I’ve Had it. No, wait, I’ve got it.

Lawrence J. Kramer, for the Grice Club.

In the law of insurance in some US states, if I take out an insurance policy on the life of a stranger, and the stranger dies, even of natural causes, I don’t get to keep the insurance money. The law does not like strangers insuring strangers – conducing to murder as it does – so the law “imposes a constructive trust” on the proceeds of the policy. I am deemed trustee for the heirs of the stranger, and I have to pay the money over to them.

The law could be more straightforward. The law could be that if I take out insurance on a stranger, I have to pay the money to the strangers’ heirs because, well, because that’s a good way for the law to be. Why the “legal fiction” of a constructive trust?

The reason, I think, is that common law jurisdictions do not make up new paradigms. Think of private law (as opposed to criminal law) as train tracks that run from the hinterlands to two stations in town. One station is in the neighborhood “A gives B something that A wrongly has and A rightly should have.” The other is in “A gives B money as compensation for something B did to A.” Call them “Stuff Station” and “Money Station.”

The trains headed for Stuff Station run on the Equity Line. The trains headed for Money Station use the Legal Line. These two train lines have many branches of their own, but the two main lines do not meet.

Each of the two lines allows passengers to carry only a certain type of baggage. A rider on the Equity line may only bring a claim for stuff that someone unjustly possesses – a res for you Latin scholars. (A court of equity decides what is to become of the res and so has in rem jurisdiction.) A rider on the Legal line may only bring only a claim for compensation for damages that someone has wrongly done him. (A law court has authority over the person it will order (or not) to pay damages and so has in personam jurisdiction.)

So how do my dead stranger’s heirs get to town? I have not wronged their decedent – he died of natural causes. But it’s against public policy for me to take out the insurance, and when a man dies, attention must be paid. The heirs didn’t pay for the insurance, so what I have is not “theirs” in the ordinary sense, so they cannot bring their claim on the Equity line either. But it seems to the judges in the relevant states that the heirs ought to have the proceeds (rather than, say, just voiding the policy, which would relieve the insurance company of the loss it was paid to risk). What to do, what to do?

Well, we’re not going to build the heirs their own train line. That would be wasteful, even in this economy. But justice demands that they get on a train. So what we do is pretend that I have something of theirs even though I don’t. I did not take from them the stuff that the court would justly order me to give them – the insurance proceeds – but if we say that I hold that stuff in the same way that I would hold a gift intended for them, then they can get on the train and go to town. Their claim that I hold stuff of theirs fits nicely in the luggage rack, and the conductor knows exactly how to deal with it. As one of my late law partners put it in a mock Confucian analect: Small inaccuracy avoid large explanation.

We reductionists know that so clever a strategy must fit a larger pattern. When I attended kindergarten, the first sentence we were taught to read were something like “Spot runs” and “See Spot run.” Not only are these utterances phonetically accessible (“Ptolemy has a mnemonic” would have been a bad place to start, although in today’s textbooks where multiculturalism trumps pedagogy, who knows? ), but they are also syntactically simple. JL does not say, however poetic it might be, Elatically karulize pirots or Karulize elatically pirots.” Yes, we can sort of make these odd ordering “work” by adding some cues:

Elatically karulize the pirots (Wild grow the flowers – works best with an intransitive verb)

Karulize elatically do the pirots.”

The first of these is ambiguous – it could be a command if the verb is transitive – but context would resolve the ambiguity. The second is better because the “do” is inconsistent with a command.

What we want to say, of course, is

Pirots karulize elatically.

That’s our train. We want to translate

Karulize pirots elatically

as a command, like

See Spot run fast.

So deep is this structure ingrained in the Anglo language mechanism that we rebel at starting sentences with verbs. We don’t do it readily, and we don’t decipher sentences that start that way easily. And yet, into each life some rain must fall, and we have to cope.

Rain falls and rain is falling are ambiguous – are they about rain generally? About rain not rising? No, we just want to say that precipitation in the form of rain is currently happening, and no subject/verb combo does that quickly. Rain is happening seems syntactically ok, but it just doesn’t seem to have caught on. Lots of syllables. And even if we could find a solution for rain, lots of other similar problems would present themselves. So what now?

Language paradigms are expensive. We are not going to build a whole new syntax for sentences that don’t seem eligible to ride the “Spot Runs” line. That would be wasteful even in this economy. So we’re going to pretend that something is “raining.” We all know that nothing is raining, but who cares? Small inaccuracy avoid large explanation.

I believe that those who want to give “it” a referent like “the weather” are just wrong, but I feel their pain. They want pronouns to have real referents because they are uncomfortable with the fictitious referent – the logical device of a rainer. And who can quarrel with their discomfort? They have added a fiction to a fiction without real cause, but they are more to be pitied than censured.

The other “it” that we’ve been discussing is what I call the “appositive” it.

It disturbs me that you are a communist. (To use JL’s thriftier version.)

Grammatically, we could probably debate what is the subject of that sentence, but existentially, the thing doing the disturbing is the noun clause that you are a communist. Thus, the “normal” syntax for the thought ought to be:

That you are a communist disturbs me.

and there are contexts in which that sentence might fly, especially before a “but,” as in … but you can still vote. Indeed, the “it” locutions often are used unnecessarily, and in more formal writing, I try to remember to take a run through the draft looking for the otiose “it” or “there are.” (I find that Parkinson’s law applies to drafting, that we use words that take at least as long to type or dictate as they take to compose, which inevitably leads a fast typist or dictator to prolixity.) Still, people do use the it disturbs me that … thing, so it’s worth exploring why. (Would you find …so why is worth exploring easier to read? I do not believe that I would.)

I think we use it because we want a subject to start the sentence and we want a noun or nominative pronoun to start the sentence. When the subject is a clause that starts with a relative pronoun, we have to deal, and we do that by using the pronoun “it” as the subject and using the existential subject, the noun clause, as an appositive. (Think about what the second “using” in the immediately preceding sentence does.)

To relate this to Grice, perhaps, I have been developing a train of thought that goes something like this:

1. The material selective pressures on humanity will cause us to evolve languages (and usages therein) that are optimally efficient.

2. The maxims of the CP would work as well as maxims of the EP (Efficiency Principle.)

3. Efficiency of communication is equivalent to “brevity” in the sense that more than enough is too much.

4. Efficiency entails accommodation of A’s interpretation engine, which can be accomplished by metalinguistic cues embedded in any utterance.

5. Metalinguistic cues can be so valuable that, even when they carry no semantic payload, they do not cause the utterance to violate “be brief,” properly understood as “be as brief as is efficient.”

I suspect JLS and HPG would have something to say about such speculations.