HeiDeas

Beyond beyond beyond beyond "Beyond embiggens and cromulent"

2009-03-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

Aaaand -- here it is, the fifth annual Simpson's linguistic joke collection. Here's links to the previous four years' posts:

2005
2006
2007
2008

And here's this year's! Can't believe I'm still doing this. But those guys are still puttin' out the funny... My personal favorite this year: Homer's coordination contortion in "Mona leaves-a". Close second: Bart and Lisa's fun with quantifiers in Any Given Sundance.

:) hh

How the Test Was Won. 2009. 0:04

Possessor-possessee relationship, phrasal compounds, clipping and compounding.

Principal Skinner: At the end of the month we'll be participating in the Vice President's Assessment Test.
Nelson (standing up in audience): He stinks!
Principal Skinner: We're assessing you, not him!
Nelson: Withdrawn.
Principal Skinner: The VPAT is part of the federal government's "No Child Left Alone" Act. It will be a rewarding day of pencil-sharpening and eyes-on-your-own-paper-keeping.
Superintendent Chalmers: Cut the horse-bull, Seymour. Your scores on this test will determine how much money this suck-shack gets for years to come.

Quantifier denotations

Superintendent Chalmers has just told Bart he received 100% on the practice federal VPAT test by writing SLURP MY SNOT on the bubble sheet.

Lisa: How did I do?
Chalmers: 96.
Lisa: What did I get wrong?
Chalmers: Several answers.
Lisa: Several? That's more than a few! Almost a bunch!

Derivational morphology, contrastive focus.

All the supposedly perfect scorers on the VPAT (Bart, Nelson et al.) find themselves on a bus that they think is headed for a special treat…

Principal Skinner: Let me explain this to you in terms even the simplest will understand. We're hiding you in Capital City for the day so your numbskullery won't drag down the test scores of the children who ARE our future.

Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words (2008)

Language change

The emcee is onstage introducing the final competition in the crossword contest, between Lisa and Gil.

MC: (Brightly) We're down to our final two constestants. (Soberly) But before they compete, we would like to pay tribute to all the words that have been removed from the dictionary in the past year.

(Lights dim, mournful Oscar-style strings swell, as words begin to flash on the screen, with pauses between them for applause in tribute for all these words have contributed):

SKEDADDLE
(scattered applause)
NIXONIAN
(stronger applause)
ZOUNDS
(scattered applause)
MIMEOGRAPH
(scattered applause; strings swell to resolution and…)
HOOTENANNY
(strongest applause)

VP ellipsis, negation

Lisa, upset with Homer for betting against her in the crossword competition, has found a message, "Dumb dad sorry for bet" embedded in the NY Times crossword.

Lisa: Wow. It's almost as if Dad planted that nessage. No, it just must be a weird coincidence. But what if it's not? Oh, it must be! Or musn't it not?

Sex, Pies and Idiot-Scrapes. 2008.

Semantic bleaching, compound headedness, oxymorons

Mayor Quimby is opening the Springfield St. Patrick's Day Parade

Mayor Quimby: Greetings fellow Irishmen and lady Irishmen!

Ellipsis, event structure of negation

Marge's St. Patrick's Day cupcakes have been rescued from a crowd of ravening urchins by a kindly Irish passerby, Patrick Farrelly.

Marge: Well, Mr. Farrelly, the least I could do is offer you a cupcake!
Farrelly (tasting cupcake): Light, moist, and such a marvellous shape retention! Marge, I own a small bakery. Will you bake for me?
Marge: Me? A professional baker's employee? Imagine how different my life would be! (She imagines dropping Bart and Lisa off at school. The back of the car is filled with cakes in boxes.) I'll do it!
Farrelly: Bless your heart, you won't regret it!
Marge: I already don't!

Derivational morphology, portmanteau morphemes, cran-morphs

The arrested rioters from the non-drinking St. Patrick's Day parade are being brought before Judge Snyder to have their bail set.

Judge Snyder: Homer Simpson! You're a repeat offender!
Homer: Three-peat!

Flanderism variation, contradiction.

Flanders has protected bounty-hunting Homer from getting shot when he's attempting to bring Snake in for jumping bail. Homer sees an opportunity.

Homer: We should be bounty hunters together! You're kind and smart, I'm cruel and strong! Together, we're nothing. But together, we're the perfect bounty hunter!
Flanders: Well, I could use the money. But you have to promise me something, Homer!
Homer: Sure, what is it?
Flanders: We have to do everything by the book!
Homer: And you have to promise no diddleys or doodleys!
Flanders: My friend, you have a dealarooney!

Mona leaves-a. 2008.

Retronyms

The Simpsons are at the mall, where they've bought sweaters for Bart and Lisa at Itchy 'n Scratchy's Sweaters, Not the Fun Cartoon. They're mad, scratching themselves furiously, as the family leaves the store.

Lisa: Mom, you tricked us!
Bart: We thought this was gonna be a fun trip to the mall!
Marge (trying to emphasize the good side): We listened to music radio in the car!

Coordination & constituent structure

Homer is lying in bed depressed after his mother's funeral.

Marge: C'mon, Homie! Your mom wouldn't have wanted you to stay in bed forever!
Homer: I'll tell you what she didn't want! Me to be a jerk to her and then she dies!

Impersonal 'you', generic sentences

Homer: Apu, what do you think happens after you die?
Apu: Manjula will sell the store, dye her hair blonde, and marry my cousin Jangular.
Manjula (in background): Yes! I will!

Dial N for Nerder. 2008.

Spelling

Nelson is investigating Martin Prince's untimely death, and has identified Bart and Lisa as possible suspects. He innocently runs into them in the Kwik-e-mart, and starts rambling, Columbo-style:

Nelson: Afternoon!
Bart and Lisa (nervous babble): Taaa
Nelson: Doing a little shopping, eh? Shop-pin' at the Kwik-e-mart. I like how 'quick' is spelled with a 'k'. It's a quicker way of spelling "quick"!

Presupposition, reference

Kent Brockman is interviewing Chief Wiggum at the scene of Martin Prince's supposed death at the foot of a cliff in Springfield National Forest.

Chief Wiggum: According to this pocket protector, the victim's name is Martin Prince. Sadly, his pocket was protected, but nothing else. And we know exACtly who is to blame! [Bart and Lisa, watching on the couch at home, cringe in fear]. Noone! The boy clearly fell by accident!

Predication

A cougar coughs up Martin Prince's torn and tattered shirt. Chief Wiggum picks it up with a stick.

Chief Wiggum (to Lou): Do you think this would fit little Ralphie?
Lou: Chief, that's evidence!
Chief Wiggum: I know. But after it's evidence, it's a shirt again, innit? (Tucks shirt in pocket)

All about Lisa. 2008.

Idioms, quantifiers

Bart is auditioning to be a Krusketeer, and his act is going over very well. The crowd is applauding and cheering.

Lisa: Yay, Bart!
Marge: My son's a good-for-something!

Irregular plurals, proper nouns as common nouns

Sideshow Mel's narrative voiceover: Over the years, show business has been home to scoundrels and saints, thespians and harlequins, abbotts and costelli.

Any Given Sundance. 2008.

Bahuvrihi participles, adjectival -ed, be-prefixation.

The Simpsons are going tailgating at the game between Springfield U and Springfield A&M.

Homer: What childbirth is to women, eating trunk meats is to the bewangèd.

Quantification, free choice any:

Homer (dreamily): What could be greater than eating and drinking for hours in a drizzly parking lot?
Lisa: Anything.
Bart: No, everything is better!
Lisa: Anything!
Bart: Everything!
Lisa: Anything!
Bart: Everything!
Lisa: Anything!
Bart: Everything!
… etc. Camera pans away.

Varieties of anything.

A roving brand of movie mucky-mucks have seen Lisa's Sundance movie (Capturing the Simpsons) and want to distribute it. They approach Superintendent Chalmers and Principal Skinner, whose company 'Chalmskinn productions' got production credit:

Movie mucky-mucks: There they are -- the producers if Capturing the Simpsons! Your movie's great! We wanna be in the Chalmskinn business.
Chalmers (aside): This is it Seymour, the big deal. Just play it cool.
Movie mucky-mucks: Look, we wanna buy this movie and we're prepared to offer you anything!
Skinner: We're prepared to accept anything!

Apocalypse Cow. 2008.

Spelling

Homer has dressed up in a cow suit to save Bart's 4-H steer Lou from being taken to the feed lot. They've loaded him into the truck instead of Lou and are driving him away. But, through the eyeholes in his cowsuit, Homer sees the FEED LOT sign going by — they're not stopping! Next he sees LAUGHTER HOUSE.

Homer: Oooh, Laughter House! With the world in the shape it's in, we could all use some comedy!

The camera pulls back to reveal the initial S — SLAUGHTER HOUSE.

Love, Springfieldian Style. 2008.

(Even the title of the episode has fancy derivational morphology)

Conversion of proper noun into common noun.

Homer is narrating a romantic story for Marge:

Homer (voiceover): They were the Bonnie and Clyde of their time. Their names were Bonnie and Clyde.

Taboo, pejoration, insults

Marge is telling the story of Shady and the Vamp, a story of canine love that breaks class barriers. Shady has taken the Vamp out for spaghetti at Luigi's, and she's stolen some spaghetti from him.

Shady: You're pretty feisty for an upper-class bitch!
The Vamp: I like that you used the technical term for a female dog!

Garden Path, literal vs. idiomatic interpretation

Willie the dogcatcher has captured Shady and the Vamp's two puppies.

Willie: You strays are going straight to the pound, where you'll be put to sleep….by my boring stories! And then you'll be killed.

Papa Don't Leech. 2008.

Rhetoric

Lisa's bringing Mayor Quimby his pre-ordered Girl Scout cookies.

Lisa: That'll be thirty dollars.
Mayor Quimby: For three boxes?!
Lisa: The money helps us serve the community…(counts off on fingers, list intonation) plant trees, pick up litter, cut up milk bones for old dogs…
Mayor Quimby: It was a rhetorical question!
Lisa: And I used rhetoric in my answer!

Four-letter words:

The family's watching Sesame Street on TV, and a beautiful country singer is singing to Kermit (to a tune roughly like Goodnight Irene): "Bunk with me tonight, Kermit, bunk with me tonight."

Lisa: Hey dad! That's that singer you used to manage!
Bart: Oh right! Dad was Colonel Homer and he wore that awesome suit and Lurleen wanted to bunk his brains out!

More rhetorical questions, constructional meaning of 'how could'

Homer and Marge have just learned that Lurleen's dad walked out on his family when she was a child.

Marge: So that's it! She's been burned by the most important man in her life — her father!
Homer: [disgusted intonation] How could a man just abandon his family? By which I mean, what is the method he would use, and could anyone do it?

Locative denominal verbs with telic particle 'up'

Marge is confronting Lurleen's father, who answers the door wearing a weathered t-shirt reading 'No Child Support' and holding a bowl of cereal:

Marge: Hello, are you Royce Lumkin?
Royce: That's right.
Marge: Father of Lurleen Lumkin?
Royce: Lurleen?! (Lip trembles) I ain't seen my little girl in thirty years! She must be what, twelve, thirteen by now?
Marge: She's thirty-four! And she's having a rough time!
Royce: Oh, man. I better whiskey up these corn flakes. (Pulls out a hip flask, pours into his cereal).
Marge: She needs to see you right away!
Royce: Oh, man. I better heroin up this orange juice! (Stoops to pick up a glass of juice and a syringe.

Flapping, r-insertion:

Lurleen has written a song for her father, and in the chorus she rhymes as follows:

Lurleen (singing): Daddy's back and I'm feeling like a daughter!
Bart: Daddy's back and she's feeling like she oughter!
Royce: Daddy's back, and I'm drinking bottled water!
Lisa: Keep it down! I'm reading Harry Potter.
Marge (in shower): My body wash is Es-tée Lauder.

Smoke on the Daughter. 2008.

Reversative un-, constituency and modification.

Marge is showing Lisa her box of Shattered Dreams (which she keeps in her Disappointment Closet).

Lisa: Mom, it's not too late to unshatter your dreams! Martha Graham danced well into her 70s!
Marge: You mean she danced well, into her seventies, or danced, well into her seventies?
Lisa: Well, she danced into her seventies!

Taboo words

Homer: This can only mean one thing! Flanders, you ate my jerky!
Flanders: As the oak said to the beagle, you're barking up the wrong tree! I spent the whole morning blacking out the goshes and darns in these Hardy Boys books!
Homer: I know you ate my jerky! Just like I ate your earthquake supplies!
Bart: Dad, look, raccoons!
Homer (menacingly, to Flanders): You stay right there!
Flanders: Okeley dokeley! (Sits and opens The mystery of the odd-shaped rock. Reading to himself:) "Aw!" "Heck!" "Darn!" I don't think so! (Deploys black marker).

Retronymy:
Lisa's been taking ballet lessons, and has gotten hooked on secondhand smoke during breaks. It's a windy day, though, and she can't catch enough of her classmate's exhales to get a hit.

Lisa: Oh, what am I thinking? I don't need secondhand smoke to do ballet! (Sees smouldering butt on ground, picks it up.) I need first-hand smoke!

Other people making Marge's signature noise

Double, Double Boy in Trouble. 2008. Towards very end of episode, Bart is reunited with his family.

Bart: I never thought I'd say this, but – I missed you guys. Even what's-her-name. Lisa.
Lisa: Rmmmrm (Makes marge's annoyed pharyngeal nasal noise).

Beyond beyond beyond "Beyond embiggens and cromulent"

2008-03-17T02:20:00.000-07:00

Well, Google's logo has shamrocks on it again, which means it's time for my fourth annual Simpsons linguistic joke collection posting. I can hardly believe it myself. These guys just never run out!

Here's links to the previous three years' collections:
2005
2006
2007

And here's this year's! Enjoy!

Episode: Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind (2007)

Category: Haplology

Homer has drunk Moe's 'forget-me-not' drink, and has 24-hour amnesia. He's visiting the Memory Recovery Institute ("We do not do MRIs"), where Professor Frink is welcoming him.

Professor Frink: Mr. Simpson, I have built a device that will enable you to explore your memories. The science was easy, but now I've got the hard part -- coming up with the name!
Homer: How about the "Dejà-ViewMaster"?
Frink: Ahh…
Homer: "Remembrance of Things Fast"?
Frink: Umm..
Homer: "The Rememberererer"?
Frink: We don't need to come up with the name now.

Category: Pronouns as common nouns

Homer's riding in Frink's 'Memory Bubble'. He looks down to see himself sledding with Bart and Lisa.

Homer: Awww -- I landed in a pleasant memory! Look at happy me and playful them!

Category: Bound roots, compounding, pronouns and proper nouns as common nounss. Also 'teach you to P' = "teach you to not P"

Homer's agreed to take Bart back to confront his own ten-year-old self in an evenly-matched playground fight…

10-year-old Homer (taking repeated blows from Bart): You're superior to me in every way!
39-year-old Homer: D'oh! Well let's see how you do against 20-year old Homer!
<…shortly…>
20-year-old Homer (taking repeated blows from Bart): Uh! Oh! D'oh! What is it you want from me? Money? Weed? [Collapses under a final blow].
39-year-old Homer: I'll teach you to beat up yesterme!

Episode: Funeral for a Fiend (2007)

Category:Idiom chunks, degree phrase

Sideshow Bob's psychiatic expert witness is giving evidence that SB was insane during his most recent attempt on the Simpsons' lives:

Psychiatrist: Robert was a peaceful boy, sickly and weak from a congenital heart defect. [He shows a picture of SB going to his prom in bed. The jury goes "Awwww!"] But then that Simpson boy started tormenting him, and he crossed over into dementia!
Sideshow Bob (defending himself): To what degree was this dementia blown?
Psychiatrist: Full! [Jury gasps.]

Category:Suppletive comparatives:

Marge has been watching her TiVo, and has fallen asleep on the couch. She dreams that the TV is talking to her…

Talking head (ominously): Marge Simpson!
Marge: Keith Oberman!?
Keith Oberman: That's right, content burglar Marge Simpson! You've been watching TV shows but skipping the commercials that pay for them! That makes you the worst person in the world!

A video graphic of photos of the world's worst people appears. First the devil, labelled, 'worse', then Mr. Burns, labelled 'worser', and finally Marge, labelled 'worst'.

Episode:The Wettest Stories Ever Told (2006)

Category:'Target state' participles, compound verbs

In a terrible storm, Captain Flandish of the Mayflower falls and strikes his head against a bulkhead.

(Puritan) Reverend Lovejoy: Our captain's beheadbumped!

Category: Identity construction through linguistic cues

Lisa is explaining about how the passengers on the Neptune are a cross-section of society. (Cf. Poseidon Adventure)

Lisa: And you've got the elderly Jewish couple making their first trip to Israel…
Jewish mother (heavy emphasis on the non-English consonants and consonant clusters): Our son Shlomo is working on a kibbutz in Haifa. We're schlepping him some kreplach!
Jewish father: We're Jewish all right!

Episode: All's Fair in Oven War (2004)

Category: Recursivity in synthetic compounds

Marge and Homer are snooping around their neighbor's open house. They have an incredibly fancy kitchen with a sub-zero fridge and other amazing appliances.

Marge: This is the kitchen I've always wanted! Oooh! A bread-maker maker! [She presses a button and the machine opens up to eject a smaller version of itself, which opens to eject a fresh loaf of bread.]

Episode: Little Orphan Millie (2007)

Category: Re-prefixation (cf. Keyser and Roeper 1987)

Kirk and LouAnn Van Houten, Milhouse's parents, are getting remarried.

Reverend Lovejoy: Do you Kirk, take LouAnn to rehave and rehold?

Category: Flapping resulting in homophony

Bart's lines: "There's no such thing as an iPoddy."

Episode: Treehouse of Horror XVII (2006)

Category: Object pronoun cliticization and particle shift

Homer has eaten a glowing green blob from outer space. It's trying to crawl out his orifices, but he determinedly and repeatedly sucks it back in.

Homer: If I can keep down Arby's, I can keep down you!

Category: Recursion, parsing.

Dr. Phil has come to try and talk blob Homer out of his eating-people rampage.

Dr. Phil: Homer, you're family's here. And you've got to help me help them help you help me help you.

Category: Literal interpretation

Homer and Marge have made a play-doh girl golem for the lonely golem that Bart has stolen from Krusty. Marge writes 'LIVE' on a piece of paper and inserts it into her mouth. She blinks and wakes up.

Girl golem (in the incredibly nasal voice of Fran Dresher): Hello everybody, ãh hã hãã. What's with this outfit? It looks like a lion ate a parrot and then threw up!
hãã hãã
Homer: Well, back to the drawing board! (Begins to attack her with an axe).
Golem: No! What are you, nuts? She was made for me!

Episode: Treehouse of Horror XVIII (2007)

Category: Borrowing

Homer chants as Marge takes some ramekins out of the oven.

Homer: Crème-bru-lée!! Crème-bru-lée!! Or in English, burnt…cream! Burnt…cream!

Category: Speech acts (threats and contracts), reduction, compound verbs

Bart, Lisa, Nelson and Milhouse are trick-or-treating at the Skinners. Agnes opens the door.

BLNM (in chorus): [ˈtɹɪkɚˈtɹijt]
Agnes: Beat it, weirdos! I don't do Halloween!
Milhouse: Y-you're supposed to give us candy!
Agnes: I got your candy right here! (She hocks up a loogie and spits it right into Milhouse's candy basket, then slams the door, muttering.) Weirdos.
Nelson (outraged): She empty-bagged us!
Lisa: What do we do now?
Bart: Hear me out. Seems to me she gave a choice. Trick OR treat. She didn't give us a treat, so…
Milhouse: Bart. Where are you heading with this?
Bart: "[ˈtɹɪkɚˈtɹijt]" isn't just some phrase you chant mindlessly like the Lord's Prayer! It's an oral contract!
Nelson: You're right. We've forgotten the old ways, the ways of rotten eggs and soaped-up windows. I say we trick'er! Trick her good!

Episode: Homer of Seville (2007)

Category: phrasal compounding, the shortest English words.

The Simpsons are driving home from church:

Homer: Oh, man, that church service was boring! I did a whole book of Find-A-Words.
Lisa (exasperated): Dad, all you circled were the is and as!
Homer (defensively): Those are words.

Category: Idiom chunk

Homer and Marge are eating in a fancy restaurant.

Homer: Happy anniversary, sweetie!
Marge: You know it might be a little more romantic without your entourage.
Homer: But I need my childhood friends to help me keep it real! Would you have me keep it fake?

Episode: He Loves to Fly and He D'ohs. (2007)

Category: Pronouns and deixis, use/mention

Burns: You saved my life! There must be something I can do for you.
Homer (thinking): A cookie! No, a car! No, a cookie!
Burns: You're getting a free dinner!
Homer: (Gasps in pleasure)
Burns: With…
Homer (eagerly): Yes?
Burns: Me!
Homer (disappointed): "Me"? But that's you!

Category: Vocatives, use/mention. Also innuendo intonation, contextual domain restriction.

Flight Attendant: My name is Svetlana. But you can call me, Hey baby!
Burns: And, just so you know, she'll do anything for you. (Brightly) Anything except sex! (Innuendo voice) And I do mean anything...
Homer: (drooling noise). I'm aroused. And confused!

Episode: Bart vs. Thanksgiving (1990)

Category: Pluralizing phrasal compounds, headedness

Bart is in line for a free meal at the homeless shelter after running out on the Simpsons' family Thanksgiving dinner.

Bart: Hey, it's that anchordude from Channel 6!
Bum: Oh yeah, he's doing one of those "be thankful for whatcha got" stories.
Kent Brockman: Oh, we have lots of names for these people. Bums, deadbeats, losers, scums of the earth.

Episode: Diatribe of a Mad Housewife (2004)

Category: Quoting out of context, use/mention

The publisher's agent has called Tom Clancy to ask for a blurb for the back of Marge's new novel, The Harpooned Heart:

Tom Clancy (speaking into phone): Would I say "If you're hunting for a good read this October, Marge Simson's book is a 'clear and present danger' to your free time?" Hell no, I wouldn't! Whatdya mean, I just said it? That doesn’t count! Hello? Hello?

Episode: Bart vs. Lisa vs. 3rd Grade (2002)

Category: Syllabification

The Simpsons have gotten a satellite TV. Bart has been watching for several days straight. After a commercial break…

Growly Voiceover: We now return to [ˈɹowbow ˈtɹʌmbəl]! Oh, I'm sorry, I mean, [ˈɹowbɔtʰ ˈɹʌmbəl]! (Screen reads, "Robot Rumble")

Episode: The Italian Bob (2005)

Category: Borrowing, nativization

The Simpsons have inadvertently ruined Sideshow Bob's new life in Italy:

Sideshow Bob (enraged): Simpson family! I hereby swear a [venˈdetta]!
Marge (flipping through English/Italian dictionary): [venˈdetta] means…(alarmed) [vɛnˈdɛɾə]!

Episode: Dude, Where's My Ranch? (2003)

Category: Acquiring a second dialect

Marge: Shucks, Lisa, you sure have taken a shine to that cowpoke! (winks)
Lisa: Mom, why are you talking like that?
Marge: Don't rightly know! I just soaked up the lingo like a biscuit in a bucket full of gopher gravy! I'll stop now.

Category: Wh-in-situ echo question, sub-word level.

Lisa: Well, I like it here too. Luke has showed me the gentle side of the Old West. He's really sophisticated for a thirteen year old.
Marge: Thir-what year old?!

Category: Proper noun as common noun

Ned Flanders and Rev. Lovejoy have forced the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution at Springfield Elementary. Lisa's getting all the answers wrong (the correct answer is now "God did it!"):

Ralph: Are oceans God's tears?
Principal Skinner (looking at Lovejoy and Flanders): …They sure are! A+!
Lisa (rolls her eyes): Ugh!
Ralph: Now Lisa's the ralph!

Category: Recursive possesives

Barney (speaking up after Lisa's impassioned speech at the trial): Homer's son's sister is right!

Episode: Thank God It's Doomsday (2005)

Category: Clipping

Skinner has taken the Springfiend Elementary Phototography Club to the mall for a field shoot. He addresses the group:

Skinner: Children, the mall will provide you a wide range a subjects, while I return some sock that appeared to be black but were in reality a very dark blue. The best photographs, or "pho-tos" [he fingerquotes agressively] will be prominently displayed in the school lobby all year long!

Category: Retronym, collocation

Marge comes into the kitchen to find Homer up to his ears in "Rapture for Dummies", with ten other books on the table around him.

Marge: Homie, you didn't touch your second dinenr tonight! And, you're reading books! Word books! What's going on!
Homer: Marge, the Rapture is nigh. These books will help me figure out how nigh.

Episode: Smart and Smarter (2004)

Category: Compositionality in compounds, metalinguistic comment

Lisa's trying out a new 'comedian' image at school, and is delivering a few stand-up type jokes in the cafeteria.

Lisa: Hey, why do they call them fieldtrips! We never go to a field!
Skinner (in passing): Untrue! Last thursday we went to a battlefield.
Lisa: Um, er…
Ralph: I'm bembarrassed for you!
Nelson: The following 'haha' is not from amusement but is an expression of contempt. Ha ha!

Category: Hooked on phonics

Maggie's school for the gifted has sent home Phonic Frog to help her learn to read. It's a plastic frog with a keyboard on its belly and a microphone; it articulates letters (mostly as onset+schwa) when the keyboard is pressed. Homer presses buttons on frog.

Phonic Frog: ah, buh, cuh. Huh o muh eh er.
Homer: That's me! Huh o muh eh er!

Episode: The Seven-Beer Snitch (2007)

Category: Derivational morphology

The Simpsons and the slack-jawed-yokels are visiting Shelbyville and attending a performance of "Song of Shelbyville," in which a character called Springfield Billy, dressed in a barrel, acts like an idiot for the amusement of Shelbyvillians.

Brandine: It's like lookin' in a mirror!
Cletus: What's a mir-ror?
Brandine: It's a big-city word for reversifyin' glass.

Category: DP as common noun, unique reference and demonstratives

Homer's been imprisoned for can-kicking in the Frank-Gehry designed Springfield Prison. He's turned informer. Lenny and Carl are prison guards. They deliver a large rectangular box to his cell:

Lenny: Here ya go! 42-inch plasma TV, as a thank-you from your…. [He notices the other prisoners looking at them all suspiciously and hesitates]
Carl: From your mother!
Homer: Ohhhh, THAT my mother!

Category: Synonyms, slang, metalinguistic comment

Fat Tony: Gentlemen, we must determine which of our fellow inmates has become the rodentus incarcererium.
Gangster #1: You heard the boss! Find the rat!
Gangster #2: I found the rat, and he's right here! [Points to gangster #3]
Gangster #3: I ain't the rat, I'm the pigeon!
Gangster #4: I thought you was the mole!
Gangster #2: No, you're thinkin' of that guy who was the canary, but we can all agree, we work in a business with a very rich lexicon!
All the gangsters nod, mutter in agreement: "Rich lexicon" "Very rich!" "Oh yes."

Episode: Marge Gamer (2007)

Category: Conversion, inferring meanings

Marge, experiencing the Internet for the first type, has the idea of typing her own name into Google.

Marge: Six hundred twenty nine thousand results! Wow! And all this time I thought "googling yourself" meant the other thing!

Category: Faux-archaisms

Marge has created an avatar in "Earthland Realms", and is getting her first instructions from the help wizard:

Wizard: Greetings, cleric! Will you undertake a quest on my behalf?
Cleric Marge: Mrmm, maybe I better run this by my husband first.
Wizard: Things are more fun if you just answer 'yes'.
Cleric Marge: Then yes! Hither me forth on mine arduous quest!
Wizard: Once again, just 'yes'.

Category: Compounding and lexicalization, and a side dish of slack-jawed yokel dialect features (nonstandard subject-verb agreement, what introducing object relative clause, plus the usual collection of phonological characteristics)

Homer is refereeing Lisa's little league soccer games, unfairly. Lisa's moaning and rolling on the ground after having been passed by an offensive player headed for goal.

Homer (whistle): Foul on the other girl! Lisa gets a penalty kick and every other kid has to pay her a dollar.
Brandine (standing up in bleachers): That is an outrage! Your daughter's been flopping all day!
Homer: She has not! Your daughter's a dirty player.
Cletus (also standing): Sir, I have sired a dumdum, a mushhead, a whatsit, a dogboy, and something with a human face and fish body what we calls Kevin. But my younguns is not dirty players!
Homer: I don't need a soccer lecture from a hillbilly!
Cletus: That's hill-William to you, sir!

Category: Tag questions (and British place names):

To make Lisa feel better about throwing her out of a game, Homer has bought Lisa a DVD documentary from the BBC ("in cooperation with [kænæl plus]").

Voiceover: Brighton, England. Nineteen eighty-five. Manchester United plays Sussextonhamptonshire-on-Leith, when a deadly riot breaks out in the stands.
Football fan #1: Oi! Your boy's a flopper, 'e is!
Fan #2: No 'e isn't, 'e isn't!

Novel derivational morphology

Homer builds a rollercoaster and names it the "Zoominator".

Episode: You Kent Always Say What you Want (2007)

The whole episode is about Kent Brockman uttering a taboo word on the air, losing his reputation and job. It's ALL a meta-linguistic comment on taboo in the media.

Category: Taboo words

Grandpa: I can't believe Kent Brockman got away with it! Back in my day, TV stars couldn't say 'booby', 'tushy', 'burp', 'fannyburp', 'water closet', 'underpants', 'dingle dangle', 'Boston marriage', 'LBJ', 'Titicaca', 'hot dog' or 'front lumps'.

Category: Derivational morphology, euphemisms

Homer is surprised to find Kent Brockman on the Simpsons' couch.

Marge: I invited him to stay with us for a few days. His career was ruined, and I was afraid he might commit you-know-what-icide!

Category: Back-formed compound verbs, headedness

The usual suspects are gathered at Republican Party Headquarters, watching Kent's streaming truth-telling webcast (from Lisa's webcam)

Burns: Look at that rabble-rouser! He's threatening our ill-gotten gains!
Rich Texan: Goldarnit! I worked hard to ill-get those gains!

Category: Degree phrases, lexical integrity:

Kent has been webcasting from the Simpson's basement since losing his job, and has reached a wide audience.

Lisa: Mr. Brockman! You're a huge hit!
Kent: Really! How wide is the web?
Lisa: World.

Episode: 24 Minutes (2007)

Category: Derivational morphology, bound roots, cran-morphs

Lisa (as 24's Chloe, monitoring a surveilance camera): I've got something! The sixth grade security camera shows three empty desks!
Skinner: Enhance!
(Lisa types furiously, camera zooms in on desks to reveal 'Skinner Stinks' carved on the center desk.)
Skinner: Dehance! Dehance!

Category: Compound nouns, pronoun as common noun, homophony

Bart has used ketchup and Grey Poupon mustard to paint a portrait of Skinner on the cafeteria wall (word balloon: "Put me on your wiener"). Skinner enters while the room is still cracking up:

Skinner: Simpson! I'll teach you to make a Poupon me!

Category: Contrast, one-replacement, establishing reference sets:

The three bullies (Kearny, Dolph and Jimbo) are plotting to do something terroristic with a deceased yogurt. Milhouse, an undercover agent for the Counter Truancy Unit, is lurking outside the Kwik-E-Mart, surveilling them from behind a newspaper. Homer strolls by.

Homer: Hey Millhouse! Who ya spyin' on? Those bullies?
Kearny: What about the fat guy?
Homer: Hey, lay off! You're the fat one of you guys!

Category: Zero-derivation, category change

Skinner: Okay, you have a deal, you conniving little [whispers in Bart's ear].
Bart (eyes go wide): Wow! That's a swear?
Skinner: Used as a noun, it is.

Episode: Stop or My Dog Will Shoot! (2007)

Category: Slang, register

Santa's Little Helper has successfully detected some stashed cocaine (he sniffed out a suitcase with a bust of Beethoven in it that had a locker key embedded in it; SLH opened the suitcase, broke the statue, and opened the locker. It was full of cocaine).

Lou: Shall I get this blow back to the cage, chief?
Chief Wiggum: Whoa, whoa, whoa. "Blow"? "Cage"? You're in uniform, Lou! Don't slang it up!

Category: Slang

Lou and Santa's Little Helper are staking out the park, where drug deals go down. Snake is meeting with the bullies.

Jimbo (shiftily): Soo, ah, you got any steroids?
Snake: You know it. I can make you huge! (Shows bag full of pills)
Jimbo (enthusiastically): I wanna pump my guns!
Kearny: I wanna rip my pecs!
Dolf: I wanna shriv my nards!
Lou (leaping out from behind bush): Nards! That's what we needed to hear!

Episode: On a Clear Day I Can't See My Sister (2005)

Category: Type vs token, underspecified nouns

Marge and Homer visit Sprawl-mart:

Homer: Oh, I just love it here! So many things, and so many things of each thing!

Category: Neologisms, bound roots

The students have all met at the school at 3am for a field trip to Springfield Glacier. Skinner is massing them for exodus.

