Barack Obama + syntax

"We're gonna each of us be responsible …"

February 7, 2011 @ 10:09 am

Daniel Mahaffy points out an interesting phrase in President Obama's pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O'Reilly:

At about 7:21, the president says:

That's saying to Americans, we're gonna each of us be responsible for our own health care.

Daniel's comment:

I know that the split infinitive is a non-error, and I know that most often it is an adverb that splits an infinitive. Sometimes a pronoun is possible, as in "He tried to himself make the presentation to the committee." This morning I was watching The Early Show which played a few moments of Mr. Obama's interview with Bill O'Reilly. In his remarks, Mr. Obama said, "We are going to each of us be responsible for our own health care." This is the first I had caught someone uttering such a phrase in an infinitive. He seemed to speak without hesitation or self-consciousness so that I believe that it was a very natural act. Have I merely been inattentive? Is this common enough that it goes undetected?

(Daniel's use of "caught" suggests that he's not totally sold on that non-error business…)

First, let's note gonna has become a sort of modal auxiliary in colloquial English, and I doubt that Daniel would have noticed the more formal phrasing "We will each of us be responsible for our own health care".

But even if we treat "going to be" as containing an infinitive, it shouldn't be suprising to find certain kinds of quantification of the infinitive's subject. Some relevant examples from COCA:

… the company asked the four experts to each write separate opinions because they " don't all agree on everything, "
that's when they made the risky decision to each withdraw $6,000 from their 401 (k) s
… the state governments themselves have ordered utilities to each acquire the specified amount of 300 megawatts renewable capacity.
… it had selected three contractors to each perform a 7-month preliminary design effort to refine the Navy's LCS concepts.
… parallax can cause drivers in two different traffic lanes to each be absolutely positive that they are the one in the correct lane for the tollbooth.
In preparation for this activity, the instructor obtains enough 24-piece puzzles for a group of 2-3 to each have one.

I'm not a syntactician, but I'm pretty sure that this all has something to do with the phenomenon traditionally known as "quantifier floating", and also with the quantified NPs  that sometimes appear in subject position in imperatives, which normally (like infinitives) lack a subject there:

Don't everyone step forward at once!
All of you just take a seat.

[Note, as usual, that this is not a writing clinic — the topic is not how Mr. Obama's phrase might or should have been re-worded, but rather what its structure is and what other constructions it's related to.]


Source: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2950