Gaps and Interruptions

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman posts on gapless relative clauses, using a reader-submitted quote from Louise Story's article "The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life", NYT 10/14/2007:

“We want to find a way to enhance the experience and services, rather than looking for a way to interrupt people from getting to where they want to go,” said Stefan Olander, global director for brand connections at Nike. “How can we provide a service that the consumer goes, ‘Wow, you really made this easier for me’?” [emphasis added]

The reader objected to the clause, or at least wanted to know if "this slip" was probably "inadvertent" or "has become common".

This particular GRC doesn't really strike me as odd, though upon analysis I see the gap is indeed missing:

provide a service that it makes the consumer go ... (underlying semantic structure)
provide a service that ___ makes the consumer go ... (ordinary gapped clause)
provide a service that the consumer goes ...

As Liberman says, Standard English discourages this, or requires a different relativizing process:

provide a service such that the consumer goes ...
provide a service where the consumer goes ...
provide a service about which the consumer goes ...

English's becoming a primarily word order rather than inflected language is probably the cause of such gapless sentences becoming not only more common (if, as Liberman says, they are becoming so), but comprehensible. The relativizers are quite commonly omitted in English (to the point that most foreign language teacher grammars stress that in Russian (or Gaelic, or whatever) they cannot be), and so too are many words that can be easily supplied by the listener. Often, omitting the gap by dropping its accompanying verb creates a distinctly peculiar clause, so peculiar that it's very unlikely to be heard (Liberman's example is (ordinary gapped clause first, then gapless clause)

... the smell that Kim was making __ by frying onions ...
... the smell that Kim was frying onions ...

which I find intelligible but malformed), but just as often - like the NYT example above - it takes a moment's thought to figure out where the "problem" lies.

But for me, the striking thing about that sentence (besides the oddly apparent need for a marketing person to assert that his company didn't want to look for ways to make the consumer's life worse) - what I expected at least a few words about, even though it wasn't selected for emphasis - was that "interrupt people from". For me, you don't interrupt from.

You can interrupt without a preposition at all, using the possessive:

interrupt people's getting where they want to go ...

But if you want a preposition, it can't be "from":

interrupt people in getting where they want to go ...

or you can

prevent people from getting where they want to go ...

(or any number of verbs, such as stop), and you can even

hinder people in getting where they want to go ...

Plus, of course, you can use other constructions entirely, such as

interfere with people's getting where they want to go ...

But you can't "interrupt from". Or, at least, I can't.

Isn't it interesting what people notice, and what they accept? And yet, some people try to pretend that "English" exists as some monolithic and invariable entity for all 380 million-plus who speak it as their first language, and that all deviations from that entity are "slips" - or, usually, much worse, often involving some form of moral depravity. There are slips, of course, especially in speech; performance errors do occur, and I sincerely doubt that the person has ever lived who hasn't said something they wouldn't have corrected if they'd been giving the chance to edit the transcript. But lots of "slips" aren't. They're just differences.

The fact is, there isn't "English": there are "Englishes". At the individual level, no one speaks like anyone else. And no one speaks like Thackeray, or Shakespeare, or Austin, or Chaucer ... or the man who wrote Beowulf. English varies in 'length' - across the globe - and 'breadth' - across the written/spoken divide - and 'depth' - through time. The same people who decry differences they notice accept quite happily those differences that came along before their time; when was the last time you heard someone bemoaning the "ambiguity" that comes from using the nominative (subject) form for nouns in the accusative or dative (object) case? Yet let an I fall where a me "should" be, and stand back.

And single out an utterance for some "slip", and someone else will find a totally different "slip" that you accept without blinking.