Nelson: Check out my t-shirt! It's wicked relevant -- it's part of my 'Things Suck' line of clothing! (opens vest to reveal t-shirt with 'Glaciers suck! on it).
Skinner: While I disagree with your t-shirt's assertion, I do encourage anything that raises glacier awareness. Busward to adventure!

Category: Speech errors (phonologically motivated nucleus substitution), senility

(They go in the front door)

Grampa (in Sprawl-mart vest): Welcome to Sprawl-mart! Can I get you a cart or basket?
Marge: Grampa! You're a greet grater, I mean, tsk, a great greeter! Now look who's senile!

Episode: Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em (2006)

Category: Back-formation.

Lisa finds Bart bowling at school trophies in the hall (left-handed!) Unbeknownst to her, he has learned of Skinner's fatal weakness and fears nothing.

Lisa: Bart! Skinner's gonna be really mad at you!
Bart: Yes! You might say he'll… (finger quotes) "blow up"! Mwahahaha
Lisa: Whatever. I've got some paper to maché.

Category: Derivational suffix meanings

Skinner: I'm supposed to stand in your store window and breast-feed Bilbo Baggins.
Comic Book Guy: Your cowering suggests that Bart has found your Kryptonite.
Skinner: Kryptonite? What's that? The -ite suffix suggests a mineral.

Episode: Homerazzi (2007)

Category: Rhetorical questions

Homer has nearly set the house on fire with his birthday cake candles. The smoke alarm went off, and the fire department came. A fireman returns Santa's Little Helper to Simpsons sitting on curb:

Fireman: You know how many fires are started by birthday candles? If you do, tell me. It would settle a bet down at the station house. I say five, Gus says a million.

Episode: Yokel Chords (2007)

Category: count-mass conversion for foodstuffs (the "Universal Grinder")

Bart is telling a scary story about the "Dark Stanley Murders". Stanley was a cook at the school. The kids made fun of him ("Stanley, Stanley, no de-gree! Two credits short at M.I.T.!") and he killed and cooked them into Kids Head Soup!

Stanley (tasting soup): Needs more girl!

Category: Denominal verbs, derivational verbal morphology

Following Bart's scary story, the rumors are flying:

Nelson: And just when you think he's done, Dark Stanley takes your skin and makes footie pajamas!
Dolf: Nobody pajaminates my skin!

Category: Archaism

Two scenes later: Bart has terrified the kids into stampeding from the school in panic.

Milhouse (stampeding): Murther!!

Category: Evasive speech ('phumphering')

Principal Skinner explains to Superintendent Chalmers that they can't provide education for the Yokel children for fear of lowered test scores and lost federal funding. Lisa overhears.

Lisa (flipping open notebook): Excuse me! Lisa Simpson with the school paper. Am I to understand you're purposely denying education to these children?

Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers (simultaneously and smoothly talking over each other): (S)That's a totally, er,..(C)Well, I wouldn't, ah, (S) Ah, y'know, (C)Y'see the thing is, (S) A, ah, boon!
Chalmers (pauses to complete a sentence): I warn you, young lady, we can phumpher all day!
PS and SC, smoothly continuing: (C) We um, you see Stop it, we have, um, ah (S) You're um not grasping the, the, the…
Lisa: You haven't heard the last of this!

Category: Back-formation

Lisa has taken the Spuckler (Slack-jawed Yokel) kids to downtown Springfield, where juggling mimes wheel by on unicycles.

Witney Spuckler (eldest Yokel daughter): These colorful bums is funny!
Lisa: And guess what? Ben and Ken The Street-Magic Men are only the beginning! The city is a treasure-trove of culture and multi-culture!

Category: Entailments of superlatives

Krusty: You kids finished signing those 8x10s?
Dubya Spuckler: I told five different dry-cleaners they's the best. Ain't that lyin', Mr. Krusty?

Category: Right-node raising

Dubya Spuckler: Miz Lisa, we just want to thank you for introducing us to, then saving us from, the big wide world around us.
Lisa: 'Twern't nothin'. (Group hug.)

Episode: The Fat and The Furriest (2003)

Category: Puralization of titles/honorifics:

Homer, Bart and Lisa have run into Patty and Selma in Sprawl-Mart:

Lisa: Aunts Patty and Selma, can you help us pick out a Mother's Day gift?

Episode: "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes" (2000)

Category: Scope of negation, presupposition

Homer, in his first excursion on the Internets, has reached the Springfield Police Department home page, where an animated Chief Wiggum talks to him:

Wiggum head: If you've committed a crime and you want to confess, click "yes". Otherwise, click "no". [Homer clicks "no"] You have chosen "no", meaning you've committed a crime but don't want to confess. A paddywagon is now speeding to your home.

Category: German word order

Homer has been replaced with a lookalike by secret overlords who are holding the real Homer on an island. The lookalike is German.

Bart: There's something really different about you, Dad!
German Homer: I am a new tie wearing.

Innateness hypothesis in 1000 AD (Crosspost from LL)

2008-03-13T00:22:00.000-07:00

Following my report last Friday of finding the standard innateness argument in a 18th-century text by an amateur philologist, I expected my inbox to be overflowing with passages about language acquisition from Aristotle, Descartes and (in contrast) Locke. I had prepared for the onslaught by performing extensive finger-limbering exercises.

Amazingly, the number of people interested in quoting extensively from the work of ancient philologists out there is considerably smaller than the number of rabid Cupertino effect fans, who cannot be beaten off with sticks or Geoff P.'s pointy, pointy words. Perhaps understandable. But I did get an interesting email from Lameen Souag, of Jabal al-Lughat. An 11th-century Arabic scholar, Ibn Hazm, considered and dismissed the innateness hypothesis before 1064 A.D. As a kind of bonus, in the same passage, he offhandedly alludes to the observation that Saussure laid such stress on: Linguistic signs are arbitrary.

Lameen writes:

If you're looking for earlier discussion of the language instinct idea, you could try Ibn Hazm, d. 1064 - coincidentally, he was also the very unorthodox medieval theologian that the Pope rather misleadingly quoted on Islam's notion of the relationship between God and ethics in his Regensburg address. In his book al-Ihkam fi Usul al-Ahkam (Judgement on the Principles of Rulings), Ibn Hazm briefly considers and rejects the idea, essentially saying that language can't be an instinct because if it were surely we would all speak the same language. I'm afraid the translation below is far from perfect - I'm not too accustomed to reading early medieval Arabic - but the idea is pretty clear:

ولم يبق إلا أن يقول قائل إن الكلام فعل الطبيعة قال علي وهذا يبطل ببرهان ضروري وهو أن الطبيعة لا تفعل إلا فعلا واحدا لا أفعالا مختلفة وتأليف الكلام فعل اختياري متصرف في وجوه شتى. وقد لجأ بعضهم إلى نوع من الاختلاط وهو أن قال إن الأماكن أوجبت بالطبع على ساكنيها النطق بكل لغة نطقوا بها قال علي وهذا محال ممتنع لأنه لو كانت اللغات على ما توجبه طبائع الأمكنة لما أمكن وجود كل مكان إلا بلغته التي يوجبها طبعه وهذا يرى بالعيان بطلانه لأن كل مكان في الأغلب قد دخلت فيه لغات شتى على قدر تداخل أهل اللغات ومجاورتهم فبطل ما قالوا. وأيضا فليس في طبع المكان أن يوجب تسمية الماء ماء دون أن يسمى باسم آخر مركب من حروف الهجاء

"There remains only the case of someone suggesting that speech is a natural action. This is falsified by a necessary proof: that nature would do only a single action, not many actions, and putting together speech is a voluntary action, coming in many different forms. Some might take refuge in a kind of combination [of the arguments], saying that different places naturally impose on their inhabitants the language that they speak. This is entirely impossible, because if languages were imposed by the natures of places, then each place would have to have only the language imposed by its nature; but the falsehood of this is plain to the eye, because almost every place has had many languages enter it due to their speakers' involvement and proximity; so this hypothesis is falsified. Also there is nothing in the nature of a place to require that water be called "water" rather than some other combination of letters."

Elsewhere in the same chapter, he discusses the common origin of Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew.

Actually, I don't really want to get a ton of philological email, so if you have additional thoughts on this, you could contribute to the comments section below. If enough accumulate, I'll update with another post on Language Log.

You say feminine, I say masculine, let's call the whole thing off (Crosspost from LL)

2008-02-24T23:35:00.000-08:00

Last week, Dalila Ayoun of the Department of French and Italian here at the University of Arizona, gave a talk in our linguistics colloquium series in which she dropped a bombshell: native French speakers don't know the genders of French nouns!

Ok, that's not quite right. It would be more appropriate to say that native French speakers don't agree on the genders of French nouns. They really don't agree. Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.

Ayoun didn't set out to test whether native French speakers can accurately identify French nominal gender. Her primary research interest is in second-language learning of French. Like nearly everyone in the field, and with good reason, she had assumed that native speakers behave fairly uniformly with respect to the grammar of their native language.

Second language acquisition studies often have a common structure. The experimenter tests people learning the language on a particular linguistic task. Usually there are different groups of second language learners — advanced vs. beginning, etc. They all do the task, and the experimenter looks at how many mistakes they make, how long they take to do the task, etc., and draws conclusions about the course of language learning, the efficacy of the teaching technique, or whatever.

The experimenter always also gives the task to native speakers, as a kind of control group, to show that when the language has been fully, correctly acquired, speakers perform at or near ceiling — close to 100% right.

Just to give a typical example, I have student who is looking at second-language acquisition of Chinese. She is having her subject perform a task in which they form a sentence containing a relative clause from two independent sentences. (Input: John saw a man. The man was tall. Correct response: John saw the man who was tall.) In my student's pilot study, she discovered that she might have to reduce the number of sentences in her study, since even fairly advanced second language learners were taking up to an hour and a half to complete the test. In contrast, her native speaker subjects were taking ten minutes to do the same test, with of course 100 per cent accuracy. This kind of disparity between native speakers and second-language speakers is the norm, rather than the exception.

Ayoun was investigating second-language learning of grammatical gender in French -- a major difficulty for learners from non-gender languages like English. She had constructed a couple of tasks: grammaticality judgments of sentences where there was a gender agreement mismatch, and a gender-assignment task, where subjects were given a noun and had to choose among "masculine", "feminine", "both", or "I don't know".

In both tasks, to her great surprise, she found a great deal of disagreement among her native-speaker controls! In these tasks, there is always a normatively 'correct' answer—French dictionaries and textbooks all agree on what the genders of nouns are, and how gender agreement in sentences should turn out—in the same way they agree on how to form relative clauses, and how to form passives, and where to put clitic pronouns, and so on. Native speakers would be expected to perform close to ceiling on this grammatical task, as on others. But, surprisingly, they don't.

There's an even more interesting twist in Ayoun's native-speaker results. Her native speakers fell into two groups: 14 adult speakers and 42 teenage speakers. On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers' native-language abilities are identical to adults' abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, 'target'. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)

Below I reproduce one of Ayoun's tables illustrating significant differences in the rates at which adults and teenagers agreed on the gender of 10 feminine nouns.

There are many questions one would like to ask about this, of course, and since Ayoun's study was not designed to answer questions about native-speaker variation in gender assignment, answers to most of them will have to await further experimentation. But the result itself seems really remarkable to me. According to Ayoun, the last study in which anyone systematically tested native speakers' deployment of grammatical gender in French was Tucker et al. (1977)—more than thirty years ago! Work to be done.

For the interested, some of the second-language speakers' results have already appeared in Ayoun (2007). And second language speakers of French, take heart! Make your grammatical gender agreement mistakes with confidence. There's a chance that your native-speaker interlocutor will agree with your version!

Ayoun, D. (2007). The acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 French. In D. Ayoun (ed.), French Applied Linguistics, pp. 130-170. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Tucker, G. R., W.E. Lambert, and A. Rigault. 1977. The French speaker's skill with grammatical gender: An example of rule-governed behavior. The Hague: Mouton

Album meme...

2008-02-08T18:21:00.000-08:00

...from tahnan. This is not what I should be doing in the middle of the night, but I just couldn't resist. My band name didn't wow me at first but then I thought it'd likely be abbreviated JT(CP) in a hip texting kind of way... and the cover and title are xcllnt... and what's that torpedo down at the corner of the cover? prob real fans of JT(CP) study the liner notes to find out these things.

and then the second one turned out even better --

heee
:) hh

A broad range of data

2008-01-18T21:43:00.000-08:00

Jerry Sadock is here at AZ giving a short series of talks introducing autolexical syntax to us. He gave an interesting presentation today outlining the structure of the theory. In the q&a, though, he hit one of my sore spots hard enough that I just can't stop myself from a public cry of anger and frustration.

He was saying that Autolexical Syntax (AS) has been called a more 'descriptive' framework, but that he finds merit in that compared to more 'theoretical' frameworks such as oh, I don't know, Principles and Parameters-style work -- us P&P people might have some elegant theory but it's much better to be able to cope with a 'broad range of data', rather than the same tired old 5 examples again and again and again and again.

I've been working in a P&P framework for about 18 years now and I've heard that charge levelled at P&P again and again and again and again. Perhaps it had some teeth once. It DOES NOT anymore.

In the course of my still-short career, I have read valuable, often beautiful, P&P dissertations and papers on Navajo, Ewe, Inuktitut, Mohawk, Warlpiri, Bahasa Indonesian, Malagasy, Hindu, Kannada, Tagalog, Zapotec, Itelmen, Niuean, Chichewa, St'at'imcets, Passamaquoddy, Tsez, Kiowa, Malay, and Nuu-chal-nulth. And if your particular language isn't mentioned in this list, it's not because I necessarily haven't read it or didn't think it was valuable or beautiful; these are just the first twenty less-studied languages that popped into my head as I typed on this particular tired Friday night. There's LOTS more.

And of course that's not even touching on the vigorous, thriving research communities that devote serious P&P effort to the major European, Middle-Eastern and Asian languages.

And by 'valuable' I don't mean just 'valuable within the context of P&P theory'. Essentially *all* of these works described new data, or new patterns in old data, that constitute important contributions to the field in themselves, regardless of framework (though of course they're even more valuable within the context of P&P theory, since they're datasets designed to discover a good P&P account). Future analyses of these languages, and of human linguistic ability, will build on these data, generalizations, and analyses, whatever framework they are conducted in.

How many kinds of data does a theory have to have worked with in order to qualify as being applicable to a 'broad range of data'?? P&P's track record in this regard is at least as good as any other syntactic approach out there.

There may be good arguments to adopt a different framework; I always like to participate in a good argument. But the discussion should not involve assertions to the effect that the only sentence that P&P theory or Minimalists is interested in is "There seems to be a man in the room."

Antedated eggnog (Crosspost from LL)

2007-12-22T20:17:00.000-08:00

Like Arnold Zwicky, I'm not the kind of linguist who is heavy into antedating and sourcing, but a student and I just recently verified our very own antedation, of eggnog, and it's so seasonal I thought I should share it.
The OED's oldest quote for eggnog is from 1825:

Sara Kraft, an Arizona undergraduate taking a independent study course with me this fall, was reporting to me on a chapter in an anthology of Alan Walker Read's articles on ok.¹ Read had occasion to quote from a 'pastoral' poem written around 1774 by 18th-century clergyman and philologist Jonathan Boucher, which quote I happened to notice contained the words 'egg-nogg':

...

Fog-drams i' th’ morn, or (better still) egg-nogg,
At night hot-suppings, and at mid-day, grogg,
My palate can regale:

I don't know why it occurred to me to check in the OED to see what the earliest source they provided was, but I did, and since it was so much later, and from a British source to boot, I got interested. We requested an Inter-Library Loan of Boucher's "A Glossary of Obsolete and Provincial Words; forming a supplement to the dictionaries of the English Language."² After a false start with an incomplete microfiche from Yale, Harvard obligingly sent us the actual volume. Amazing...

The pastoral poem, quite a long one, is a footnote in the 60-page Introduction to the glossary. The full title of the poem, in the verbose convention of the day is "Absence: A Pastoral: drawn from the life, from the manners, customs and phraseology of planters (or, to speak more pastorally, of the rural swains) inhabiting the Banks of the Potomac, in Maryland".

In the introduction to his Glossary, (p. xlix), Boucher writes the following:

"A List of some of the most remarkable and common [words], collected during my residence in Virginia and Maryland nearly thirty years ago, is here set down at the foot of the page. To this list I will subjoin a copy of verse, which I have ventured to call a Pastoral, written during my residence in America; written solely with the view of introducing as many of such words and idioms of speech, then prevalent and common in Maryland, as I conceived to be dialectical and peculiar to those parts of America."

The italicized terms in the quoted lines above (lines 69-71) are italicized in the original, and are the 'words and idioms of speech' that Boucher considered to be "dialectal and peculiar to those parts of America", including egg-nogg. As Read notes, from his reference to ‘nearly thirty years ago’, we can be sure that the pastoral was written around or before 1774, since Boucher died in 1804. Read notes that he left his Maryland parish in 1775, being a loyalist.

We wrote of our finding to the OED, and received a nice note back from Margot Charlton, saying in part:

I see that the Dictionary of American Regional English has some interesting eighteenth-century evidence for EGG POP, which seems to be similar....The entry goes back to the first edition, and was originally published in 1891; as we revise the text we are finding that we can antedate most entries with the help of the large historical databases now available to us, but it is always
helpful to receive such precise information.

Boucher is a fairly well-documented fellow, having been rector in George Washington's parish, tutor to GW's stepson, and personal friend of GW. A bit of quick googling on eggnog revealed a startling connection between Boucher, Washington, and eggnog: apparently a recipe for eggnog was found among George Washington's "kitchen papers" at Mount Vernon. It doesn't say whether the recipe was titled with the word "egg nog(g)' or not -- the term "egg flip" and (according to DARE) "egg pop" were also in use, or maybe it wasn't titled -- but given that Boucher noticed Marylanders in Washington's parish using it, presumably it's likely that Washington called it that too. Perhaps Boucher even sampled some of Washington's concoction at a holiday party around this time of year in the early 1770s.

¹Read was the kind of linguist who is heavy into a/s; I learned a lot from that independent study! If you think the recent rash of abbreviationism is purely technology-driven -- email, texting, all these newfangled electronics driving the kidz of today crrrazy -- you should check out his discussion of the mania for abbreviations in 19th-century New England. Larry Horn describes some of the amazing parallels in detail in this 2002 post to the ADS-L listsev.

²The volume we consulted was indeed titled as above, with "Obsolete" instead of "Archaic", and was from the first (1807) publication of part of Boucher's overall Glossary. It had been bound together by Harvard with another dictionary by Nares, dated 1822. The same piece of Boucher's glossary, up until 'Blade', was published again in 1832, as described in the following excerpt from the "Works of the Camden Society," published by Camden Society (Great Britain), Royal Historical Society (Great Britain) in 1868 (image below from GoogleBooks):

.

Update: The far more sophisticated antedaters and sourcers over at ADS-L have been hot on the trail of 'eggnog' since this post went up! You can follow the discussion by going here and entering 'eggnog' as a search term. The upshot is that a) Sara and I were far from the first to spot that Boucher used 'eggnog' very early on, and b) there are several other instances of the word in published sources from the late 1700s (i.e. whose actual date of publication is earlier than that Boucher publication date of 1807).

So, apologies for wasting everyone's time! but at least it was seasonal. And, as in my independent study, I learned a lot. Happy new year everyone --

Is this good or bad?

2007-12-04T19:49:00.000-08:00

It's been ages since I've had time to even read the blogs, let alone post -- I miss the blogosphere! -- but getting caught up tonight I ran across polyglot conspiracy's and Mr. Verb's blog readability evaluations: Post-Grad! So of course I immediately plugged in HeiDeas, and what did I get?

Ack! Maybe Post-Grad is too fancy for a blog, but surely I should be hitting at least 'Undergrad', as pg reports the Log does? Not even High School!? Must get more hi-falutin' pronto! How can anyone respect a rating like that?

Let's see... I know! I'll include a ton of fancy grammar words in this post and then reevaluate.

accusative
nominative
matrix
dependent
complementizer
imperative
declarative
interrogative
conditional
determiner
modal
predicate
intransitive
ditransitive
transitive
synthetic
fusional
irregular
constituent
coordination
privative
binary
preposition
adposition
postposition
tense
aspect
perfect
pluperfect
futurate
causative
applicative
benefactive
desiderative
malefactive

That oughta do it... stay tuned!

Update: No effect!! I'd like to see a junior high school student use the word 'postposition' in a sentence! damn. Ah well. Maybe it's good; I'm readable beyond the dreams of readability.

Update update: You know, I bet it's that post about Harry Potter and speech act theory. I could experiment by taking it down, but now I've included the words "Harry Potter" in this post, so it'd be for naught. Rats!

You don't have to say "Use English"! Crosspost from LL

2007-10-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

Greetings from the US Airways terminal at Laguardia, where I'm waiting for a flight to Ithaca. A propos of the cartoon that Mark posted earlier today, I wish to acknowledge a not-crazy piece of language commentary in a public venue, namely the US Airways inflight magazine, US Airways Magazine. A subsection of a story about how to interlocute with your teenager is devoted to coping with the strange, barbaric language being developed by Young People Today:

That way, when your daughter speaks to you in a language she got straight from a hip-hop CD, you don’t have to say, “Use English!” She is using English, but it’s in a special sociolect that isn’t yours. (In fact, a teenager could argue that the illogical rules and punctilios of correct grammar constitute a code language that’s not any different from her own hip-hop lingo.)

The surrounding text even helpfully provides some kind of pop interpretation of identity construction through language choice. So props to you, US Airways Magazine, and contributing author Jay Heinrichs, for exhibiting some evidence of having come into contact with a Ling 101 course, or relevant equivalent content, sometime in the past.

(See how I used 'props' there? Hope I got it right -- it's one of them words I've picked up from Young People Today, who I am sadly apparently no longer one of, what with being hyperconscious of 'props' as an innovation and all (unless I'm having a recency illusion). Consulting the Urban Dictionary, I think I'm pretty close. One of the definitions there says it's short for 'propers', which just sounds crazy to me, but checking in with Wikipedia, I see that that itself might be short for 'proper recognition', and that there's a gesture for communicating this very same notion, the 'fist pound'. I knew about the gesture but not its connection to the word 'props'.)

Update:Ok, so 'propers' is something I've been singing happily to myself without understanding for years, darnit, in 'Respect', a song recorded before I was born; it's short (apparently) for 'proper respect'. What a dweeb!¹ Thanks to grixit for that info.

And since I'm logged in here, and one of Mark's other Halloween posts is about science reporting, I thought I'd pass on the link to one of the most spectacularly surreal BBC "science" reporting tours de farce I've run across lately, forwarded by my colleage Andrew Carnie. Apparently H.G. Wells' imaginary future of Eloi and Morlocks is a realistic possibility: today's modern humans will divide into two subspecies, 'gracile' and 'robust', "according to a report commissioned for men's satellite TV station Bravo."

a) Isn't Dr. Oliver Curry a bit young to be bitter and unsuccessful already, and answering calls from the Dogberts at Bravo? Update: So of course a little elementary Wikipedia work would have alerted me to the fact that Dr. Curry feels his essay was taken out of context and misrepresented by Bravo and subsequent articles, surprise surprise...

b) Is this the same TV network known as Bravo here in the US? If so, it's not really accurate to describe them as a "men's satellite network".Update cont: ...and to the fact that 'Bravo' is indeed a men's network in the UK. Thanks to Lance and Barbara Zimmer for these clarifications!

c) 'Science reporting' is supposed to be about 'science', which is often these days made up of a series of claims together with supporting evidence which has appeared or will appear in a peer-reviewed academic journal of some kind. Science does not often orignate in special reports commissioned by television networks (though sometimes it shows up there later).

Shouldn't somebody get the BBC Science team a subscription to Science or Nature or something? Their reporters seem to have been reduced to trolling for stories while surfing the late-night offerings. Next thing you know we'll see BBC Science articles about the Bowflex machine or laser-sharpened kitchen knives.Update cont. cont. ...though of course, as Mark points out from the IcelandAir gate at BWI, they have already addressed the burning scientific issue of breast enlargement.

¹ "Propers" is an interesting formation, assuming it is from "proper respect", though. Clippings usually respect the categorization properties of their head nouns, so I wouldn't expect a reduction from "proper respect" to "proper" to pluralize, since "respect" is a mass noun (*respects). What I guess it must be is a clipping of just the 'pect' part, leaving "proper.res" with subsequent reduction of that "res" syllable, so you end up with a superficially plural-looking form, which is probably then treated like "proper" + "pl", interpreted, probably, like 'scissors' or 'thanks', as a pluralia tantum... and *that* is shortened thence to "props". But this is all just armchair etymologizing; there's nothing in any of the sources I can access from my hotel room here in Ithaca about it (e.g. it's not in the AHD, the OED, or the Cambridge Dictionary of American English). Anyone out there either a) have intuitions or b) know of other sources on it? (It must be in DARE, no?)

PS: This, I see, is Heideas' 100th post! Given my increasingly spotty posting record of late, it's maybe not appropriate to celebrate too much, but I couldn't let this big base-10 moment go by completely unacknowledged... :)

W-type pronouns, dragon heartstring and speech act theory (crosspost from LL)

2007-09-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

A draft manuscript recently appeared in my inbox. I was so struck by its potential implications that I requested permission to circulate it to a wider audience--that is, you, dear [HeiDeas] readers--and I am pleased to report that the author agreed! You will therefore get to see this groundbreaking research in its early stages, years before the rest of the world reads a mangled three-paragraph description of it in the BBC Science (or possibly Arts) feed. Just one more of the many perks of your yearly subscription to HeiDeas.

The work in question--How To Do Things With Words And Wands: The Pragmatics Of Casting Spells--is an investigation of the deictic devices and speech-act properties of successful spellcasting, based on the corpus of spells and descriptions of spellcasting events which has recently become available through the efforts of J.K. Rowling.

Author Molly Diesing investigates the syntactic and semantic conditions on the expression of spell targets in spells, including cases of explicit mention, deictic wand pointing, noun incorporation, and complete object drop. She then considers whether spells themselves are imperatives or performatives, and, if the latter, what happens when you violate their felicity conditions.

Dr. Diesing will develop this investigation in collaboration with Sally McConnell-Ginet, and their results will certainly be of interest to the entire Wizarding and linguistics world. I predict that many future Ravenclaw term papers will take their work as a leaping-off point. Wuggles (non-linguists) beware, however! This is heady territory. Take along a linguist companion, or at least a good encyclopedia article on pronominal reference and another on speech act theory. HeiDeas cannot be held responsible for the consequences if you don't!

Polysynthet- (Crosspost from LL)

2007-08-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

This morning Mark posted a paragraph from Russell which read in part:

We are given to understand that a Patagonian can understand you if you say 'I am going to fish in the lake behind the western hill', but that he cannot understand the word 'fish' by itself. (This instance is imaginary, but it represents the sort of thing that is asserted.)

I wonder if someone had been telling Russell about verb roots in polysynthetic languages, which often are what linguists call 'bound', i.e. cannot stand on their own as well-formed words. Rather, they must be inflected with one or more affixes to be well-formed utterances of the language.

Consider, for example, this description of Inuktitut verb stems from a translation of Elke Nowak's book Transforming the Images: Ergativity and Transitivity in Inuktitut, which allows a preview of itself to be nicely Googled up, hooray:

Inuktitut verbs can be formally described as nuclei that attain the status of a free-standing form by the addition of an inflectional ending containing information as to person, number, valence and mood. ...

(3) tukisi-paanga

. understand-3sS.1sO.tr.cond

. 'if s/he understood me'

The stem tukisi- means 'understand', all right, but it can't be uttered on its own; it's not a word. It might not be quite appropriate to say that an Inuktitut speaker wouldn't understand tukisi- on its own, but they certainly wouldn't take it as a meaningful utterance.

Even in English we have several roots with this property of needing an affix or two to make them independently utterable. In our case, they're mostly roots that came into English from a Romance language, but they're now a major subsystem in the vocabulary. Consider electr- for example. It shows up in electr-ic and electr-on and other words derived from those, but it is itself a unit of English morphology with a form and meaning. Or similarly the stem in anxi-ous and anxi-ety, or feroc-ious and feroc-ity, or frivol-ous and frivol-ity.

Those are just to give you the idea -- in some languages, all the roots and stems have this property of needing additional endings to make them possible utterances. The consequence is that, of course, you might not be able to say 'fish' by itself, without saying "my fish" or "I'm going fishing" or "Would you like to fish?"

Russell is right then to wonder what infants acquiring such languages do. In particular, do they invent uninflected forms of these bound roots to use as 'baby talk'? In fact, judging from this abstract, they don't. I don't have time to do any more investigating right now but I'd guess that the kids might use some frequent or default suffix as a generic way produce morphologically-well formed utterances until they've mastered the full complex system. I'll doublecheck on that and get back to you.

Update: Pursuant to the comment below from Ricky, I went to check on frivol- -- I'd forgotten that it had a free use! It's a back-formation, though, so at least it used to be a bound root; check out the OED's rather severe usage comment:

LSAngst!!

2007-08-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

Agh! It's 12:21 AM, Wed. Aug 1st, 2007, in Arizona. By my reckoning, that makes it 3:21 AM of the same day 'EDT'. Abstract submission for the 2008 meeting of the LSA is supposed to close at 5:00 pm EDT on this day. However, when I click on the "Abstract Submission" button helpfully provided on the LSA website, it pulls up a page which reads,

Online abstract submission for the 2008 Annual Meeting is now closed.

This cannot be true, no? And after I'd made our abstract so perfectly less than 500 words? What is going on? Agh!

Update: I see I'm not the only one -- Claire has had the same experience. Hopefully they will fix this. I expect that they'll have an inbox full of abstracts waiting for them tomorrow morning (mine certainly is there).

Update: Aha, they've fixed it! And even extended the deadline. Excellent.

PS. hello again after a long summer-travel-and-then-work blog hiatus. Ridger, I'm gonna pick up that meme one of these days-- been gone, hope you haven't thought I was non-taggable!

Now it's time to play our game (Crosspost from LL)

2007-06-14T15:26:00.001-07:00

So, yesterday, I asked which of the following four instructions was not like the others:

English: Work into lather with a little water.
German: Mit etwas Wasser aufschäumen.
French: Faire mousser avec un peu d'eau.
Spanish: Producir espuma con un poco de agua.

As one would expect from the sophisticated beings that are you LLog regulars, many people had interesting thoughts about what might make one of these sentences stand out from the crowd. I had one particular, very syntactic, dimension of difference in mind, which a lot of commenters also spotted, but there were (of course) several other possibilities mooted.

Some people pointed out ways in which one or the other language's lexical choices stood out. For instance, peter berry writes:

All except the German have "a little" translated directly.... If the translators had done the same for German it would be "ein bisschen", but instead we have "etwas".

And terrycollman notes:

... the English one uses "lather", not "foam" - a lather, surely, is thicker and heavier than a foam ...

Both perfectly true, and both touching on the thorny problem of lexical translation equivalents: A given word in language A in context a and b may not have a direct translation in language B at all, or may be idiomatic only in context a but not context b. Or language A might split a given semantic field into two subcategories where language B only bothers with a name for the supercategory.

Another kind of difference, more syntactic but also not what I had in mind, noted by jack lecou, among other, is that the word order of the German example stands out. The PP Mit etwas Wasser comes first, and the verb aufschäumen at the end; in all the other languages, the verb comes first, a phrase related to the foam next, and the PP last.

One pretty subtle semantic difference that had definitely not occurred to me, noted by miked (who remarks, "IANALinguist", but who could be), is that, in the English sentence,

...whether the lather already exists could be ambiguous (ie, mix product into an existing lather by using water (say as a solvent) versus using just this product and some water to create a lather.

Given the English sentence out of context, one can imagine that there might have been previous instructions to create an independent lather, e.g. with some soap, and then sprinkle the powder into it and mix it in, incidentally using a bit of water. This interpretation isn't possible for the French or the German, since the 'foam' bit is contained within verbs in both these two cases, and definite reference is famously not possible within lexical items; nor is it available for the Spanish since the instruction is not ambiguous between a producing-foam interpretation and a do-something-to-existing-foam interpretation, because it explicitly uses a verb meaning 'produce'.

People also noted two different kinds of morphological differences. An anonymous commenter thought the stand-out language was:

German, for instructing you to "foam" rather than to "make to foam" "produce foam" or "work into lather."

Andrew referred to the hardworking German verb aufschäumen as a "synthetic causative with an incorporated result", but don't mind him; he's been as overexposed to linguistic terminology as I have.¹

The second-most-identified difference is also morphological, and, maddeningly, caught me a bit off guard. In every language except English, the verb form is not imperative, but infinitive! I'd noticed that for the French and Spanish, enough to change 'imperative' to 'instruction' in the LL version of my original post (but, sadly, not in the Heideas version), but didn't think too much about it. It should have been reflected in my glosses, though. If I'd been glossing the English, the verb would have come out something like, 'work.IMP', and, properly glossed, the French, German and Spanish verbs should have been 'make.INF', 'foam.INF' and 'produce.INF', respectively. (Indeed, the French should have been 'make.INF foam.INF', definitely not, 'make to.foam', which implies that the faire and the mousser are not the in the same form). Since the bare infinitive and the imperative are indistinguishable in English, though, I didn't think about it too hard and the distinction was not reflected in the glosses. My bad!

