Descriptively Adequate

'only' peeving on the comics

2012-01-11T12:27:00.003-05:00

i read all of my daily comic strips online now. one of the serious downsides to this is that gocomics.com has a comments thread(!) on every single strip that they post. they don't generate the same type of bottom-dwelling stuff as youtube comments, but they are some of the most mirthless places on the internet. nothing is worse than going all Van Hœt on something that's just supposed to be harmless fun. so i wasn't surprised, but still baffled when i saw this response to a Frazz comic a few weeks ago:

misplaced a modifier? what? i wasn't even familiar with this language peeve. yesterday i was catching up on my RSS backlog, and found a post about "The elusive 'misplaced only'" on Jan Freeman's blog Throw Grammar From The Train. it details how this peeve works: basically people swear up and down about a relationship between linear order and scope involving only, despite the fact that English doesn't work that way.

so the "only fetishists" would like Caulfield to put only immediately preceding heartburn, because they are blinded by dogma and can't see that it modifies the entire VP. all in spite of the fact that putting it there makes the sentence actually sound worse. in other contexts it would sound worser and worser. compare the following constructed sentences, also using heartburn just for fun.

my uncle went to the ER yesterday because he thought he was having a heart attack…

but it turned out he only had heartburn.
?but it turned out he had only heartburn.

moving only makes the sentence sound worse. put it in the progressive and it becomes even more terrible: he was having only heartburn?? not modern English. so no, our only conclusion here is that neither Caulfield nor Jef Mallett misplaced a modifier. he put it exactly where it's supposed to go.

"un reality" and unreality

2012-01-09T14:16:00.000-05:00

today, the following bit of Italian headlinese came across the tubes to my RSS reader:

Napoli, presentato Vargas: "Mi sembra di essere in un reality"

the post is about a new acquisition of the soccer team in Naples, and his reaction to arriving in the city. the quote in the headline appears to be "I seem to be in a reality." this would be a decidedly odd thing to say in English — some sort of metaphysical claim.

but actually, it's just the result of a creative borrowing from English. if we were talking about reality vs. fantasy, there's no doubt that the headline would have used the word realtà or verità. (note that i have absolutely no idea what Vargas actually said; the quote is given in a different form later in the article, although still including the word reality, and it may be translated from his native Spanish.)

so what is un reality? it's a reality TV show. wordreference.com even has a separate Italian to English entry for reality indicating this. Italian has a propensity for this type of clip-and-borrow process, often taking just the attributive piece of a phrase or compound, and they turn up very frequently in headlinese, where space is at a premium. (another famous example is Italian basket for English basketball, which is more common than the native pallacanestro.)

perhaps more interesting than the morphological process here, though, is the semantic shift. Vargas' use of un reality clearly indicates that the content of un reality is anything but reality! replace reality with sogno 'dream' or fantasia 'fantasy' and the sentence means basically the same thing. of course, the blame for making a compositional phrase that can easily shift to mean the opposite probably falls more on English here, but Italian helps to obfuscate the process. i'm sure if we start using a reality to mean a fantasy in English, peevers will tell us that it's just another sign that 2012 is certainly the end of days. i guess we'll just have to wait and see what the realtà turns out to be.

"grammar" as catch-all

2011-12-23T00:31:00.000-05:00

yesterday, Mignon Fogarty (aka Grammar Girl) posted a link to "The 20 Most Controversial Rules in the Grammar World" on Google+. sufficiently baited, i read through it. as i did, i noticed that "The Grammar World" is a very vast place, and may in fact encompass several galaxies.

i went through the list a second time to categorize each of these alleged "grammar" points in terms of what linguistic realm they fall under. (several fail to qualify for any linguistic subfield.) here were the results.

