Ataxis

Bolinger (1988) discusses a number of examples of what he calls ``ataxis''. In

The plane crashed with no apparent survivors.

the adjective ``apparent'' does not really modify ``survivors'', say, in contrast to real survivors. Rather, it is the quantifier ``no'' that is apparent. The meaning is that the plane crashed with apparently no survivors. In

He held some of the most powerful men in the world at his complete mercy.

his mercy is not complete. Rather the holding at his mercy is complete. In

We appreciate every automobile you ever purchased.

``every'' quantifies purchases, not automobiles (and ``appreciate'' similarly takes purchases and not automobiles as its logical object). In the most likely reading of

She lost her first tooth.

``first'' really modifies the loss, not the tooth--she had her first loss of a tooth. Similarly, in

(5)	John smokes an occasional cigarette.

it is the smoking and not the cigarette that is occasional. During the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton, a television reporter signed off with

John Palmer, on a nervous North Lawn of the White House.

Bolinger defines ataxis as ``the tendency for more routinized syntactic processes to invade the domain of less routinized ones.'' He talks about ``migrant modifiers''. In addition to the above examples, he gives a number of attested examples that sound less good but are nevertheless easily understandable.

Bolinger quotes Tommola (1978) as saying, ``the listener ... focuses his attention on the content words in the message, and interprets them in the light of normal experience, predicting and building up a representation of what the speaker intends to convey. This strategy makes it possible for him to predict the correct internal relationships between message units even independent of any syntactic structure.'' He further quotes him, ``Speech comprehension proceeds with fairly little direct reference to grammar as formulated by linguists.''

In this paper I take a less radical stance. Grammar is used where the meaning derived from it makes sense. But there are other interpretive devices that can be applied when it fails to make sense. Metonymic coercion is one such device, and in an important class of applications of metonymic coercion, the coercion function is taken from the explicit content of the sentence itself, that is, from the logical form that is recognized by virtue of the ``grammar as formulated by linguists''. Bolinger's examples of ataxis yield to this approach.

Consider sentence (5). The adjective ``occasional'' requires an event for its argument, but its explicit argument is a cigarette, which is not an event. The reference to the cigarette must be coerced into a reference to an associated event. The main verb of the sentence provides that event--the smoking of the cigarette. It has the cigarette as one of its arguments, and consequently can function as the desired coercion relation.

Figure 6 gives a somewhat abbreviated proof graph of this interpretation. Where y is the cigarette, the nonmetonymic predication that syntax alone would give us, occasional'(e₃,y), is coerced into occasional'(e₃,e₁), and the coercion relation that effects this is smoke'(e₁,j,y).

  

Figure 6: Parse of ``John smokes an occasional cigarette.''

Of course, the most salient event associated with cigarettes is smoking them, regardless of the rest of the sentence, so in

An occasional cigarette can't be harmful.

the coercion will again be to the smoking. However, this salient event is overridden in such sentences as

John buys an occasional cigarette.
John eats an occasional cigarette.

where the coerced events are the buying and the eating, respectively.

Bolinger's other examples yield to the same approach.

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