Anyway, that's a really obvious way in which the English stands out from the other languages. And it's really quite interesting! I had never really consciously recognized this use of the infinitive in French, though I've read enough French product directions and recipes. And it's certainly interesting that it's common to French, Spanish and German but not English! Commenter Sus speculates:

I think it's because we have the "du vs Sie" problem. If we were to use the imperative in manuals and instructions, we'd constantly have the trouble of having to decide the age group and status of our customers... But I'm just thinking aloud here.

Certainly the availability of grammaticized formal vs. informal forms of address is one way in which French, Spanish and German pattern together and differ from English, so this makes sense as a possible explanation, though I would have thought the natural thing to do in anonymous instructions would be to just use the formal form. A Spanish-speaking anonymous commenter notes:

Recipes and product instructions normally use the infinitive (producir espuma) or a passive voice (prodúzcase espuma). The imperative (produzca espuma) seems very intrusive to me, and definitely feels like a literal translation from American English.

I'll have to check with a buddy who wrote her dissertation on imperatives to find out if this difference has been discussed in the literature.

The difference I was actually fixated on, though, was the one picked up on by the first commenter (and many subsequent ones), gregates, who wrote:

It seems to me it's the Spanish variant which is different, on the grounds that the word for "foam" is the direct object of the verb, whereas in the other three the object is left unspecified, with the context filling in the product itself as what one is to make into foam (up-foam?). So the other three tell you what to do with the product, whereas the Spanish version seems to leave the product out of it.

Well spotted! (If only the LL would fund a prize... but I'm afraid the whole discretionary budget is gone on the sherry in the senior writers' lounge. Some kind of Oxbridge thing. You could have one of my old conference name-tag holders, if you want.)

In fact, in each of the the first three sentences, there's an implicit direct object, however they might otherwise differ from language to language. It would be grammatical to insert a direct object noun phrase — 'this powder', 'it', whatever — into the sentence in the appropriate spot in all three cases. In the English case, it'd be the object of 'work'; in the German, it'd be the object of the causative verb 'aufschäumen'; in the French, it would be the structural object of the whole clause but the semantic subject of the intransitive 'mousser'. In the Spanish, however, no additional direct object is possible; 'espuma' is the direct object of 'producir'. The reader has to infer that they're supposed to use the powder to produce the foam; syntactically, there's no spot for it in the clause.

The issue of objects and their potential absence has been extensively discussed before here at LL in the past, e.g. here, here, here, and here. This 'recipe' scenario is one of the most well-known object-drop contexts, and clearly has its object-eliminating effect in at least three languages in which object drop is normally not too common. It would be interesting to know if this context can eliminate objects universally. Particularly, I'm curious about what happens in this context in polysynthetic languages, where object marking is generally obligatory. I bet you need some object marker even in this context. I'll see if I can find out and report back.

The reason this set of sentences caught my eye in the first place was that several brands of syntactic/lexical semantic analysis (including my own) would assign a broadly uniform syntactic structure to the English, German and French sentences, emphasizing their common causative and resultative natures. It would differ in its surface particulars from language to language, but not much in essentials. As I ran my eye over the different instructions with a particular kind of analysis in mind, comfortably going, mmm, yep, oh, sure!, running into a different structure for the same message brought me up a bit short. That Spanish sentence would get a different kind of analysis.

¹ Commenter Sus provides some nice examples indicating that the auf in aufschäumen is one of them there nifty separable prefixes, being pulled apart from the schäumen in the finite forms Ich schäume auf, 'I foam up', du schäumst auf, 'You foam up'...

One of these things is not like the other... (Crosspost from LL)

2007-06-13T14:22:00.001-07:00

Audience participation segment: Instructions from the back of a container of special Japanese 'silk' facial cleansing powder:

English: Work into lather with a little water.
German: Mit etwas Wasser aufschäumen.
French: Faire mousser avec un peu d'eau.
Spanish: Producir espuma con un poco de agua.

I really only have any actual speaking command of two of the langauges on this list (English and French), but given that these are all intended as a direct translation of the English instruction, and what with being able to recognize various cognates in the German and Spanish, and having worked on causative and resultative constructions in English and Italian, and you know, heck, being a professional linguist and all, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on what was going on in these four sentences, syntactically speaking, when I first read them. And it seems to me that one of these ~~imperatives~~ instructions is not like the others.

Which one? And why?

Post your thoughts in the comments section here. I'll tell you what my take is tomorrow.

(Interlinear glosses (not translations) provided below, if you want a little more direct information.)

German:
Mit etwas Wasser auf-schäumen.
with some water up-foam

French:
Faire mousser avec un peu d'eau.
Make to.foam with a little of water

Spanish:
Producir espuma con un poco de agua.
produce foam with a little of water

Post on MySpace and get fired! (Crosspost from LL)

2007-06-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Bridget Copley writes in with the sad story of David Noordewier, who was fired by Wal-mart for posting the following in his MySpace:

Drop a bomb on all the Walmarts, trailer parks, ghettos, monster truck shows, and retarded fake "pro wrestling" events, and the average I.Q. score would probably double.

Why's this a sad story? Wal-mart can't have its employees publicly insulting its customers, probably; pretty harsh to fire him outright but you can see their point...

Thing is, Wal-mart didn't fire him for the implied insult. Rather, they fired him (and ensured that he was denied unemployment benefits) because they say he threatened them. He provides the following quote from their 'notice of determination':

"You were discharged from Walmart associates inc. on 2/27/07 for integrity issues. You had a posting on your personal website stating to "Bomb all the Walmarts" to increase the average IQ scores.

David needs to add a semanticist to his legal team, stat! Someone who can do the following:

(a) Explain, in words of one syllable, the concept of a 'conditional conjunction'. Actually for this David could just provide a link to an English as a Second Language website, e.g., here.¹

(b) Explain, with argumentation, the exact conditions that must be met for an utterance to be a 'threat' speech act. Conditionals (conjoined or regular) can be threats -- "Take another step and I'll shoot!" -- but not, I suspect, unless the consequent has a negative effect on the supposed threatenee. That's not the case in David's sentence.

(c) Prove that the conditional conjunction of his MySpace sentence does not have an imperative antecedent, as the Wal-Mart legal department seems to think. An imperative conjoined conditional like "Bomb all the Wal-marts and double the average IQ!" wouldn't be a threat per se, but it would be incitement to violence and perhaps justify the treatment he's getting. But the antecedent here is not an imperative; rather, it's a declarative with a concealed impersonal 'you' subject. ('You bomb all the Wal-marts and...')

The author of this paper could probably do it. Or any of the people he cites.

¹This is not an endorsement of the content here; it's just a high-up Google hit with examples of the right kind. I haven't really looked at it properly.

AZ commencement: Carmontastic!

2007-05-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

Well, it wasn't, as I had feared, in Wildcat Stadium! I think my colleagues were having a little fun with me. It was in the
McKale Memorial Center, where the basketball team plays; all nicely covered and well suited for dramatic lighting.

Funny how you can work for a long time at an institution and be totally ignorant of its particular traditions... turns out U of A grads throw tortillas at commencement; have done since 1919 or something. This is frowned upon, and the security detail was actually patting down students for tortillas (and, presumably, other more sinister things) beforehand. Nonetheless, a large number of tortillas found their way into the ceremony. I even got hit with one.

The speaker was Dr. Richard Carmona, former surgeon general of the US and now professor in the school of public health. He gave a really excellent and very anti-Administration speech about being citizens of the globe, about winning hearts and minds and improving the lives of others through good works and not with bombs and guns, about recognizing and addressing the long list of scary problems we all face. Very inspirational and suitable and remarkably political, unequivocally characterizing current foreign policy as a failure on all fronts, both with respect to its stated goals and with respect to catastrophic unintended consequences. As one of my colleagues said as we recessed, "He's out of the closet now!" The graduating audience at UA, not a necessarily especially progressive group, were remarkably on board with it all, cheering and clapping. Then they got back to throwing tortillas.

Family Circus Filology (Crosspost from LL)

2007-05-11T00:48:00.000-07:00

Today's language cartoons come via the Comics Curmudgeon, who has featured a coupla linguistically-significant Family Circus cartoons in recent rants.

First, a simple Eggcorn Genesis moment:

Next, something a bit more sophisticated:

To fully appreciate this one, you really need to read part of what Josh (the Curmudgeon) has to say about it in his original rant:

I wasn’t aware that there was some Papally proscribed prayer posture, with more knees denoting more Christian sincerity. I’m also not sure how Dolly can tell Jeffy’s only doing half an Ave Maria if he’s still in the midst of it — is he only doing every other word or something?

Josh's remark illustrates an important point about the temporal properties of events that can be described as "saying half the Hail Mary", namely, that they unfold towards a specific endpoint along a timecourse specified by the extent properties of the element denoted by the object NP in direct object position. That is, such events keep on going until half a Hail Mary is said and then they stop. The size of half a Hail Mary determines the extent of the event. This necessary stopping is a crucial property of such events -- called "telic events" -- and distinguishes them from another kind of event, ones with no predetermined endpoint, like running or singing -- ''atelic'' events..

Now, the English progressive (be + V-ing) has the property of focussing on the midpoint of some event -- the event is ongoing when you use the progressive to describe it. So the normal interpretation of "Jeff is saying half a Hail Mary" is that Jeff is in the middle of saying half a Hail Mary -- he hasn't reached the endpoint of the saying-half-a-Hail-Mary event yet.

Josh's point is that Dolly can't possibly tell whether Jeffy is only saying half a Hail Mary or saying a full Hail Mary. Any midpoint of a saying-half-a-Hail-Mary event is ALSO a midpoint of a saying-a-Hail-Mary event, so if Dolly's in the middle of watching Jeffy executing such an event, she can't know if he's going to stop halfway through or not, so she can have no evidence that he's only saying half.

There are only a couple of ways her report can make sense as a true statement about an ongoing event. One is the way that Josh mentions in his comment -- if he's saying half the Hail Mary by uttering every other word. Then, after hearing just a few words of the Hail Mary, Dolly could extrapolate the pattern to the end of the prayer, conclude that Jeffy isn't going to say the whole thing, and make her report.

The other way is if she's witnessing an iteration of half-a-Hail-Mary-saying events -- Jeffy has been repeatedly saying half-Hail-Marys. This represents a so-called 'coercion' effect of the progressive+telic verb combination -- rather than one event halfway through, the event is reimagined as consisting of multiple iterated events. He knocked at the door could be true with just a single "knock!", but He was knocking at the door has to involve multiple knocks -- coercion to an iteration interpretation, since knocking has no internal event duration that the progressive could focus on. Saying a Hail Mary does, though, so there's both the 'normal' and iterated interpretations available. And only as a description of iterated half-Hail-Mary-saying events does Dolly's report make sense.

I imagine this is why it's the Hail Mary and not some other bedtime prayer that is mentioned in the caption -- in my media-based and sketchy impression of Catholicism, Hail Marys are a prayer that is often said repeatedly, yes? Poor little Jeffy. Now he'll have to go back and say all the other half-a-Hail-Marys. Halfs-a-Hail-Mary? Certainly not halves-a-Hail-Mary. Hmm!

Comments?

Humanities convocation

2007-05-08T18:13:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a hooding ceremony that I wouldn't normally attend. At Arizona, Linguistics is (I think rightly) housed in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, so normally I would participate only in SBS-related pomps and circumstances. This spring, however, a student from the Spanish and Portuguese department who had enrolled in a couple of my classes over the past few years asked me if I would be willing to come and hood him at the Humanities ceremony, for his Masters in Hispanic Linguistics. I was naturally honored to be asked, and happened to be available, so happily went, though not really looking forward to the long ceremony, the repeated clapping, the sitting and sitting...

But the Humanities ceremony wasn't as long as the SBS ceremonies that I have been to -- just about an hour and 20 minutes to hood 67 graduate students. And it's always fun to be around so many happy people, the students enjoying a proud moment in front of the friends and family, the advisors happy to be honoring the efforts of their students in pursuit of (in the case of many of the Humanities degrees) purely non-mercenary ideals of erudition, creation, beauty and/or truth. Hooray for societies that value such things.

Anyway, it was a happy moment; it's hard not to smile when you're around so many smiling people. Like watching people greet each other at the airport.

On the other hand, I'm on tap to stand up for the Linguistics department at the BIG commencement ceremony for the whole university on Saturday. THAT -- three+ hours in the seriously hot sun in black robes -- is an honor which we are happy to rotate through the faculty, once per year. Given the current size of our department, I won't have to do it again for 15+ years. By that time maybe they'll have put a dome on Wildcat Stadium.

Ineffable apes (crosspost from Language Log)

2007-05-02T00:41:00.000-07:00

News from the animal communication front: Chimps and bonobos have arbitrariness of the sign, at least sort of, at least with respect to some gestures.

From the New Scientist article:

By observing captive groups of bonobos and separate groups of captive chimps, Pollick and de Waal identified 31 gestures and 18 facial or vocal signals made by the apes, and recorded the context in which they were used. It turns out that the facial and vocal signals were practically the same in both species, but the same gesture was used in different contexts both between and within species.

For example, the vocal signal "bared-teeth scream" signals fear in chimps and bonobos, but the signal "reach out up" – where an animal stretches out an arm, palm upwards – has different meanings. It may translate as begging for food or as begging for support from a friend, says de Waal. "The open hand gesture is also used after fights between two individuals to beg for approach and contact during a reconciliation. So the gesture is versatile, but the meaning depends on context."

In other words, chimps and bonobos seem to have gestural homophones--one symbol with two or more meanings.¹ The authors, Amy S. Pollick and Frans B.M. de Waal, of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, find this suggestive in thinking about the evolution of language: Perhaps the earliest symbolic communications were gestures, and the symbolic use of vocal signasl came later?

A colleague of theirs at the Yerkes Primate Research center agrees:

"The openness of the hand-gesture system among chimps and bonobos “is consistent with the idea that the early hominid communications system was gesture based and that vocal communication came later,” said William Hopkins, a Yerkes researcher not involved in the study. “The speech system is a very recent adaptation in hominids.”

But are the gestures really symbolic? Maybe they're just used as an enhancement of the vocal/facial signal (like the gestures accompanying speech among users of spoken languages). Are they really independent communicative units on their own (like the symbols of signed languages)?

In fact, it seems to me that the 'flexibility' of (at least some) gestures is consistent with the notion that they are general attention-getting devices. On this interpretation, they show up in multiple contexts precisely because they are not symbolic. A gesture might be saying, 'Pay attention to my vocal /facial signal!' rather than, say, denoting 'Help!' in one context and 'Can I have some of that?' in another. Flexibility of contexts are the opposite of symbolic communication, in a way!

Consider Fig. 3 from the article, where the reliability of the correlation between particular contexts and particular gestures and vocal/facial signals is reported. The gestures that show the least reliability are hand/arm motions in various directions -- 'reach out side', for example. These gestures happen to be the ones which intuitively (speaking as a communicative primate myself) have the least symbolic content.

If these gestures are actually signal amplifiers, rather than symbols, then we wouldn't expect them to show up by themselves, in the absence of the 'real' signals coming through in another modality (another communicative medium, like sound). They would always appear in combination. This seems like the $64,000 question to me, if use of symbols is what is at issue. (Marc Hauser, of {Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch} is quoted in the NY Times article as wondering the same thing).

Indeed, in the article itself, the authors introduce the research with remarks on the pervasiveness of mulitmodality in the communications systems of many different species:

Gestures are rarely produced in the absence of other communicative signals, such as facial expressions and vocalizations.
Multimodal communication has been appreciated in humans for several decades (43) and is becoming increasingly important in the study of animal communication (44). Multimodal signaling occurs across taxa, from snapping shrimps to spiders and birds, and in all contexts, although those related to courtship and mating are best documented (A.S.P., unpublished work). This communication strategy can have a variety of functions, including amplification and modulation of signal meaning. Combined with the graded facial/vocal signals typical of the apes (46), gestural flexibility has the advantage over the more stereotyped signaling by monkeys that it permits greater communicative
complexity.

So, you get multimodal signaling across all taxa; makes its existence in chimps and humans seem less special. But you don't get it in monkeys, which makes it seem more special, within our lineage, anyway. Looking for clues about whether the gestures were always in a multimodal context, it turns out there is a significant difference between bonobos and chimps in this regard:

No significant difference was found in the proportion of signals that was gestural versus facial/vocal, but chimpanzees did
combine these two signal classes relatively more often than did bonobos.

.

So there are at least some non-mulitmodal gestures in the data, enough to run stats on.

Interestingly, although chimps were more likely to use multimodal signals, multimodal signals were significantly more effective than gesture alone in eliciting a response from another animal in bonobos, but, remarkably, not in chimps. Among chimps, another chimp responded about 67-68 percent of the time to any gestural signal, whether it was embedded in a multimodal context or not. Among bonobos, on the other hand, a gesture alone elicited a response at about that same rate, 67 percent-ish, but if a bonobo gestured and made some facial or vocal signal along with the gesture, they got a response a whopping 83 percent of the time! And yet the bonobos were less likely to produce mulitmodal signals than the chimps! What's up with that?

The interest of this inverse correlation does not escape the authors, who write in their discussion,

That this contrast between multimodal
and single modality utterances held for bonobos only is
interesting given that multimodal combinations are less common
in bonobos. Could the relative scarcity of multimodal signaling
in bonobos relate to a more deliberate combination of gestures
with other forms of communication, perhaps in an attempt to
add critical information to the message instead of merely amplifying
it?

The whole question of the attention-getting issue is complicated by the methodology. The authors wanted to have good criteria for which signals (gestural or otherwise) to count as communicative, so they only counted gestures made at the start of a 'social interaction'...

...in which one individual approached another and attempted to engage the recipient with a communication signal. The two individuals may have been in proximity before, but without observable interaction. Signals were not included in the analysis, therefore, if they occurred in the middle or toward the end of an ongoing interaction.

So all of the communicative contexts examined were in attention-getting contexts; this may muddy the waters for sorting out the precursor-to-symbolic-communication hypothesis from the signal-amplification hypothesis.

Even if the gestures are more attention-getters than symbols, though, it's definitely interesting that apes, but not monkeys, use them. Silly monkeys -- it couldn't be more obvious that you should wave your hands to get attention! Working to get someone's attention, though, presupposes that you know they have an attention to get -- presupposes a theory of mind. And that is likely a sine qua non for language. Maybe the reason that bonobos use multimodal signals more selectively than chimps do is not that they are trying to 'add critical information' to the signal. Perhaps it's because they have a better theory of mind than chimps do, and hence they've got a better grasp of how to deploy the whole 'Look at me!' thing.

¹ Anyone want to coin a term for this? Maybe there already is one.

Rarely missing a chance to overanalyze (Crosspost from LL)

2007-04-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I wrote the following sentence:

1. I rarely miss a Daily Show, though sometimes not for several days after the fact.

As I read it over at the time, I had a sensation of overnegation bizarrity, but after thinking about it for awhile, I decided that it did say what I wanted it to say, although in a fairly obscure way, which I thought might be amusing, so I left it. Almost immediately after I posted it, though, alert reader Sridhar Ramesh wrote in with a description of having gone through the same boggle, pause, click of comprehension, pause, but it's still weird! that I did, and I though I'd go back and think about it some more.

I don't think there's an overnegation in the sentence—it has just the right amount of negation—but there's a weird ellipsis-reconstruction problem: the understood verb phrase inside the though-clause has to be understood as containing something that does not correspond to a syntactic constituent in the antecedent mail clause.

Here's the way the problem goes, I think.

"I rarely miss a Daily Show" is interpretively equivalent to "I usually watch the Daily Show." Informally, one could say that "miss" = "not watch"¹, and "rarely" = "not usually", and the two negations cancel each other out, interpretively, like this:

2. a. I [rarely [miss a Daily Show]] -->

2. b. I do[n't [usually [not [watch the Daily Show]]]] -->

2. c. I [usually [watch the Daily Show]].

Now, consider what happens if I replace "rarely miss" with "usually watch" in my weird sentence above:

3. I usually watch a Daily Show, though sometimes not for several days after the fact.

This has a totally unobjectionable interpretation, derived by filling in an elided "I watch it" in the though clause, modified by the not in the though clause.² This is shown in (4) below. I have colored the filled-in material red and put it in brackets so you don't lose track of it. The antecedent of the filled-in material is underlined.³

4. I usually watch a Daily Show_i, though sometimes (I) don't (watch it_i) for several days after the fact.

That is, as Sridhar notes, my not watching it can extend for several days before ending with my watching it. Note that it's not my usually not watching it that extends for several days -- the usually is not part of the filled-in material, just the VP watch the Daily Show.

In order to get this reading out of my actual sentence, one has to dissect "miss" into "not watch". If you don't do this, and reconstruct the elision as involving the actually present VP miss a Daily Show, you get the overnegation problem:

5. I rarely miss a Daily Show_i, though sometimes (I) don't(miss it_i) for several days after the fact.

The though-clause here is saying there are several days of my not missing a given Daily Show followed by my missing it. That is, it sounds like I watch it repeatedly for several days and then begin to miss it.

The 'good' reading for the sentence that I and Sridhar were getting is based on decomposing 'miss a Daily Show' into 'not watch a Daily Show', as in (2b) above:

6. a. I rarely [miss a Daily Show]

6. b. I rarely do[n't [watch a Daily Show]]

After filling in the elided bit, this would give the right interpretation, namely, one in which [watch it] is the reconstructed constituent:⁴

7. I rarely don't watch a Daily Show_i, but sometimes (I) don't (watch it_i) for several days after the fact.

The key thing about (7), of course, is that it involves reconstructing a subpart of the decomposed "miss a Daily Show". This is what's making the sentence in (1) feel so bizarre. That subpart is not present in the syntax of the antecedent clause; if it's present at all, it's only in the sentence's 'logical form'.

One approach to ellipsis phenomena says that the whole understood sentence, repeated material and all, is actually present in the speaker's mental syntax, but because some bit of it is identical to some other bit of it, the second instance of the identical bit is simpy not pronounced. If this is how ellipsis works, we can understand the bizarre feeling: Ellipsis involves non-pronunciation of material that is syntactically identical with its antecedent, so the deleted phrase would have to be the whole verb phrase miss a Daily Show, not some deconstructed semantic subpart of it which isn't present in the real syntax. (See, e.g., Jason Merchant's work.)

Another approach to ellipsis says that the speaker doesn't bother constructing the syntax for the elided bit; rather, it's just not present at all, and the hearer reconstructs it from the semantic interpretation of the antecedent clause. (see, e.g., Ray Jackendoff and Peter Culicover's work). Under that approach, the bizarre feeling might show that miss is not decomposable, semantically; although the lexical meaning crucially involves a negative implication of some kind, the negative part of the meaning can't be prised apart from the rest of the meaning.

Either way, the bizarre feeling Sridhar and I get from (1) shows that in some important way, watch the Daily Show is not a subpart of miss the Daily Show.

¹Actually, the imagined negated verb probably shouldn't be 'watch' here -- it'd be safer to posit a more general negated verb like 'not experience' with this reading of 'miss'. That would cover things like 'I missed the dance', where you don't mean 'I didn't watch the dance', but probably 'I didn't attend the dance'; 'I didn't experience the dance' would cover it), or 'I missed what you just said', where you don't mean 'I didn't watch what you just said', but rather, 'I didn't hear what you just said' -- 'I didn't experence what you just said' would cover that too. Nonetheless I'm going to go with watch rather than experience just coz the problem is already complicated enough; it doesn't change anything about the reasoning undertaken below, though.

²I represent the filled-in-bit as 'I watch it' rather than 'I watch a Daily Show' because using the latter to elucidate the filled-in-bit wouldn't give the necessary bound-variable reading of the object of 'watch' in the elided bit; 'it', however, does. Just consider it a slight fictionalization that allows me to gloss over a discussion of why an overt repeated 'a Daily Show' wouldn't give right bound variable reading and the mechanics of how some syntacticians think an invisible, elided 'a Daily Show' can give such a reading.

³ For another LL discussion of ellipsis phenomena see this post of David Beaver's.

⁴Note that the n't in the though-clause is not the same as the n't in the main clause. It's crucial to leave that main clause negation behind, otherwise you end up with the bad interpretation in (5), where it's my not watching it, i.e. my missing it, that starts several days after the initial air date.)

Comments?

Third Annual Simpsons St. Patrick's Day Linguistic Round Up

2007-03-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

This is now the second anniversary of Heideas. Imagine that! In keeping with what may possibly develop into a tradition, unless it doesn't, I'm posting my collection of Simpsons linguistic humor for the year. After each of the two previous collections were posted (and with the extensive contributions from readers in the comments sections of those posts), I felt pretty confident that the Simpsons had been tapped out, but looking at the list below, it appears that I was even more wrong about that last year than I was the year before. They just never seem to run out of material, those writers!

Same format as last year: Episode title and year (not season); linguistic category for joke, transcript of joke.

Enjoy!

geekily,
hh

The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and her Homer (2006)

Gender, vocabulary and language use.

Martin (on schoolbus): Mr. Driver? One of my mates has purloined my French horn!
Kearney: Why can't you talk like a dude?

Epenthesis, language games, perception of foreign speech sounds:

The Simpsons are having dinner at Fat Tony's house.
Fat Tony: In the words of the old country, mangiare, mi amici!
Homer: Heeheehee! He's talking like the guy in Fat Albert! Howbuh arbuh youbuh?
Marge: Homer! (Kicks him under table).
Homer: D'oh! Whybuh youbuh dobuh thabuh?

Euphemisms, codes

Henchman 1 (interrupting dinner): Boss! The Calabreses are here for the sit-down!
Fat Tony (stepping outside): No sitdowns tonight! (gets out his Palm, checks it.) Again, this Palm Pilot has failed to remind me! I believe this needs to be hot-synched.
Henchman 1: (Snatches Palm from him, throws it to the ground, and pumps four shots into it, disintegrating it totally.)
Fat Tony (outraged): What are you doing!?
Henchman 1: I thought you meant (draws finger across neck) hot synch it, you know how it is with us! Everything means 'kill'!

Nonce change of state verb, resultative verb-particle constructions:

Fat Tony's son Michael has just confessed in front of the competing Calabrese mob family that his dream is to be a chef.

Calabrese son, to Michael: You know what I like? Those little tiny hot dogs. Do they small 'em down, or do they make 'em different?

Infinite generative capacity, (productive) compounding:

Homer drives home in a new red pickup.
Marge: Homer! Where did you get that truck?
Homer: Uhhh, it fell off a truck! You know, a truck truck!
(An airhorn blasts and Bart rolls up at the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler transporting pickup trucks).
Lisa: Where'd you get that?
Bart: It fell off a truck-truck truck.
(Another airhorn, and a truck-truck truck drives past, carrying several eighteen-wheelers loaded with pickups).

Pranksta Rap (2005)

Language change

Bart's watching a TV entertainment news broadcast called "Hip-Hoppenings":

Rapping Anchor: Yo yo yo, here now the nuhzooz! The top artists of hip hop are comin' to Springfield! This all-star concert, dubbed 'Murder for Life', features Da Glock-Pointers, Romeo Smooth, Queen Booty-Shakah, MC Champagne Millionaire and Assault Weapons magazine Man of the Year Alcatraz!
Bart (throwing gang symbols): Alcatraz is widespread! I’m talkin' da junk!
Lisa (rolling her eyes): Just what we need. Another lame suburban kid who loves rap.
Bart: So? You like the blues!
Lisa (smugly): Yeah, but the blues are unpopular!
Bart (more symbols): Man, are you illin'!
Lisa: Rappers stopped saying illin' twelve years ago!
Bart: I'm keepin' it real!
Lisa: They stopped saying keepin' it real three years ago.
Bart: Mom, Lisa's dissin' me!
Marge: Dissin'? Do rappers still say that?

Prescriptivism

Later: Alcatraz's personal video has pinpointed the date of a taped concert, thereby proving Bart faked his own kidnapping, much to Principal Skinner's satisfaction:
Skinner: Thank you, Alcatraz!
Alcatraz: It ain't nothin'!
Skinner: Ah-ah-aah! It is nothing!
Alcatraz: It's idiomatic, beeyotch!

The Simpsons Christmas Stories (2005)

Result-denoting -ing nominals, folk-etymology

Bethlehem innkeeper Moe leading Herod and his soldiers to the stable to kill baby Bart-Jesus:

Moe: The kid you're looking for is in there! The other tenants have been complaining about the incessant swaddling. All hours, day and night.

The Heartbroke Kid (2005)

Irregular plurals

Superintendent Chalmers: Today's the day we choose who gets the school's vending machine contract! I anticipate quite the dog-and-pony show.
Skinner: Sir, this school has a strict no-animals policy. I assume these are hypothetical dogs and ponii?

Folk etymology?, focus

Sea Captain (pitching a vending machine): Yar, everyone likes a gumball machine, so why not a gumBO machine? (Points behind him to gumball machine full of gumbo, gleefully holds up quarter).

Use of slang, registers in advertising, compounding, marketing-speak

Lindsay Naigle and slick colleague, pitching vending machine:
Lindsay Naigle: Kids want a snack that skateboards, won't clean its room, and hates homework.
Colleague: That's why we created 'Scarf-ables' by Scammer and Z-dog!
Lindsay Naigle: These two spokesrebels were invented by the marketing team that came up with 'Hip-hopsicles', the urban popsicle!
Skinner: Yes, I saw those when my normal grocery store was on strike.
Colleague: Here's what really seals the deal! (opens the door to reveal flashing, rap-pumping vending machine with "Scammer and Z-dog" emblazoned thereon)
Vending machine: Yo yo yo! Slide your green into the machine and don't expect any change, dog!
Colleague: It's like a fundraising school bakesale, with slang as the saran wrap!

Sound-spelling confusion

Bart has had a heart attack. Marge has been to the grocery storee
Marge: I talked to Dr. Hibbert today. He gave me a list of heart-smart foods!
(She hand Bart a tub of cottage cheese)
Bart (puzzling over the label): Kotta-hay cheese?
Marge: Cottage cheese!
Bart: From the looks of it, this cheese has already been eaten!

FutureDrama (2005)

Slang, language change:

Bart and Lisa are seeing their future prom through Prof Frink's time machine (Lisa graduated two years early, of course!) Bart's date Jinda arrives on a skateboard:

Jinda: Hey everybody! Bart, you're looking crooked!
Bart: Hey Jinda! How about some forehead?
(They headbutt each other.) Ow!
Jinda (looking concussed but happy): That was jagged!
Marge: When I was a kid, we didn't show our affection by headbutting!
Homer: Ohh, Maa-arge! (Looks at her sidelong, then takes a headfirst run at her with closed eyes. She steps aside. He misses and hits the fireplace.) Oh, right. Separated.

Jargon, language change:

Later, at the prom:

Professer Skinner (finishing welcoming the celebrants): And now, here's assistant principal Kearney!
Kearny: Ok, I want a nice clean prom! That means no booze, kick, puff, doze, max, stim or turb. Remember, stim kills!
Skinner: It's what turned Superintendent Chalmers into a vegetable! (Cut to shot of Chalmers strapped into an electric wheelchair, circling and saying 'Skin-ner! Skin-ner! Skin-ner!' in that 'Luuu-cy!' intonation.)

Idioms, taboo speech:

Skinner is calling the graduates up at the graduation ceremony.
Skinner: Bartholomew Simpson!
Bart (annoyed, in the audience): What?!
Skinner: Come and get - your diploma.
Bart: Why don't you mail it to your butt!
Skinner: Bart, now that you've graduated, I can finally say this: You really press my cider!
(Entire crowd freezes, gasps in horror.)

Springfield Up (2007)

Derivational verbal morphology, compounds, accidental homophony

Narrator: At age 16, Marge was the star photographer for her school newspaper. But her interests soon expanded beyond shutterbuggery.

All's Fair in Over War (2004)

Blends:

At the church pot luck (motto: "What a friend we have in cheese puffs"), Moe is unenthusiastically surveying the selection:

Moe: Same ol' stuff. Meatloaf, casserole, tuna loaf, loaferole, casseloaf…

Homer and Ned's Hail Mary Pass (2005)

Laughter in different languages.

Comic Book Guy (real name: Jeff Albertson) has uploaded a video of Homer doing an in-your-face victory dance at a carnival after he beat Bart at the frog-on-lilypad game. (Website: Dorks-Gone-Wild.com; video file title: Big-Ass Baryshnikov). We see it traveling around the world, triggering laughter in France (the usual nasalization, see Trilogy of Error), Japan (higher-pitched, faster, percussive) Botswana (clicks and prenasalized stops) and Antartica (seals barking).

Passives.

Homer is supposed to be planning the Super Bowl half-time show, but has choreographer's block. He runs into Ned Flanders, who's been making gory Old Testament films à la Passion of the Christ, which no one will distribute.

Homer: I've got a venue the whole world will be watching, and nothing to fill it with!
Ned: Wait a minute — you've got a medium, and I've got a message! Maybe God brought us together for a reason!
Homer (thoughtfully): Yeah! You help me, and I in turn am helped by you!