the Oxford Comma
orthography / style
the pronunciation of "controversial"
morpho-phonologycalling it that may be generous.
double negatives
syntax
they give a lousy example and fairly tone-deaf comments, but it's definitely a syntactic issue.
"irregardless"
morphology
ending sentences with prepositions
syntax
while writing this post, i noticed that when you create a link in the new blogger interface it asks you "To what URL should this link go?" at least it's reassuring that my blog software is a robot, not a native speaker of English.
"hanged" vs. "hung"
morphology
"like" as a conjunction
wait…what?
hold on, this is a double problem. anyone criticizing someone for using like as a conjunction should first ask themselves whether they know what a conjunction is. this peeve requires it to be anything that takes a clausal complement. the built in Mac OS X dictionary lists such uses of like under a subheading "conjunction", and does the same for when (which also baffled me: apparently Saturday is the day when I get my hair done contains a "relative adverb" while I loved math when I was in school contains a "conjunction". this is completely backwards terminology, since it's clearly the latter that's modifying something verbal, the VP [loved math].) however, the entry for "after" has no erroneous label as conjunction, despite the fact that it too can clearly take clausal complements.
so if this one was controversial, it's more likely because it's poorly defined, rather than having zealots on two sides of a clearly drawn line.
"good" vs. "well"
morphology
again, generously. this is a fight over the meaning and distribution of lexical items.
text/internet speak
vague orthographical morass
not particularly grammar-y, and a grab-bag unto itself. this should have failed the criteria for inclusion on the list by not being a rule.
starting sentences with "however"
syntax / style
starting sentences with "but" or "and"
syntax / style
should've been 10b.
gender-neutral pronouns
morphology
totally misses the point by not even mentioning singular they. in an article about controversy, we're failing to teach the controversy.
split infinitives
syntax
passive voice
syntax
punctuation inside quotation marks
orthography
possessive apostrophes on words that end in 's'
orthography
side note: my students this past semester were unduly concerned with this. apparently this is a failing offense in certain US high schools now.
"e-mail" vs. "email"
very specific piece of orthography
all the rest up to this point were at least generalizations that had to be applied to individual circumstances.
universal grammar rules
what is this i don't even.
we are informed that Noam Chomsky is an "influential linguist", but otherwise…i mean sure, there's some controversy over whether UG exists, and plenty over what it contains, but this description of it says so little. and if you were thinking that this doesn't seem like a "grammar rule" on par with the rest of the list, just wait for the next one.
the fact that there are different kinds of dashes
typography
GAH. orthography, ok. punctuation, at the fringe of orthography, maybe. EM AND EN DASHES ARE GRAMMAR? about as much as camera ISO settings are visual cognition, or audio file formats are hearing. this wins the award for shameless list-padding.
"who" vs. "whom"
morphosyntax
infamous. covered previously. (now with dead Google Video link!)

the final tally, giving benefit of the doubt: 13 items that could actually be considered on the spectrum of "grammar" from phonology to pragmatics; 4 orthographic points that tangentially bear on the written encoding of language; 2 ill-defined bits of nonsense; and 1 complaint about the geometry of making writing look pretty. i give it a C- and suggest it repeat its course on the definition of grammar.

Ignite Ithaca talk

2010-04-30T22:28:00.007-04:00

this is storming the internets thanks to all my friends promoting it. they will probably drive more traffic than me posting this here, but nevertheless, here it is: my Ignite Ithaca talk entitled "Why nobody ever taught you how to write good (and what you can do about it)".

newsflash: language peeves potentially irritable

2010-02-01T12:18:00.003-05:00

coming across the twitter tubes this morning (via @jillianp), this story out of New Zealand: "Research could dismay English language purists". in other news, "Water is wet", "Vegetarians not so keen on meat", etc. etc.

i shouldn't mock the bit of news that prompted this piece: a USD $400K+ grant to do a massive morphological survey of English. this could be incredibly useful. it's just the "context" that the writer put it in. gems like:

It is the first time the morphology of the English language has been looked at in this depth since rules were first laid out in the 19th century.

because before the 19th century, there were no rules! sheer and utter chaos! it's a miracle people could even form words.

but this brings up an interesting question: why did the (mostly inaccurate) grammar texts of the 19th century become sacrosanct to the so-called "purists"? and there's no doubt that they've taken on a mystical value, because they have the ability to trump basic logical reasoning. present a "purist" with two options—150 years of hearsay based on something initially wrong, or the collaborative research of renowned language experts—and they'll chose the former every time. and it can't just be anti-institutional, "down with the man!" sentiment; if that were the case, they should have rejected the prescriptivist poppycock (to borrow Geoff Pullum's term) in the first place.

oh well, we all know that the surest way to go insane is to argue with irrational people. so instead, i'll just pretend that the headline on the story was "Research could be pivotal for English linguists" and go about my day.

give and take: math and linguistics

2010-01-19T12:15:00.003-05:00

this is a response to the excellent post "Why Linguists Should Study Math" over at The Lousy Linguist, which i found via fellow Cornellian @nmashton on twitter. i was going to just write a comment there, but i realized that it would probably become rather long.

first of all, let me say that i am in absolute agreement with the sentiments put forth by Chris in his post. in fact, i'm going to be auditing the brand new, never-before-offered Statistics for Linguists course this semester. but i think that one major point needs to be added.

simply: there is a grave asymmetry in linguists learning math versus mathematicians (or statisticians, or computer scientists, etc.) learning linguistics.

