"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher" is an English
sentence used to demonstrate
lexical ambiguity and the necessity of
punctuation
Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. An ...
,
which serves as a substitute for the
intonation,
stress
Stress may refer to:
Science and medicine
* Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition
* Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
, and pauses found in
speech.
In human information processing research, the sentence has been used to show how readers depend on punctuation to give sentences meaning, especially in the context of scanning across lines of text.
The sentence is sometimes presented as a puzzle, where the solver must add the punctuation.
Meaning
The sentence refers to two students, James and John, who are required by an English teacher to describe a man who had suffered from a cold in the past. John writes "The man had a cold", which the teacher marks incorrect, while James writes the correct "The man had had a cold". James's answer, being more grammatical, resulted in a better impression on the teacher.
The sentence is easier to understand with added punctuation and emphasis:
In each of the five "had had" word pairs in the above sentence, the first of the pair is in the
past perfect
The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time i ...
form. The italicized instances denote emphasis of
intonation, focusing on the differences in the students' answers, then finally identifying the correct one.
Alternatively, the sentence can also be read as John's answer being better than James', simply by placing the same punctuation in a different arrangement through the sentence:
Usage
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle
[3802 – Operator Jumble](_blank)
or an item on a test,
for which one must find the proper
punctuation
Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. An ...
to give it meaning.
Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book ''Elements of Symbolic Logic'' as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and
metalanguage. The intention was for the reader to add the needed punctuation for the sentence to make grammatical sense.
[Reichenbach, Hans (1947) ''Elements of Symbolic logic''. London: Collier-MacMillan. Exercise 3-4, p. 405; solution p. 417.]
In research showing how people make sense of information in their environment, this sentence was used to demonstrate how seemingly arbitrary decisions can drastically change the meaning, analogous to how changes in the punctuation and quotes in the sentence show that the teacher alternately prefers James's work and John's work (e.g., compare: 'James, while John had had "had", had...' vs. 'James, while John had had "had had", ...').
The sentence is also used to show the
semantic vagueness of the word ''had'', as well as to demonstrate the
difference between using a word and mentioning a word.
It has also been used as an example of the complexities of language, its interpretation, and its effects on a person's
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
s.
For the
syntactic structure to be clear to a reader, this sentence requires, at a minimum, that the two phrases be separated by using a
semicolon
The semicolon or semi-colon is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation. In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought. When a ...
,
period
Period may refer to:
Common uses
* Era, a length or span of time
* Full stop (or period), a punctuation mark
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Period (music), a concept in musical composition
* Periodic sentence (or rhetorical period), a concept ...
,
en-dash or
em-dash. Still,
Jasper Fforde
Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is an English novelist, whose first novel, '' The Eyre Affair'', was published in 2001. He is known mainly for his '' Thursday Next'' novels, but has published two books in the loosely connected '' Nursery Cr ...
's novel ''
The Well of Lost Plots
''The Well of Lost Plots'' is a novel by Jasper Fforde, published in 2003. It is the third book in the Thursday Next series, after '' The Eyre Affair'' and ''Lost in a Good Book''.
Plot summary
Apprentice Jurisfiction agent and SpecOps-27 op ...
'' employs a variation of the phrase to illustrate the confusion that may arise even from well-punctuated writing:
[
]
See also
*
*
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" () is a short narrative poem written in Classical Chinese that is composed of about 94 characters (depending on the specific version) in which every word is pronounced ''shi'' () when read in present-day Stan ...
*
List of linguistic example sentences
A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to:
People
* List (surname)
Organizations
* List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
* SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...
*
it is">That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is
*
Antanaclasis
In rhetoric, antanaclasis (; from the el, ἀντανάκλασις, ''antanáklasis'', meaning "reflection", from ἀντί ''anti'', "against", ἀνά ''ana'', "up" and κλάσις ''klásis'' "breaking") is the literary trope in which a sin ...
References
External links
* {{youtube, 7M4iCN3aGyY, An explanation of the concept
English phrases
Psycholinguistics
Word games
Homonymy
Ambiguity
Word play
Linguistic example sentences