Ice Cream of Marge (With the Light Blue Hair) (2006)

Feminine profession names, mass/count conversion, synonymy:

Kent Brockman: I'm here with local sculptoress Marge Simpson, who works in, of all media, popsicle stick! Our viewers want to know two things: Why? and How come?

Little Big Girl (2007)

Words for snow

Lisa's giving a presentation on the 'Hitachi' tribe at the Springfield Multicultural Center. She made them up as pretend ancestors to make her 'Heritage' homework more interesting.

Lisa: The Hitachis invented women's lacrosse… soft luggage.. and that thing where you're walking and someone's walking towards you and you each try to step aside but you both go the same way and you do it again and again until one of you just scoots around? They had seven names for that!

Synonymy

Bart's emergency cell phone rings
Homer (sounding terrified): Bart! This is a matter of life and death! What is the difference between ketchup and catsup?? They're going to cut my head off!
(Bart throws away phone)

Back-formation, nationality morphemes

Bart and new girlfriend Darcy from North Haverfield
Bart: I'm gonna be a father?!
Darcy: What! No! You couldn’t be the father! We never got close to that.
Bart: Really? But we kissed and held hands at the same time!
Darcy: Wow, you really are ten! I thought you were just kinda stupid.
Bart: I'm ten and stupid. Look, if I'm not the father, then who is?
Darcy: A Norwegian exchange student. He's long gone, back to Norwegia.

Simple Simpson (2004)

Pluralia tantum in idiom; failed snowclone

The ornery Texan has humiliated Lisa in the place-setting contest at the county fair. Homer dresses up as Pie Man so he can get revenge without being recognized.
Homer as Pie Man: You've hurt your last feeling! (throws pie in Texan's face).
Drederick Tatum (in applauding crowd): We all know pie are squared. But today, pie are justice!

Agreement errors as indicators of intelligence, also, English *amn't I paradigm gap:

Homer thinks he has found a golden ticket to visit the bacon factory in a package of bacon he bought in the Quick-E-Mart. He's kissing Apu in celebration.
Apu: Mr. Simpson, please! I fear your smooches are premature. This is in fact a silver ticket. This silver ticket entitles you to judge the pig competition at the Springfield county fair.
Homer: Judge a pig competition!? But I'm no super genius -- or are I? Hmmm.

Truth conditions. (Cf. Lisa on Ice — retread of same joke!)

Narrator of Fox's hit reality TV show Promiscuous Idiots Island: Tonight: we reveal a shocking secret.
Host: Ladies, when you were selected, you were told you'd be dating a billionaire on his private island. Well, I'm afraid we misled you.
Ladies: *gasp*
Marge (watching TV, pumping fist): Get ready, skanks! Here comes the Truth Train!
Host (walking over to map, pulling off false water): This isn't an island at all — it's a peninsula!
Outraged Contestant #1: This was supposed to be about trust! (storms out)
Sobbing Contestant #2: I just wanna get on that boat and go home!
Host: Well, you don't need a boat, 'cause you can walk.
Sobbing Contestant #2: (renewed sobs).

Brake My Wife, Please! (2003)

Derivational verbal morphology, change of state verbs, nominal predicates

Homer: I did it! I walked all the way to Moe's from my house!
Bart (faintly, from home, seen about a block away in the background): Way to go, Dad!
Homer: Y'know, I feel pretty good! Maybe I should just keep walking instead of going into a dark, dreary bar!
Moe (opening the door and grabbing him by the ear): Get in here, boozy! You're late for your drunkening!
Homer: No, from now on, walking is my beer! And feeling good is my hangover!

Denominal verbs in English, structural ambiguity:

Homer has brought Bart and Lisa to Moe's to consult with them about preparing a romantic dinner for Marge.

Lisa: You know what Mom really likes? Julienned potatoes! And for dessert, peach crumble!
Moe: Ya wanna know how to make a peach crumble? Kick it in the groin! Ha!

Dude, Where's My Ranch? (2003)

Ambiguous pro-form referents.

Marge: Why don't we take a vacation and get away from that song for awhile?
Homer: Well, I guess we could afford one nice trip.
[He walks to the corner of the kitchen where a stand holds tourist brochures, the kind of stand you see in a hotel or an airport. It's labeled 'Tourist Info' on top. He reaches for a brochure.]
Marge: I still think you should have left that in the motel!
Homer: What? It says, 'Take one!' [Shot broadens to reveal that, indeed, at the bottom of the stand in capital letters, it does say, 'TAKE ONE'.]

Revenge is a dish best served three times. (2007)

Inter-linguistic homonymy (aka 'shoecabbages')

Bart: Papa, may we have chocolat?
Lisa: Papa, may we have petit fours?
Homer: May we? May we! Mais oui! (waves money) (all laugh through noses, cf. Trilogy of Error)

Inalienable possession marking in French

Marge (to Homer): Let us kiss with the tongues!

Syntactic gender

Marge and Homer are peacefully sleeping, snoring [+nasal]ly. Soldiers burst in.
Capitaine Wiggum: Monsieur Simpson! You are under arrest for treason!
Homer: Treason?! But I love France! The way all our words are either a girl or a guy? Oh, that's the best!
Capitaine Wiggum: Tell it to le baton! [whacks him]

Garden-path, idioms and productivity

M. le justice Snyder: I sentence you to life!
Homer: You moron! I'm already alive!
M. le justice Snyder: In prison!

Productive derivational morphology

Marvin (unveiling glove and remote control contraption): Behold! The Getbackinator!

Back-formation, cran-morph, productive derivational morphology

Milhouse is using the Getbackinator to get back at all the kids who have made his life at Springfield Elementary miserable.

Cowering strange kid (to threatening Milhouse): I haven't done anything to you! This is my first day at this school!
Milhouse: You will! This is prevenge!

I'm Spelling As Fast as I Can! (2003)

Linguistic terminology, etymological spelling cues in English ('deep' orthography)

Springfield Elementary supporters cheer Lisa at the state spelling bee: Dipthongs, cognates, Latin roots! Lisa clobbers all you fruits!

Backformation and nonce suffixes

Kent Brockman (reporting Lisa's success): In business news, 3M and M&M have merged to form, get this, Ultradyne Systems! And, speaking of news stories, here's another. Springfield's spelling phenom Lisa Simpson has qualified for spelling's answer to the Olympics, the Spellympics! And, in a related story, the Spellympics is being sued by the Olympics for the use of the suffix -lympics.

English spelling rules

Marge: Okay, champ! 'I' before 'E' except after 'C'!
Lisa: Except when pronounced like 'A' as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'.
Marge: Really?! Hm! And what about in the sentence, "Jim Nabors is way cool!"
Lisa: Well, how often is that gonna come up?
Marge: It's on my apron! (Camera pans down to reveal it's true.)

Respect for the orthographically informed

Lisa (following Rocky-style spelling training montage):Thank you! I've never felt more accepted. Perhaps one day, people who spell correctly will replace athletes at the top of our national pantheon!

Multiple wh-questions

Krusty: Look, about the Ribwich. There aren't going to be any more. The animal we made 'em from is now extinct.
Homer: The pig?
Otto: The cow?
Krusty: You're way off. Think smaller. Think more legs. [Crowd goes 'ewww']. People, we went through something magical together. And it's not important who got rich off of whom, or who got exposed to tainted what. And because you believed in my dream, I want you to fight over the last Ribwich ever made. Here. [Tosses ribwich.]

English sound-spelling correspondences

Spelling bee announcer: All right. Your word is [wET´r].
Third-place contestant: Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?
Spelling bee announcer: Certainly. "I don't know whether the weather will improve."
Third-place contestant: uhhh….W…E…. [buzzer goes]

G.I. (Annoyed Grunt) (2006)

Morphemes and onset maximization, deadjectival change-of-state verbs

Col. X (Through megaphone, from jeep): Attention Springfield! We are rounding up and detaining all men who are fat, or bald, or who have ever been amused by the antics of Homer Simpson!
Superintendent Chalmers (within compound with Comic Book Guy, Barney, etc.): Excuse me, I don't belong here! I am not bald, I am balding! [To self, exasperated] Why will no one honor the -ding??
Principal Skinner: I honor the -ding, sir!
Superintendent Chalmers: What the hell are you talking about?

Bart Of War (2003)

Spelling oddities

Chief Wiggum: "Hijinks." There's a funny word. Three dotted letters in a row.
Lou: Is it hyphenated, Chief?
Chief Wiggum: It used to be. But… And how about " 'N Sync"? What's up with that?

Home away from Homer (2005) (?not sure this is right)

Idioms, compounds

Flanders: You want to make me a laughingstock?
Homer: No, I want to make you a respecting stock!

22 Short Films about Springfield (1996)

Dialect differences

Principal Skinner is entertaining Superintendent Chalmers at his home.

Skinner: Superintendent, I hope you're ready for mouth-watering hamburgers!
Chalmers: I thought we were having steamed clams.
Skinner: No, no, I said 'steamed hams!' That's what I call hamburgers!
Chalmers: You call hamburgers 'steamed hams'.
Skinner: Yes! It's a regional dialect.
Chalmers: Uh-huh--What region?
Skinner: Upstate New York?
Chalmers: Really. Well, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use the phrase, 'steamed hams.'
Skinner: Oh, not in Utica, no! It's an Albany expression.

King-Size Homer (1995)

Grice in the men's room (Maxim of Quantity)

Homer is hiding in a stall in the men's room from Mr. Smithers and his goons, who want to compel him to participate in the company fitness program. The goons slam the door of his stall open, revealing a cowering Homer standing in the toilet.

Homer: Someone's in here!

[So thisis why I thought I'd posted on this before! I'd typed Homer's version of it, here!]

I Scream of Marge (with the light blue hair) (2006)

Nasal assimilation

Burns, coming upon Homer squirming and giggling on the floor after a two-minute tickling penalty during a game of chair hockey.

Burns: On your feet, you sniggering o-raN-gu-tan!

The Canine Mutiny (1997)

Accents, [h]-dropping

Bart's looking for Santa's Little Helper, who was sold by the repo man to "a man in a dress". After one false start, he's figured out it's Groundskeeper Willie (kilt), and has gone to ask him about the dog:

Groundskeeper Willie (gnawing on a drumstick of some kind): Yeh, I bought yer mutt, and I 'ate im! [Bart gasps.] I 'ate 'is little face, I 'ate his guts, and I 'ate the way 'es always barkin'! So I gave 'im to the church.
Bart (sighs in relief): Oh, I see! You hate him, so you gave him to the church.
Groundskeeper Willie: Aye. I also 'ate the mess 'e left on my rug. [Bart turns and looks at him.] You 'eard me!

Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore (2006)

P-V compounds, focus, idioms

Burns’ ‘instructional’ video:
(Hard-hatted blue-collared workers, toasting in cans of Duff):
Worker 1: It’s a miracle! They moved our factory to a third world nation!
Worker 2: Now I have more time to play the lottery! Ka-ching!
Voiceover: Hey America! Why not let some of the other countries carry their share of the load? You can, with the best kind of sourcing—OUTsourcing!

Syntactic opacity of NN compounds

Comic book guy, interviewing Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver, and star of Stargate):
Comic Book Guy: Richard Dean Anderson: Of the four Star franchises—Wars, Trek, Gate and Search—Gate is easily my third favorite!
Richard Dean Anderson: I get that a lot.

Please Homer, Don’t Hammer ’Em (2006)

Inherent case, ‘of’-insertion, clefting and constituency.

Marge has just repaired the nightstand by her bed, using the Time-Life Carpenter’s Library Volume 7: Floorboards and Nightstands.

Marge: I did it! What’s that strange feeling? *gasps* It’s … of accomplishment!

Jazzy and the Pussycats (2006)

Gricean maxims: Relevance?

The Simpsons are arriving at the church for Homer’s Vegas wife’s funeral.

Bart: So how did malt liquor mommy die?
Marge: Stop calling her that!
Lenny: I’ll tell you how she died. You know that sign that says ‘Do not stand up on the rollercoaster?
Bart: Yeah?
Lenny: She overdosed right in front of it.

Little Girl in the Big Ten (2002)

Idioms and reference:

Kerney is threatening a smaller child:

Kerney: Gimme your lunch money!
Kid: But it's after lunch!
Kerney: It's just an expression. Like, 'kick your butt' could involve no kicking whatsoever.

Mother Simpson (1995)

Rhetorical questions:

Lisa and Grandma Simpson are jamming. Grandma Simpson sings Dylan:

Grandma Simpson (strumming): How many roads must a man walk down, Before you can call him a man?
Homer (interrupting): Seven!
Lisa: No Dad! It's a rhetorical question!
Homer: Rhetorical, eh? Eight!
Lisa: Dad, do you even know what "rhetorical" means?
Homer: Do I know what rheTORical means!?!

Self-monitoring for dialect/register

A taxi driver is looking at old mug shots of Grandma Simpson for Burns and the FBI.

Cabbie: Yeah, I mighta seen her. It's hard ta tell from this old picture, y'know?
FBI Agent (typing): According to our computer aging program, she should look abooout … 25 years older! (Turns laptop to reveal the number '25' displayed on the screen).
Cabbie (doubletaking): Yeah, I seen her! (Self-consciously:) Ah, that is to say, I saw her.

Later the same FBI agents are showing the mug shots to a gravedigger at the Springfield Cemetery:

Gravedigger: Yep, I saw 'er! (Self-consciously) That is to say, I seen 'er.

Lisa the Vegetarian (1995)

Count/mass coercion (food):

After a visit to a petting zoo, Lisa is having a realization at the dinner table:
Lisa: I can't eat this! I can't eat a poor little lamb!
Homer: Lisa, get ahold of yourself! This is lamb, not a lamb.
Lisa: What's the difference between this lamb and the one that kissed me?

Fear of Flying (1994)

Chinese word for opportunity, or something:

Homer's sad because of being banned from Moe's. Lisa tries to console him:

Lisa: Look on the bright side, Dad! Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for 'crisis' as they do for 'opportunity'?
Homer (brightening): Yes! Crisitunity! You're right! I've been wasting my life away in that dump for years. That's it! I'm going to find a new bar to drink in! And I'm going to get drunker than I've been in my entire life!

Lisa On Ice (1994)

Intonation, imperatives, object drop

Bart and Lisa are playing on opposite PeeWee hockey teams, Bart's "Pigs" and Lisa's "Gougers." The stadium is packed. Bart is taking a penalty shot.

Pigs fans (screaming): Kill, Bart! Kill, Bart!
Gougers fans (screaming): Kill Bart! Kill Bart!

[The punctuation here indicates the intonation contour difference in the chants of the two crowds.]

Grice: Maxim of relevance

Lisa is worrying about the possible impact of failing gym class. She imagines her inauguration….

Chief Justice: I now pronounce you President of these United --
Reporter: Stop the inauguration! I just discovered our President Elect got an F in second grade gym class!
[crows gasps; Lisa is handcuffed]
Chief Justice: In that case I sentence you to a lifetime of horror on Monster Island. [to Lisa] Don't worry, it's just a name.

[Cut to scene of ex-president-elect Lisa and others being chased by Gamera, Mothra and Rodan]
Lisa (panting): He said it was just a name!
Fellow chasee: What he meant is that Monster Island is actually a peninsula.

Bart Has Two Mommies (2006)

Noun incorporation

Bart is grabbed by a chimpanzee at the zoo and pulled into her cage for mothering.
Homer: My son's been ape-napped!
Lisa: No, no! It's still kidnapped, the prefix applies to the victim!

Sarcasm:

Marge: Where's Bart? I haven't seen him since you came home!
Homer (very sarcastically): Oh, you haven't seen Bart for a few hours so you automatically assume I let something TERRIBLE happen.
Marge: I didn't say that!
Homer (still very sarcastically): I know what you think! "When stupid Homer wasn't looking, Bart got kidnapped by a monkey."
Marge: I could never think something that horrible!
Homer (still): And NOW I'm using SARcasm to confess the whole thing, so LATer I can say that I already TOLD you.
Marge: I'm sorry I asked.
She leaves in disgust.
Lisa: Dad, you can't keep this up for long.
Homer (STILL very sarcastically): Oh, you're SO right. I GUESS I should be more concerned with Bart's SAFEty than covering my own butt! And MAYbe I'm talking like this because I can't STOP! Help me, Lisa! I have SERious MENTAL problems!

Translation:

Ned gives the Simpsons his free 'feMac' computer, because "all those complete strangers Googling each other makes my flesh crawl."

Marge: Ned! That's so generous! But there must be something I can do in return!
Ned: Well, sir, we could do a little quid-pro for the Kaypro. The left handed convention is in town and as the owner of Springfield's largest southpaw shop I just gotta be there! Could you nanny-goat my kid-diddly-ids?
Marge (consulting a "Flanders-English English-Flanders Dictionary"): Hmm, let's see, just a sec… Oh! Yeah, sure I'd be happy to babysit for Rod and Todd!
Flanders (consulting a "Simpsons-English English-Simpsons Dictionary"): "Woo hoo"!

Retronym, contrastive focus:

A mother duck makes off with Homer's entry in the rubber duckie race.
Homer (outraged): This race is for rubber ducks, not meat ducks!

Homer's Paternity Coot (2005)

Translation

Marge (finding an unpaved side road around the toll booth): Voilà! That's French for 'Ta daa!'

Cape Feare (1993)

Inter-language homonyms (orthographic shoecabbages):

Sideshow Bob is being questioned in a courtroom during his parole hearing. Attempting to determine whether or not he still has homicidal inclinations, especially towards Bart, the lawyer quizzes him:

Lawyer: What about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn't it say 'Die Bart, Die?'
Sideshow Bob (opening his shirt to reveal the tattoo): No! That's German, for 'The Bart, the."

Phonetic spelling conventions:

Sideshow Bob, out of prison on parole, is working out with free weights. We see that the knuckles of his three-fingered hands have 'LUV' and 'HĀT' tattooed on them.

Homer and Marge Turn a Couple Play (2006)

Reciprocal predicates ('essentially plural' predicates):

Homer and Marge are necking on the big-screen 'Kiss Cam' at the ballpark, to the cheers of the crowd.
Lenny turns to Carl. "Remember when we used to kiss like that? With our respective girlfriends?"

Spelling

Tabitha, a sexy diva, is addressing her slugger husband Buck over the ballpark PA system.
Tabitha: Buck, I love you too! And I'll take you back if you can guess tonight's attendance!
[Screen flashes choices: a) 8191 b) 8128 c) 8208 d) No way to tell. He boggles.]
Tabitha: It's C! As in keeping together!

Principal Charming (1991)

Pun

Bart has written his name in 40-foot high letters of dead grass on the school field, in sodium tetrachloride. Skinner is outraged. He says, "The sheer contempt demonstrated by this incident makes me wish I could pull the trusty board of education out of retirement." His gaze falls wistfully upon a paddle in a case behind glass.

My Fair Laddy (2006)

Dialect differences

Lisa tries to civilize Willy, My Fair Lady-style. She tries to get him to shed his accent by teaching him a phrase, 'What flows from the nose does not go on my clothes,' presumably to get him to pronounce his /o/ in her standard dialect. Weirdly, he produces RP, not Standard American English.

Marge Gets a Job (1992)

Contractions and lexicalization

Troy McClure, in the instructional video, “The Half-Assed Approach to Foundation Repair”: Over the next six hours, I’ll be taking you through the dos and do not dos of foundation repair.

The Otto Show (1992)

Subsective modification, ambiguity of 'real'.

Marge: Homer, I've been thinking about what Bart said. If he's really interested in being a musician, maybe we should buy him a guitar.
Homer: (Picking up an obviously toy guitar) That's a waste of money! We already have a guitar! (Turns crank, guitar plays Pop Goes the Weasel. Maggie reaches for it.)
Marge: I meant a REAL guitar.
Homer: This is real! (Bangs it on the crib, then on his head, to prove his point.)

The Great Money Caper (2000)

Structural ambiguity, Dialectal variation in coda consonant clusters

Mentalist/waiter: And for the lady -- a [laaaaaŋg] island iced tea!
Marge: Oooh, they oughta call that a large island iced tea! (She laughs. Family looks blankly at her.) Nah, long is better.

Lisa the Tree Hugger (2000)

Topicalization

Kent Brockman (reading the news): The eco-radical group 'Dirt First' staged a daring protest today at Krustyburger. Krusty the Clown has issued the following statement: "This, I don't need."

Marge Simpson in Screaming Yellow Honkers 1999

Definitions:

Skinner: (Introducing a school skit show) Good evening! Our old friend Noah Webster defines "laughter" as the act or sound of laughing!
(Shoe flies in from audience and strikes him on the head.)
Nelson: Ha ha!
Skinner: (Chuckling) Well illustrated, Nelson!

Homonyms, wh-words

Superintendet Chalmers and Principal Skinner are in a stand-up routine together. Chalmers is dressed in a baseball uniform.
Chalmers: Well, Seymour, it seems we've put together a baseball team. I was wondering, who's on first?
Skinner: Yes! Not the pronoun, but rather a player with the unlikely name of "Who" is on first.
Chalmers: Yes, well, that's just great, Seymour. We've been out here six seconds and you've already managed to blow the routine! (Walks off, mumbling, "Sexless freak.")

Grift of the Magi. 1999.

'Semantics' and philosophy of ethics

Lisa: Your toy company is evil!
Gary Coleman: Well, isn’t it possible for an evil company to make people happy?
Lisa: Are you saying that the end justifies the means?
GC: That’s a very glib interpretation!
Bart: Hey! Don’t talk to my sister that way!
Lisa: No Bart, he’s right. I did oversimplify.
Homer: Perhaps. But let’s not get bogged down in semantics.

‘Tis the Fifteenth Season. 2003.

Irregular plurals:

Burns: Time for your Christmas bonii!

Grice in the ladies' room (from LL)

2007-03-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

When you're in a stall in a public bathroom and someone rattles the handle of your stall, what do you say to make them go away? There are several options — "Occupied!" or "Just a minute!" are popular, in my door-ratting experience — but when a rattlee, I have always favored the following:

"Somebody's in here!"

An aunt of mine (who apparently uses this same phrasal deterrent) once came back from the ladies' room mulling it over. Why, she wondered, would you say "someone"? You know perfectly well who's in there! It's you! Why wouldn't you say, "I'm in here!"? I giggled all night.

I recently had occasion to say it again, and it suddenly occurred to me it's because of Grice's Maxim of Quantity:

(i) Be as informative as necessary.
(ii) Don't be more informative than necessary

To your interlocutor, rattling away on the other side of the door, it doesn't make any difference whether it's you in particular or somebody else. From her perspective, what matters is whether the stall is occupied or not. Knowing that, it would be pretty self-centered of you to mention that it's you, specifically, who's in there. Really, all you want to communicate is the presence of a warm (and articulate) body in the stall, hence the indefinite.¹

¹ I keep having the feeling that I've blogged about this before, but a search doesn't turn anything up. Recent posts by Geoff Pullum and the follow-up over on An Individual's Concepts reminded me of the idea. Sorry if it's a repeat!

Adjectival friends? (Crosspost from LL)

2007-03-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

It's orthogonal to the point of Mark's post, but in thinking about the expression, 'be friends with', a few questions sprang into my head, and having (I think) introspectively answered them to my satisfaction, I thought I'd inflict the whole train of thought on the rest of the world.

First, note that the idiom 'Be friends with' is one of them there symmetric predicates, related to the 'essentially plural' predicate 'be friends', which requires a plural subject:

(1) X and Y are friends

(2) a. X is friends with Y

b.Y is friends with X

It's the same way 'be married to' is realted to the essentially plural predicate 'be married':

(3) X and Y are married

(4) a. X is married to Y

b. Y is married to X

"Be married" is an adjectival passive, and 'be friends' looks like a predicate nominal. In their singular-subject forms, both involve idiosyncratically selecting a preposition to introduce the non-subject argument (with or to, respectively).

However, with respect to 'be friends', I think it's likely that an interesting process of idiomatization involving category change has occurred. In (5),

(5) X and Y are friends

the plural nominal predicate 'friends' is appropriate because the subject is plural. It's behaving like the straightforward nominal predicate in (6) below: plural subject, plural predicate. Singular predicates are not possible with plural subjects:

(6) a. X and Y are doctors
b. *X and Y are a doctor

Originally, X and Y are friends would have been symmetrical with the following singular and truly nominal predicate constructions, entailment-wise:

(7) a. X is a friend to Y
b. Y is a friend to X

These are behaving appropriately: nominal predicates with singular subjects take singular predicates, as in (6). Note that a plural predicate here sounds bizarre:

(8) *X is friends to Y

So why is "X is friends with Y" grammatical? If 'be friends with' is a real nominal predicate, it shouldn't be able to take a singular subject.

I think "X and Y are friends" must have undergone reanalysis, to become an idiomatic predicate adjective construction where the plural -s isn't really doing its plural job. That is, in the minds of speakers, [[friend]_N -s]_Pl changed to [friends]_A .

A predicate adjective isn't marked for number with respect to its subject in English, the way nominal predicates are, so that the faux-plural form 'friends', now a predicate adjective, became acceptable with a singular subject. Hence, X is friends with Y is grammatical.

The proof that 'friends' is not the same nominal as 'friend' here is that as a predicate, it takes a different preposition than 'friend', namely 'with', rather than 'to' (though the change in preposition in itself doesn't confirm that friends is now an adjective in this expression -- but it does confirm that it's a different friend than the one in be a friend to).

With respect to the subtler semantic issues with this kind of predicate, Googling quickly I came across the following abstract from Martin Hackl about these and other similar but not-the-same plural-subject predicates (from which I got the term 'essentially plural').

So a linguist's Sunday morning goes.

PS. What does it mean that 'be friends with' can be modified by 'best' without invoking a uniqueness presupposition?

John and Mary are best friends/Mary is best friends with John.

You can't do that with normal nominal predicates:
John and Mary are *(the) best doctors.

And, of course, 'best' can't modify adjectives, being the superlative form of one itself. That's kind of problematic for my friends-as-adjective hypothesis.

"Be best friends (with)" is related, semantically, to the following real predicate nominal expressions, which do require the the:

John is the best friend of Mary.

Mary is the best friend of John.

Maybe it's just that 'be best friends' is also an idiom.

More on spraying

2007-02-16T20:24:00.000-08:00

So, biking home today, I found myself thinking some more about spraying. I think that although the essence of my comments in the last post are correct, there's some other things that might be interesting to note.

Yesterday, I noted that 'spray' comes in an intransitive manner-of-motion construction:

1. The oil sprayed onto the wall.

Interestingly, I find this to be ill-formed without the Goal PP:

2. #The oil sprayed.

What about the transitive case? The agentive manner of motion form is fine, with the unselected object, of course; that's what we were talking about:

3. Sue sprayed her way out of the hospital.

But there's also a selected-object causative, a true causative of (1) (unlike (3), which is an unselected-object case:

4. Sue sprayed the paint onto the wall.

I personally find (4) somewhat degraded without the Goal PP, which is nice, because it means that (4) and (5) really do parallel (1) and (2):

5. ?#Sue sprayed the oil.

And, of course, (4) can undergo the famous 'spray/load' alternation, whereby the Goal PP can be reanalyzed as a direct object, with consequences for its measuring-out ability and scope properties (scope of indefinite Goal gets fixed w/r to universally quantified Theme):

6. Sue sprayed the wall with oil.

But really got me thinking on the way home was that it occurred to me that there is another transitive 'spray' -- interestingly, where the subject isn't agentive at all. Rather, the subject is just the source of the spraying. The object is the Theme, and no Goal is necessary (though of course one is possible).

6. a. The hose sprayed oil.
b. The wound sprayed blood.

How about that! This is kind of an interesting case. The subject is truly external, with a kind of source/instrument reading, but is crucially nonvolitional. (There are other examples like this -- 'glow', etc. -- but this is the first transitive one I've really noticed). It's almost a kind of cognate/hyponymous object construction (The broken pipe sprayed a fine spray of oil), except that the object isn't optional, unlike the usual cognate/hyponymous object constructions (see (2)).

Hmmmm!

What should the penalty be for violating the DOR? (Crosspost from LL)

2007-02-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

Headline tonight from AP: "Woman allegedly 'sprays' out of hospital."

That's terrible! I thought. But what's with that 'allegedly'? Spraying out of a hospital isn't a crime, surely!

But of course, she didn't spray out of the hospital. She sprayed her way out of the hospital. She actually pepper-sprayed her way out of the hospital. I can understand how that might be a crime.

See, thing is, in English you can describe motion events -- something going from point A to point B -- with almost any verb, even ones that don't in and of themselves refer to motion.

Verbs like 'walk', 'run', 'stroll', etc. are motion verbs in and of themselves. Their subject is the traveller; in John walked out of the hospital, John is the one going from point A to point B.

Now consider verbs like 'whistle', 'sing', 'rattle', 'wriggle', 'twitch', 'smirk', etc. The events denoted by these verbs by themselves don't imply travelling from anywhere to anywhere. With a sentence like Mary whistled, the crucial thing that makes the sentence true is that Mary do some whistling, not that she be moving or not.

However, even these verbs can describe motion events in English, with one crucial restriction. When you add the location to the sentence (to the house, out, there, whatever), you have to add some kind of direct object to the sentence. It's not usually a real direct object, more a kind of an ersatz one, involving some pronominal element that refers back to the subject:

1. Mary whistled her way down the lane.

2. John smirked his way out of the room.

3. Bill sang himself to Carnegie Hall

So, what about 'spray'? Spray is a motion verb. You can use it to describe motion from point A to point B, as long as that motion occurs in a characteristic spraying fashion -- i.e. moving as droplets or particles propelled outward in a spreading fashion. So, e.g., the sentence below is fine:

4. The oil sprayed out of the hose.

That is, the motion itself has to be occurring in a spraying kind of way, when there's no direct object. The same fact obtains with the non-motion verbs above -- the direct object isn't required if the motion itself is occurring in the relevant way. So, famously, The bullet whistled through the window is ok without an object, because it's the bullet's motion itself that is making the whistling noise.

But spray can also occur in a causative construction, where the subject of the verb is not actually spraying per se, but is rather the cause of spraying, as in (5) below. In this structure, the crucial truth-maker is that the subject be the cause of some spraying, not that they be moving or not moving.

5. Sue sprayed paint on the wall.

So, what about our headline? In the situation described by the news story, the woman emerged from the hospital in the normal human fashion. At least, she was corporeal enough to subsequently 'flee' the scene. Thus, her motion probably occurred in a normal human fashion, like walking or running or strolling or swaggering or similar. The motion itself didn't occur in a spraying fashion. Rather, the woman was the cause of spraying, which doesn't necessarily involve any motion.

So, the situation is one in which the woman is doing some (non-motion-entailing) spraying, and simultaneously moving out of the hospital. Her motion is itself not accomplished in a spraying manner. This is precisely the situation in which an ersatz direct object, like her way is required. He sprayed out of the wood chipper, yes. (Thank you, Coens!) She sprayed out of the hospital, no.

So, there you go: The headline writer has wantonly violated the Direct Object Restriction on the English manner-of-motion construction. How rude.¹

¹The Direct Object Restriction observation is due to work by Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav, who know all that there is to know about what kinds of tricks can be played with English verbs. Update! Beth writes to remind me that ACTUALLY this generalization was first formulated by Jane Simpson, in her 1983 paper “Resultatives” published in L. Levin, M. Rappaport, and A. Zaenan (eds), Papers
in Lexical Functional Grammar. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club,
143-157. Many apologies, Jane! Beth and Malka did name it the DOR, though. Ray Jackendoff is the go-to guy for the way-construction.

Purple haze, all in my brain (crosspost from LL)

2007-02-09T00:33:00.000-08:00

Parsing's a bitch, ain't it? At least, that's the hook for a recent Newsweek article about a theory of the brain's mechanism for telling time, which involves tracking signal propogation in neurons following perceptual events, or something; it was a bit hard to tell from the article's description.

On the researcher's homepages there's some nice java animations and sound files, suitable for intriguing undergraduates, illustrating the brain's temporal abillities. One of them shows that timing is important in speech perception. If an [s] sound is followed by a few milliseconds of silence and then by the vowel [i], the listener perceives the [s] as the lone onset consonant in a syllable [si]. If the [s] is separated from the [i] by just a few more milliseconds of silence, on the other hand, the listener perceives the silence as a voiceless stop between the [s] and the [i]. You get the impression of having heard the syllable [sti], instead of [s..i]. The point seems to be that in order to perform this feat, the brain has to have some quite sensitive mechanism for distinguishing small temporal intervals.

The Newsweek article starts off with a famous mondegreen to lure the reader, but then doesn't do anything to explain how that particular misparse is related to the question of timing. Never fear, though, Language Log is here!

So, here's the mondegreen in question:

Acting funny, but I don't know why

Jimi sounds like he's saying, "Scuse me, while I kiss this guy", when in fact the lyric is "Scuse me, while I kiss the sky". That is, the listener mishears the sequence

/kɪsðəˈskaɪ/

as

/kɪsðəsˈgaɪ/

Now, it is a puzzle why this would happen. One doesn't normally mishear /g/ for /k/ or vice versa; you wouldn't mix up 'coat' and 'goat', for example, in the usual case. But in the case of Purple Haze, some particularities of English pronunciation are at work to mislead you.