here's the scenario. you're a grad student in linguistics. this means that you went to high school once, and probably were rather good at most of your subjects, or you wouldn't be a student anymore. in high school, they made you learn math. if you were really good at it, you made it through single-variable calculus; if not, probably trig. even if you didn't like it and haven't touched math since, you should have a decent sense of How Math Works, in case you need to pick it up again.

but the converse just isn't true. i've audited the NLP course at Cornell, which is taught by an excellent professor in the CS department who has a very solid grounding in theoretical linguistics. but that almost doesn't matter given the fact that there are zero prerequisites for the course. that's right, no LING101, no nothing. the demographics of the ~80-person lecture break down roughly as 70 CS undergrads, 9 linguistics undergrads, and 1 lonely linguistics grad student.

so what's the big problem? they'll learn as they go, right? learning by doing is the best way, no? wrong. as has been shown time after time on Language Log and elsewhere for this and other fields (law, education, etc.), these would-be NLPers have a complex against linguistics. i think they recognize that they're uninformed on the finer points of linguistic theory, but because "hell, i speak a language!" they don't think they need any more expertise to solve complex linguistic problems. throw more code at it, throw more servers at it, we can brute force our way through. i've watched them re-invent the wheel, and it's a square wheel with an off-center axis. and they're not looking to refine its design, or ask those crazy round-wheeler linguists what they've got cooking in their lab. instead they're trying to make titanium and carbon-fiber square wheels, thinking that will improve things. the mantra is to strive for good enough rather than (i concede, unattainable) perfection.

i think that linguists are more and more cognizant of the need for mathematical training. and for those who just aren't math types, they're willing to go find fellow linguists who are, or even statisticians and computer scientists outside their departments to collaborate with. but nobody comes knocking on the linguistics department door. it's open, guys, and seriously, you could stand to visit. we won't bite.

seek and ye shall not find

2009-12-07T09:16:00.004-05:00

morphological revelations on my morning comb through twitter and facebook statuses:

Just so we're clear: The past tense form of "to seek" is "sought" not "seeked" as 2/3 of my World History class seems to believe.

whoa. on the other hand, this isn't entirely unexpected. morphology tends to be entropic, that is, it favors simplicity and regularity and minimal expression, and moves in that direction over time. this doesn't mean the language apocalypse is upon us any more than the heat death of the universe, as predicted by physical entropy, is. just like physical entropy, language entropy can be locally reduced by other factors, particularly token frequency. that is to say—in the broadest terms—speakers are likelier to hang on to irregular forms of words that are used all the time, and tend to regularize words that aren't as common.

that brings me to my "whoa" moment. i just hadn't realized that 'seek' was possibly on the cusp of regularization. so the question is, how does 'seek'/'sought' stack up to other verbs with past tense forms in -ought? to get a comprehensive list, i turned to a reverse dictionary, which yielded just five non-compound -ought pasts: bought, fought, thought, brought, and our test case, sought. next to test their frequencies i headed to wordcount.org, a nifty visualization of frequency in the British National Corpus. admittedly the BNC might not give the most precise results for predicting the tendencies of young speakers in Michigan, but should be accurate enough. here are their ranks (not token counts; smaller numbers indicate higher frequency):

buy/bought: 785/1129

fight/fought: 1484/3204

think/thought: 102/152*

bring/brought: 631/461

seek/sought: 1875/1895

the data reveals that i perhaps shouldn't be as surprised as i was. 'seek' is the least frequent of the five verbs, although strangely 'fought' is the least frequent past tense form. i starred 'thought' since its frequency is probably affected considerably by use of the noun 'thought'. also of note is the fact that 'bring' is the only item whose past tense is more frequent than the base form; this is due to the fact that 'bring' requires a progressive present tense ("I bring the wine" ≠ "I am bringing the wine" but rather "I (habitually) bring the wine"). despite—or perhaps owing in part to—its frequency, 'bring' is subject to taking on a different irregular pattern, 'bring'/'brang'/'brung' in many children's speech and some adult dialects.

anyhow, to wrap this up, it looks like 'sought' might well be the best candidate of these forms to undergo regularization, even if i hadn't expected it before. the only other form that might do the same is 'fought'-->'fighted', but i think that would be even more surprising...i'm actually wondering why its frequency turned out to be so low in the BNC.

a postscript: although i certainly have 'sought' as the past tense of 'seek' in its basic sense "to look for", 'seeked' is also in my lexicon. it's the past tense of the relatively new lexical item 'seek' "to move rapidly through a video or audio clip". 'sought' is terrible as its past tense:

i seeked ahead 2 minutes to skip the commercials.

