Why is "Mary told the cake to be cut by John" ungrammatical?

Question

Mary told the cake to be cut by John.

A textbook says that this example is ungrammatical, but it seems to make sense to me: where does the sentence have its fault?

Answer 1

This is a grammatical sentence, but it would be very unusual for anyone to say it because Mary is telling the cake, an inanimate object, to do something (have John cut it). It would make more sense to say:

Mary told John to cut the cake.

The main difference is to whom or what Mary is speaking. In the example in the question, she is speaking to the cake. In the example in this answer, she is speaking to John.

Answer 2

"Mary told the cake to be cut by John" is, IMHO, not ungrammatical but simply nonsensical. We don't tell cakes to be cut by anyone; we tell people to cut cakes. That's a semantic restriction and a usage problem: it's not idiomatic English.

Consider this one:

If you're gonna work for the Mob, you're gonna end up dead sooner than later. If yuh die young, it's prob'ly 'cause someone's gonna shoot yuh. The least you can do for your poor old mom is to be murdered by someone who has oodles of money. Then I can sue for wrongful death in civil court and win millions, just like the plaintiffs in the O. J. Simpson case did.

Same grammatical structure but different lexemes. Clear meaning. Grammatical. Semantically sound.

Rudolf Carnap created the sentence "Pirots carulize elatically", which contains no English words but, like Chomsky's "colorless green ideas" sentence, is perfectly grammatical and semantically nonsensical.

Is there a real and consistent connection between grammar and semantics? What is it? Is saying "I poured a yak into my cup and drank it" ungrammatical because it's not possible to pour a yak into a cup or to drink a yak? Or is this merely an example of nonsense (violation of semantic restrictions) in a real-world (vs. a fantasy-world or contrived) context?

When we deal with semantic restrictions on lexical items (words), are we concomitantly dealing with grammatical restrictions? I don't think so. If a sentence has a clear and discernible meaning but violates a syntactic rule, then there's a grammar problem; if it has no clear and discernible meaning but violates no syntactic rule, there's a semantic problem; if it has no clear and discernible meaning and it violates a syntactic rule, then there are semantic and grammar problems.

We can see that the syntax of "Man bites dog" and "Dog bites man" are exactly the same, NP-V-NP, but the semantics are different. Both sentences are meaningful and grammatical. Using the same syntactic structure but different lexemes, however, "Man drinks beer" and "Beer drinks man" is quite a different story. The first is both grammatically correct and semantically meaningful, but the second is grammatically correct and semantically nonsensical.

What have grammar and semantics to do with each other in this case? Nothing. The second sentence violates a semantic restriction: Beer is a liquid; it is drunk but cannot drink. Therefore, "Beer drinks man" is impossible in real-world English; it is not ungrammatical, however, because it violates no grammar rules, only semantic rules.

Usage isn't grammar and it's not necessarily semantics: it's a set of commonly expressed and commonly understood linguistic formulae (idioms, whether they're common and simple, like "Hello" or "The line's {busy / engaged}", or more complicated, like "He bought the farm" for "He died") in a particular linguistic community that ranges from very local (small social group) to international (virtually all native speakers of a language).

Answer 3

REVISED 11/03/2014
Tell in its ordinary sense takes three arguments: a Subject (S) who tells, an (optional) Indirect Object (IO) to whom the telling is addressed, and a Direct Object (DO) which is what is told:

[_S Mary] told [_IO John] [_DO a story].

This structure is maintained when tell is used in the sense command or instruct; the difference is that the DO is cast as an infinitive clause and signifies what action the IO is told to perform:

[_S Mary] told [_IO John] [_DO to cut the cake].

• (NOTE: Many grammarians would object to my calling this infinitive clause a DO; if you would rather call it an infinitival complement or something of that sort I won't mind. What you call it doesn't really affect the argument.)

But in this case John plays two roles: as 1) Indirect Object of Mary's action and 2) as the Subject of the infinitive clause. Moreover, the semantics of tell imposes two constraints on who may act in this dual role: it must be some entity which is capable of both 1a) receiving the command and 2a) performing it.

Your sentence violates both of these constraints: a cake is insensible, so it cannot receive a command, and inanimate, so it cannot perform a command.

Furthermore, your sentence casts the infinitive in the passive voice, and this will almost always violate constraint 2a; for the Subject of a passive construction is by definition not the Agent of the action, its performer, but its Patient, the entity upon which the action is performed. For example:

Mary told John to be beheaded.

It is (almost) inconceivable that John could perform his own beheading, or that Mary could issue the command "John, behead yourself". If Mary wishes John to be beheaded she must issue the command to some third party capable of performing the execution.

And if you want to express this action in the passive—for instance, if you don't know who actually performed the execution—you have to use some other verb than tell:

Mary ordered/commanded/decreed that the cake be cut by John.

A passive infinitive with tell is only acceptable in cases where the passive somehow retains a sense of Agency. Araucaria offers an interesting example:

He told me to be guided by my conscience.

In this case there is a 'hidden' term in that passive: what my mentor really demands of me is that I submit to the guidance of my conscience or that I choose to be guided by my conscience rather than by my interest.

Answer 4

Firstly, since the cake is inanimate, Mary can't tell it anything. Secondly, even if we change it to, say,

1: Mary told John to be seen by a dentist.

...it still wouldn't be acceptable to many native speakers. If we look at an inarguably valid form:

2: Mary told Bill to be quiet.

...we can derive...

2a: What did Mary say to Bill? She said "Be quiet!".

...but when we try that with...

1a: What did Mary say to John? She said "Be seen by a dentist!".

...which is most emphatically not grammatically valid in current English. A long time ago, Mary could have said "Be gone!". But that construction hasn't been valid within my lifetime, except when used facetiously.

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As other answers and comments indicate, all native speakers agree that if we accept OP's construction as grammatical, it must mean Mary told the cake what to do (which I dismissed as semantically absurd).

But there's obviously disagreement among native speakers as to the "grammaticality" of my alternative example #1. Some (including myself) aren't comfortable with "X told Y to be acted upon by Z" because we think Y can only be told to do something (even if it's a relatively "passive" action, such as allowing Z to perform the primary act). Others see no such constraint.

In this context it's important to remember that "grammar" isn't a pre-existing objectively-defined set of rules setting out what people can and can't say. That's just how it's usually presented to learners, but in reality it's a set of (more- or less-well observed) principles derived from what people actually say.

At the level of my example #1, therefore, it's meaningless to debate whether the form is objectively "grammatical" or not. To some native speakers, it's acceptable; to others, it's not.

Answer 5

This sentence is grammatical. It is also nonsense. It means that Mary spoke to the cake, commanding it to have John cut it.

Answer 6

@ctype.h's answer is correct: if the meaning is that Mary instructed John to cut the cake, then the phrase must be:

Mary told John to cut the cake.

However, if the meaning is that Mary informed someone that cutting cake is John's obligation (and nobody else's), it should be:

Mary said that the cake was to be cut by John.

• Said, not told, because she's not actually requesting John to do it; Instead, she's informing someone about the "destiny" of the cake. See this answer for details;
• that provides a link between the main phrase (Mary said) and the additional phrase;
• was is used here because it's impossible to use to without it;
• Note a special role of to be. It's a relict of an old form of be in the context of intention or obligation: This answer has more details.