I saw the following sentence in a dictionary. I'd like to know whether it is correct and what relationship holds between "what even you must condemn" and "he was lying."
[1] But, what even you must condemn, he was lying.
This head-scratcher of a question sucked me in yesterday, and the more I scratch it the more it itches.
I agree with Rover and Roman55 that the sentence is grammatical,
unlike the alleged variations in post #3. While not robustly grammatical to my ears, the example in the OP has a kind of fringe acceptability. I believe that "even" is crucial to its fringe grammaticality, too. That is, if we deleted "even," I would find the sentence ungrammatical:
(2)
*[strike]
But, what you must condemn, he was lying[/strike].
Further, even with "even," I would not find sentence grammatical if the "what"-clause were placed at the end:
(3)
*[strike]
But he was lying, what even you must condemn[/strike].
However, if "what" were changed to "which," end placement would be fine. This would change the structure in question to a sentential relative clause:
(4) But he was lying, which even you must condemn.
That sentence is clearly equivalent in meaning to the example in the OP, though it arguably has differences in emphasis or focus. Also, consider this paraphrase:
(5) But—and this is something even you must condemn—he was lying.
To me, that is the precise semantic equivalent of (1). What is more, it is robustly grammatical to my ears. The "problem" is that it changes the syntax completely! The phrase "and this is something even you must condemn" is a complete sentence, inserted parenthetically inside em dashes. The "what"-clause in question, however, is obviously not a complete sentence. I think that it works rather like the structure "What is more," with which I began the second sentence of the present paragraph.
It is extremely difficult to find a detailed analysis of sentence-initial "what"-clauses (free relative clauses, nominal relative clauses) like "what is more." The only actual discussion of them that I can find is in Quirk
et al. (1985, page 1117). They classify them as a type of "comment clause." Huddleston and Pullum (2002) seem not even to mention this use of "what"-clauses, though I hope I can be proven wrong about that. Interestingly, in each of Quirk
et al.'s examples, "what" functions as the subject of its clause:
What's more surprising, he didn't inform his parents.
what's more serious
what's most significant of all
what annoys me
What is also interesting (does that work?), each of those examples (save
what annoys me) contains "more" or "most"—words which indicate a relationship to the foregoing context, just as "even" does in (1). Such words seem necessary. The following seems to me to be of questionable grammaticality:
?? What's surprising, he didn't inform his parents. Please note that that sentence is very different from the perfectly correct pseudo-cleft sentence
What's surprising is that he didn't inform his parents.