*i sought ahead 2 minutes to skip the commercials.

this kind of regularization is a common symptom of generating a new, distinct lexical entry from an existing form, cf. the classic case bad/worse/worst vs. bad/badder/baddest.

[UPDATE] regarding 'wrought', which is very low frequency, and i (rightly) eliminated from consideration as not being a productive past form. i commented the following on the ongoing facebook thread that prompted this all:

'wrought' is a strange case...it's actually the old past participle of 'work' (e.g. "wrought iron" = "worked iron" ≠ "wreaked iron"), and the historical past tense of 'wreak' is regular 'wreaked'. they got conflated because both 'work' and 'wreak' were used in the "____ havoc" idiom. since 'wrought' is almost never used outside the idiom any more, it probably doesn't fit into the regularization question here.

surprisal for dogs

2009-08-27T10:35:00.003-04:00

today's Frazz comic:

i don't know if anybody has actually done research on dogs' abilities to learn frequency-based patterns (although we had cottontop tamarins not so long ago). and unlike the ~~grammar~~pattern-sensitive monkeys, Mario didn't even wait to confirm the probability-based prediction, he just went for it.

AND??? and i hate you, congress.

2009-02-07T14:02:00.004-05:00

why, why do i do things like try to figure out what has been going on in the Senate regarding the scazillion-dollar stimulus plan? it only a) gets my blood pressure up and b) confirms that our elected representatives are morons, or at least have stared at legislative doubletalk for so long that their judgements about English have been seriously compromised. exhibit 1: Senate Amendment 309, introduced by Thomas Coburn (R-OK)

At the appropriate place, insert the following:
SEC. __. LIMIT ON FUNDS.
None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.

take another look. "…museum, theater, art center and highway beautification project"??? that is one hell of a project. in fact, i'm pretty sure you won't be finding any such mega-conglomerate initiative anywhere in the original bill. and they passed this amendment. what a waste of time. idiots.

of course, having someone proofread the damn thing and change and to or would have saved the nonsense that this will create in conference committee, in the courts if the bill is signed into law with this amendment in place, &c. &c.

Pearls Before Swine takes on English-only

2009-02-01T17:55:00.005-05:00

sums it up pretty well, i should say (click for big):

flavors of English on Google

2008-08-27T21:46:00.005-04:00

i was just looking through the site statistics for this here blog. one of the most interesting and useful bits of information that statcounter provides me are the search terms that people use. i would say that 99% of these searches are done on Google — we really have drunk the pagerank kool-aid. a lot of searches are pretty lengthy and specific (e.g. "kobe bryant interview in italian" or "who is the girl in the benny lava video?"). one recent search stuck out to me, though. somebody searched for just the word "whomever", and wound up at my previous post "The Office on whomever". i thought that was pretty remarkable. i clicked through on the link that statcounter provided me and saw that the search was made on google.co.uk, and that descriptively adequate was on the front page of results, at position number 6.

then, for whatever reason, i decided to re-run the search using google.com. my post was nowhere to be found on the first page. the results were entirely different. descriptively adequate finally showed up at #14 on the list of results. what's going on? certainly google hasn't written different versions of pagerank to deal with different localizations of English? as far as cataloguing search results goes, the fact that a bunch of Americans in California wrote the algorithm shouldn't adversely affect Brits and the like.

i couldn't stop there. i ran the search on all of the English Google localizations that i could think of, and got even more different results. i've also noted the number of total results that Google estimates, which also (oddly) vary by localization.

localization	#	total hits
google.com	14	7,480,000
google.co.uk	6	8,200,000
google.ca	7	8,180,000
google.com.au	10	8,190,000
google.com.nz	7	8,460,000

as i was compiling this table i remembered that Google mucks with your search results if you're signed in (which i of course had to be in order to access blogger, without which i couldn't be writing this post). i signed out, and on google.com the DA link rose to #4. i guess i should just be happy i'm on the front page on all of these searches. but there are still lingering, bizarre questions.

why does Google report different numbers of hits for different localizations?
no clue. (comments are open!)

what is causing the rank fluctuations even when i'm not logged in?
some clue. on all of the non-US localizations there is a feature "search pages from [country name]". perhaps i've got fewer australian sites linking to my blog, so my rank is slightly lower in australia than in the US or great britain.

why the hell is Google biasing my custom algorithm against my own damn blog?!
i mean throw me a bone here, guys.

and the baffler...
why do i get this on google.ca?
i mean, you're kidding, right? i'm sure that the frequency of whatever is much higher than that of whomever, but 8 million hits on a word that's in the dictionary should be enough data for google to not question my intent. and why only canadians, eh? this, of course, isn't the first time that i've seen weird spelling suggestions on Google. so perhaps they really do think they know something about English varieties that i don't?

