as an evaluative phrase. But if we put an all in front of it, as in All you wazzocks!, now it can’t stand on its own anymore. Now it has to be part of a sentence.
So what’s the answer? Is the you in evaluative phrases like You wazzock! or You wazzocks! a determiner or a pronoun?
We don’t know! And as an aside, this kind of problem came up when we were making our iOS game, Grammar Pop. In that game, you match words with their part of speech, and we had to throw out some sentences because when forced to categorize certain words, we couldn’t. Sometimes English just isn’t as neat and tidy as we’d like it to be.
What Is an Evaluative Phrase?
Now let’s move on to the more-general question of what kind of construction these evaluative phrases are. In fact, linguists don’t have a definitive answer for this, either. Some linguists consider them to be vocative phrases—in other words, they’re just another kind of phrase you could use to address someone, similar to personal names, terms of endearment, and kinship terms such as Mom, or Daddy. This is also the view taken in the Cambridge Grammar, as well as in a paper by Dutch linguist Norbert Corver, who analyzes these expressions in several Germanic and Romance languages.
However, it’s not the view of linguists Christopher Potts and Tom Roeper. In their paper, they note that for one thing, you can put things that are unquestionably vocative expressions in the same utterance with you wazzock and it works; for example, Fenster, you wazzock! Second, the noun in expressions like you wazzock always carries some evaluation, but this isn’t the case in true vocatives. For example, you can address a member of the police force as officer, but the expression You officer! doesn’t make sense.
I would also add that in addition to saying You wazzock!, you can also say That wazzock! or Those wazzocks! when you learn that someone has been a wazzock, and those clearly are not vocative phrases. You could even say The wazzock! as a complete thought when someone tells you about someone else’s outrageous wazzockry. Incidentally, these facts also favor the classification of you as a determiner, because it’s patterning together with the determiners that, those and the--but I’m not opening up that can of worms again!
If Potts and Roeper don’t think evaluative phrases are vocatives, what do they think? They call these phrases expressive small clauses, or ESCs, and argue that they are a piece of early childhood grammar that survives into our adult grammars. They begin with the well-known fact that when children are acquiring language, they go through a “two-word” phase, when utterances are at most two words long. As a result, this one kind of structure has to cover all the kinds of thoughts a child might express. But as the child acquires more and more complex grammar structures, these structures take over more and more of the jobs that were formerly done by the two-word phrase.
Potts and Roeper use the example of Mommy milk. In a child’s early grammar, this could mean Mommy’s milk, or that Mommy has milk, or maybe that Mommy drinks milk. Later, though, after the child can say Mommy drinks milk, they won’t use Mommy milk to express that thought anymore.
For formal semantic reasons that I won’t go into, they argue that the meaning of these expressive small clauses is incompatible with structures that are more complex than just two words, so they survive unchanged into our adult grammars. Potts and Roeper argue that this is why, not only in English, but all other languages they investigated, these expressions never contain verbs. Mommy milk. You wazzock. No verbs.
Potts and Roeper’s analysis requires that you be a pronoun, which fits nicely with some of the data, but there are still some loose ends. One problem with their analysis is that it also predicts that phrases such as *Squiggly wazzock! should be acceptable evaluative phrases, which they’re not. It also doesn’t take into account evaluative phrases such as That wazzock!, because that isn’t a pronoun. Well, OK, it is a pronoun, a demonstrative pronoun. However, when you use that as a pronoun, it means more or less “that thing,” whereas in a phrase like That wazzock!, it’s referring to a person.
So to sum up what we know about evaluative phrases such as You wazzock!, the you could be a pronoun, or it could be a determiner, and the best analysis we have so far is that the entire phrase is a kind of living fossil preserved from the language of our childhood.
That segment was written by Neal Whitman, an independent researcher and writer on language and grammar. He blogs at literalminded.wordpress.com, and tweets @LiteralMinded.
Sources
Corver, N. 2008. Uniformity and diversity in the syntax of evaluative vocatives. Journal of comparative Germanic linguistics, 11.43–93.
Huddleston, R., and G. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language, 356, 374, 422, 522–523. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Potts, C., and T. Roeper. 2006. The narrowing acquisition path: From expressive small clauses to declaratives. In The syntax of nonsententials: Multi-disciplinary perspectives, eds. L. Progovac, K.
Paesani, E. Casielles, and E. Barton, 183–201. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar