Semantics etc.

Geoff Pullum has a post on Language Log, riffing on a sentence he was given by Jim McCloskey: “More people have written about this than I have”. The sentence slips by any human parser, even very wary ones, and nevertheless it is complete gibberish once you try to figure out what it means.

I wrote to Geoff, saying that I remembered the original version to have been “More people have been to Russia than I have” and that I vaguely remembered that Mario Montalbetti came up with it. In the absence of anything better to do on this momentous day here at the world headquarters of semantics etc. (it is the official dedication of our new building, the Stata Center, more on which some time soon), I dug around and here is what I found:

In the “Prologue” to Montalbetti’s dissertation (p. 6), he writes:

To Herman Schultze, my eternal gratitude for uttering the most amazing */? sentence I’ve ever heard: “More people have been to Berlin than I have”. (Some have taken this sentence to be a proof of the autonomy of syntax!).

[Mario M. Montalbetti: 1984. After Binding: On the Interpretation of Pronouns. MIT PhD Dissertation.]

I have to confess that I didn’t page through the entire work to see whether there is any further mention of the example (it would be great if I could electronically search it — but alas).

So, I went to google. There are a few hits for the Russia version, none for the Berlin version.

At http://www.kith.org/logos/words/upper/G.comments.html, one finds the Russia sentence among some other teasers, with this comment:

[I had thought Elliott Moreton came up with "More people have been to Russia than I have," but he wrote in to set the record straight: "I heard it around the Brain & Cognitive Sciences dept at MIT circa 1993, quoted by William Snyder in conversation. He attributed it to a mid-1970s syntax paper by someone with an Italian surname, but I forget who." My apologies to the original author for my misattribution.]

So, this might in fact go back to Montalbetti, although it’s the Russia version, not the Berlin version.

At http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lachter/research.html, the Russia version is said to be due to Andy Barss, but that can’t be. I’m sure it’s just that Andy told this guy about the example.

Colin Philips uses a Paris version in his 101 notes:

*More people have been to Paris than I have.
[Note: while most of the class shared the instructor's intuition that this sentence 'sounded fine', but turned out to be impossible to interpret, for one group of students were able to get the interpretation for this "Not just I have been to Paris".]

Chris Potts uses a Brooklyn version in his class notes:

Are there any grammatical sentences that we can’t find meanings for? Yes. Amazing though it might seem, there are such sentences. Consider this weird one: “More people have been to Brooklyn than I have.” Meaningless, right? But it sounds okay.

Chris refers to a page by Ken Shan, who has a Moscow version:

Please analyze these sentences: *More people have been to Moscow than I have. (mentioned by Lance Nathan)

[Lance is a graduate student here at MIT.]

Lastly, a student author in the official student newspaper of the University of Houston uses an Iraq version:

I admit that more people have been to Iraq than I have, so I don’t know everything.

That’s all I have. Don’t know whether this really came all from Montalbetti’s friend (?) and that from then on people just plugged in whatever place name they could think of.

Does anyone know more about the provenance of this example type?

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