Malaysian government fails to ban feature reconstruction

2008-08-23T22:39:00.003-04:00

please, don't judge me about the inspiration for this post. the short story is "sometimes you just get bored, and who knows where you could end up on Wikipedia!" tonight it was crappy pop song articles. thence comes this quote from the "Controversy" section of the article for this summer's top hit, I Kissed a Girl.

In Malaysian radio stations, the song has been retitled 'I Kissed...' with the words 'a girl' silenced throughout the chorus in the song.

never mind the odd choice of preposition (as a native English speaker i've never heard a song in a radio station; on works fine). the fact of the matter is that this censorship is about as effective as bleeping the -hole in asshole. if you take the phrase "i kissed a girl" and eliminate "a girl", then in isolation it becomes completely open-ended. it could be "i kissed a man" or "i kissed my mother" or "i kissed a frog". too bad there are more lyrics in the song's refrain!

i kissed ~~a girl~~ / and i liked it / the taste of her cherry chapstick

oops! there's a gendered pronoun hanging out there, eight words later. and it needs an antecedent. and the only preceding nominals are i and it. i can't be the antecedent, because then she would have said my, and it is decidedly neuter. so it can only be...gasp! she didn't! chances are nobody's getting the wool pulled over their eyes either; Wikipedia also says that increasing numbers of Malaysians are identifying English as a first language. they can put the pieces of this not-so-tricky linguistic puzzle back together as quickly as i did. censorship falls flat again.

i think i've gotten more linguistic enjoyment out of the song than by listening to it. there's one other bit of the chorus that intrigued me. it's the other pronoun in those lines, namely it. i'm sure that the intended antecedent is "[the fact that] i kissed a girl", but i can't help but get an ambiguous interpretation where it could be topicalized and actually refer to "the taste..." is this a weird judgement? comments are always open here.

we want...a count noun!

2008-08-18T16:15:00.004-04:00

it's great that Language Log has enabled comments on some of their posts, but it's all the more frustrating when i have something pithy to say and they're turned off. this is a would-be comment in response to Arnold Zwicky's post Countification.

in describing the difference between mass and count nouns in English, he says that shrub is a count noun while shrubbery is a mass noun. while i can certainly use shrubbery as a mass noun, i rarely talk about shrubbery at all, and when i do, i'm almost always quoting Monty Python.

throughout the Knights Who Say 'Ni!' sketch, shrubbery is used consistently as a count noun, taking determiners such as a and another, and having a plural form shrubberies. i never thought of these as ungrammatical in any way, although i suppose it would add to the humor, although the pure absurdity of the scene is plenty. we of course also have Monty Python to thank for the brilliant backformation shrubber (n.) - one who arranges, designs, and sells shrubberies.

aaaaaand back!

2008-08-18T16:13:00.004-04:00

a barrage of posts is forthcoming! i'm officially declaring my summer blogging malaise to be over as a new school year is (sadly) just around the corner. as with all my blog revival phases in the past, things will probably slow down in a few weeks, but in the meantime, here we go!

mind your [t]s and [ʔ]s

2008-06-04T18:46:00.004-04:00

this is a few days old, coming from this past weekend's National Spelling Bee. ah, America. home of the only language in the world that actually creates a need for spelling bees (as far as i know), and word final glottalization of vowels.

Erin Andrews and numbnuts? youtube gold.

don't mention this one

2008-05-12T18:06:00.005-04:00

a strange coincidence of events just occurred. i was walking home from campus, where i had been working on a paper on some bizarre control phenomena, when "Pipe Dream" by the now-sadly-defunct Trendy came up on my ipod. the first sentence of the song is:

would it be all right / if i asked a deaf guy / to borrow his headphones?

yeah, that's PRO, in a clause introduced by ask that also contains an object, being subject-controlled. i've got enough to talk about in my paper (analyzing sentences of the type "John said PRO to leave"), so this oddball case is going to get conveniently ignored for the time being.

WTF, Cupertino???