/k/ and /g/ are usually described as being pronounced exactly alike except for the vibration of the vocal cords: /k/ is voiceless and /g/ is voiced. Otherwise everything about the configuration of the tongue and oral cavity are identical -- they're both velar stops. In fact, however, there's more than one way to skin a /k/ in English, and some /k/s are more like /g/ than others.

English voiceless stops are pronounced in several different ways depending on their position in the syllable. A voiceless stop alone at the beginning of a syllable gets an extra oomph, an extra puff of air, making for a longer, more perceptible period of voicelessness before the vowel sound starts up (a longer "Voice Onset Time"). That extra puff of air is called aspiration, for those of you keeping track at home, and is transcribed with a superscripted 'h' after the consonant: [k^h]. In coat, e.g., that initial /k/ is aspirated, so it's not pronounced just [kowt], but rather [k^howt], when you really get down to it. That aspiration really makes the voicelessness of the /k/ stand out and sound quite different from the voiced /g/ at the beginning of 'goat', [gowt]. You'd never get them mixed up.

The trick is, the aspiration doesn't show up everywhere. Voiceless stops are notaspirated when they occur after an /s/ at the beginning of a syllable. (You can feel the difference if you put your hand in front of your face and alternate saying 'pot', [p^hɑt], and 'spot' [spɑt] — in the first you should feel the puff on /p/ but not in the second). In such cases, the absence of the little puff of air means that the voiceless period associated with the stop is shorter and less perceptible—that is, the /k/ sound following /s/ in complex syllable onsets sounds a lot more like a /g/ than other /k/s do.

This isn't normally a problem, because there aren't any syllables in English that begin with /sg/ -- that's not a legal English onset consonant cluster. But in connected speech, you might get a word that ends in a vowel (like the) in front of a word that starts /sk/ (like sky)...and in the right circumstances, the listener might think that the /s/ belonged with the preceding word that ended in the vowel, for instance if there's a very frequent alternate word, suitable to the syntactic and semantic context, that sounds just like the vowel-ending word but ending in an /s/ (like this).

Imagine the listener got as far as making that mistake, of understanding the /s/ as part of the previous word, hearing this ... rather than the s... Then the next problem they'd have to solve would be to try to identify the next consonant in line in the speech stream. It's definitely a velar stop -- but is it /k/ or /g/? "Well," their perceptual system reasons to itself, "if it were a /k/ at beginning a word like this, it would be aspirated -- I'd expect a longer period of voicelessness right here. Given that there's not too much voicelessness, I guess it must be a /g/." And presto! 'kiss the sky' turns into 'kiss this guy'.

So it does all have to do with timing after all -- the brain has to detect the difference between 30ms of voicelessness and 60ms of voicelessness, and the research described in the Newsweek article is about figuring out how it pulls that off.

Oddly enough, just as Prof. Shuy was posting the Newsweek clipping on the bulletin board next to the water cooler, I was reading a blog post all about this exact same thing over at In A Word: It's all about persbective. How would you spell that word of Mary Poppins'?

1Of course it's not really thinking this. It's just trying to settle on a pattern of activation that corresponds to a sensible linguistic representation for that stream of sound, given all the contextual factors involved. 'Kiss the sky' and 'kiss this guy' are two competing representations that are strongly activated given Jimi's sound waves. In fact, probably '...kiss this guy' gets an activation edge from the semantic context. Kissing is usually involves an animate direct object, after all. Those who hear 'kiss this guy' are seriously underestimating the degree to which the narrator in the song is acting funny.

Language cartoon of today

2007-02-05T23:13:00.001-08:00

...or is it yesterday? Maybe even tomorrow by the time I hit the 'publish' button. Today's linguistic cartoon theme: deixis, or words with a built-in contextual dependence as a core component of their meaning.

Alice showed that she knew what this was all about when she heard about the jam. It was ok, though; she didn't want any anyways.

The astrophysical lexicon and liver shrinkage (crosspost from the Language Log)

2007-01-31T00:23:00.000-08:00

On tonight's Daily Show, Jon's guest, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson¹ remarked that astrophysical terminology was kept simple because the universe is complicated enough as it is:

What is a black hole? Matter is so dense, and has such a high gravity, that light travelling even at its tremendous speeds cannot escape. So it's dark, it's a black hole, and in astrophysics, we call it like we see it. It's black, it's a hole, it's a black hole. [laughter] We are simple people in astrophysics. (Jon: You are not simple people!) We are! Our lexicon -- spots on the sun? Sunspots! [laughter] No, I'm serious! The universe is complex enough! We don't want to lay down a lexicon to confuse the public, [who] try to follow what we do. The chemists do that! The medical doctors do that! Not in my field. (Jon: You are going to walk out of here tonight and get jumped by a gang of chemists.)

Of course, he's right that medical terminology, and most English scientific terminology in general, is Latin- (and Greek-)based, because Latin was the international language of learning when science was first getting going. (Modern astrophysics perhaps came along late enough in the game not to be bound by this convention.) Even in England, back in the day, English couldn't get no respect, at least as far as scientifically codifying the natural world went. As a consequence, English chemical, medical and biological terminology is generally opaque to nonspecialists, requiring particular effort or special training to understand natively.

This famously causes something of a distancing effect between patients and their problems: understanding the exact nature of our illnesses often involves an extended interview with the diagnostician, asking for precise explanations for what the diagnosis really mean, in lay terms. It's not that English lacks native or common terms for most relevant body parts or conditions (it would be a very odd language indeed that did), but rather that science doesn't use those terms, instead employing parallel Latin-based ones.

However, I've often wondered what the patient-doctor relationship feels like in other languages. In Romance languages like Spanish or Italian, the Latinate terminology presumably seems at least somewhat familiar, being cognate with the everyday terms for the relevant body parts.

An English speaker might be able to get something of a feel for what that must be like by looking at some German disease names, where the terms are often cognate with familiar English terms. Although it does employ plenty of Latinate medical terminology, German seems not to employ as much as English. For example, cardiovascular disease translates as Herz-Kreislauf-Erkrankung, 'heart circulation illness', according to this online dictionary.² What if, instead of being told you had a fracture of the tibia, you instead heard you had a Schienbeinbruch, a 'shinbone break'? How would you feel if your doctor told you you had Lungenentzündung, 'lung inflammation', rather than pneumonia, or Leberschrumpfung 'liver shrinkage' rather than cirrhosis, or Sprachstörung, 'speech disorder', rather than aphasia? It feels different, doesn't it?

Does this sensation of semi-understanding mean that Germans and Italians have a less boggling experience when talking about their illnesses with their doctors? Perhaps patients are lulled into a false sense of understanding by the familiar terms, and skip the extended interview that would really let them know what's going on? Or perhaps they have a better understanding of what's going on, not needing an extended translation of even the most basic terminology? Or are doctors inscrutable the world over?³

¹How's that for an anarthrous NP, eh?

²(Despite my given name) I don't actually speak any German, so I've relied entirely on this dictionary for the particular translations offered here.

Grass

2007-01-10T22:01:00.000-08:00

You know, if we're gong to do the whole GMO thing anyway, maybe someone could work on modifying a grass so that it wasn't all indigestible celluose and instead had human-accessible protein and carbs in it. There's really interesting and admirable work going on trying to develop perennial grasses as a productive, resilient, sustainable human food source, which is doubtless preferable...but it has to be focussed on grass seeds, because we can eat the seeds. But what if we could eat the grass itself? We can't become ruminants, but we could become the ecological equivalent by changing the output end of the grass sunlight-conversion machine so it matched our dietary needs and capabilities better.

Hey, and SC? Funnily enough, Manchego is basically my absolute favorite cheese!

Herb & Jamaal are talking to me (crosspost from Lang Log)

2006-12-22T11:44:00.000-08:00

I swear Herb and Jamaal are trying to send a message to linguists. But what?

Maybe they're just trying to catch the attention of linguists, and then the message is coming later. If that's the plan, they're succeeding with me. Here's today's cartoon:

Do you see what I mean? Isn't that bolding in the ultimate panel on the wrong word? I take it to indicate contrastive stress. But for the joke to work the way I think it's supposed to work, the bolding ought to be on the verb know. See, there's a whole lecture in this cartoon about how contrastive stress is introduced by a speaker to distinguish two parallel propositions with a single distinct element, in this case, the different predicates taking 'how much she spent' as a complement, trying to figure out versus know. This cartoon seems odd because the stress is indicated on a non-contrasting element, she, instead. (I don't think there's any other character who she could be referring to that would contrast with my wife). Depending on the direction of the lecture, you could talk about the phonetic properties associated with contrastive stress, or the semantics of the contrasting propositions, or their syntax (island effects appear, I believe). All blogworthy stuff, really, but seemingly based on nothing more than just an accident of inking.

But this is far from the first time H&J have produced this kind of 'accident'.

Just a few days ago, pretty much at the three-week point after the Brizendine kerfuffle, H&J published this:

I nearly posted under the title, 'Noooooooo!' but then thought really, the less said the better. But then this thing today...and see, I've been saving up H&J's for a post on 'whom' someday, because as far as I can tell they are the last bastion of whom in modern-day America, certainly on the funny pages. Check it out:

It's not just one character who says 'whom', so it's not supposed to just be a personality quirk, but rather a whole community of speakers for whom (!) straight-up, prepositionless accusative whom is still au courant. I was going to post about how it really leaps out as a marked/odd usage to me in the context of a cartoon, where the norm is for the dialogue to be represented in fairly colloquial style, lots of contractions and informal speech, even some &*$%&!!# now and then.

And then, also not long ago, this was the Sunday strip:

This one illustrates the nonce formation of a denominal location/locatum verb meaning 'to put/get into a sink' (like to corral, to box, etc.), a process that I've been professionally interested in. Moreover, this particular denominal verb is homophonous with an irregular English verb, sink, meaning 'to descend', past tense sank, participle sunk. The difference between the nonce denominal verb sink and the established irreguar verb sink has been experimentally investigated by Steven Pinker, inter alia. Subjects reliably form the past tense of denominal sink as sinked, not as sank, illustrating the psychological reality of the invisible layer of nominal structure which verbalizes the noun in the denominal verb.

[sink]_V + past = sank
[[sink]_N]_V + past = sinked

So this cartoon is basically another whole lecture (or a whole nother lecture). And of course there was the cartoon from a few weeks ago presenting an opinion about the use of nigger. And a few months ago, there was this cartoon, which has so far occupied several precious hours of my conscious existence:

This one incorporates a version of a semi-famous example sentence as the punchline, illustrating the peculiar problem of parsing a negation inside a too/enough-construction. (For some technical discussion of the properties of these constructions, you could see this paper). I blogged about this cartoon here before; see the comments for a dramatic debate between readers who blinked at the cartoon (like me) and readers who didn't.

So anyway, I'm starting to think that H&J are trying to tell us something. Or maybe their creator is reading some linguistics on the side and he's just messing with me. Or maybe I'm developing a worrisome degree of paranoia. I'll let you know if I ever figure it out.

art, arts, arted, arting

2006-12-02T07:45:00.000-08:00

Meta-blog news: Over the weekend, I was inducted into the Language Log cabal. I now know the secret handshake, and the retinal scanner at the secure building at Language Log Plaza now recognizes my left eye. I'm not sure how things work over there yet, but I'm going to be finding out. If you have any questions for the CEOs, I could... well, probaby if you just write to them yourself it'll be faster. Anyway, the point is, some of my Heideas posts will now show up as LL posts too, though I'll probably also post some of the more linguisticy technical thingies for the more select Heideas audience. But this post will be the first to appear in both places -- apologies for duplication in any of your feeds!

Here's another example of the 'X is a verb' snowtrope that I saw on a display panel at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art a week or two ago:

They mean to convey something like, 'Art is an activity we, the curators, and you, the museum goers, and they, the artists, all actively engage in,' as in the other uses of the 'X is a verb' formula discussed on the Language Log. Just another misguided linguistic metaphor. However, it reminded me of something else about 'art' as a verb that I'd been thinking of posting about.

When I was a kid in Newfoundland, we said the Lord's Prayer every morning at school. (It was a secular public school, but derived from the Protestant half of a historically denominationally organized school system; old habits die hard.) I knew 'art' was a verb—"Our father, who art in heaven"—but I understood it as some verbal counterpart of the noun 'art', as in skill, work, magic, the opposite of the 'dark arts'—you know, arcane, mysterious art. 'To art' in this sense would mean something like, 'to work (magic)'. So I thought we were intended to be addressing "Our Father, who works (magic) in heaven..." It wasn't until much later that it occurred to me that this was in fact just an arcane, mysterious form of the verb 'to be'.

But recalling my childhood confusion as I stood in the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, another puzzle about this use of art occurred to me. It is true that art is a former member of the present tense conjugation of the English copula to be, but it's the wrong one! The relevant entry in the OED, for art, says this:

"2nd sing. pres. ind. of BE. One of the remaining parts of the orig. substantive vb.; cf. AM."

That is, as a form of BE, art is unambiguously second person singular. Consequently, its use in "Our father, who art in heaven" is mighty peculiar. Relative pronouns like who or which inherit the person of the NP they modify, and the modified NP, "our father", is third person. Consequently, the verb should be a third-person (singular) form, that is is. (The logic of my childhood misparse was similarly flawed; my verb should have been 'arts' rather than 'art', unless I imagined it was irregular, of course, which I guess I must have).

So then I started wondering where the art came from.¹ In fact, in the New Testament Greek 'original' version, there is no copula present; the line in Greek went like this (interlinear gloss taken from the relevant page at the Center for Indo-European Language and Culture at the University of Texas Austin):

Pater hêmôn ho en tois ouranois;
O-father of-us he in the heavens
'Our Father which art in heaven,'

In the 'Standard Latin' translation of this, the second-person form of the copula es, first appears:

Pater noster, qui es in caelis

because, I suppose, the head of the relative clause is vocative, the case form used to address someone (this is kind of interesting in itself! I didn't know that the vocative could do this within a relative clause).

The first Old English translations were made from the Latin translation, rather than from the Greek, and an actual second person pronoun appears (line and gloss taken from Cathy Ball's Old English web pages at the University of Georgetown):

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum
Father our thou that art in heaven

And of course, here the use of the second person form here makes all kinds of sense, since the head being modfied by the relative clause is itself second person.

What's interesting is that the art form of the verb persisted in official English versions of the prayer long after the 'thou' had been dropped and regular rules of English agreement would have predicted a switch to the third-person form is. (NB: English does not have a vocative case form.) You can track the persistence of art at Cathy Ball's online collection of English forms of the prayer, here. Almost no modern English translation of the prayer from the Greek includes any copula at all; for a complete description of the process employed in the creation one modern English translation and side-by-side comparisons of ten different translations, check out this pdf.

With the loss of the thou, the art became an anachronism. its persistence illustrating an interesting point about ritual speech.

Ritual speech is one place where archaic words linger on, long after they have fallen out of common use and indeed over time often become unintelligible to youger generations uttering them (a situation which is conducive to misparses and eggcorns like mine). In ritual speech it's important to get the form of words exactly 'right'—words that are just a paraphrase of the meaning won't do. By the time the thou was dropped from the official version, the use of 'art' must have been completely formulaic, retained because it was the 'right' form to use in this prayer, like the predicate-first subjunctive in the next line, 'Hallowed be thy name'.

The 'thou', although present neither in the Anglican or Catholic official versions, isn't completely gone. There are still 12,900 Google hits out there for "Thou art in heaven" vs. 252,000 for "who art in heaven" and 94,500 for "which art in heaven". A search for "who is in heaven" turns up 247,000 hits, but only two of the first 10 hits have anything directly to do with the prayer, so I assume most of those aren't relevant. "Our Father, who is in heaven" has a measly 21,600. A lot of the modern translations just use 'in heaven', no copula or relative clause at all, and "Our Father in heaven" weighs in at 284,000 hits.

Cautionary Postscript: This discussion is not about the Lord's Prayer itself, but rather about subject-verb agreement in free relative clauses, problems of translation, formulaic speech and the genesis of misparses. The prayer is just an extremely well-documented source of data about these issues.

¹Caveat: I am not trained in any classical language, or in Old English; the information that follows is what I can deduce by looking at some paradigms and making a few educated guesses.

Super duper!

2006-11-13T00:46:00.000-08:00

OMG, everybody! Set your TiVos, update your NetFlix queues, run out to the video store if you have to! By a complete coincidence, as part of a "Gary Cooper" keyword search, my guy Art happened to TiVo a 1941 Gary Cooper movie, Ball of Fire. It's a pretty good movie even if you aren't a linguist, but it's especially hilarious if you are a linguist. The first 30-40 minutes are mostly taken up with scenes of linguistic fieldwork on American slang! Really! Orchestrated for comedic effect, and usually sounding like some layperson's half-baked impression of dialect research, of course, but nonetheless, actual linguistics on the silver screen! With GARY COOPER as the linguist! It's been a glamour comedown ever since, as tracked by the following graph:

This is a very sad comment on our profession. I trust that one of the major agenda items for the LSA Executive Committee in the coming year will be to arrange for Matt Damon to play Ken Hale in a big-budget docudrama (working title: "Man of a Thousand Tongues"), with cameos from Daniel Day-Lewis as Noam Chomsky and Ben Kingsley as Morris Halle. Actually, I'm sure it would make a great movie...

(This film has been noted on the Linguist List, here, but that was more than a decade ago, and Michael Kac, who posted, hadn't seen the film recently. But I've just seen it, and I'm tickled pink. Very timely given the recent LL posts about fictional depictions of linguistic research.)

I know some of you won't act immediately, so just to whet your appetite, here are a few choice moments. First, the scene establishing the impetus to get our (sometimes obtusely prescriptivist) hero into the field:

A garbage man has invaded the ivory tower, asking for answers to a radio quiz he wants to win.

Garbage man: (reading from his notes on the radio quiz questions) 'Which way wouldja say it? "Two and two is five", "Two and two are five", or "Two and two makes five"?'
Professor X: Professor Potts covers English. Did you hear the question, Potts?
Professor Potts: I did. As the verb is always governed by the subject, the correct answer is, "Two and two are five."
(general smirks and snickers)
Professor Y: Correct for a grammarian, perhaps, but not for a mathematician — two and two are four!
Garbage man: That's a good one! Nobody's going to get that. Well, I certainly am obliged! I could use a bundle of scratch right now on account of I met me a mouse last week.
Professor Z: Mouse?
Garbage man: What a pair o' gams! A little in, a little out, a little more out… (gestures).
Professor Potts: I'm still completely mystified!
Garbage man: Well, with this dish on me hands, and them givin' away twenty-five smackeroos on a quizola —
Professor Caterpillar: Smackeroos? Hwhat are smackeroos?
Professor Potts: No such word exists!
Garbage man: Oh, it don't, huh? A smackeroo is a dollar, pal!
Professor Potts: (getting out his notebook) The accepted vulgarism for a dollar is a 'buck'!
Garbage man: The accepted vulgarism for a smackeroo is a dollar! That goes for a banger, a fish, a buck or a rug!
Professor Potts: What about the "mouse"?
Garbage man: The mouse is the dish, that's what I need the moola for! The dough! We'll be steppin', me an' the smooch— I mean the dish— I mean the mouse— you know, hit the jiggles for a little rum boogie?
Professor Potts: (writing furiously in tiny notebook) Please, please, not so fast!
Garbage man: Brother, we're gonna have some hoy-toy-toy!
Professors: (in unison) Hoy toy toy!
Garbage man: Yeah, an if you want that one explained, you go ask your papas.
Exit Garbage man.
Professor X: He seemed a most likeable fellow.
Professor Potts: Yes. And I'm an idiot! …I'm going out.
Professors: Going out!? Where are you going?…
Professor Potts: Research! The garbage man! Didn't you hear him?
Professor Caterpillar: Well, I didn't quite understand all he said.
Professor Potts: Nor did I! And it's catastrophic, gentleman! Catastrophic! I've just finished my article on slang. Twenty-three pages compiled from a dozen reference books, eight hundred examples! Everything from the idiotic combination absitively to the pejorative use of zig zag! I traced the evolution of hunky dory, tracked down skidoo from skedaddle — eight hundred examples and I may as well throw it in the wastebasket. Outmoded! Based on reference books twenty years old! Take smooch, take dish, take hoy toy toy! Not one of them included! Living in this house cut off from the world, I've lost touch, and it's inexcusable! That man talked a living language. I embalmed some dead phrases! I'm going out to collect new data. To tap the sources of slang, the major sources — the streets, the slums, the theatrical and allied professions. I know it's regrettable, this loss of time, gentlemen, but it must be done!
Exit Professor Potts, with a flourish.
Professor X: I'm writing about the planet's surface! Do I insist on going to the planet's surface?
Professor Z: (wistfully) Maybe my data on sex is a little outdated, too…?

Moment two: Professor Potts has found a primo informant in the person of "Sugarpuss", a burlesque singer played by Barbara Stanwyck. He tries to talk her into participating in his research, but she turns him down flat. Later, he describes the incident to his colleagues, who are all agog at his adventures in the real world:

Professor Potts: Unfortunately, she disclaimed any interest in our project…in words so bizarre they made my mouth water!

The climactic moment, linguistically speaking, is four full minutes of screen time covering a three-day elicitation session with four or five speakers of several different dialects.

Finally, of course, the professor is smitten by his vivacious and incomprehensible informant. In confessing his love to her, he comes up with the following:

Professor Potts: The only thing I thought I could care for deeply was a correctly constructed sentence—the subject, predicate, the verbular clause [honest! -hh], each in its proper place.

Anyway, the whole thing is a gem, really. Check it out!

But aren't they already troublesome enough?

2006-11-08T17:09:00.000-08:00

Funny headline in NYTimes Science section:

Remedies: Researchers Devise New Weapon for Head Lice

The unbearable lightness of adpositions strikes again.

A knowingly treacherous salad dressing

2006-10-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

Those automatic-language generators for sliding spam past filters sure make some poetic stuff sometimes. This one has the word 'linguistic' in it.

When you see the sheriff, it means that an abstraction
of a cowboy leaves. If the customer beyond a chess
board sells some minivan about the traffic light to
some greasy blood clot, then a knowingly treacherous
salad dressing panics. Now and then, the CEO from a
support group sells the lover to a wrinkled bartender.
When a short order cook about a nation is nuclear, the
short order cook around the oil filter brainwashes a
skyscraper beyond the cowboy. Sometimes the grain of
sand reads a magazine, but the linguistic garbage can
always falls in love with some turkey toward a line
dancer!

I haven't gone to look for a spam-lit collection but I'm sure they must exist. Maybe I could start one, call it "The linguistic garbage can." Colorless green ideas, indeed!

Paradigm gaps

2006-10-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

Here's another linguistically oriented cartoon, this time confronting the serious problem of paradigm gaps and the complicated mental operations that go into deciding if something 'sounds right' or not. A famous case in English is a coordinated possessive NP: if John and I write a paper together, is it my and John's paper? John's and my paper? Mine and John's paper? Me and John's paper? Paradigm gaps are rather odd, in that they represent indeterminacy in a corner of the grammar where indeterminacy is not the norm. Speakers choose different variants on different occasions, usually find that none are particularly satisfactory, and will sometimes deliberately rephrase to avoid using the construction at all, as the Soup 2 Nutz kid is doing below:

On a similar but syntactic, rather than morphological, note, while car camping this weekend a friend noticed the following instruction on the 'warning' tag of a fold-out camp chair:

(1) Do not sit on the arm of this chair to avoid danger.

We all agreed that if a mountain lion should jump out of the bushes, it would be dramatically ineffective to try to avoid it by sitting on the arm of the chair. Of course, what the label intended is this:

(2) To avoid danger, do not sit on the arm of this chair.

What's interesting is how the right-adjoined position for the purpose clause 'to avoid danger' in (1) does not allow matrix scope -- that is, it can't be construed with the imperative 'Do not!" part, as intended, but has to be construed with the main verb ('sit"). The thing is, right-adjoined material normally can allow multiple scopes if there's multiple modifiable constituents, e.g.

(3) I told her to go to the party to annoy Bill.

...where 'to annoy Bill' can be construed with 'go to the party' (embedded scope) or 'told' (matrix scope); in the first case, the speaker is personally trying to annoy Bill (by doing the telling to go to the party); in the latter, the object of 'tell' ('her') is the one presumptively doing the annoying (by going to the party). That is, the rightmost position for the purpose-clause allows both scopes. Compare that to (4):

(4) To annoy Bill, I told her to go to the party.

Here, only matrix scope is available. So normally, rightwards attachment allows multiple scopes, leftwards only matrix scope.

But with the imperative in (1), rightwards attachment doesn't allow the highest (imperative) scope, only the lower (verb-oriented) scope. It's a kind of a paradigm gap.

P.S. The camp chair purpose-clause, we all agreed, was likely the result of a bad translation. But I'm curious about the source language and its behavior with purpose clauses. If it's a head-final language, like Japanese or Korean, it could just be that the translator didn't know how to properly adjust the word order to get the English scope s/he wanted. On the other hand, if it's a head-initital language like Mandarin or Cantonese, perhaps that language has interestingly different purpose-clause properties than English, and the clause-placement here reflects an L1 effect. Going to check the 'Made In:' tag now...yep! Made in China. So maybe there's something about Chinese purpose clauses, or Chinese imperatives, that means the matrix scope is available in the equivalent Chinese sentence. Free paper topic! :)

Talkative women, taciturn men

2006-09-26T23:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Arlo and Janis cartoon is a timely embodiment of the stereotypes that Mark Lieberman's been debunking pseudoscience about (e), over at Language Log lately:

The thing about the pseudoscience in question is, people think it's giving them objective confimation of something they are inclined to believe anyway, but which is mildly un-PC to discuss. This makes it a) very easy to believe and b) both interesting and safe to repeat, since any skeptical or disapproving raised eyebrows can be referred to the supposed(ly) scientific experimental results.

Maybe people experience women as being more talky than men not because they actually are that much more talky (Mark shows that they're not), but rather because people are less patient with women than with men. That is, a speech segment of length X might be perceived as being longer or shorter depending on the sex of the speaker. The idea would be that because women are generally lower-status community members than men, people are less inclined to invest a lot of time in listening to them. (Quiet and respectful attention is something accorded to higher-status people more than to lower-status people, after all.) Consequently, if a lower-status person talks the same amount as a higher-status person does, an interlocutor will perceive that person (negatively) as too talkative, that is, as talking more than their relative status 'should' warrant. If women are, on average, lower-status individuals than men, and if they, on average, talk more or less the same amount as men do, then they'll be perceived as 'talkative'

This would be very easy to test experimentally -- take the same speech segment, say 30 seconds worth; manipulate the pitch to create two copies of the recording identical in all respects except that one sounds like it's spoken by a female and one by a male, and play each to different randomly selected group of subjects. Ask the subjects to estimate the length of the recording (and perhaps for estimates of other factors too: e.g. is the rate of speech above or below average?) Analyze the estimates to discover if subjects tend to estimate that the 'female' speaker talked longer than the 'male' speaker, or vice versa, or neither.

That much would test whether people do in fact perceive women as more talkative than men. Assuming a positive result, the next step would be to test the conjecture that this experiential effect is correlated with social status, perhaps more than with gender. To do this, one would run the same experiment again with just a single recording (either male or female), but giving the subjects one of two short descriptions of the 'speaker' before they listen to it. Half the subjects would hear a description consistent with a high-status individual as the speaker, half would hear a description of a low-status individual. After listening to the stimulus, they'd be asked to estimate the talkiness of the speaker, exactly as in the previous experiment.

Perhaps such work has already been done? Anybody know of any?

As slippery as an eel

2006-09-21T00:07:00.000-07:00

So on to the promised language-oriented thing:

I've been interested in idioms for a long time but like many researchers, have never had a really solid criterion, or even a semi-solid criterion, for drawing a boundary line between an idiom and a metaphor. Some things are clearly idioms ('bell the cat'), some clearly metaphors ('All the world's a stage'), but for many expressions, it's quite unclear whether to locate them in one box or ther other. In the course of a lecture in Stuttgart, a student was asking about an expression in Japanese, 'make X dance', meaning to control someone as a puppet, pull their strings, so to speak (there's another one!). We were trying to decide whether that was a real idiom or not...

...and Michal Starke suggested that one possible way to distinguish might be to ask whether the interpretation is available after literal translation from the language under investigation into some other language. That seemed to draw some clear distinctions—'X kick the bucket' doesn't translate, 'fear gripped X' does translate; we decided the 'make X dance' expression also translates.

This is clearly not going to make things black and white -- metaphors can depend on culture-specific entities (like stages or puppets) for which literal translation equivalents might not be findable in the target language because of cultual differences. Furthermore, closely related cultures/languages, in contact for one reason or another, might borrow idioms--I recently learned that the British English idiom 'pull the chestnuts from the fire', meaning to solve the problems or save the situation, also exists in Italian, which seems like a possible candidate for a borrowed idiom. But nonetheless, it seems like a possible start.

Aside: Did you notice that in that story about the 3.3 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis infant fossil, they found a hyoid bone, to which tongue and throat muscles attach? The bone differs significantly between apes and humans, and the differences may be related to the language adaptations of the human vocal tract. The little female's hyoid looked more apelike than humanlike, although she walked upright. So did her arms and shoulders.
Update: Ah, of course the Language Loggers noticed. Hey, could one call the Language Loggers 'Language Lumberjacks'? That'd make a fun Ling 201 constitent-structure bonus question.

Stuttgart souvenirs

2006-09-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been forever since I posted. Arriving in Tucson after having had a great time at the GLOW/DGfS Summer School in Stuttgart, I landed in the middle of a semester that had already been underway for 2 weeks, and have been scrambling to get on top of it ever since (with no real prospect for a letup, sadly). But thanks to extremely generous colleagues without whose assistance my students would have been sitting looking at an empty whiteboard two weeks in a row, classes are progressing appropriately (I hope) and other things are settling down to a dull roar.

Stuttgart was really a blast -- we went biking, visited the wonderful Wilhelma botanical gardens/zoo, went to the farmer's market, ate spaetzle and maultaschen until we got fairly pasta-like ourselves--the beer probably didn't help with that--went to an amazing fireworks festival (aside: Fireworks usually don't do too much for me, but the stuff we saw at this event finally made me feel like I had some sense of what Gandalf's fireworks were supposed to be like, in Tolkein's description in The Fellowship of the Ring. They were synchronized with a very loud musical score, which helped a lot. On the last night, a part of the display was synchroanized with the Moonlight Sonata: just a very simple visual evocation of the keyboard of a piano playing the melody line -- flashes coordinated with the notes at a location along the horizon that was consistent with the relative position of the keys on a giant invisible keyboard. SO cool...); we went to the Limes ('limits'), the German equivalent of Hadrian's wall, the northernmost frontier of the Roman empire, marching impossibly straight across the landscape; and also to the Maulbronn monastery, a very beautiful monastery complex that shows the whole evolution of (Cistercian) monastic life and ideals from the 12th century to the Reformation (and where maultaschen are supposed to have been invented)—both the Limes and the Maulbronn monastery are UNESCO world heritage sites, which I've decided are going to be my personal touristic goals in life; more on this in furture posts, I imagine; we walked and biked in the woods at the top of a hill next to a tall TV tower, the first of its kind in Germany, and then went up in the tower and looked at the whole Neckar valley; went to the flea market, visited several museums my favorite of which was the anthropological one, free on Wed. afternoons, saw the Schiller Oak, walked on the Konigstr., went to the wine festival and the German Open Latin/Ballroom competition ... and we still missed a lot in the area -- Ludwigsburg, the Black Forest, the Tee House, the mineral baths... Anyway, Stuttgart was fun. We discovered that you can get hefeweizen mixed with banana juice. Nowhere else in the world, we thought, would you find 'bananenweizen' on the menu of any restaurant, nor would it occur to anyone else that that might be a good mix. (Probably not to a lot of Germans either, but Art says it's good, especially with Thai food, and he knows about these things. Googling it, I see that there's a pretty popular open source software developer with that handle...)

And of course there was really excellent linguistics too. This post is prompted because today I had occasion to remember one of the most interesting linguistic things I heard, which I want to post about, but felt like I had to give Stuttgart its review first, to set the stage. Coming up next: something language oriented.

Confusion creates the possibility of topicalization

2006-08-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

I recently received a long but clearly personally addressed email in German. Besides being personally addressed, it was clearly about linguistics, so I was fairly confident that it wasn't from the wife of a dead Nigerian millionaire. Consequently, due to my very embarrassingly complete ignorance of German, I was forced to resort to an online translator to get the gist of the message.

(A person can know that German is SOV with V2 word order in matrix clauses, that it has four cases, three genders and strong and weak determiners, that the verb 'help' in German takes a dative object, and that the position of objects in the middle field is correlated with their definiteness and specificity, and that person still can be completely unable even to order a beer by any means other than pointing and saying, ' "Beer", bitte.' Luckily this works. Sometimes I'll throw in an 'Ein' before the 'beer' to fool people into thinking that I'm saying 'Bier', but it's just a pathetic pretense. Very, very sad.)

Thanks to the translator, I got it, and am extremely grateful to the translation service, since it did so much better than I could have in the equivalent time. Nonetheless, (since I do know about the V2ness), I can't help being especially amused at one of its mistakes.

