Love this. I recently talked about "end focus" on my substack Delusions of Grammar. (Albeit in a much more silly way. I taught it at the dog beach.) Is the Principle of End Weight the same as End Focus? Maybe just a different name for the same thing?
It's not quite the same. English has another information structuring principle called the Given Before New Principle, which is similar to End Focus. I'll write about it in the future.
It seems to me that the simplest fix for the Guardian headline is: "Climate experts' and politicians' turn on Tony Blair risks &c", which I may be primed for because my perhaps overlatinized sensibility would call the "politicians spreading conspiracy theories on the internet" example incorrect and have it be either: (a) "politicians spreading conspiracy theories on the internet pose a risk to our democracy" or (b) "politicians' spreading of conspiracy theories on the internet poses a risk to our democracy": the risk comes either from the politicians (in which case "pose" should be plural) or, if "pose" is singular and the risk is the spreading, then it's *their* spreading.
Incidentally, I find the "I consider a genius the person who …" to be somewhat affected compared to "I consider the person who … a genius": the construction of the former strikes me as rather stilted and formal, and actually less easily processed, precisely because the order of the components is all out of whack: I very much want the object of "consider" to follow it immediately, independent of its length, unless the complement is being especially emphasized. "I consider any friend of his a friend of mine" is much better, or at least plainer, than "I consider a friend of mine any friend of his"; "I consider anyone who would condescend to speak at that conference, which is well known for hosting the worst sort of pseudo-sophisticated nonsense that actually just recapitulates the idiocy that passes for conventional wisdom in these disgraceful times, utterly reprehensible" is at a minimum not worse than "I consider utterly reprehensible anyone who would &c"
Yes the fix with apostrophes is a possibility, but it never came to mind for me. Interesting how we are primed differently! The headline is a 'garden path' construction (https://tinyurl.com/bdhzmc49). I interpreted 'climate experts and politicians' as the Subject of the verb 'turn'. As for the displacements, these are just tendencies that can work differently for different people, as your response makes clear. I agree with you that "I consider any friend of his a friend of mine" is better than "I consider a friend of mine any friend of his", but that's because the two noun phrases have equal weight, so there wouldn't be a need for heavy noun phrase shift. In fact, the two sentences have radically different meanings, because in both cases we would interpret the postverbal NP as the Object and the second NP as a Predicative Complement (https://tinyurl.com/yc45j9sh). As for your last point, both versions are perfectly grammatical, but I would expect that language users would be much more inclined to use the version with heavy noun phrase shift. It's an empirical matter to what extent people prefer the shifted versions of constructions like this. It would make a nice research topic.
"In fact, the two sentences have radically different meanings, because in both cases we would interpret the postverbal NP as the Object and the second NP as a Predicative Complement"
I don't see how this is possible for "I consider a friend of mine any friend of his", tbh. I think the only available construal is that the complement is coming first and the object sentence, much as if one had said "I consider to be a friend of mine any friend of his" and don't know what could be intended by taking "any friend of his" to be the complement.
You’re right. Scrap my earlier comment. However, I think that my point about the ‘equal weight’ (same number of words) of the two noun phrases stands which might explain why ‘I consider a friend of mine any friend of his’ is less likely.
I love the restaurant example showing cohesion as a reason to open with a heavy clausal subject. Joseph M. Williams uses an example sentence involving black holes to justify preferring the passive voice (I think it begins, "Black holes are formed") because of the way the passive subject follows from the sentence that comes before it.
Is the principle of end weight more likely to be in effect in languages like English that are less heavily inflected? I know syntax is more flexible in Russian and German, and I'm guessing (because I don't remember my Russian well enough to do anything but guess) that they might be less likely to follow the principle.
I'm also wondering if end weight was less common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Latin-influenced rhetoric was producing more periodic sentences relative to cumulative sentences than you see now. I know this is a different issue, but I wonder if writing those long periods had a general effect on how patient writers expected readers to be. I suppose I need to gird my loins and review some Dryden to find out.
You raise some really interesting questions here, Joseph. Great topics for PhD students who work on the language-literature interface (literary linguistics) or in historical pragmatics (https://tinyurl.com/3z32hnbf)!