2008-04-29T00:30:00.006-04:00

i have just stumbled upon a most peculiar Cupertino effect trap. i am writing a paper for my phonology ii class on raddoppiamento in Italian. it's a continuation of some previous work that i did last semester. when writing my previous paper, i was running Mac OS X 10.4. the system-wide spellchecker had no clue what this big, long, Italian word was, and offered up no possible corrections. to avoid lots of little red underlines, i added the word to the dictionary and went merrily on my way. since then i suffered a hard drive failure, which had two consequences: 1) the dictionary "forgot" that raddoppiamento is a word, as far as i'm concerned and 2) i've upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5. no problem, i just have to re-teach the dictionary the word.

and that's when this happened:

whaaaaaaaaat? where did that "d" come from?? i fired up dictionary.app (which presumably is the same dictionary resource used by the spellchecker) and, no surprise, raddoppiamdento is decidedly not in the dictionary either. nor, as far as i can tell, is any substring that would fool the spelling suggestions algorithm (which i know for a fact does sometimes produce novel suggestions, especially when two words are accidentally conjoined) into thinking that raddoppiamdento was not only a possibility, but in fact preferable to raddoppiamento.

just for confirmation that i wasn't going crazy, i turned to Google, which seems to know which is the real word and which is the imposter (what the hell is going on, imposter just got flagged, despite the fact that dictionary.app gives both imposter and impostor):

um, yes?

if anyone has any hypothesis whatsoever as to what the great "improvement" Apple made to its spellchecker algorithm such that it produces these shenanigans, please leave a comment.

i can haz fotos?

2008-04-26T09:42:00.001-04:00

seriously, flickr? seriously?

a quick handful of refreshes gave me greetings in languages that i expected: Portuguese, Tagalog, Arabic, French, and English. although i guess flickr isn't totally hanging on formality—both "hello" and "yo" are given as English greetings.

just as long as they don't publish an entire site localization in lolcat.

on the origin of sign languages?

2008-04-24T10:32:00.002-04:00

with sign languages, the sign is not necessarily arbitrary. which can lead to hilarity.

i stumbled on this from a "don't click here!" link on mgoblog today. i'm a little embarrassed to say that i enjoyed it quite a bit, and there are several other related videos on youtube.

the performer is David Armand, in character as Johann Lippowitz. this was recorded in 2005, so don't get upset with me for being behind on my memery.

this also reminds me of the "fake language" videos going around youtube last year (which seem to have all been taken down since). in those, the best you can do to fake a language is try to make up nonsense words that accurately reflect the phonology and prosody of the language, but with fake sign language you can actually put some semantic content into the mix. just think about it: it's possible to "translate" an English song into fake sign language, but it's impossible to translate ASL speech into fake English!

everything's...segmented differently in texas?

2008-04-23T21:50:00.002-04:00

i've been watching a lot of hockey on the versus recently (probably to the detriment of my academics, but it's the playoffs!) as a result, i've seen the same eight commercials dozens and dozens of times over the past couple weeks. mostly they're unremarkable, but one stuck out. it's an ad by the Texas tourism board or something, and what caught my attention the first time i saw it is their tagline, which is displayed proudly at the end of the spot:

Texas: it's like a whole other country

i meant to write on "split another" last fall, but never got around to it, after i realized that there's already been quite a bit done on it (which i somehow can't find now via quick google search; odd). the fact of the matter is that i didn't have anything too exciting to say. my ideolect has split another—i say "a whole 'nother" without exception, so when i saw the Texas ad, it seemed wrong to me. i wonder how many Texans actually say "a whole other." my bet is that it's very few, and the only reason we got "whole other" in the tagline is because an editor at some point in the creative process nixed a spelling with nother.

so why prefer nother at all? this may be just due to the influence of orthography getting the best of me, but it seems that if you take it upon yourself to reconstruct the unmodified phrase by removing whole, the results are better with nother.

a whole other --> *a other --> ?an other
a whole 'nother --> a 'nother --> another

when you get to the intermediate stage a other, allomorphy kicks in and you get an other, but does it get to go on to fully become another afterwards? it seems to me that a 'nother is more likely to reform into a single word. like i said, i realize this is relying on the spelling somewhat, but i have a feeling that unless i'm totally artificially imposing it there is some difference in the prosody of an other vs. a 'nother.

regardless of whether this little reconstruction exercise was sound or not, i still think that Texas should have stuck with 'nother.