Here's the relevant German sentence:

Stefan Schierholz und ich möchten Sie hiermit persönlich einladen, ebenfalls an diesem für unser Fach so wichtigen Projekt mitzuarbeiten.

And here's the translation:

You would like to invite Stefan Schierholz and I herewith personally to cooperate likewise in this so important project for our field.

And I didn't even know I was involved in organizing this so important project for our field!

I *guess* the thing must have imagined that the German sentence was topicalized, and that the pronoun Sie is actually the subject of the verb möchten, though that seems odd given that in fact in this case the preverbal subject mirrors exactly the intended English sentence. This translator knows too much! (It's not because of any context, either, because this translator gives the same results for this sentence in isolation as in the original block of text.)

The irony is that actually this is one of the better-translated sentences in the group; many others are much less comprehensible. Here's another pair, the next sentence in the email:

Um sich eine Vorstellung der Artikel zu machen, finden Sie als Überblick über das Gesamtprojekt auf der Webseite meines Lehrstuhls eine Liste aller zu bearbeitenden Schlagwörter, so genannter Lemmata.

And the English:

To do to itself an image of the articles, find as an overview about the whole project on the web page of my chair a list of all catchwords to be worked on, so-called dictionary entries.

Obviously I can understand what it means, but that impersonal reflexive really threw it for a loop.

Actually, comparing this translator, http://translation2.paralink.com/, to the Babel Fish, Babel Fish does better on who does what to whom, but misses the obvious personal name in that conjoined subject. Here's the Babelfish interpretation:

Stefan ski wood and I would like to invite you hereby personally to likewise cooperate in this project so important for our subject.

And, just for completeness, here's how the Babelfish does on the other sentence:

In order to make itself a conception of the articles, you find a list of all as overview of the overall project on the web page of my chair key words which can be worked on, Lemmata so mentioned.

Here the Paralink translator loses in the first clause but wins in the second. The Babelfish is boggled by the reflexive too, but manages 'conception' rather than 'image', which is much closer to what's intended, I think, so that's better. But the Babelfish makes a total hash of what should be a noun phrase, 'a list of all the key words', interleaving the modifier 'as overview of the overall project' and location PP 'on the web page of my chair' in the middle. The other translator uses 'catchwords' instead of 'key words' but otherwise does better with the structure of the noun phrase, and gets the better 'so-called dictionary entries' where Babelfish leaves 'Lemmata so mentioned'. So basically they're both problematic but have different problems. The Paralink translator makes you look at a popup ad before you can see your translation, though, so it's not as nice if you don't have a good popup blocker.

But who am I to complain about the results? I'll have plenty of time to order my Biers and listen to German in the next three weeks while participating in the DGfS/GLOW summer school in Stuttgart, which I'm really looking forward to. Maybe I'll even learn how to say where I'm from and what I do. And if they say, Linguist? But you don't speak German? I'll demonstrate my beer-ordering capabilities, and that ought to mollify them.

The case of the $2,000,000 comma and the ambiguous adjunct

2006-08-06T23:55:00.000-07:00

Check it out — a comma in a contract is costing a Canadian communications company $2,000,000! A Basic Rule of Punctuation.

The long and the short of it is that Rogers Communications had a deal with another company, Aliant, Inc, who had agreed to string cable across utility poles in Eastern Canada for a fixed rate per pole. Rogers understood their contract (and per-pole price) to be in place for five years, and to be subject to renewal after that. Aliant Inc disagreed. They understood the contract to allow them to cancel at any time, with one year's notice. (After cancelling, they could then renegotiate the rate.)

The court case hinges on whether the the phrase about cancellation with one year's notice takes scope over the entire sentence about the duration of the contract, or (as Rogers thought) only the second conjunct of that sentence. Here's the crucial sentence (as excerpted in the Globe and Mail):

The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

So the issue is whether the constituent structure of this coordinated sentence is as indicated in (1) or (2) below. Rogers would have it that it's (1); Aliant is arguing that the placement of the bolded comma indicates unambiguously that it's (2):

(1) [ [ The agreement shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made] and [[ thereafter for successive five year terms] [unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party]] ].

(2) [ [[ The agreement shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made] and [ thereafter for successive five year terms]] [unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party] ].

Rogers, naturally, argues that the intent of the deal was understood by all at the time of its making:

Rogers was dumbfounded. The company said it never would have signed a contract to use roughly 91,000 utility poles that could be cancelled on such short notice. Its lawyers tried in vain to argue the intent of the deal trumped the significance of a comma. “This is clearly not what the parties intended,” Rogers said in a letter to the CRTC.

But to no avail. The CRTC lawyers, "armed with the rules of grammar and punctuation" decided that a comma setting off an adjunct clause from a conjoined structure necessarily gives it matrix scope, and if Rogers' contract lawyers didn't know that, too bad for them.

Does anyone know *what* prescriptive rule precisely is at issue here? Although the article mentions English textbooks and rules of grammar, no precise formulation of the relevant rule is given. Is it a sensible one? Or a foolish one?

I'm personally inclined to think it might be foolish. The description of the decision implies that the rule states something like this:

When an unless-clause modifies locally, it may not be set off from the clause it modifies by a comma.

That seems to imply that when an unless-clause is used unambiguously, locally modifying a simplex sentence, you are forbidden to use a comma to set it off. That is, the punctuation of the following sentence is incorrect:

Mary will ask John to the dance, unless he asks her first.

Contrast that with the commaless punctuation:

Mary will ask John to the dance unless he asks her first.

It actually seems to me that both are fine, AND that the comma makes a difference—the two sentences would be spoken with quite different intonation patterns (the first with nuclear stress on John and an intonation break before unless, the second with nuclear stress on first and no intonation break). Hence the commaless and commaful variants likely do have different structures at some level—but both are perfectly felicitous, and in both cases, the unless-clause is happily modifying the most local clause. Because the presence or absence of the comma is linguistically signiicant, though, no prescriptive rule should forbid it from preceding a locally-modifying unless-clause.

Then the real question is, can a conjoined sentence with an unless-clause spoken with the intonation break indicated by the comma allow modfication of the second conjunct only? Try for yourself:

Jane will ask Bill to the dance, and John will ask Sue, unless Phil asks Sue first.

In this situation, obviously the unless-clause is intended to modify only the second conjunct (since it would be pragmatically odd if Phil asking Sue to the dance had any bearing on whether Jane asks Bill). In my judgment, speaking the sentence with nuclear stress on the first occurrence of Sue, and with an intonation break before unless does not force the unless-clause to take matrix scope, thereby rendering the sentence pragmatically odd. Rather, the sentence is pragmatically natural, and the intended scope is perfectly accessible, with that intonation.

In my professional opinion then, Rogers has been unjustly done out of its $2.13 million; I think their contract language does permit the reading they thought they'd agreed to. On the other hand, there is no question that the matrix reading is also available (though, contra the court decision, it's not the only reading available). Further, it is the presence of the comma that makes the matrix reading available—the comma introduces ambiguity. Eliminating the comma would have eliminated the matrix reading, since the nuclear stress associated with the second conjunct would then have to fall in the unless-clause. So maybe the Rogers contract lawyers are really in the wrong after all, for letting such an ambiguity remain in their contract language. That's what they're getting the big bucks for, after all. They should have asked a linguist.

Update: Actually, now I think my example is not the best one to make this point. For a conjoined sentence to be true, both its conjuncts must be true. So truth-conditionally, it makes no difference whether the unless-clause in my example is attached locally to the second conjunct or to the matrix clause, taking scope over the first conjunct as well; [A and [B unless C]] has the same truth conditions as [[A and B] unless C]. Doesn't it? Though maybe the comma after A indicates that it is to be evauated as an independent proposition. Hmmm.

Update update: No, no, not so. [[A and B] unless C] is true if B and C come to pass but A doesn't. But [A and [B unless C]] is false in that situation. Phew. I think it's all ok & my original remarks stand.

Update update update And see the comments for a much better example with the temporal properties of the original from koldito. Also, Mark at the Language Log has weighed in on the matter, also suggesting the lawyers should have watched out for the ambiguity. But I still think that if the intended reading is available, and if common sense tells you that it WAS the intended reading, then the judge can't claim that the comma forces the matrix reading.

Update update update updateMark Liberman has now posted the text of (one version of) the actual rule in question, thanks to an alert reader, and it does say that a comma should be taken to indicate scope over the entire clause, and that otherwise one should follow the Law of the Last Antecedent. Looks like Late Closure was discovered in 1891 -- very sensibly surrounded with acknowledgements that the overall sense of the text should be taken into consideration. Not an adequate basis for a $2,000,000 decision, I would think!

Cognitive jetsam

2006-08-04T00:28:00.000-07:00

(1) On yesterday's Daily Show, guest Vali Nasr summed up the situation in Lebanon with the following lovely example of a nonce causative manner-of-motion verb, one my fave features of English grammar:

You can't shock-and-awe Hezbollah out of Beirut.

B: With enough computational space, couldn't you implement a natural-selection approach to any programming problem? Just give it a few clues so the stuff will compile, give it a few little algorithms that it can embed or modify, and let the thing string together lines of code, looking for sequences that will do something useful towards a user-defined goal. Take the best ten results from every generation as the starting point for the next, and may the best code win. Maybe people are already doing this? (Thanks to a commenter for pointing me to this link about the progress being made in this area -- it's only a matter of time before humans never have to think again... :) )

III. Maybe pagoda-style roofs are good in rainy climates? Rain wouldn't run along to collect on the corners and erode foundation-threatening holes at the corners of the building, but rather drip with less impact off the length of the eaves?

Δ - Trying to decide on the meaning of a completive aspectual verb, ya'ate, in Hiaki (Yaqui, Yoeme) today, we were looking at the following sentence:

Haivu yukya'atek.
Haivu yuk-ya'ate-k
already rain-ya'ate-perf
"It's already stopped raining."

We had some reason to think that ya'ate means something more like 'finish' than 'stop', but the main verb in the example here, and the translation, of course, made me wonder if it might really be more like 'stop' than 'finish'. I said as much, and someone asked me why -- what's the difference between stop raining and finish raining? Well, I said, let me put it this way: in Newfoundland, where I grew up, it does occasionally stop raining. But it never finishes raining. Har.
[Here's the thing: 'Rain' is usually a pretty good example of an activity verb, rather than an accomplishment like, say 'evaporate'—activities just come to a halt whenever, rather than culminate at a necessary endpoint. The meaning of 'stop' goes with pretty much any verb with a duration, while 'finish' is a bit pickier, preferring to go with a verb that has a natural endpoint built in. With accomplishment predicates you can really see the difference:

The water stopped evaporating ---> still some water left
The water finished evaporating ---> water all gone

He stopped building the house ---> complete house doesn't exist
He finished building the house ---> complete house exists, move on in.

So if ya'ate means something like 'finish', then it might be a little unusual to see it in combination with a non-culminating verb like 'rain', in an apparently episodic context like this. But maybe not; it's not like 'It finished raining' is uninterpretable or even unnatural. Heck, rain here in the southwest really does 'finish' -- the monsoon rains we're having right now will finish in a couple of weeks, and we won't see any more for at least three or four months. We're going to have to get some examples with good accomplishment predicates, and check the entailments.

Let me tell you, figuring this stuff out is fun! I am one lucky linguist.]

NY Times on Irish: No impovement on Safire

2006-07-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

This week's "On Language" column in the NY Times Magazine is guest-contributed by Marion McKeone, and it really is a pretty sad example of grammatical characterization.

She seems to be trying to say that the Irish (like many cultures) have more conventionalized circumlutory politeness formulas than speakers of American English (though I'm not 100 per cent convinced of even that). But she attributes this to the influence of the grammar of Irish (Gaelic)...

She correctly notes that Irish repeats the complementizer/auxiliary and a type of pronominal to express agreement or disagreement (there's a negative complementizer), rather than use a single word 'yes' or 'no'. However, there's no necessary connection between using this grammatical mechanism (also used in several other languages) and directness or indirectness—in particular, one can of course directly express disagreement with the negative complementizer just as easily as with a word like 'no' (another example of the Language X has no word for concept Y trope). Here's the passage, in which she goes on to attribute the perceived tendency to circumlocute to genetics (does anyone need to be told that genes have nothing to do with the particular language one speaks? though of course they have everything to do with the ability to learn a language at all):

But we Irish just can’t say yes. Or no. It’s not in our genes. In Irish Gaelic, our native tongue, we don’t even have a word for them. The closest is “Is ea,” which means “It is so.” And “Ni hea,” which means “It is not so.” There are, however, about 50 different approximations that indicate various degrees of equivocation.

Our genetic inability to call a spade a spade and our compulsion to say no when we mean yes, and vice versa, are but surface manifestations of a deeply ingrained reflex to subvert, invert and pervert the English language at every opportunity.

A "genetic inability" is just a surface manifestation of something deeper?

The very next thing she says maligns the ability of Irish to be used to express logical truths, a conclusion which I'm sure would have horrified the great Irish scholars of the Middle Ages, when the rest of Europe looked to the Irish monasteries as great centers of learning:

In Ireland, the words must fit the rhythm, often at the expense of logic or clarity. Irish Gaelic has its roots in the ancient Goidelic of the Celts. English comes from the Germanic. We may be geographic neighbors, but when it comes to linguistic traits, we’re poles apart.

For someone who makes her living writing in English, it seems a bit much to claim her linguistic traits are poles apart from those of other English speakers. She quotes some famous Irish users of Irish English on the characteristics of Irish Gaelic. Here's Colum McCann, a novelist, claiming that Irish is 'convoluted' and 'evasive' compared to direct, forthright (Germanic!) English:

“The Irish language is convoluted in its grammar, evasive in statement and relies much more on sound, rhythm and onomatopoeia than English does,” he says. “It ducks and swerves. The forced marriage of English to Irish, resulting in what some people call Hiberno-English, has resulted in a great deal of wonderful literature but also a lot of head-scratching.”

And here's Shane McGowan, formerly of the Pogues, on swearing in Irish English (song)writing:

The liberal, and frequently illogical, peppering of conversations with swearwords by Irish writers is more a method of retaining a rhythmic pattern of speech than an expression of hostility. Shane MacGowan, founder and frontman of the Pogues and arguably the finest songwriter of his generation, colors his lyrics blue because it reflects the Irish way of speaking, of emphasis and underscoring a point. And besides, he says, “they plug the rhythmic gaps.”

Now, it's possible that this point has more substance, especially in the realm of poetry and song—meter is a harsh mistress. But the connection to 'illogic' is, well, illogical. And he goes on to refute the apparent earlier assumption that there's something logical and direct about English. In discussing Joyce, McGowan says:

“Joyce was simply taking the inner Irish rhythm to the limit and imposing it on the English language. There were all these mad English language rules that don’t work anyway. The entire book is about pointing out the absurdity of the English language.”

And, not to impugn the Irish Gaelic credentials of any of these sources (I'm a big fan of the Pogues and McGowan's songwriting myself), but the assertion on the part of McKeone that Irish Gaelic is the "native tongue" of the Irish in general also doesn't reflect reality, or maybe reflects a misunderstanding about the normal use of the term 'native tongue'. Irish is an endangered language; Irish English is the first language of the vast majority of Irish citizens. The Ethnologue claims 260,000 speakers of Irish, while the population of Ireland according to Wikipedia is 5.9 million people, in short, less than five percent of Irish residents speak Irish Gaelic as a native tongue. I sort of doubt that McGowan's a native speaker of Irish, since he seems to have spent his early childhood in the center of the country (not in the Gaeltachtaí, the Irish speaking regions, mostly in coastal areas). He might still be, of course, but odds are against it. And I don't know about Colum McCann (who's from Dublin) or Marion McKeone. But surely the NYTimes Magazine can do better than this, linguistically speaking, if they want to publish on Irish! I am not one iota more inclined to read "On Language" now than I was before I accidentally stumbled on this guest post this weekend; quite the reverse, in fact.

(I hasten to add that I'm absolutely not any kind of Irish expert, either—but I at least know people who are.)

Newfoundland News

2006-07-27T20:50:00.000-07:00

Hey! St. John's Newfoundland, essentially my hometown, got a write-up in the NY Times Travel Section today! They hit many high points, including Signal Hill, the LSPU Hall, cod tongues, Moo Moo's, Auntie Crae's, whales, icebergs and Cape Spear. They get the name of the Ship Inn wrong, probably because it's usually just called 'the Ship', so who knows if it's Inn, Pub, whatever. They do miss out a lot of great things you should catch if you're there for more than 36 hours: Cape St. Mary's (check out the caribou herd while you're down there, and don't miss the haunting eponymous song), the Fluvarium, the East Coast Trail, the Trinity Bay pageant, fish and brewis at the Classic Café (open 24 hours), fish and chips (proper chips!), traditional music, a ferry ride to Bell Island from Portugal Cove (my actual hometown), the Ediacharan fossils at Mistaken Point, the oldest multicellular fossils in the world, 560-575 million years old... you better stay for the whole summer, actually. There's lots of great events: the folk festival, of course, 30 years old this year; the Sound Symposium is usually weird and wild (dang, just missed it); the St. John's Regatta is highly traditional; the Peace-a-Chord is always a lovely event, especially in these troubled times, though apparently they've had to scale back a bit this year, wouldn'tcha know. If you're into unusual food, after the cod tongues and fish and brewis, you could try seal flipper pie or caribou steak, partridgeberry jam or bakeapple preserves, Purity molasses candies or hard tack. You can't miss the berries, everywhere in late August and early September... And there's some great linguistics available at my alma mater, MUN -- stop in and say hi, at least, if you're into that sort of thing!

Hmm. Maybe I'm feeling a little homesick. Not that the Arizona summer is without its charms. Really! But it's a bit different.

Confabulous robots

2006-07-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

Today's NYTimes science section has an article about the state-of-the-art in AI, Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life. I read it with an eye out for news about language-related developments. Tthe article was mostly a mishmash: computers imitating neural activtiy, artificial lifeguards, Turing tests, video games, Roombas, automatic phone-answering systems and the dream of putting a robot in every home. But sure enough, there was one guy working on an electronic butler that could "hold a coversation with its master, or order more pet food."

The butler researcher's name is Robert Hecht-Nielsen, and...

Last year he began speaking publicly about his theory of “confabulation,” a hypothesis about the way the brain makes decisions. At a recent I.B.M. symposium, Mr. Hecht-Nielsen showed off a model of confabulation, demonstrating how his software program could read two sentences from The Detroit Free Press and create a third sentence that both made sense and was a natural extension of the previous text.

For example, the program read: “He started his goodbyes with a morning audience with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, sharing coffee, tea, cookies and his desire for a golf rematch with her son, Prince Andrew. The visit came after Clinton made the rounds through Ireland and Northern Ireland to offer support for the flagging peace process there.”

The program then generated a sentence that read: “The two leaders also discussed bilateral cooperation in various fields.”

Pretty impressive, especially given the zeugma-inducing coordination in the first sentence ('sharing coffee, tea, cookies, and his desire for a golf rematch with her son, Prince Andrew"), and the backwards anaphora ('He' in the first sentence, 'Clinton' in the second.) This is confabulation? How's it working? And how's the sentence-generation working? Templates? Neural nets? Transitional probabilities? An actual PSG?

Judging from his bio, probably neural nets; he doesn't seem like he's much focussed on language. He's got a Darwinian view—or maybe it's a kind of optimality-theoretic view—well, neural-netty, anyway—of the solution to the abduction problem, which Jerry Fodor considers insoluble by current approaches to cognitive science. But it's not clear how the language-generation bit works.

His Wikipedia article ends with the following hardly believable quote:

"This new era, which as yet has no name, will be characterized by the eternal universal freedom from want provided by intelligent machines."

Wow! Those are some rose-colored glasses! Guess he hasn't seen Terminator. Or 2001. (In the article, his butler is explicitly compared to H.A.L., apparently without intending a negative connotation.) Or Westworld. Or the Matrix. Or I, Robot. Or... It's like he's chronoported¹ here from a former life as a voiceover in a 1940s newsreel about Progress.

He probably grew up reading Asimov, where robots ultimately really do have the best interests of humanity at heart. Maybe it's productive to return to that kind of relentless optimism.

Maybe linguists can name this nameless era. I hereby throw the floor open to Nominations for the Name of the New Era. I always liked "The World of Tomorrow", but that'll hardy do as a name for an era. Deixis. Any thoughts?

Update: Thanks to Nikolas for providing a link to the following short paper outlining the confabulation idea: Cogent Confabulation. It's pretty interesting! The sentence-completion algorithm does in fact seem to be based on a transitional probability calculations. In short, it's a complicated example of linguifying -- the machine is computing what words in a sequence are likely to co-occur, given a big training set of natural English. It returns a null answer if the sequence is a nonsense string (and also sometimes if it isn't). Sadly the article doesn't explain how the complete-sentence cases were generated, but probably it's just more of the same, with the power cranked up an exponent or two. I think the machine isn't processing the sentences, or representing their meanings and drawing inferences, or anything similar.
But it is an exciting time to be doing this kind of thing. Maybe Asimov was right. The Foundation could be Microsoft's kinder, gentler offspring, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, if it got seriously into this kind of thing.

¹How about this coinage? I was fairly pleased with it. But Google tells me someone's already named some time-management software that, and it's appeared in a couple of sci fi stories with the 'time-travel' meaning. Not many hits, though, considering how obvious a form it is. Maybe it'll take off.

Mt kgmd ,gkj kjd h.soav vdtnsaoh

2006-07-08T20:31:00.000-07:00

So, three years ago I invested three weeks in becoming a proficient user of the Dvorak keyboard.

Why? I was a very proficient typist on Qwerty, as someone who spends a minimum of 50 per cent of her useful hours (and plenty of the non-useful ones) in front of a keyboard can hardly help being. I didn't need any of the extra speed reputed to be possible with Dvorak. And I could hardly spare the time, that pre-tenure summer.

But I'm a fan of good design, and the Dvorak is a very well-thought-out tool. (The Qwerty keyboard was too, but its design goal wasn't to promote efficient typing -- it was to prevent the keys of a manual typewriter from jamming.) Plus it has a geek coolness factor that seemed attractive. Plus I'd just been reading about how trying to execute well-rehearsed behaviors in some unusual way (e.g. with your off hand) is good mental exercise, promoting cognitive flexibility that can stave off symptoms of senility. I went around doing things left-handed a lot that summer. I figured that learning a new keyboard layout could be worth an extra three months of lifetime cogency. Finally, having your keyboard produce gibberish when a stranger sits down to it is a pretty good security feature (until they switch it back).

Some of the features of the Dvorak keyboard include distributing the work better between the left and right hands, placing the most commonly used keys on the home row, and planning for the efficient typing of common English digraphs. All the vowels are under the fingers of the left hand: a-o-e-u-i, rather than a-s-d-f-g. The 't-h' sequence is placed where the 'k' and 'j' are in a normal keyboard--very easy to type.

I've enjoyed being a member of this exclusive club, and I certainly was able to achieve typing speeds equal to or better than my old times with the Qwerty keyboard.

But -- I'm switching back, this summer. This may be permanent, or temporary, depending on whether my right arm finds it relaxing or not. I've started to find that my right forearm tendons are acting up. I'm thinking that my right hand already had enough to do in the other parts of my life, and the Dvorak layout, with its increased workload for the right hand, may have just pushed it over the edge. I had noticed while learning that my right arm got tired, when it really never had before. That went away with proficiency, but came back after prolonged typing. (Probably it's not rational to think that Qwerty will help, slince Dvorak is in fact thought by its proponents to be more ergonomic than Qwerty).

There are a couple of other reasons, too. When I'm visiting a foreign keyboard, or looking over someone else's shoulder and want to lean in and type a password or something, it's inconvenient to have to go into the relevant control panel and make my special keyboard layout available (and on some networked machines access to such things can be limited anyway). But if I don't switch it, it's pretty sad to be hunting and pecking and explaining defensively about how I'm actually a good typist on the Dvorak keyboard ("The what?"). (My cognitive flexibility did not extend to maintaining proficiency on two keyboards at once, sadly.)

So now I'm re-training on Qwerty (this post is typed in it). I'm progressing a bit faster than I did when learning the other direction, but not as fast as I would have thought, considering that I spent the first 20 years of my life typing in this keyboard! I think it's because the Dvorak layout really is way more sensible, linguisticaly and functionally. My fingers have a hard time reaching for all those commonly-used letters that used to be right underneath them.

So far it's not helping out with my right forearm — all this laborious conscious thinking about the correct motions is leaving it as tired as ever. It may be that I'll just have to ration my typing, like a normal repeitive stress injury victim. If that's the case, maybe I'll switch back. But it probably won't be worth it, really.

But — if I was handing out advice to someone learning to type for the first time (how young on average would I have to catch them these days, I wonder?), I'd still absolutely recommend just skipping qwerty altogether. Go straight to Dvorak. It really is a better system, and I think anyone'd find it more sensible to learn and more efficient to use, starting from zero. And if enough people go for the gusto, then the visiting keyboard inconvenience will ultimately be a non-issue.

The Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor is my teaching software of choice, by the way. It works great.

Too much negation to fail to confuse

2006-07-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a cartoon that made my head hurt this morning:

So, the third panel is very parseable. There is no degree of badness such that it would prevent someone from coming into church. But the fourth panel, with a completely parallel structure, boggled me.

Presumably, it conveys a meaning expressible with the same kind of paraphrase: There is no degree of goodness such that it would prevent someone from staying out of church.

Ouch! Even the paraphrase hurts!

I felt like I had the right parse there for a minute -- surely the intent of the comic is to say, no one is excluded from belonging to the church, i.e. everyone can come in. The intent, then, is to say that bad people, no matter how bad, can come in, and good people, no matter how good, can't stay out. But I don't think it says this. I think it says that good people, no matter how good, CAN stay out.

That is, the reverend seems to be saying that good people don't need to come to church.

Is that right? Do you extract the same message? Is that supposed to be part of the joke? ('Herb and Jamaal' is not usually that devious, seems to me, not that I've read it a lot.)

The problem is the cartoonist is mixing all the degree semantics (what *do* you call those 'too X to Y' constructions? They're not comparatives -- what's the word?) and opposites (good vs. bad, come in vs. send out), and negatives (never). He's thrown in two opposites when it should have just been one ('too good to come in' vs. 'too bad to come in'). Maybe it is supposed to be part of the joke.

Anyway, more evidence of the confusability of negatives. (...less evidence of the comprehensibility of positives?)

Update: Check out the comments for more attempts at interpretation! also this post from Micheal Kaplan...seems like there's a substantial number of people out there who can get the intended reading out of this structure! I'm still buffaloed, though. Could this be a semantic microparameter? Or just a failure of imagination?

Update Update: I'm inclined to agree with Neal and Lance (see the comments). That is, I do understand the 'so X you don't need to Y' interpretation of the 'too X to Y' construction (what is it called??) — but I don't think it helps the cartoon at all. Take an exchange like the following:

Teacher: Did you practice this week?

Student: I don't need to do that any more! I'm too good to practice.
( = '[so good that I don't need to practice]') Student is saying he won't practice anymore, right?

Teacher: You're never too good to practice!
( = 'you're never [so good that you don't need to practice]') Teacher is saying student does need to practice, right? Indeed, Teacher is saying that Student will always need to practice.

By the same token, our religious leader above is literally saying, 'you're never [so good that you don't need to stay out of church].' That is, you will always need to stay out of church.

Not the intended message, I think, no?

I haven't done anything tricky in the above, just substituted the predicate 'stay out of church' for the predicate 'practice'. The entailments of the construction should remain constant modulo that change. So if the student/teacher exchange above makes sense to you (modelled on the 'swimming' scenario suggested by the riger in the comments section), then I think you ought to find that the cartoon doesn't say what it thinks it's saying.

On the other hand, if the teacher/student exchange says something else to you, or is just infelicitous, then maybe there's something else going on! :)

Old MacDonald had a handle

2006-06-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

Dave Barry's been autotranslating his whimsical prose for humorous effect: English-->French-->German-->French-->Greek-->French-->English. Kinda funny:

http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2006/06/24_4.html

Among other things, adjectival 'dead' becomes past participle 'died' while still retaining the 'be' auxiliary, and 'Jack Bauer' become 'Bauer-Klinke' ('jack' in the sense of 'socket', my online dictionary tells me -- inverting the headedness of the imaginary compound coz it's coming from French, I guess, though 'jack' doesn't appear in my French dictionaries) then 'La poignée d'agriculteur' ('Klinke' in the sense of 'handle'), then 'The handle of the farmer'. Don't even ask what happens to "Chinese actors who are still ticked off about a subplot from the previous season that most of us don't even remember."

Lingnews.net

2006-06-15T21:32:00.000-07:00

Bridget of the late Ilani Ilani has started a digg.com-style site for language-related news stories: Lingnews.net. I've just now posted a story, about the new RC mass tracking the original Latin phraseology more closely—weirdly, deliberately making the ceremony even more opaque. (Probably they're just eliminating stranded prepositions and split infinitives, in honor of the Latin original. Haw.) The other news items already there are much more linguistically interesting—I just wanted to contribute something as I made this announcement! Check it out!

Update: Check out caelestis' excellent series of posts on the translation's improved metrical qualities, and other qualities:

Mea Culpa
Gloria
Credo

It must be good, I can say it!

2006-06-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

Hi all! I'm back from various wanderings across the Atlantic, including my first visit to Norway and the linguistic mecca of Tromsø, which is really beautiful. I had a few linguistic things to note about my travels, but unfortunately I forget them, except one: In Oslo, there are as many English-language advertisements on billboards and posters as there are Norwegian, which I thought a bit odd. A native told me that English has a coolness factor in Norway, as it does in Japan. Anyway, they're all amazingly bilingual, luckily for me.

But the main point of this post is to note a lingusitically-oriented NYT Science story, according to which 'pronounceability' has a demonstrable appeal in stock ticker names. Princeton psychology grad student Adam Alter and his colleagues had students rate possible company names as more or less 'pronounceable', and then had other students estimate the financial appeal of hypothetical companies bearing the names: more pronounceable companies were rated more appealing than less pronounceable ones. The result was then borne out by looking at actual stock names and correlating their pronounceability with initial short-term performance at the beginning of public trading.

They note that 'pronounceable' abbreviations are more appealing than 'unpronounceable' ones -- that is, acronyms which can be read as words, like PER, are more appealing than initialisms which must be pronounced letter-by-letter, like GTS.

I'm curious about whether 'proounceable', in the estimation of Alter's subjects, correlates with 'matches English phonotactics' or 'has a relatively simple phonological structure'. For example, English allows complex consonant onsets and codas, so something like 'Prax' would be phonotactically unremarkable to an English speaker. Cross-linguistically, though, simpler syllable codas are more common -- something like 'Praka' would be more pronounceable by more speakers of more languages than 'Prax' would. These two types of pronounceabliity can be in conflict -- English doesn't allow short vowels in open, stressed syllables, for instance, so something like 'Notemi' is orthographically foreign-looking and uncommon, though perfectly pronounceable. Would such names be rated as more or less 'pronounceable'? That is, does 'pronounceablity' in this case just equate with 'familiar-looking'.

The article goes on to say,

People respond positively to easily processed information in other areas as well. For example, they are more likely to believe an aphorism that rhymes ("woes unite foes") than one with an identical meaning that does not rhyme ("woes unite enemies"). Studies cited in the report demonstrate that people more often judge easily processed information to be true, likable, familiar and convincing than more complex data.

The last sentence I think suggests that the relevant notion is 'familiarity', rather than 'pronounceablity'. But the first part of this para is also interesting. Rhyme facilitates memorization, for sure, but it's not clear to me why rhyming would render an aphorism more 'easily processed', unless it's some kind of phonological priming effect. The illustrative example given could also involve differences in syllable count, lexical frequency, or several other other dimensions. I would imagine that the actual research showing this effect would have controlled for such factors, and would have had an explicit way of connecting rhymingness to processability (as measured by e.g. reading times or something).

Gender-appropriate behavior

2006-05-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

I was happily interested in a NYTimes' World article today on a Peruvian high-ranking female mummy discovered buried with items that characteristically appear only in male tombs, along with other items that characteristically appear only in female tombs. The convention-defying burial included both "weaving materials and needles, befitting a woman" and "2 ceremonial war clubs and 28 spear throwers", customary in male tombs. (I assume the journalist intended a null cultural-context restrictor there on the 'befitting a woman' phrase, i.e., 'befitting a woman in the ancient Moche ["pronounced MOH-chay"] society'.)

I was also happily interested to read that physicists can do even more weird tricks with light now. In the context of the previous article (and also because she's quoted in this one), I was reminded of one of my personal heroes: Lene Hau, the first physicist to ever to slow light to a crawl, and ultimately bring it to a complete halt. Can you imagine: she stopped light. How amazing is that! I should have tried to meet her & get her autograph or something when I was in Cambridge last spring, but didn't think of it. Ah well. Maybe some other time.

Notes on the news

2006-05-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

First -- hey, look! Everybody down tools! Scientists Have Identified Basic Principles of Communication!

