22 Days of Music: Day 6

[rsadelle]

There's probably a time in life when you're supposed to discover Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah." I think that, as with many things related to music, I missed that time. I'd heard of it by the time it was on The O.C. the first time ("The Model Home"), and I remembered it and therefore got the reference when I heard Imogen Heap's version over Marissa's death in "The Graduates," but I didn't know it particularly well or have much of an opinion of it. Sometime in the last year or so, Seth Roberts had a comparison of "Hallelujah" versions (some entertainment site/magazine, possibly Entertainment Weekly, did the same thing at about the same time), and I got caught up listening to it over and over again. I'm in a kind of melancholy mood today, so it seems appropriate.

Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley

(Dear imeem, Please tell me which things will embed the whole thing and which only clips. No love, Ruth You can also hear this with the video.)

Comments

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

I want to know how Leonard Cohen wrote so many songs that so many music artists love, and yet is still a relative unknown.*

For another interesting exploration/interpretation of the life of my namesake, I recommend Joseph Heller (http://dedalvs.conlang.org/read/search_english.php?word=Heller,%20Joseph)'s God Knows (http://dedalvs.conlang.org/read/search_key.php?cid=212). It's by no means excellent, but it's a pretty thorough and consistent treatment of the books of the bible that deal with his life.

* That sentence seems ungrammatical, but it isn't, technically. If you remove "that so many music artists love", the sentence is fine. Adding that seems to flub things up, even though doing so shouldn't. After all, it's just a relative clause, and should have no bearing on the matrix clause, and yet it seems to do just that...

[rsadelle]

Does it seem less ungrammatical to say, "I want to know how Leonard Cohen wrote so many songs loved by so many music artists, and yet is still a relative unknown"?

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

It does. Just what is the syntactic status of a phrase like that (e.g. "a paper read by so many academics")? It seems like something less than a relative clause yet something more than an adjectival or prepositional phrase...

[rsadelle]

Well, I'm not actually a linguist, but: "songs loved by so many music artists" sounds like a noun to me, although if you want to break it up, "loved by so many artists" is the adjective describing "songs."

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

It certainly is a thing describing "songs"; we're trying to figure out what type of thing it is, and whether it's crucially different from a relative clause. (allegram should really get in on this.) I don't think it's merely an adjective, because it's distributionally distinct, e.g.:

1. The green cat.
2. *The loved by all cat.
3. The cat loved by all.
4. *The cat green.

What's odd is that there's material that's been left out if this is going to be a relative clause, to wit:

5. The books (that have been) read by millions.
6. Songs (that are) loved by so many.
7. Houses (that were) burned by the fire.

That seems a bit too higgledy-piggledy for a relative clause, whose omitted elements are always quite clear. It's also clear, as you noted, that it's primarily adjectival (i.e. it's intended as a description). In fact, if you remove the extra material, you can even put these before the noun:

8. the read book
9. the eaten apple
10. the destroyed house

There's a bit clunky, but not ungrammatical. They become ungrammatical if you expand the perfect/passive participle into a phrase.

Hmm... This feels like something I've learned before but can't recall...

[rsadelle]

Uh, yeah. This feels like nothing I've learned before. I'll let you invite Erin in and you two can debate away!

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think Erin has hit upon the problem/solution (depending on how you look at it). I'm satisfied, at least. :)

[rsadelle]

I'm glad you two were able to work this out.

[allegram.livejournal.com]

I think it's a garden path type sentence, like "The horse raced past the barn fell" where we get judgements of non-grammaticality because we get a start that makes us expect a structure incompatible with a later section of the sentence. So we take "The horse raced past the barn" as a sentence rather than a noun and adjectival phrase, and are bewildered by the seemingly incompatable addition of a verb "fell". Though once you've heard the example enough not to be lead down the garden path you get an acceptable sentence. Seems to me this sentence is similar in that it creates a tree in which you think you have a finished sentence with the end of the "that" adjectival phrase only to find out after the conjunction that somewhere in there there was a VP you were supposed to conjunct to. Notice you can fix the sentence by saying "...songs that....and yet *he* is..." in this case the conjuncted phrase is a sentence on its own so it goes with a complete sentence and you only have one of those at hand so no problem. The problem with this analysis (and I have some very nice tree diagrams which make it more convincing) is that if it is problem to reanalyze a sentence when presented with a conjunct VP nobody would ever be able to say anything like "Bob liked Sally and kissed her." which is definitely grammatical. However there are several other things that could make the original sentence different than Bob, one is choice, there are a lot of VP's in the original that could be conjuncted with, and only one of them (and the middle one at that) is ok. Dave now thinks a lot of this might depend on intonation, which might also explain why when I read the sentence out loud it is better than when I read it in my head (though I should mention that the sentence is only marginal for me, I would not have given it the ungrammatical judgement, maybe just an "odd", or "less than optimal" one, but as all who have lingugisticked with me know, I'm a very permissive speaker!). And of course there's an issue of interference from depth, the more clauses you embed and the more complex it gets the harder sentences are to unravel and the more likely people are to give technically perfect structures bad scores, because sooner or later their brain stops correctly moving up and down the tree (Which is why Dave's page long single sentence short story impresses me, it stays lucid which requires some skill on the part of the sentence constructor).

[rsadelle]

I'm glad you two were able to work this out.