LL made me do it

2008-04-21T00:16:00.007-04:00

look at this here, a new post. back from the dead. Eric Bakovic posted a call for comment on a couple sentences over on Language Log, and I couldn't resist putting in a quick two cents. i'm sure his comments will be more in-depth, but here's a quick shot before i head to bed.

the sentences in question are the following:

I’ll never forget how he must have felt. (overheard)
Aren’t you glad you archived instead of deleted? (over-read)

1. I'll never forget how he must have felt.

yeah, this is definitely semantically odd. the intent and necessary pragmatic context seems pretty obvious to me, and i doubt that i would do a serious double-take at hearing it. the oddity lies in the complement of forget, "how he must have felt." there's no syntactic trouble, since similar constructions like "i'll never forget how that sunset looked" are unproblematic. there is a semantic disconnect, though. the predicate forget includes a presupposition, namely that whatever is to be forgotten was at some point known or experienced by the subject. this is not realized in the complement "how he must have felt," because the experiencer in the complement is not the same as the experiencer of forget (the forgetter, if you will).

nevertheless, i can come up with two scenarios where this sentence could be used felicitously. the first, and i think more plausible, interpretation is that the sentence means "i will never forget witnessing/experiencing his outward reaction of how he felt." for example, someone just dropped a full cup of coffee all over himself; he makes an unforgettable yelp and a look of shock comes over his face. it's an event not to be forgotten, and furthermore the onlooker has a pretty good idea of how a hot cup of coffee in the lap feels. the second, and a little more strained, interpretation is that the forgetter has had a strikingly parallel experience, and therefore "how he must have felt" actually refers to the forgetter's experience, which is in keeping with the requirements of the predicate. an example scenario: "his brother died of cancer last month. i'll never forget how he must have felt (because my brother died of cancer too)."

2. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted?

maybe i've just been organizing my email too much recently, but this seems perfectly normal to me. of course, if i look at it, i can see the object drop that's going on, which is uncommon for english. ew, i thought simple reconstruction would do the trick, but that just creates more syntactic problems. taking "your email" as the understood object of each predicate gives

*aren't you glad you archived your email instead of deleted your email/it?

bad, bad, bad. this is definitely WTF coordination. the closest grammatical paraphrase with reconstruction would be something like:

aren't you glad you archived your mail instead of deleting it?

the question then is whether this is still perceived as an oddity with truly unaccusative predicates. are the following weird?

aren't you glad you walked instead of ran?
aren't you glad you whispered instead of shouted?

the walked/ran sentence seems more natural to me; it might have something to do with the fact that the forms are not morphologically parallel. anyway, there is something about the "instead of..." clause that wants a tenseless verb form. i'll leave it to Eric to flesh that out further.

more posts to come soon in the future? maybe. because i quit blogging when it starts to feel like work. but when i have papers to write, blogging definitely becomes a preferable form of writing. (huzzah, procrasti-tasks!)

the peroles of "whore"

2007-11-22T13:24:00.001-05:00

i was watching the pregame coverage of the Packers - Lions football game today and noticed the continuation of a somewhat disturbing trend: strange pronunciations in the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner. now you should know that i'm certainly no prescriptivist, so this has to be offending some other sensibility of mine. my one peeve is certainly more legitimate than the other.

prior to today's game, the singer (whose name i unfortunately missed) pronounced the word perilous rather strangely, with a definite [o] as the nucleus of the middle syllable. i know that singing coaches often fiddle with vowel quantities, but i wonder what motivated the distinction to change [ɨ] or [ə] to [o]. it certainly wasn't by analogy to the stem which perilous is formed from, namely peril, in which the corresponding syllable is pronounced with [ɪ], which is perfectly acceptable in most voice coaching systems, to the extent that i'm familiar with them. based on some standard assumptions about back-formation and english orthography, you would guess that the stem is perole. but as i said, this is a bit more of a peeve than anything else—it doesn't really detract from the song.

what does detract from a national anthem, designed to honor our country, is the gratuitous aspiration of vowel-initial words when singing. sometimes it's even more pronounced than some sort of aspiration, and is an actual addition of [h] to the beginning of the word. this is dangerous within the context of the phrasing of our national anthem. i have heard several performers turn "o'er the land of the free..." into what very distinctly sounds like "whore the land of the free..." this sounds like an imperative verb with the interpretation "sell out the land of the free for sexual favors." now i think the whole ho ho ho debacle with the Australian Santa Clauses is absurd, but clearly pronouncing the word whore in the middle of the national anthem—even unintentionally—is really a bad idea, regardless of who it's offending. so please, respect our country, and watch your pronunciation, at least when you're singing on national TV.

quick takes; hiatus

2007-11-07T20:08:00.000-05:00

this is a very very short post, as i'm very busy. i won't be around to make any new posts until at least monday night, and probably not until tuesday. so here we go!

immature moments in phonology
in my phonology class yesterday, we were looking at a data set. i had to stifle a few giggles as i looked over one of the examples. this is probably funny even if you don't know IPA: fʌkkʌrʌ. i'm glad it was only referred to as "example 3" and not read aloud.

resumptive pronoun sighting
i noticed this yesterday while reading an article about file-sharing lawsuits:

It then demands the institution to turn over the identities of the individuals to whom the IP addresses were assigned to.

these constructions made the headlines over at language log a while back. no time to add anything new to that, but it stuck out to me!

gotta run now. have a good weekend!

as winter approaches...