Actually, the title is very odd, given the actual story, which is really about trying to automatically recognize idea devolopment patterns in good writing by extracting content words and doing some computations over their occurrences and interrelationships during the course of a given text. Reading the story, I can't identify any basic principle of communication that's already been identified by this work, unless it's supposed to be the claim that there's hierarchicial structure underlying poor li'l linear language, at a textual as well as a sentential level... but frankly, I don't think these guys are trying to take credit for discovering that! In their investigation they do seem to be mixing genres wildly (Einstein and Tom Sawyer!), so if they do find a commonality in idea development that holds of good scientific writing and good comic novels (but not of bad scientific writing and bad comic novels), they might well have discovered a basic principle of communication. But I'm not holding my breath.

In other news, on Thursday, the New York Times had a story about online gaming on the front page of their online edition:

Online Game Galaxy Gets a New Race of Characters

This is certainly newsworthy to the millions of Warcraft players, but I'm guessing that they already knew about it. Not being much of a gamer myself, I didn't know about it, and don't much care. I was, however, interested to see this upgrade in the newsworthiness of virtual worlds, rating national coverage in the NYT. I guess we're well on our way towards living in the world of Dream Park, where gaming superstars earn like top athletes in popular sports do, and are dissected as celebrities by the national press. Currently, the thing is, as a recent Time article on the new Nintendo video game interface puts it,

"Video games are an unusual medium in that they carry a heavy stigma among non-gamers. Not everbody likes ballet, but most nonballet fans [hey, check out the constituency on that compound! -hh] don't accuse ballet of leading to violent crime and mental backwardness. Video games aren't so lucky. There's a sharp divide between gamers and nongamers, and the result is a market that, while large and devoted...is also deeply stagnant. Its borders are sharply defined, and they're not expanding."

I think this explains why coverage of events in the gaming world (fantasy, video or online) seems to be pretty nonexistent in the established media: gamers have their own sources for news, and non-gamers are aggressively uninterested. Maybe the NYT article is the beginning of a sea change in this regard.

(If you haven't read Dream Park, you might enjoy checking it out — I expect it's still as entertaining as I remember it being, though I don't much care for the cover on the edition in the link above -- I don't remember dragons figuring in the story at all.)

Anyway, another thing that I found a bit weird about the NYT story was its placement in the paper, in the Technology section. As far as I can tell, although the people who play the game are doubtless interested in 'technology', the change to the game that's being covered doesn't seem to involve any actual new hardware or even significant changes to the software platform of the game at all. That is, there's no technology in the story. A lot of newspapers have 'entertainment/lifestyle' sections that I would have thought would have been more approprate for, but none the Times' section headers really fit... video games aren't 'Sports', so that's out; 'Arts' just doesn't seem quite right either, though TV and movie coverage is in there; video games, since participatory, aren't quite an Art, and anyway, Warcraft coverage would probably clash with the dance and theater reviews, and also probably wouldn't reach its intended audience. Science -- no. Style -- no. Health -- uh uh. Not World, not Region... if it had been me, I perhaps would have put it under 'National'. But really a paper needs an Entertainment section for that story, which the NYT doesn't have.

Don't steal this book!

2006-05-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

Well, since the Language Loggers are unabashedly shilling their own old-fashioned paper 'book', I figger I can officially endorse the following, a hardcopy of which I rest my eyes upon even as I type. Useful as a paperweight, for throwing at the TV, and even maybe for introducing English morphology to undergraduates (also with some phonological, psycholinguistic, semantic & historical coverage). Will Leben says it's very special. Bart Simpson and eggcorns make cameo appearances. Get one for yourself and one for a friend!

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=0631230319&site=1

Komunikashen

2006-05-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

David Beaver over at Language Log wonders how misspellings on a senator's ballot for speaker of the Italian Senate can be unambiguously taken to indicate weakness of support for the candidate. He writes:

"But the fact that the manner of expression departs from the norm does not in itself tell us what that departure signals, only that something is being signaled. The logic of the implicature seems to be: if I can't be trusted to spell the name of your favorite candidate correctly, I can't be relied on for anything."

But it seems pretty transparent to me: If a senator was wavering in his support for the prime minister and his candidate for speaker, and if said senator knows that misspelling the name of the candidate on a ballot is grounds for voiding said ballot (upon challenge from the opposing party), then that senator's (deliberately) misspelling the name of the candidate is a conscious attempt to render his ballot technically questionable, while not actually voting against the candidate overtly—thereby communicating 'I'll vote for your candidate but I don't really want to, and if the other guys are smart enough they can annul my ballot.'

That's assuming that the Italian public is right in assuming the misspellings are deliberate—that the candidate's name is not in fact so obscure as to be easily accidentally misspelled, and that after the second vote, any previous honest misspeller had paid attention to what was going on and corrected his error on the third ballot.

But this brings me to a new version of the Nigerian spam letter that I received a couple of days ago. Excerpted text is below. Note in particular the bolded bits:

Good Day:

I am Tony Fred Williams I am 14 years old I live in Manchester(UK) before my father die, now I live with my mother in Scotland. my late father Mr. Fred Williams was a Contractor in Manchester(UK) before he die in a car accident last years July 25th 2005. he left £50Million (Fifty Million Pounds) in his account before he die. The £50Million is in (First Union National Bank UK)...

I could have tell my mother to assist me to collect the £50Million for me but my mother and father has devoured before my father die and my father told me to not have anything to do with my mother I don’t even want her to know because what my father told me before he die was true...

...The MD CEO (First Union National Bank UK) told me to look for some body that is honest and old enough so that he can send the £50Million to the person account immediately.

I will give you is contact so that you can contact him to enable him send the £50Million to your provided account immediately...

Best Regards
Tony Fred Williams

This is one of the less plausible versions of the letter I've received, and not just because it offers me millions of pounds free and clear. It's because of mistakes in the English. They're not the mistakes that a 14 year old from Manchester might make. (There are some of those too—absence of punctuation and capital letters in some places, a space between 'some' and 'body' rather than 'somebody' in a couple of places, and failure of 3rd person agreement in other places (mostly in the excised bits—lack of agreement could well be the norm in some dialects).) Rather, they are mistakes that practically scream 'non-native English speaker'. In particular, failure to use the appropriate tense with 'before he die', the wrong participle form in 'could have tell', absence of infinitival 'to' in 'enable him send' (if a 14-year old English speaker knows how to appropriately use 'enable' he knows it takes an inifinitival complement). Also a couple of other weird things: use of 'devoured' for 'divorced' (probably spell-checker error--but a weird one not to catch, for a native English speaker), and use of parentheses around "(First Union National Bank UK)" with no apparent motivation—it's like the author had an acronym in there at first and then took it out without remembering to take out the parentheses—but that's implausible because it happens twice in the email.

From the widow of a deceased Nigerian Finance Minister, these kind of mistakes really add plausibility—they're clear ESL errors, and communicate appropriate degrees of foreignness for that backstory. But from an orphaned 14-year old purportedly in Manchester, I think they're just weird, and communicate 'Fraud!'.

But really it's the millions of pounds that's the key tip-off.

Compound construal

2006-05-04T00:09:00.000-07:00

This morning I got on a flight out of Honolulu Airport (and yes, visiting Hawai'i is just as great as you think it is, at least, if you think it's great), and, waiting to check in, I saw the following sign:

Now, compounds are famously not too compositional in their internal interpretations. If alligator shoes are shoes made of alligators, then what are nurse shoes made of? But I'll eat my hat if (what I think is) the intended interpretation of this compound is actually grammatically available.

What it's supposed to indicate, I think, is that people who have checked in online (i.e. on the web) should stand in line here to drop their checked luggage (bags) off with airline personnel. But I don't think that scenario makes that location describable as a web bag drop.

If the constituency is [[web bag] drop], then on the intended interpretation, 'web bag' should be able to refer to a bag whose owner has checked in on the web. But I don't think it can. IMHO, a 'web bag' would have to be a bag made of webbing, or a bag for carrying webbing, or a bag one bought on the web (as opposed to a bag one bought in a store), or a virtual bag, akin to a virtual shopping cart, which presumably wouldn't need to be dropped at this location.

If the constituency is [web [bag drop]] then it's even worse; sounds like a virtual (i.e. on the internet) location for dropping bags, which presumably also would have to be virtual in order to be able to virtually dropped. (I'm ignoring meanings for 'drop' here like 'drop of water', which would open up a whole bunch of other possible construals, even though I didn't ignore alternative interpretations for 'web' above. So sue me). I think that's pretty much a colorless green ideas situation in the context of an actual airport.

So anyway. just a note. I usually tell my students that English N-N compound interpretation is as free as the wind blows, a wide-open interpretive nexus wherein pretty much any association between the two nouns, given a sufficiently rich context, is enough to license the compound as interpretabale (although of course there are preferred and frequent such relations, which tend to spring to mind in out-of-the-blue contexts). So different from the relationship between a predicate and its arguments, I tell them. Interpreting the relationship between two Ns in an NN compound gives one a feeling for what it might be like if language was just linearly strung together content words without hierarchical structure, I hyperbolize madly.

But here I think the intended interpretation just ain't there, despite a horrendously rich environmental context that did in fact enable me to divine what it was supposed to be. Hmm!

And just for bonus material, here's a hotel counter that amused me a few days ago:

As opposed to the Horrible Activities Center? I bet they don't get a lot of business, on either constituent structure.

Monkeys are like people trapped in fly-bodies

2006-04-27T03:00:00.000-07:00

I see the Globe and Mail has reprinted the worse-than-worst AP article about birds 'learning grammar' verbatim.

I look forward to seeing Mark's interlinear interpretation, since I can't make head nor tail of it as written. I really like the opinion attributed to Mark Hauser at the end, though, apparently offered in partial explanation of why the birds did better than his tamarins:

"Monkeys may be trapped like Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, a man metamorphosed into a bug and unable to communicate with the outside world, Mr. Hauser suggested."

What??

Hee hee.

Cattle, cars and firearms

2006-04-18T00:32:00.000-07:00

Over on Language Log, Bill Poser presents an entirely rational argument for concluding that a cow is not a motor vehicle. I would just like to note, however, that there are genuine laws of the land according to which cows and cars do form [oh, fine, belong to...] a natural class, namely the class of items which you can be charged with 'Grand Theft' for stealing one of [e]. See, if you dare, my post on the topic from last year.

Update: See follow up posts on A Roguish Chrestomathy, p(b)ilokok, and the Language Log! Everybody's into categorization.

Just two amino acids...

2006-04-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

...separate my FoxP2 gene from a chimp's, notes Gary Marcus. Howzabout that.

Roughly speaking, 17 miscellaneous items

2006-03-28T20:01:00.000-08:00

1) When Mark over at the Language Log crosslinked to my Simpsons post, traffic on this blog increased roughly fiftyfold. It's fun to track via Sitemeter. Especially fun to look at the world map of who's on where at a given time. Thanks, Mark!

2) There's a fairly bizarre series of language-related scene-setting descriptions in a recent NYT article about the sensational trial of a 'Mafia Cop' (starting at the last para before the fold):

"Beneath the facts, however, lies an urban universe of glottal accents and working-class grammar that may be getting as old as the marijuana dealer, Burton Kaplan, 72, who, in testimony, said that he should have "stood" in school."

3) I find a recent post about Wittgenstein over at logicandlanguage.net quite amusing. I'm anxiously awaiting the translation verdict on the phrase, 'Roughly speaking...' Is that pretty much what W. intended to say?

4) I'm of course curious as to whether the Dakota and Carrier Scrabble letter distributions were based on the frequency of letters in corpora of each language, or on the frequency of letters in the lexicon of each language...Bill? Ben ? Update: See Ben's answer in the comments section below.

5) In my Simpsons post, I forgot to link to a Simpsons language joke over at Literal-Minded that appeared a while back. It's at the bottom of this post. It'd go under the heading "Interpretation of plural number marking." Hee. Update: Neal has just posted on another one, which I was planning to note down in my list for next year, from this Sunday's show, but now I won't have to. Thanks, Neal!

6) It recently occurred to me to wonder whether the availability of P-stranding in a language correlates with the absence of pro-drop in that language. Obviously P-stranding languages, like English, Dutch, Norwegian, are not pro-drop; anti-stranding languages like Italian are not. French is not pro-drop and (mostly) not P-stranding, so it's clear the correlation doesn't hold in that direction, but what about the other one? Anyone know of a robustly P-stranding language that is unambiguously pro-drop (I know about Irish... it's not really unambiguous in its prodroppiness)?

7) Wave of the future? I recently participated in a conference in Syracuse by delivering a talk from Tucson via webcam, along with my colleague who had the idea, Andrew Carnie. It was fine -- fun to take questions from people hundreds of miles away during the question period -- but frustrating in that I didn't get to see the other talks, since I didn't really want to spend the weekend sitting in front of a computer. (I was very grateful that the non-virtual attendees were willing to spend an hour watching my (fore)head on a movie screen!) I did get their handouts though.

8) Here's a link to that important recent work of M. Goose and R. Rabbit I was alluding to a few weeks ago. Check it out -- it's chock-full o' truthiness. (Chock-full 'o truthy goodness? Snowclone alert!)

9) Haven't gone back to try puzzle number 17 yet, but I will soon... I'm scared, now that Lance has blanked! Check out his excellent example sign post, though. How does that whole construal thing work, anyway?

Try the Linguist List 'Lexicon' game...

2006-03-24T23:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks to SC for the link to the linguistic puzzlers up on the Linguist List as part of their annual Fund Drive. I happily clicked my way through to screen 9, but now I'm stumped. Better go to bed and try again in the morning.

Hippo Birdie to This Blog

2006-03-17T22:57:00.000-08:00

So a year ago today (ok, yesterday, technically, it being after midnight), I was having so much fun reading the linguistics blogs I figured I oughter start one up. I think the post activity on this blog has followed a fairly typical pattern of waxing and waning, but so far it's always gone back to the waxng side so I'll count this as my one-year anniversary as a blogger. I hadn't noticed at the time that it was St. Patrick's day, but I notice this year; that'll make the occasion easy to remember.

In honor of the occasion, I post a follow-up to my most popular post ever: linguistically relevant Simpsons jokes. Since last year I've been noting them down when catching the show, and have found a whole bunch more... and this isn't really even the tip of the iceberg; I'm sure I'll have more by next year. I've tried to stay away from ones added to the comments section of the original post, though I may have doubled up in places; apologies if so. I didn't go get all the episode reference numbers this time; I just note the episode title and original air date.

Enjoy!

Maximum Homerdrive. 1999.

Quantifier interpretation:

Homer and Bart watching a drive-in movie, “The Monster That Ate Everybody”

Movie Girl: You mean, it ate Patrick too?
Movie Guy: It ate everybody!
Movie Girl: What about Erica?
Homer and Bart, in unison with Movie Guy: It ate EVERYBODY!

Wild Barts Can’t Be Broken. 1998.

Generic nature of -er nominalizations:

(Homer picking up the family after an Isotopes game, after having been dissing the Isotopes earlier.)
Homer: Who won? The losers?
Bart: No, they lost.
Homer: Those losers!

Lisa the Simpson. 1998.

Inchoative deadjectival verb formation with -en, again:

Lisa, worried that the ‘Simpson Gene’ is kicking in, writes in her ‘Flowers for Algernon’-style log:

“Dear log, can it be true? Do all Simpsons go through a process of dumbening? Wait, that's not how you spell dumbening. Wait, dumbening isn't even a word!”

Accents, stereotypes:

Later in the episode, when she’s imagining her future as an obese, soap-watching mother of twenty, she imagines herself speaking in the same accent that the slack-jawed yokels have.

The President Wore Pearls. 2003.

Sarcasm:

Lisa (just elected school president): I think I can say, with all humility, I am going to be the best school president ever!
Bart: (claps loudly and slowly. With sarcastic intonation) Bra-vo, Lisa, Bra-vo!
Marge: Oh, isn’t that sweet? Even your brother’s adding his kudos!
Bart: No! I was being sarcastic!
Marge: You were?
Bart (sarcastic intonation): Nooo. I was being sin-CERE.
Homer: Oh, I’m so confused!

Treehouse of Horror III. 1992.

Blends:

Scary man in House of Evil (“Your One Stop Evil Shop”): (Ominously) We sell forbidden objects from places men fear to tread. (Cheerfully) We also sell frozen yogurt, which I call frogurt!

Spelling of interdental fricatives:

Marge Bouvier (as the girl in King Kong): Am I going too?
Burns (as leader of expedition in King Kong): Of course! We wouldn’t think of going without the bait!…ah, that is, the bait-thing beauty, the bathing beauty! (aside: I covered that up pretty well!)

Homer’s Paternity Coot. 2006.

Double plurals, locatum verbs, reverse reading of de-prefixation

Mayor Quimby (worried because everyone’s taking an alternate route around the toll road): Damnit! We need those seventy-five centses to de-python the town fountain!

Midnight Rx. 2005.

Language loss:

Video in drug company office (Pharm-er John’s Productions):
Voiceover: The mighty Amazon river. The natives had a word for it. Then we got rid of the natives, and no one remembers that word.

Back-formation, cran-morphs:

(Smithers is on the floor with a swelling thyroid, gasping and choking):
Burns: Smithers! Is this some sort of high jink!? Stop it immediately!

The Girl Who Slept Too Little. 2005.

Register:

Karl: Now we’ll be at the mercy of weekend philatelists!
Lenny: Why can’t you just say stamp collectors?
Karl: I’m tired of dumbing myself down for you!

My Big Fat Geek Wedding. 2004.

Focus constructions, idiom chunks, reanalysis:

Carl: Come on, have a beer!
Skinner: I can’t! I might be called upon to give directions later!
Chalmers: Skinner! You were asked to chugalug, and a lug you shall chug!

Pronominal antecedent ambiguity:

Marge (explaining why she doesn’t want Edna and Skinner to get back together): I won’t let Edna throw her life away for some passionless marriage, where two people lie in bed together with no contact, whittling away the batteries until they die!
Homer: Which are you saying is dead -- our marriage or our batteries?

Clipping, acroblends:

ComicBookGuy: We’re doing everything together — breakfast, bath, and then the Bimonthly Science Fiction Convention:
Bart: The BiMonSciFiCon!?

(Later in the episode Klingon is spoken at the BiMonSciFiCon.)

Wandering Juvie. 2004

Focus intonation:

Woman in Costingtons selling Marge face cream: And, it contains over 60 INGREDIENTS!!

Faith Off. 2000.

Confusability of multiple negations:

At ‘Brother Faith’s Revival’, Brother Faith is introducing his act with some high-energy patter:
Brother Faith: Now, correct me if I’m incorrect, but was I told that it’s untrue that people in Springfield have no faith? Was I not misinformed?
Audience: (murmurs of puzzlement)
Brother Faith: The answer I’m looking for is ‘Yes’.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star. 2005.

Back-formation, idiom chunk

Skinner, collaring Bart for unleashing a plague of rats on the school (which he didn’t):

Bart: No way! I didn’t do it! Unlike all the other stuff I told you I didn’t do which I did.
Skinner: Bart, I’m sick of playing the tom fool!

Last of the Red Hot Mamas. 2005.

Twin language:

The twins Sherri and Terri say, ‘Let’s speak in our secret twin language!’ and act/verbalize oddly like Frink does at the end of each utterance.

Language acquisiton, first and second:

Lisa tries to learn Italian. Milhouse, who has been covertly bilingual all this time, is her instructor.
Luigi comes up to Lisa and Milhouse in Little Italy.
Luigi: Mr. Milhouse -- thanka gooddness! Could you trannzlate an helpa me my cheese for my lasagna
Lisa: But Luigi! Surely you speak Italian!
Luigi (sighs): No I don’t. I only speak ahh, how you say, um, fractured Englisha — that’s what my parents spoke at home.

Brother from the Same Planet. 1993.

Slang:

Homer and Marge are discussing Bart’s reaction to Homer’s forgetting to pick him up:
Marge: He said you were a bad father!
Homer: Marge. When kids these days say ‘bad’, they mean ‘good’! And to ‘shake your booty’ means to wiggle one’s butt! Allow me to demonstrate!

Adjectival vs participial -ed:

Homer is telling his underprivileged ‘little brother’ about the constellations (which he has just made up).
Pepe: Oh, Papa Homer! You are so learnèd!
Homer: ‘Learned’, son! It’s pronounced ‘learned’!

Goo Goo Gai Pan. 2005.

Headedness in compounds:

Burns (taking a driving test from Selma, who’s having hot flashes and mood swings): Good heavens! She’s some sort of female madman!

Archaisms (including what I think is a faux-archaic adjectival -ed):

Selma opens the roof.
Burns: Stop that, you wantwit! I might get stung by a bumbled bee!

Interpretation of sentence fragments:

Bart tries to warn Milhouse, whose shirt is over his eyes after a hockey fight with Bart, of an oncoming vehicle.
Bart: Car!
Milhouse: Car what? Car’s the subject, but I don’t know the verb!

They Saved Lisa’s Brain. 1999.

Snowclones, irregular plurals, register & hypercorrection:

Lisa: (writing a letter to the editor) We are a town of low-brows, no-brows, and ignorami.

Amibiguity of 'get':

Homer: Look! I got runner-up prize!
Lisa: You won second place?
Homer: No, but I got it!

Expletive pronominals? Idioms?

The Sprinfield Mensa club and Lenny and pals have booked the same gazebo.

Skinner: Excuse me, gentlemen, might I take a peek at your gazebo reservation form?
Lenny: Beat it!
Skinner: Yes, well, we each have a good case.
Karl: What part of ‘Beat it!’ didn’t you understand?
Skinner: Mmmm, I guess it would be the ‘it’; I’m not exactly sure to what that refers…. It’s a—(beer can clobbers him)

Sarcasm:

Mensa town steering committee meeting: Linsey Naigle, guest star (re the question of whether to build a Balinese or Thai shadow puppet theater): Why not both? Then everybody’s happy.
Comic book guy (sarcastically): Oh yeah. Everyone’s REAL happy then.
Linsey: Do I detect a note of sarcasm?
Professor Frink: (twiddling dials on a flashing lights machine labeled ‘Sarcasm detector’): Are you kidding me? This baby is off the charts!
Comic book guy (extremely sarcastically): A SARcasm detector! That’s a REALly useful invention!
(Sarcasm detector overheats and explodes).

Euphemism, idioms:

Principal Skinner: We have some new rules and regulations that you’re just gonna go ape-poopy over!

Treehouse of horror IX. 1998. Terror of Tiny Toon

Garden path:

Krusty reading cue cards, dressed as Dracula, says, “Tonight, I’m going to suck! … Your blood!”

Superlative -est affixation:

Then Krusty says, Get ready for the violentest, disembowelingest, vomit-inducingest Itchy and Scratchy Halloween Special ever!!

Treehouse of Horror II. 1991.

Nonce locatum verbs (productivity of verbing words):

Homer brushes aside the warnings of the strange old Moroccan market salesman about the wish-granting monkey paw he wants to buy. “Paw me!” he says. (Cf, “Fugu me”, from later.)

Treehouse of Horror XV. 2004.

Redundancy, deadjectival verb formation:

Prof Frink (before shrinking an inner spaceship with the Simpsons inside): Let the commencement beginulate!

Bart’s Friend Falls in Love. 1992.

Canadian raising:

Bart has ratted out Milhouse and Samantha, whose father has put her in a Roman Catholic all-girl’s school. Feeling bad, he and M. go to visit.:
Bart: Hey, Samantha, I'm sorry about getting you thrown in the
penguin house.
Samantha: That's all right, Bart. I love Saint Sebastian.
It's run by a group of French-Canadian nuns.
They're very nice, except they never let me oot.
(French singing)

Vocabulary:

Also in this episode: Homer accidentally gets a subliminal improve-your-vocabulary tape, and temporarily talks in extremely high-register vocab, which no one understands. In the end credits he gives a vocabulary lesson on some of the words he’s used in the episode (Homer sez, Increase your wordiness!):

Satiety: belt-popping fullness
Triumvirate: Three guys giving orders
Gourmand: like a gourmet, only fatter.
Machiavellian: I don’t know
Boudoir: Where a French guy does it.

The Boy Who Knew Too Much. 1994.

Register, legalese, semantics of logical operators

Homer is on jury duty hearing the case of Mayor Quimby’s son, who allegedly assaulted a French waiter for mispronouncing ‘chowder’. ("Say CHOWDAH!!") Homer’s reading the jury instructions.

H. What does ‘sequestered’ mean?
Princ. Sk. If the jury is deadlocked they’re put up in a hotel together so they can’t communicate with the outside world.
H: What does ‘deadlocked’ mean?
P. Sk. It’s when the jury can’t agree on a verdict.
H.: Uh-huh. And ‘if’?
P. Sk. A conjunction meaning ‘in the event that’ or ‘on condition that’.
H: So IIIIF we don’t all vote the same way, we’ll be DEAAAADlocked, and have to be seQUESStered in the Springfield Palace Hotel.

Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky. 2003.

Retronyms:

Kent Brockman: Look out Matthew Modine and Charlene Tilton — There are new stars in town! SKY stars!

Gump Roast. 2002. (DABF12 / SI-1312), 21 Apr 2002.

Derivational morphology:

Mr. Burns, trying to convince the town that Homer is a menace, says, “Just look at all of this catastrophic nincompoopery.”

Context-dependent reference of tense (cf. Partee 1973 example: “I didn’t turn off the stove!”)

Marge and Homer getting into bed:

M: Did you close the gate?
H: Yeah.
Through the open window comes the sound of the gate slamming in the wind. Marge looks at Homer. Homer looks fake-surprised and says,
H: Oh, you mean tonight!

The Way We Weren’t. 2004. #FABF13 / SI-1513

Ambiguity of ‘get’:

Opening sequence: Bart is sitting on the lawn watching Milhouse and Ralph rake leaves for him, à la Tom Sawyer. They wonder why they’re doing it. Bart says, “The first one to finish gets a lemonade,…” they brighten up immediately. “…for me.” they sag in dissapointment.

Milhouse of Sand and Fog. 2005.

Back-formation:

Marge (to Homer): You don’t trust me? After I salved every chicken pock on your ungrateful body?!

Spelling:
Bart: Does this mean that you and Dad might get a d-a-v-u-r-s?

Treehouse of Horror XI. 2000.

Brain damage and language production:

Homer’s had a horoscope that predicts he will die. Every time he evades another close call with the Grim Reaper, he says, “Stupid horoscope!” Driving to work, a pickax comes flying through the air and lodges in his forehead. Homer says, “"Flupid bloroplope!”

Animal language:

Dolphins are striking back! They concoct an elaborate plan to conquer humans in whistle-speak, subtitled for our viewing pleasure. Later, King Snorky addresses humans in English, beginning in squeaky Tarzan-speak and then switching to an eloquent baritone.

The Brother From Another Series. 1997.

Semantics of comparative construction:

Lisa: Face it Bart! Sideshow Bob has changed!
Bart: No he hasn't! He's more the same than ever!

Treehouse of Horror I. 1990.

Causative verb formation, derivational morphology, object-experiencer psych-verbs:

Bart: “Here’s a story that’s really scarifying!”

Mommy Beerest! 2005.

Infrequent vocabulary, prescriptivism, language change:

Lisa observes that Marge has been spending more time at Moe’s than Homer has.
Homer: Just what are you inferring?
Lisa: I’m not inferring anything! You 'infer', I 'imply'!
Homer: What a relief!

The Seven-Beer Snitch. 2005.

Idioms, figurative vs. literal speech:

Kent Brockman: We’ve all heard of a laugh riot, but a prison riot?

Derivational morphology:

Burns: I need more cons in my dungeonarium

Scenes From the Class Struggle in Springfield. 3F11, Feb 1996

Class-specific accents, multisyllabic names?

Names of all the country club ladies are stressed on the last syllable: Evelyn: Karin, GilliAN, ElyzaBETH, PatriciA, RauberTA, SuSAN, meet Marge.

Definitions

(After country club lady obliquely insults Marge with a pun on ‘suit’). "Oh don't worry, Marge. Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation, humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."

Sweets and Sour Marge. 2002.

Slang:

Garth Motherloving: I'm not up on the current slang, but do the kids still say, "Get the hell out of my office."?

Lisa Gets an A. 1998.

Eggcorns:

Ralph: Hi Super Nintendo Chalmers!

When You Dish Upon a Star. 1998.

Deontic vs. epistemic readings of modals (also see the comments section below for another good one of these):

Man: Uh, sir, you can't operate a boat under the influence of alcohol.
Homer: That sounds like a wager to me!

Simpson Tide. 1998.

Nuclear/nucular:

Homer: correcting a superior officer on his submarine: Nu-cu-lar. It's pronounced nu-cu-lar.

Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment. 1997.

Phonological rules of diddily-insertion (See http://207.36.37.9/db/eng_diddly.htm)

Rex Banner: Are you the Beer Baron?
Ned: Well, if you're talking about root beer, I plead guilt-diddily-ildly as char-didily-arged! (iltily?)
Rex Banner: He's not the Baron, but he sounds drunk. Take him in.

HOMR. 2001.

Contrastive focus & cran-morphs?

Homer: I have a great way to solve our money woes. You rent your
womb to a rich childless couple. If you agree, signify by getting indignant.
Marge: Are you crazy? I'm not going to be a surrogate mother.
Homer: C'mon, Marge, we're a team. It's uter-US, not uter-YOU.
Marge: Forget it!

One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish. 1991.

Location/locatum denominal verbs:

Homer (ordering blowfish): C'mon pal! Fugu me!

The Way We Was. 1991.

Origins of English

Homer: English? Who needs that? I'm never going to England.

A Star is Burns. 1995.

Idiom interpretation:

Homer: My ears are burning.
Lisa: I wasn't talking about you, Dad.
Homer: No, my ears are really burning. I wanted to see inside, so I lit a Q-tip.

The Computer Wore Menace Shoes. 2000.

Same idiom:

Homer: Now (talks into mouse) Computer, kill Flanders.
Flanders: Did I hear my name? My ears are burning.
Homer to computer: Good start. Now finish the job.

Lisa’s Date With Destiny. 1996.

Broadening, pejoration:

Kearney: Aw, man! You just kissed a girl!
Jimbo Jones: That is so gay!

The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show. 1997.

Phonological coolth, buzzwords:

Network Executive: We at the network want a dog with attitude. He's edgy. You've heard the expression "Let's get busy"? Well, this is a dog who gets biz-zay; consistently and thoroughly.
Krusty: So he's proactive?
Executive: Oh, God yes! We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
Writer: Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't those just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that... I'm fired aren't I?

El Viaje de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer). 1997.

Speech errors:

Homer: I hope I didn't brain my damage.

Marge Simpson in Screaming Yellow Honkers. 1999.

Meaning change:

Bart: I didn't think this was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.

...and the final word, from the same episode:

Bart writing on the blackboard: ‘GRAMMAR IS NOT A TIME OF WASTE’

Armory Park Utterology

2006-03-13T15:44:00.000-08:00

Something I've been meaning to mention for a while now -- my phonologically-oriented colleague Adam P. Ussishkin has started up a blog, Armory Park Utterologist. Its topics range from the future of his Tucson neighborhood, Armory Park, to the future of phonology. (Hmm -- very futur-y topics, I now notice -- and when you google 'Utterologist', google wonders if you meant 'Futurologist' -- Coincidence? or conspiracy?)

Anyway, in his 'future of phonology' post he reports having constructed a (lexical) neighborhood-density calculator for Hebrew. Very cool!

Notes from the catbird seat

2006-03-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

a) So I won the game of scrabble I was playing when I started wondering about letter distributions. It was a game of Super-Scrabble, actually—quadruple word scores! 200 letters! Four blank tiles! I feel they should have named it ExTREME Scrabble, so that it could augment our collection of Extreme products. ('Extreme' has become the new 'New!' in the last five years or so -- how long will that last, do you suppose? Our favorite Extreme packages in our collection so far are the 'Extreme Vanilla Ice Cream', and the 'Extreme Pastel Gel Pens'.) Anyway, Super Scrabble is fun, especially if you've been playing a lot of regular scrabble; it feels like you have lots of room to roam by comparison.

b) Check out Lance's further notes on letters at the end of words in the comments on the previous post; it does seem like the big 's' count in the lexicon he used (the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary) is due to the inclusion of all the plural forms. Interesting observations about the letters which are most likely to be addable-on to the ends of words -- 'y', of course, and, surprisingly, 'o'.

c) I've had occasion to make another letter distribution observation lately, as I've just moved offices and have been unpacking my books onto my new bookshelves. I think linguists have an unusual tendency to have names beginning with 'b' and 'c' -- or at least, I have a tendency to buy books by linguists whose names begin with 'b' and 'c'. I keep having to make more room in that section of the bookshelves. I thought I'd had it all planned out with adequate space allotted for each letter, but now I'm back into the stupid move-all-the-books-one-shelf-on procedure... drat! Hey, Lance -- want to do a comparison of the percentages of initial letters of surnames of members of the LSA with the percentage of initial letters of surnames in, say, the NY phone book? (No, no, I don't mean it. Do your work! :) )

d) The Advanced Search capability on ODIN has been activated -- now you can actually access the searchability functions I was talking about a while ago. I have already had a look at all the examples of questions in Yaqui that the spider has found, and multiple wh-questions in Itza and Malagasy. Sadly it hung up when trying to show me examples of counterfactuals; probably counterfactuals blow its little electronic brain.