Love this. I recently talked about "end focus" on my substack Delusions of Grammar. (Albeit in a much more silly way. I taught it at the dog beach.) Is the Principle of End Weight the same as End Focus? Maybe just a different name for the same thing?
It's not quite the same. English has another information structuring principle called the Given Before New Principle, which is similar to End Focus. I'll write about it in the future.
Thank you! I look forward to that.
It seems to me that the simplest fix for the Guardian headline is: "Climate experts' and politicians' turn on Tony Blair risks &c", which I may be primed for because my perhaps overlatinized sensibility would call the "politicians spreading conspiracy theories on the internet" example incorrect and have it be either: (a) "politicians spreading conspiracy theories on the internet pose a risk to our democracy" or (b) "politicians' spreading of conspiracy theories on the internet poses a risk to our democracy": the risk comes either from the politicians (in which case "pose" should be plural) or, if "pose" is singular and the risk is the spreading, then it's *their* spreading.
Incidentally, I find the "I consider a genius the person who …" to be somewhat affected compared to "I consider the person who … a genius": the construction of the former strikes me as rather stilted and formal, and actually less easily processed, precisely because the order of the components is all out of whack: I very much want the object of "consider" to follow it immediately, independent of its length, unless the complement is being especially emphasized. "I consider any friend of his a friend of mine" is much better, or at least plainer, than "I consider a friend of mine any friend of his"; "I consider anyone who would condescend to speak at that conference, which is well known for hosting the worst sort of pseudo-sophisticated nonsense that actually just recapitulates the idiocy that passes for conventional wisdom in these disgraceful times, utterly reprehensible" is at a minimum not worse than "I consider utterly reprehensible anyone who would &c"
Yes the fix with apostrophes is a possibility, but it never came to mind for me. Interesting how we are primed differently! The headline is a 'garden path' construction (https://tinyurl.com/bdhzmc49). I interpreted 'climate experts and politicians' as the Subject of the verb 'turn'. As for the displacements, these are just tendencies that can work differently for different people, as your response makes clear. I agree with you that "I consider any friend of his a friend of mine" is better than "I consider a friend of mine any friend of his", but that's because the two noun phrases have equal weight, so there wouldn't be a need for heavy noun phrase shift. In fact, the two sentences have radically different meanings, because in both cases we would interpret the postverbal NP as the Object and the second NP as a Predicative Complement (https://tinyurl.com/yc45j9sh). As for your last point, both versions are perfectly grammatical, but I would expect that language users would be much more inclined to use the version with heavy noun phrase shift. It's an empirical matter to what extent people prefer the shifted versions of constructions like this. It would make a nice research topic.
"In fact, the two sentences have radically different meanings, because in both cases we would interpret the postverbal NP as the Object and the second NP as a Predicative Complement"
I don't see how this is possible for "I consider a friend of mine any friend of his", tbh. I think the only available construal is that the complement is coming first and the object sentence, much as if one had said "I consider to be a friend of mine any friend of his" and don't know what could be intended by taking "any friend of his" to be the complement.
You’re right. Scrap my earlier comment. However, I think that my point about the ‘equal weight’ (same number of words) of the two noun phrases stands which might explain why ‘I consider a friend of mine any friend of his’ is less likely.
Yes, I read it with 'turn' as a noun too, and with the determiners lacking the proper apostrophe(s) required.
I love the restaurant example showing cohesion as a reason to open with a heavy clausal subject. Joseph M. Williams uses an example sentence involving black holes to justify preferring the passive voice (I think it begins, "Black holes are formed") because of the way the passive subject follows from the sentence that comes before it.
Is the principle of end weight more likely to be in effect in languages like English that are less heavily inflected? I know syntax is more flexible in Russian and German, and I'm guessing (because I don't remember my Russian well enough to do anything but guess) that they might be less likely to follow the principle.
I'm also wondering if end weight was less common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Latin-influenced rhetoric was producing more periodic sentences relative to cumulative sentences than you see now. I know this is a different issue, but I wonder if writing those long periods had a general effect on how patient writers expected readers to be. I suppose I need to gird my loins and review some Dryden to find out.
You raise some really interesting questions here, Joseph. Great topics for PhD students who work on the language-literature interface (literary linguistics) or in historical pragmatics (https://tinyurl.com/3z32hnbf)!