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Stephen King, and Google as a Statistical Tool
On my way to work today I was listening to Stephen King’s third book in the Dark Tower series. As I strolled alongside the rolling hills, accompanied by the raspings of the monotonous voice actor, a sentence suddenly struck me: “Eddie picked Susannah up.” Okay, I admit that the sentence might have been “Roland picked Susannah up,” but Eddie was carrying her later. I didn’t pay close attention. The structure seemed very strange to my ears, either way.
At first I thought that I had encountered a split infinitive; I blame that on my five hours of sleep. Of course it wasn’t – it was a phrasal verb. When I got to work, I had to look up a list of phrasal verbs, to check whether or not it was separable. Indeed it was. And the only reference I could find regarding object placement was that long objects sound better after the particle, and that pronouns must be placed between the verb and the particle.
Susannah is definitely not a long object, so nothing indicates that “X picked Y up” is wrong in this case. Still, it felt intuitively erroneous when I heard it. What to do? Ignore this? Humbly admit that English isn’t my native tongue, so I have no right to comment on what sounds right and wrong? Ha!
Time to bring out the ultimate statistical tool: Google. Languages are fluid and ever-changing, and a good way to find a large set of statistical data is to search for various constructs and compare the results. (I’ve had teachers in Linguistics as well as English grammar who used this method when controversies arose. So I guess it has to have some scientific relevance.)
Here are some interesting results:
- “picked up the knife” = 24 400 hits
- “picked the knife up” = 177 hits
- “picked up John” = 12 500 hits
- “picked John up” = 199 hits
- “picked up Mary” = 488 hits
- “picked Mary up” = 91 hits
- “picked up Susannah” = 1 hit
- “picked Susannah up” = 4 hits
I know that the last result is too small to say anything at all, but I find it ironic that the exact phrase I was questioning is the only one where the “false” example is more popular than the “correct” one. Either way, I guess the general consensus is that objects more often than not ought to be placed after the phrasal verb.
I wonder why Stephen King chose to place it before the particle. As a non-native speaker I can’t say if it brings an emotional change to the sentence. Maybe putting more emphasis on Susannah makes her the center of the action? Or maybe it’s the preferred style for small sentences without following adverbs and whatnot?
Or maybe he just wanted to avoid the idiomatic interpretation that Eddie was picking her up, as in hitting it off with her. Silly bugger. They just killed a guardian! Eddie was covered in dead white worms! Not the most romantic setting, eh? And besides: they were a couple already.
June 17th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Perhaps I’m misinterpreting something here since I’m not too good at linguistics and certainly not in English, but it seems to me that really short words like “it” and “me” sounds really strange if one does _not_ put it in the middle.
“picked it up” vs. “picked up it” (is that even correct?)
“picked me up” vs. “picked up me”
Am I missing something obvious?
June 17th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Ah, that’s the pronoun case! Me, it, she, and so on – all are pronouns and those cannot be placed after the preposition/particle. The only valid versions are “picked it up” and “picked me up.” (There’s a small comment about it above, in the “only reference” link.)
Nouns, noun phrases and proper nouns (like “Susannah”) go under a different rule; in those cases it depends on whether or not the phrasal verb is separable.
I know… I’m a sick, sick person for actualling enjoying English grammar!