Scrabble's letter distributions: Art or science?

2006-03-05T21:52:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Lance's python wizardry, we now have lexicon-based letter distribution counts! (See his comment to the previous post.) Interestingly, comparing the lexicon and corpus-based counts side by side with the Scrabble counts, some odd discrepancies appear.

Here's some bar charts summarizing the results. The leftmost (blue) bar represents Lance's lexicon letter counts. The center (red) bar represents the corpus letter counts. And the rightmost (yellow) bar represents the Scrabble tile distribution (as if it's out of 100, though it ought to be 98, because of the two blank tiles).

A-L
M-Z

There are a few differences between the corpus and lexicon counts. As Lance notes, the letter 'h' occurs in the corpus way more frequently than it does in the lexicon (the, he, her, their, those, them,...). The letter 't' as well, is more frequent in the corpus than the lexicon. Weirdly, the letter 's' is underrepresented in the corpus compared to the lexicon; I wonder if the headword list Lance chose included plurals of all the nouns?

What's interesting is that the Scrabble tile distribution matches lexicon frequency in some cases of discrepancy, corpus frequency in other cases, and neither in a couple of cases. This seems like a possibly odd result, given that the Scrabble letter distribution was supposed to have originally been based on a corpus count consisting of NYT front pages. Either the front pages on the days in question had some exceptional trends in letter usage (see below) or the creator of Scrabble, Alfred Mosher Butts, adjusted some frequencies based on his intuitions about what would make the game go better.

Of course, for letters whose frequency is less than 1%, Scrabble has a higher distribution because you can't have a letter with less than one tile. So 'q', for instance, is overrepresented in Scrabble, of necessity.

Other variations, though, seem to be more a matter of intuitive game-play facilitation. 'S', for instance, is less frequent in Scrabble than in either the lexicon or corpus -- obviously 's' makes high-scoring hooks easy, increasing its value as a letter, and Alfred foresaw this and deliberately made them scarcer. On the other hand, there's twice as many 'v's as there ought to be, as anyone who's tried to find a good way to use one knows (there are no two letter words with 'v' in them -- hard to hook). On the mitigating side, there's fewer 'c's than there ought to be, at least comparing to the lexicon distribution; ought to be 3, but there's only 2 'c' tiles. Since there's also no legal two letter words with 'c', that's kind of nice. I find it hard to imagine that Alfred was thinking about the availability of two-letter words, though maybe he was. Elsewhere, there's too many 'i's, compared to the lexicon count, and too many 'o's, but two few 'l's. In the latter two cases the corpus and Scrabble counts match pretty well, but he must just have been being perverse about the 'i's, because there the extra-high Scrabble count matches neither the lexicon nor the corpus count. (It does often feel like there are too many 'i's, IMHO.)

Anyway, thanks to Lance for pulling this data out! I think it's interesting how the two counts are actually not all that different. In the phonological version of this, of course, the edh segment would be the one with the way high count compared to the lexicon (rather than 'h' or 't' -- though maybe /h/ would also be high because of the pronouns). I wonder if any others would also exhibit significant mismatch?

Update: Check out this series of posts on the same topic at Nikolasco:
Scrabble Distributions
Best Fit Scrabble Letter Distribution
Super Scrabble

I was especially interested to see the results of his 'Best Fit' computations, and the discussion of Super Scrabble (which I have found to be actually quite a lot of fun—a more freewheeling game, especially with four players.)

Also, check out this post from Patrick Hall on Blogamundo about helping linguists execute their programming inclinations. Thanks for the thought, Patrick! I'll be watching for the updates.

(Spelled) segment distribution: lexicon vs. corpus

2006-02-28T21:55:00.000-08:00

Recently reading a historical para about Scrabble, I was surprised to (re)realize that the letter distributions in Scrabble are based on an (informal) corpus count (New York Times front page), not a dictionary-headword (i.e. lexicon) count. So, e.g., 12 per cent (12 tiles of 100) of letters in the Scrabble bag are 'e'; that's pretty exactly the percentage of letter occurrences that are 'e' in a corpus of written English.

The reason this surprised me is that in a corpus there will be many repetitions of function words, which probably inflates the percentages of certain letters, e.g. 't' (the, to, it), 'e' (the, he, she), etc., when compared to their percentage occurrence in the lexicon, which contains only one token of each function word.

But of course Scrabble is all about producing nice individual words, really, not about producing a corpus-like set of word tokens. Indeed, someone who repeatedly put down words like 'to', 'the', 'it', and so on would not get very far in a game of Scrabble. So it seemed to me that it would have been more appropriate to use a letter distribution based on the percentage of each letter occurring in a list of dictionary headwords.

I thought I would try to find out how different the lexicon-based letter distribution in English is from the corpus-based letter distribution, but I can't find any numbers online for the former. (Numbers for the latter are all over the place, of course, and match the Scrabble distributions pretty exactly; the reason letter distribution is so interesting to many people is because it's a good way to solve simple encryption problems.)

I know it would be a supersimple programming problem to produce a list of letters and their respective percentage distributions in the headwords of any online dictionary database (e.g. the fourth column of Mike Hammond's 'newdic' file), but it'd be a biggish time investment for me to figure it out right this second. Anyone who can see a quick and easy way to do it want to send me the numbers for comparison to the corpus numbers? It would be interesting...

(Seems to me that it might even be useful, theoretically -- if you're into exemplar models of mental lexicon representations, e.g., the frequency/markedness value of a given English segment in your mental inventory might be expected to correlate with the corpus distribution, while if you're not into exemplar models but rather a more traditional lexicon-based model, with a single abstract phonological representation of each given word, you might expect the segment markedness values to correlate with their lexicon distribution in English.)

They did it!

2006-02-26T22:44:00.000-08:00

Just have to note that the entire island of Newfoundland (and the considerably bigger hunk of land that is Labrador) has gone bananas with joy because the men's curling team won the gold medal on Friday. Hooray! They were very endearing about it too -- Brad Gushue, attempting to throw the hammer into scoring position in the decisive sixth end, with six of his stones already in place to score, threw the seventh stone right through the house and out the other side. Six points in a end is already an unheard-of amount in international-caliber curling, but he could have had seven. He said to his teammates in apology for the missed shot, "Sorry guys -- couldn't get my heart rate down." Six, seven -- it didn't matter; it was in the bag.
Apparently the provincial govenment declared a half-day holiday so schoolkids could go home and watch the game; the Memorial University of Newfoundland (my alma mater) set up a live feed a screen in the Field House for the whole campus to come see, which they apparently did. A friend of my dad's, himself a come-from-away, wrote in bemusement: "There are apparently three important dates in the history of Nlfd.: 1497, when John Cabot landed and claimed the island for England; 1949, the date of Confederation with Canada, and 2006, when Gushue and the boys won the gold medal in curling."
I expect it's keeping them all warm through the 60 centimeters of snow that apparently has just fallen on St. John's.

In other news, I'm about to go give a colloquium talk in Madison, where MILC will be happening again this year. Watch for an important paper by M. Goose and R. Rabbit!

Search interlinear data from 600 languages!

2006-02-23T22:53:00.000-08:00

University of Arizona alumnus and current University of Washington faculty member Will Lewis and his collaborator Scott Farrar, also a grad of UAZ, have put together a website that allows you to search for example sentences from over 600 languages, made available online in interlinearly glossed form. The website is called ODIN, for Online Database of INterlinear (linguistic data), and is part of the GOLD project.

The example sentences are culled from the web by a spider program that uses various heuristics to recognize the tell-tale signs of interlinerally glossed example sentences in on-line text. The spider then automatically identifies the language in the example by a combination of searching surrounding text for language names and statistically analyzing the letter sequences and comparing transitional probability profiles to those of language samples that have been hand-identified. It then enters the example into the database, which is searchable by language and gloss terms. (The 'Advanced Search' function, which allows access to the search-by-gloss terms, isn't linked to its button yet but will be soon.)

Will and Scott are currently working on upgrading the search function to identify several easily-picked-out syntactic configurations, based mostly on the translation line. For example, looking at the translation line of sluice example, it's easy to pick them out: interlinerally glossed sentences whose English translations end in wh-words are mostly sluices; this afternoon a quick simple query to the database for sentences like that turned up examples of sluices in Passamaquoddy and Hausa. Besides sluicing, future search functionality may include ways to find sentences exhibiting obligatory control, gapping, ellipsis, ACD, scopal ambiguity, and whatever else they can think of straightforward ways to automatically identify. Suggestions from interested linguists very welcome!

In other news, the Newfoundland rink has made it into the gold medal game in men's curling! They play Finland for the gold today (Friday Feb. 24). (The Canadian women won a bronze yesterday. )

I checked out the team at the Canadian curling website and it turns out that of the guys on the ice, actually only Brad Gushue, the skip, is from St. John's. Mark Nichols and Mike Adam are from Labrador City, and Jamie Korab is from Harbor Grace. Their second rock, Russ Howard, is a longtime Canadian curling champ from the mainland. The coach, Toby McDonald, is a St. John's man.

I'm feewing wucky

2006-02-17T21:04:00.000-08:00

My brother points out that in Google preferences you can set your preferred language for Google to talk to you in. It's got lots of your more interesting actual languages such as Xhosa, Twi and Guarani, as well as Klingon, Elmer Fudd, Hacker, Pig Latin, and Bork Bork Bork (what the Swedish Chef speaks). Took me a while to find English again from the Klingon menu, but I was able to switch to Elmer Fudd and then back to my native language from there.

The Canadian curlers have been rocking the house! (That's a little curling pun.) They were in first place until today, when they dropped back to a tie for second with Finland, behind Great Britain. Keep it up, b'ys! Get into that final!

Newfoundland English

2006-02-14T20:54:00.000-08:00

Hey -- if you want to hear some (St. John's) Nfld. English, tune in to NBC's coverage of the Canadian curling team. The Newfoundland team is representing Canada this year, and they've been playing some awfully good ends. The teams are miked, so you can hear them discussing the shots and encouraging their stones. So check it out! and root for them a bit while you do. They lost a heartbreaker to Sweden today, but they're still in it.

Peter Ladefoged

2006-01-26T22:31:00.000-08:00

I never met him, nor read any writing of his beyond A Course In Phonetics when I was an undergraduate, which has thus far constituted pretty much my entire professional exposure to phonetics. But when I got an email announcing his death this morning from a listserv, I felt startled at how shaken I was by the news. I felt sad at the thought of how sad many of my colleagues in the extended fraternity of linguists must be feeling. I subsequently went and read several of the various documents people had linked to in the annoucements, and felt a bit more entitled to feel sad on my own behalf, for having never met him.

You can hear Peter's (rather devastating) voice for yourself at this URL:

Vowels And Consonants, Chapter 2

The random lines of English he's reading form a bit of a poem themselves, really.

UWO in Canada rationalizes language consulting approval

2005-11-18T08:56:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, Claire Bowern over at Anggarrgoon was collecting examples of human subjects policies as they apply to language consultants at various institutions. In that connection, I've been meaning to post this announcement I received from the Canadian Linguistics Association mailing list a couple of weeks ago for consideration:

"The Office of Research Ethics at the University of Western Ontario has recently approved a document giving exemption from ethical review for certain types of language consultation. We invite linguists across Canada to consult this document and to use it as the basis for exemption at their institution if they so choose. This document was written by Claire Gurski, Stephanie Kelly, David Heap and Ileana Paul from the Department of French at UWO and we would like to thank the research group PERL (Practice of Ethics for Research in Linguistics) for their hard work over the summer. A link to the document can be found on the PERL website, as well as other information about our on- going activities:

http://ling.uwo.ca/perl/ "

The document itself can be downloaded at this link: http://www.uwo.ca/research/ethics/nonmed/3g006-guideline-language-consultation-oct-2005.pdf.

In my own capacity as field researcher, I present a two-and a half-page, densely written consent form to my consultants for their signature. This document, based on University of Arizona guidelines and modified by me for my particular research project, was vetted extensively by our Human Subjects office and was a necessary part of getting project approval. Its intention is solely to ensure that my consultants are fully informed of any possible negative effects that the research project might have for them, and to be sure that they are aware that they can withdraw from the project at any time, and of the compensation rates which they are entitled to for participating in the research.

Despite all of these good motivations, however, the document is a problem; it's quite awkward to begin my relationship with my usually elderly, sometimes not-100%-fluent in English consultants by asking them to sign something that looks like a contract and describes every imaginable negative repercussion they might suffer from participating in the research. I am required to (and do) explain the content of the document to my consultants in cases where they don't seem to want to or be able to read it, and I explain that it's required for them to sign it, but it's not the best way to begin a comfortable, friendly relationship that I hope will last over many sessions.

Not only that: I personally feel that the relationship of a linguistic researcher and language consultant is just that -- a professional relationship between an investigator and someone with expert knowledge not available in the population at large (particularly in the case of minority or endangered languages). Treating a language consultant as a 'human subject' seems to me to express exactly the wrong attitude. The consultant is an expert who must be treated with respect and appreciation, more like a teacher than a experimental subject. Although the elicitation of a grammaticality judgment is technically a psychological experiment, it is one which crucially depends on the specialized knowledge of the judger and their willingness to deploy it. The consent form, however, administered as part of the 'human subjects protection program', is a disempowering document, with a 'me investigator, you gerbil' feel to it. We do have to watch out for our gerbils, human and otherwise, but a language consultant is not one and should not be made to feel like one. (This sentiment is much more eloquently expressed in the PERL document linked to above.)

It is of paramount importance as a field researcher to be aware of the ethical ramifications of one's work, and to be sensitive and responsive to the wishes and needs of one's consultants and their larger community of language speakers, most especially in cases of minority and endangered languages. I would consider it very appropriate for our human subjects office to try to find a way to monitor researchers' behavior with respect to these questions. I don't think that consent form model, however, succeeds at this particularly well, and consequently I applaud the UWO decision to exempt language consultant work from this procedure.

rationale which

2005-11-17T08:12:00.000-08:00

Been insanely busy these last few weeks (somehow have managed to become more than a month late on no less than four projects, which is kind of putting me in a paralyzing frenzy of conflicting priorities -- must do this today! no, this is more urgent! no, this is!) and has hence cut into blogging time. But just noticed the following which/that alternation in reading a student's paper. My student wrote:

"The voiced velar stop is only found in recent loan words from Spanish, that is why it is in parentheses."

As it is, I find I can only read this as a run-on sentence, with 'that' anaphoric to the preceding proposition; it should therefore be punctuated with a period after 'Spanish' and a captial 't' on 'That'. However, the rationale clause could be introduced with 'which' and be perfectly good as some kind of adjunct to the root clause, allowing the current punctuation to stand; that's how I've corrected it, as I think it's what is intended.

0. The voiced velar stop is only found in recent loan words from Spanish, which is why it is in parentheses.

The question is, what kind of adjoined clause is this (the corrected version)? Is it a nonrestrictive relative on a proposition? Does that phrase even make any sense at all (can one have a relative clause of any kind on anything other than an NP/DP?)? (Hmm. If I try to use this type of which-clause on a DP as any kind of relative, I get weirdness -- (1) below seems bad, but (2) is fine.

1. *(Sue described) [the situation(,) which was why she left]
2. (Sue described) [the situation(,) which was the cause of her leaving]

trying the same thing for 'how', I don't get the contrast as strongly. (3) is with a 'which is how...' clause modifying a propositon, like the first case above; (4) has a 'which is how...' modifying a DP, which I find pretty much acceptable compared to (1) above, (5) has a non-Q alternant:

3. Sue pulled on the handle, which was how she'd opened it last time.
4. ?(Sue described) [her secret recipe, which was how she got such great results].
5. (Sue described) [her secret recipe, which was the way she got such great results.]

Ditto for 'what':

6. Sue ate one of Mary's cookies, which was what had gotten her in trouble at the last birthday party.
7. (Sue described) [her secret recipe, which was what had won her first prize the year before.]
8. (Sue described) [her secret recipe, which was the reason she had won first prize the year before.]

Hmm, ok, now I'm really confused; if I modify 7 back to a 'why', I find it's fine as a relative on the DP; maybe (1) is just a garden pathing problem which is clarified in the secret recipe case:

7'.: (Sue described) [her secret recipe, which was why she had won first prize the year before].

Drat. Now that I say (1) to myself again. I find it perfectly fine. (Cf, e.g., the declarative, 'This situation is why she left'). I must have primed myself for the propositonal-modifier reading with the original case, and hence illusioned myself into missing the DP-readig. So never mind the whole raving series of contrasts above. Unless you also find a contrast... do you? It's probably all a question for the newly credentialed Lance, who no longer wonders his time remaining, but rather his job prospects. )

Basically, I just want to know what to call the kind of which-clause illustrated in 0, 3 and 6 above, where the 'which' is adding information about the proposition. Is it a (nonrestrictive) relative clause? What is it? I'm sure I should know this. Maybe my overcommitted state has shorted out my network of grammar concepts, as well as my judgments.

scalar adjectives with arguments

2005-10-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a cartoon with a grammaticality judgment as the punchline:

Funny thing is, I concur: 'half empty' can't take an internal argument, although 'empty' certainly can ('empty of meaning', e.g.). 'Half empty' is also clearly fine. 'Half full' is of course fine, and 'half full' can of course take a internal argument. Here's some Google searches which bear out this judgment:

Ghit ratio: 'full':'empty'

1,980,000,000: 133,000,000 (approx 15:1)

Ghit ratio: 'half full':'half empty'

2,070,000: 1,810,000 (approx 1:1)

Ghit ratio: 'half full of':'half empty of"

247,000: 1660 (approx 149:1)

Indeed, about a third of those 'half empty of' cases seem to be typos for 'half empty or half full'; the Ghit return for "half empty of" -"half empty of half full" is only 1080, so the real ratio is more like 247:1. (Note that if you weed out the "half full of water" cases, to avoid that one expression about the glass being half empty or half full of water, you still have 188,000 hits for "half full of", so the ratio's still about 188:1.

Anyway, I don't need Google to tell me that 'half empty of X' is way worse than 'half full of X', but that the difference between 'empty of X' and 'full of X', although sensable, isn't of the same grade at all.

Whyzat?

Update: Mark Lieberman at Language Log has pursued this problem considerably farther, in the context of comparing search results between engines and reliable linguistic corpora, and has lots of interesting remarks to make and examples to exhibit. Among other things, he looked even closer at the sixteen hundred or so results for 'half empty of' and finds that not only are those typos mentioned above inflating the numbers, so are hits for strings that match superficially but have significantly different structures, such as "Only the most 'glass half empty' of HR professionals would...". Nonetheless, a few examples of 'half empty' with an internal argument that seem to be both naturally produced and easily interpretable did turn up. I don't myself find them particularly grammatical, despite their clarity, though the tide of opinion (3 votes for to mine against) seems to be against me here.
I should also note that the GoogleFight ratios that I reported above are slightly different than the results you would get if you just typed the strings straight into Google; mostly the Ghit results are a little higher. I don't know why that is, unless GoogleFight is plugged into an older/newer version of Google that is not obvious from their main website.

Bat-maaaan!

2005-10-04T23:11:00.000-07:00

Speaking of euphoniously named people, I can't resist noting that the only other Heidi Harley in the world that I know of has managed to teach a dolphin to reproduce the theme from 'Batman'. No, really! At this version of the story, there's even a link to an audio file, though I haven't been able to connect to it yet (it just gives me 'access denied').

Actually, it really seems to be about proving that dolphins can recognize and reproduce rhythms independently of pitch or tempo. Judging from the first quote in the ABC article, it's even maybe supposed to be about showing that humans' language-and-music skills are not species-specific, and hence might be an entry on the anti-innatism side of the great divide. Or something. Must remember to take the journalistic version of the research with a grain or lick of salt.

I look forward to many years of being asked about this by people who think I'm that Heidi Harley. I've got to work up a story to tell.

Sluicing puzzle 2.5

2005-10-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

This isn't mine, which is why it's 2.5; it certainly deserves its very own integer on its puzzle merits, methinks. Lance Nathan over at *I wonder my time remaining has gotten into the sluicing puzzle business with a good 'un; check it out.

3 sluicing puzzles: Number two

2005-10-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

This one isn't at all involved, it's just a simple query: Does anybody's theory explain why you can't sluice an embedded yes/no question?

E.g., what's wrong with (1)?

1. *Bill guessed that Mary had left, but when I asked, Sue didn't know whether.

or, to make the antecedent and the sluice even more parallel:

2. *Bill asked if Mary had left, but I didn't know whether.

Maybe you can sluice them but the C° has to be null, as in

3. Bill asked if Mary had left, but I didn't know.

Any opinions?

Update: Norvin Richards writes:

"Anne Lobeck had a theory that was intended to handle this, which she talks about in her book Ellipsis (and some other folks have used it or developed similar theories--Saito and Murasugi have a relevant paper in a J/K from 1990).

The theory is that you can only elide the complement of a head that agrees with its specifier--so the fact you're discussing here is grouped together with contrasts like "I wanted to read a book, so I stole John's __" vs. *"I wanted to read a book, so I stole a __".

I don't think they have a story about why agreeing with your specifier has anything to do with being able to elide your complement. And the facts for NP-ellipsis are not so clear--it sure looks like you can have D's like "that" or "five" with elided complements (unless there's something more complicated going on in "...so I bought five"). Ignoring this, I have an article where I try to get the facts to follow from tenets of Kayneanism ("Why there is an EPP")."

Thanks, Norvin!

Martin Sexton

2005-09-30T00:54:00.000-07:00

Just back from my first Martin Sexton show. I've been a Sexton fan since first hearing his music on WXPN in Philly in the late 90s, but always with a little bit of reluctance, because I'd also heard an interview with him on WXPN in which I thought he sounded like he might be an insufferably self-satisfied and conceited prat. Didn't stop me playing his discs, though.

But now I can say, having seen him live, that he's bloody entitled, if that's really what he's like, which of course it's probably not. Amazing. He's got a phenomenal voice, of course, and he's an excellent songwriter. He also plays with his voice in surprising and fun ways, setting up a second mike to create eerie and beautiful and wild feedback effects, and producing enough rich and layered sound with a single guitar to put most four-piece groups to shame. And finally, he projects a joy and abandon in performing that is absolutely infectious and irresistible, and which only a few other musicians of my experience can manage. He's an extremely generous & giving performer.

Plus he's a bit of a slob, which is endearing, and his fan base seems to consist largely of twenty-something males who I find very familiar; they all seem like they're in grad school. I think this speaks well of him.

But mainly: it was an amazing show, capped by a long, jammy series of covers, including A Day in the Life (Beatles) and Mercedes Benz (Joplin) and various Pink Floyd and Peter Frampton clips, among other things.

Go see him, all you residents of Las Vegas, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Barbara, Sacramento, Petaluma, Eugene, Bellingham, Tacoma, Dallas, Austin, Helotes, Tulsa, Louisville, Birmingham, Greensboro, Norfolk, and Northhampton out there. You won't regret it.

3 sluicing puzzles: Number one

2005-09-29T00:33:00.000-07:00

I don't actually know anything much about sluicing or ellipsis, but this past year I've learned a lot more than I had known, notably from a talk I heard at MIT in March by Sandy Chung, reporting one of the neatest observations I've heard in a long time, and now from a supercool seminar that Andy Barss is giving here at Arizona on the topic. Also, last year, a student in my fieldwork class at Harvard was interested in sluicing, and now this year I'm on the prelim committee of Dave Medeiros, one of our graduate students, and he's been thinking about it. Plus recently Rob Stainton sent me a paper, and then kindly invited me to come and kibitz at an ellipsis Erniefest he's organizing next year. So I'm gradually getting up to speed.
In the course of learning about it, I've run across a few related phenomena that (I think) are surprising or interesting. They may be discussed in the literature -- as I say, I'm no expert -- but so far I haven't seen 'em talked about. I don't have any immediate plans to investigate, but I'd like to tell about them, in case some one else might find them interesting.

The first one is a discovery from our fieldwork class on Finnish at Harvard last year, where undergrad Jeremy Hartman was interested in sluicing, and elicited some surprising things. The main surprise was that Finnish seems to violate Merchant's generalization concerning sluicing and preposition-stranding. This may have been noticed before, but this was the first I'd learned of it.

Merchant's generalization is this: A language L will allow preposition-stranding under sluicing iff L allows preposition stranding under regular wh-movement.

That is, in English, we can say

1. John talked to someone, but I don't remember who.

because we can say

2. Who did John talk to ?

... whereas in French, you can't say

3. *Marie a parlé à quelqu'un, mais je ne sais pas qui.
Marie has spoken to someone, but I neg know not who.

because you can't say

4. *Qui a Marie parlé à ?
Who has Marie spoken to?

In French, you can't strand a preposition when you wh-move the NP associated with it; rather, you have to pied-pipe the preposition along with the question word. That is, you have to say

5. a. À qui a Marie parlé?
To who has Marie spoken?

b. Marie a parlé à quelqu'un, mais je ne sais pas à qui.
Marie has spoken to someone, but I neg know not to who.

(Excuse any mistakes in my French, 'tis been a while. But the point about preposition stranding is true).

Anyway, the point is that the possibility of a sentence like 2 or 4 in a language is supposed to predict the possibility of a sentence like 1 or 3 (and vice versa). It's a very robust generalization, it seems. But Finnish, according to our consultant Santeri Palviainen and another Finnish friend of his, does not allow sentences like 2 or 4 but does allow sentences like 1 and 3.

Here's the illustrative examples, taken from Jeremy's paper for the course. First, examples which show you can't strand an adposition in a wh-question in Finnish:

6. a. Kene-n kaa sä leiki-t
who-gen with you.nom play-2sg
With who(m) are you playing?

b. *Kene-n sä leiki-t kaa
who-gen you.nom play-2sg with
Who are you playing with?

Because 6b is ill-formed, while 6a is ok, it's clear that the adposition cannot remain in its base position, but has to move to the front of the sentence with the wh-word.

And now, here is the sluice:

(7) Se leikki-i jonku-n kaa, mutt-en tiiä kenen (kaa)
He.nom play-3sg sb-gen with, but-neg.1sg know who-gen (with)
He’s playing with someone, but I don’t know (with) who.

The adposition kaa is perfectly omissible, indeed, Santeri suggested that the sluice is somewhat more natural without it.

Finnish is of course probably somewhat special in terms of its adposition inventory, since it's got a zillion nominal cases to play with, but it definitely has lexical items that qualify as adpositions (both pre- and postpositions, and some that are both), and they definitely can't strand in wh-questions.

Some, though, seem to do something funny when they pied-pipe along with their wh-NP. Compare (8) and (9):

(8) T tule-e ennen uu-ta
T come-3rdsg.pres before U-part
‘The T comes before the U.’

(9) Mi-tä ennen T tule-e
What-part before T come-3rdsg.pres
‘Before what does T come?’

That is, a preposition like ennen appears after the wh-phrase, rather than before it, when it pied-pipes in a wh-question. This might be the place to look in trying to reconcile Finnish with the generalization, I suspect -- it's maybe like Finnish does mandatory swiping in wh-questions, without the deletion part. (It's worth noting that in other respects, such as in exhibiting case-matching, Finnish sluicing is quite well behaved).

Anyway, that's the first thing. I'll post the other two (much less involved) observations sometime in the next week, but I'm not sure exactly when.

:)

Update: Francophones -- check out this survey on sluicing posted by Chris over at Serendipity. How bad are those prepositionless wh-words?

F*ing evolution

2005-09-20T20:28:00.000-07:00

There's an extensive article in today's NYTimes Science section about language, which seems to have so far escaped comment in the linguablogosphere. The title, "Almost before we spoke, we swore," frames the article as making a claim about the relative timing of the evolution of language and the emergence of swearing. The implication that the article is about the evolution of swearing is strengthened by an immediate attribution of an opinion to 'researchers who study the evolution of language'. This was somewhat off-putting, because I think there is unlikely to be any direct evidence of whether prehistoric humans swore or not.

The article, when you get to the meat of it, is mostly a reasonable presentation of interesting and evidence-driven research into what is behaviorally and neurologically special about swearing, in contrast to more neutral forms of human linguistic expression. However, choosing to frame it as a claim about evolution strikes me as fairly misguided.

The strongest statement of the apparent claim in the entire article is the following:

In fact, said Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the author of "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention," the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before.

In other words, the reasoning seems to be, because we have evidence that humans' linguistic behavior has included swearing for the past 5000 years, it has probably included swearing since linguistic behavior itself first appeared. This reasoning is supposed to be bolstered by the claim, attributed to 'researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing,' that all human languages include swearwords, i.e. that cursing is a linguistic universal.

If you substitute "recursive syntactic structure" for "swearing" in this chain of reasoning (where the facts are the same — 5000 years of written evidence and a reasonable conjecture that it's a human universal), I think you would have grounds for a fistfight among evolutionary linguists. I don't think that that claim would pass muster as the uncontested framing message of a NY Times Science section article.

Nonetheless, about 60 percent of the article consists of clearly written discussion of actual reseach on swearing, which was interesting and informative. I guess overall it rates about a C.

Penguins and therolinguistics

2005-09-20T20:23:00.000-07:00

This summer I was reading a collection of short stories of Ursula K. LeGuin's that I'd been meaning to enjoy for some time, The Compass Rose, and my mind was doubly blown by the first story, first because it was fantasy about linguistics (interspecies literary studies, really), and second because it talked about the poetry of emperor penguins, and I'd just seen the March of the Penguins. The story's titled " 'The author of the acacia seeds', and other extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics." I like the whole story, but here's the bit that I really felt showed LeGuin's amazing perceptiveness (and of course prose skills), decades before the IMAX Experience:

To those of my colleagues in whom the spirit of scientific curiosity and aesthetic risk is strong, I say, Imagine it: the ice, the scouring snow, the darkness, the ceaseless whine and scream of wind. In that black desolation a little band of poets crouches. They are starving; they will not eat for weeks. On the feet of each one, under the warm belly feathers, rests one large egg, thus preserved from the mortal touch of the ice. The poets cannot hear each other; they cannot see each other. They can only feel each other's warmth. That is their poetry, that is their art. Like all kinetic literatures, it is silent; unlike other kinetic literatures, it is all but immobile, ineffably subtle. The ruffling of a feather; the shifting of a wing; the touch, the slight, faint, warm touch of the one beside you. In unutterable, miserable, black solitude, the affirmation. In absence, presence. In death, life.

I read this right after seeing the MotP, and it really hit me like a ton of bricks. LeGuin, I think, expresses the stirring aspect of the penguins' story more elequently than the narration in the movie, which was full of (what felt to me like) Disneyfying talk of the power of love. Luckily they had all that amazing footage to offset it.

[You try spelling "Disneyfying"!]

The sheer enormousness

2005-09-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

The same NY Times article containing a use of 'as such' that prompted comment from Mark Lieberman at Language Log this morning contains another noteworthy linguistic innovation, this time morphological, that caught my eye. Paragraph 8 begins:

"The problems clearly stem largely from the sheer enormousness of the disaster."

Here, the adjective enormous has been nominalized, but not with its normal nominalizing derivational affix, -ity. Rather, the all-purpose default -ness has been pressed into service. To my eye, it's a classic example of overgeneralization, of the Daddy goed! type, only with derivational morphology. Evidence, methinks, of the productivity of derivation and of its paradigmatic, Elsewhere-Principle nature, and remarkable because of its occurence the the NY Times -- neither the writers nor the editors noticed that the standard 'enormity' might have been called for, in a prescriptive sense.

In a Google fight between 'enormity' and 'enormousness', 'enormity' is the overwhelming victor at 1,920,000 to 28,600 gH, so this regularization is still in its infancy; I wonder if it'll ever catch on. I found this particular case especially interesting because the nominal 'enormousness' is contained within a phrase that I recognize as a collocation, which I guess I'll have to gloss "sheer enorm-NOM", normally "sheer enormity", but in this case, of course, "sheer enormousness". The phrase "sheer enormity" gets 43,000 gH (more even than 'enormousness' by itself), while other, less codified modifiers of 'enormity' are much less common: "great enormity" at 437 gH, "extreme enormity" at 57 gH, "remarkable enormity" at 77. 'Sheer enormousness' does pretty well, considering, at 290 gH. Indeed, the gH ratio of "sheer enormity":"enormity" = 0.02, and the ratio of "sheer enormousness":"enormousness" = 0.01, not too dissimilar.

Given Mark's 'as such' observations together with the use of 'enormousness', seems like these NY Times authors, Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lipton, are on the forefront of linguistic innovation.

Update: Chris and q_pheever have brought it to my rather astonished attention that in point of fact, 'enormity' at some point fell into prescriptive disfavor as a simple nominalization of 'enormous', and 'enormousness' was recommended as the appropriate form. See the usage notes from the AHD that Chris has posted in the comments.

Spam!

2005-09-07T00:20:00.000-07:00

Grrr..spammers seem to have discovered this blog recently. Very annoying. Blogger provides word verification; I'm turning it on.

In the meantime, here's a couple of language cartoons for your viewing pleasure. Re the Dilbert languages: They're all in the Ethnologue.