topics: |  fiction | young-adult

in this narnia meets artemis fowl rale, the smart-alec teenager jiggy mccue
finds himself transported into a parallel universe.  the plot is slow
at first, but the Extreme Ironing Championship turns out into a great spoof
of all types of american contests from the spelling bee to various sports
jamborees.  the gender reversal in the parallel universe is interesting,
but appears to be an afterthought not quite worked into the tale.

michael lawrence captures very well the smart schoolkid's eye for ambiguity
in language.  this type of ambiguity has had a role in debates on
linguistic theory, particularly in overthrowing the chomskyan view of
autonomy of syntax, as elaborated on below.

Excerpts

"No one in their right minds would care if their underpants are pressed."
"I care," said Mum.
"My point exactly". 17
(this type of verbal tomfoolery persists throughout...)

The post drops through the letterbox. I picked up the envelopes from the mat,
hoping there was one for me.*
FOOTNOTE: * Envelop, not mat.   20
	(see analysis below for a linguistic analysis)

[bald Mr. Prior] grew his hair extra long on one side and combed it over his
dome to try and kid the world that he was fully thatched. 48

I replaced [the gum] and wiped my hand because it had been in two other
mouths.  [FN: the gum, not my hand]

why do you have to be fast asleep?  what's fast about sleep? 132
[good q. i had to look it up.
  OED: used to be "fast a sleep" -
     1570: The olde Byshop‥was fast a sleepe.]

  further it says:
	In phrases [like fast aground, fast asleep] fast seems to have been
	originally the grammatical predicate; now it is usually apprehended
	as an adv. qualifying aground, ashore, asleep.
  whatever "grammatical predicate" may mean. ]

He looked the same as I remembered, only a bit fatter, with a moustache and a
flashy gold medallion around his neck.
   [FN: only the medallion was around his neck.  The moustache filled the gap
   between his top lip and his nose. ] 208

why isn't your nose [x] twelve inches long?
because then it [x] would be a foot.

i bent down, slipped the key out of the gnome's behind, and kissed it.  The
key, that is.  327

Linguistic analysis of childrens' ambiguities

the ambiguities that children detect are real aspects of language, and not
matters to be relegated to postscripts in a linguistic theory.

lawrence's writing highlights the frequency with which ordinary english
sentences can have multiple meanings at the syntactic level.  without
knowing that moustaches don't normally go around one's neck, it is
impossible to know which parse is correct.

the fact that most sentence analyses depend on semantics has been pointed
out for many decades, e.g. by Lakoff (see Philosophy in the Flesh),
but largely ignored within the chomskyan "standard theory" view of
language, in which syntax is autonomous.  however, syntax, far from being
autonomous, is just not powerful enough even to analyze everyday language.
the cognitive linguistic view is that syntax is a mechanism for expressing
semantics, and grammar must combine both (see

I picked up the envelopes from the mat, hoping there was one for me

Here the ambiguity arises in interpreting the anaphor "one".  The parse
can be

[ [ [I] [ [picked up] [the envelopes] [from the mat]]]],
    	[ [hoping] [ [there] [ [was] [one [for me]]]]] ]

corresponding to the parse tree:

                        Sentence
               /                        \
          S                                     particpl-P
    /       \                                    /            \
NP            VP                                /               \
           /          \       \             pres-partcpl          S
  [(phrasal-V)+PAST   NP      prep P          hoping        /    /  \
                [Det    N+Pl]  [prep   NP]                /     /    \
I   picked-up   the envelopes  from the mat             /      /      \
                                  [partcpl]   [pleon V   anaphor    Prep N]
                                   hoping      there was one    for me

But the binding for the anaphor one is not determined by the syntax;
one could bind to the most recent noun mat, or to the earlier
entity, envelope.  here is a sentence with very similar syntax:

	I picked up the envelopes from the mat - fortunately there was
	one under the mail slot.

where one could quite plausibly bind to mat.

Note that here we have analyzed the first part as
	[picked-up] [the envelopes] [from the mat]
so that [from the mat] is a subcategory of the V and not the N, but it is
also possible to see it as modifying the envelopes:
	[picked-up] [ [the envelopes [from the mat]]
In this instance, it does not make much of a semantic difference, but
distinguishing these type of parse differences can sometimes be crucial.

with a moustache and a flashy gold medallion around his neck

this prepositional phrase has two possible parses:

1. [ with  [a moustache] and [a flashy gold medallion around his neck] ]

OR

2. [ with  [ [a moustache and a flashy gold medallion] around his neck] ]

these reflect an ambiguity in the conjunction and which may join two
clauses, or two NPs.  in the following,

	with a bright scarf and a gold medallion around his neck.

where both objects may go around the neck, the parse of 2 is more likely.

I replaced the gum and wiped my hand because it had been in other mouths

what had been in other mouths? the hand, or the gum?

here we may need a larger context to decide what is exactly meant.  the
larger analysis - considering primarily the semantic-pragmatic aspects,
is that he wipes his hand because the gum is dirty - it had been in other
mouths.

the footnote, "the gum, not my hand" - merely serves to point out the
ambiguity here, in case the reader has missed it.