I'm bringin' syntax back

On the occasion of this evening's Grammy awards, SC is reminded of a topic he's been meaning to address for a while, specifically a song by Justin Timberlake. It should be noted that your host never listens to Mr. Timberlake's ouevre, and is familiar with his "music" entirely and exclusively through exposure to it at the gym. Aside from the boy-band taint, SC despises Mr. Timberlake for the associations he's created in the public mind with the name "Justin", formerly a sign of discriminating good taste among those parents sophisticated enough to use it.

But back to the subject at hand, a ditty of Mr. Timberlake's titled "SexyBack". This artless title manages to combine one of the most annoying typographical conceits of our time -- the gratuitous elimination of spaces between words -- with an ugly grammatical choice. One might think from the juxtaposition of these words that the song would be about someone having a particularly sexy back, and that the title would reflect a construction like NP-[Adj N]. And one would be wrong. The first line of the song goes, "I'm bringin' sexy back", a construction which requires the title to be extracted across phrase boundaries; i.e. VP-[V-bringin' NP-[N-sexy] PP-[P-back]]. If you're finding this page through Google, and don't understand extraction, think of it this way: You can say "What's J.T. bringin' back?" or "Where is J.T. bringing' sexy (to)?" (that latter one is awkward to your host's ear, though), but "What where is J.T. bringin'?" is just wrong.

If those representations are still a little too abstract in making the point, see if you can recognize the classic songs that would be mangled by the application of the operation we'll call Timberlake extraction:

• ItOnHomeToMe
• HerInSomeDay
• YourFriendsBehind (thanks to Neal Whitman for reminding SC of this one)

Get this man a copy of Barriers. Or maybe a copy of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Comments

[Ben Zimmer]

I have a vague memory of a syntactician keeping a collection of book/film/song titles that are not constituents. The only ones that I can think of at the moment are "And The Ladies Of The Club" and "A Scanner Darkly".

[polyglot conspiracy]

Hahahaha. There's more on the album to this effect, though not crossing constituents in the same way. First, the name of the album as well as the title track, is
FutureSex/LoveSound. Which I *think* (though I'm not certain) means "future sex/love sound," because he sings "...must be my future.sex.love sound" (periods indicate paused beats). However, this took me a long time to reconcile, and it still sounds weird to me any way I try to parse it: is the sound from the future and created for sex/love? is the sex/love to be had in the future? is the sex in the future and the love describes the sound? is it a future sound, a sex sound, and a love sound? etc.

Then there's LoveStoned, which is just an adjective, with no conceivable reason for the internal capitalization. As in "She's got me love stoned."

And yes, I knew these off the top of my head (ahem).

[Neal Whitman]

Yeah, this non-constituent titling bothers me, too: Remember http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2005/10/20/gettin-down-on-the-farm/>"Down on the Farm"?

[Lance]

Oh, gee, thanks. Now every time I hear Safety Dance, I'm going to hear the lyric as "You can leave [your friend's behind]."

And, yes, Ben, I believe that one of Pullum's articles from NLLT, collected in "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax", has a list of non-constituent titles. I have a vague feeling that Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" was on that list (though websearching tells me it's from a spiritual: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign,/No more water the fire next time"--and I think it is a constituent, perhaps a (very) small clause, there); I also recall Trudeau's "A Tad Overweight but Violet Eyes to Die For", which may be a constituent but conjoins an adjective phrase with a noun phrase.

And of course the archetypical example is "If on a winter's night a traveler", which crosses phrase boundaries like nobody's business. Or, perhaps, "IfOnAWinter'sNightATraveler".

[Lance]

Aha, yes, here we go. From TGEVH:

1. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
2. Nuclear and Radiochemistry
3. The Fire Next Time (of which he says that the latter two words are, in the original, "an adverbial modifier to an implicit predication"; but I don't know how he can tell that the implicit predication isn't also present in the title)
4. A Tad Overweight, but Violet Eyes to Die For
5. Sometimes a Great Notion
6. Dancer from the Dance

[polyglot conspiracy]

but...but...Sometimes a Great Notion is one of the best titles ever! Ever!

[Ben Zimmer]

And yet Billy Joel's "Sometimes a Fantasy"? Not so much.

[Nik]

"What is J.T. bringin' where?" - Perfectly grammatical to my ear. It's just a matter of word order. Granted, it's a marked construction, and in my experience speakers usually stress all of the wh- words ("Who do you say was bringin' what where?").

Regardless of that, of course, the song title is a grammatical nuisance.