Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 July 30

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July 30

Are different "for" objects mergeable?

A quote from the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One reads: "This is our chance to control the truth - the concepts of right and wrong for everyone, for centuries to come." Would it be allowed in English to merge the two different for objects into "for everyone and centuries to come"? --KnightMove (talk) 04:40, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

That would be syllepsis, and it can get out of hand. From How To Write Badly Well: Joe Stockley was in an expensive sports car and deep trouble. This time, he had really let his mouth and his exotic foreign lover run away with him and it was getting beyond a joke and his immediate circle of friends in the form of rumours and speculation. As he ran a red light, the conversation back in his mind and away from his troubles, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of rising panic and the soft matte finish of his hand-stitched leather steering wheel. Angelica had been absolutely right and his wife for fifteen years, so why was he running scared, these kind of risks and this deadly gauntlet of illicit entanglements?  Card Zero  (talk) 05:00, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

In this specific case, apart from syntactic considerations, the merger suggests that the implicit conjunction, denoted only by a comma, is a coordinating conjunction. The meaning of the merged sentence we control the truth for all people and all centuries to come appears to be,

(we control the truth for all people) AND (we control the truth for all centuries to come).

Denoting we control the truth for X by CT(X), this can be expressed (somewhat sloppily) in formal logic notation as,

$(\forall p\in people(century(21)):{\text{CT}}(p))\land (\forall c\in {\mathit {future}}:{\text{CT}}(c)).$

This is not equivalent to what I take the meaning of the unmerged sentence we control the truth for all people, for all centuries to come to be. It can be rewritten as, for all centuries to come, we will control the truth for all people, or, in formal logic notation,

$\forall c\in {\mathit {future}}:\forall p\in people(c):{\text{CT}}(p).$

 --Lambiam 12:31, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

The simple answer is that this sort of thing is typicaly done only for humor. --142.112.221.64 (talk) 09:15, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

I guess it could also be used as a technique to confound and bewilder, but there might often be a bit of humor involved in such language games, anyway. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:05, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

For me, neither clearly yes nor clearly no. I'd preface the sentence with "^??". -- Hoary (talk) 04:23, 2 August 2023 (UTC)