2007-11-04T10:10:00.000-05:00

it can be dangerous when you gather together a bunch of linguists, give them alcohol, and sit them down around a bonfire. or it can be a lot of fun, but you might get some strange conversations. one such conversation that happened last night was an argument about the possible lexical categories of the word blizzard. i have, as far as i can remember, always used it as both a noun and a verb. other people, some of whom are from regions where blizzards are common enough occurrences, maintained that they couldn't ever use it as a verb.

we'd already had a conversation earlier in the night about how Google is a great quick-and-dirty corpus tool, so i combined the two discussions to find the following results:

word	lex. cat.	# hits
blizzard	N	30,500,000
blizzards	N/V	1,840,000
blizzarding	V	10,300
blizzarded	V	2,610

the noun form obviously is dominant, but the verbal forms are also attested pretty well. although Google's sorting of results is a definite bias, in the first few pages there are more uses of blizzard to refer to things that are not snowstorms (including the video game company, the Dairy Queen ice cream concoction, and a minor league sports team or two), but i'm fairly confident that in less popular results the prevalent meaning refers to the weather.

next i turned to the OED to see whether it has an entry for blizzard as a verb. they only give a past participle, which i thought was a bit strange. i can equally well say both:

it blizzarded twice in Cleveland last year
it's blizzarding outside now

like other weather verbs in English, i cannot use a simple present form of the verb, but only the frequentative

it blizzards/snows every winter here
*it blizzards/snows outside now

the only thing that puzzled me more than the OED's inclusion of only the past participle is their lone example of it, which has nothing to do with weather phenomena:

1892 GUNTER Miss Dividends I. vi. 67 Then he suddenly ejaculates ‘Well I'm blizzarded!’

therefore i have to return to my own intuitions to figure out anything more about the verbhood of blizzard. as far as i can tell, i use it in the exact same distribution that i use storm, as both noun and verb. this makes sense, since blizzard is semantically a subset of storm. there is, however, one blizzard-like phenomenon (note i don't say blizzardly, despite the fact that the OED attests it, but only with examples from the 19th century) which is strictly a noun in my mental lexicon: white-out. it falls in the same category as fog, not storm. the difference to me is that a storm or blizzard is a process, whereas a white-out or fog is a state. therefore it fogged, is fogging, is whiting-out, is white-outing, whited-out, or white-outed are all awful to me. i don't know if anyone wants to disagree with me on any of those points.

i think that's all i have to say about blizzarding for now, other than the fact that i hope it doesn't snow for at least a few more weeks.

Benny Lava revisited

2007-10-31T14:17:00.000-04:00

thanks to the sleuthing of an anonymous commenter, i've discovered the true identity of the Benny Lava song. it's by the Indian artist Prabhu Deva, and the title of the song is "Kalluri Vaanil." once you know that, it's easy to find the real lyrics, so i had to do a comparison. note the English codeswitches in the original Tamil lyrics, which i've bolded:

Male
Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?
My looney bun is fine, Benny Lava!
Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?
Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!
En madi meedhu saayndha nilaavo?
Anybody need this sign? Benny Lava!
Ennidam vandhu vaayndha nilaavo?
You need a bun to bite Benny Lava!

so we can see the origin of the name Benny Lava. each instance comes from the Tamil string -dha nilaavo. i'd personally expect something like Donny Lavo, or Denny, or Johnny, but we got Benny instead. the change of an accurately heard [la:vo] to Lava is natural, since it's the closest approximation that's actually an English word.

we can also see that the English comes from a mix of logical correlations and total fabrication. (n)enjil --> engine is highly plausible, as is the entire anybody need this sign line. there's also a fairly uniform interpretation of [v] as [b].

Haikuvae haikuvae... high speedil vandhaaye…
Have you been high today? I see the nuns are gay
Eyebrowai male thookki, I love you endraaye…
My brother yelled to me, I love you inside Ed

Buffalax missed a lot of English words here, only matching i love you (as did i on my first listening). haiku, which is well-established in English, is nevertheless a Japanese loan. i think the CV syllable structure of Japanese helps this blend in with the Tamil lyrics. high speed and eyebrow both get Tamil suffixes (huzzah word-internal codeswitching!), which helps to obfuscate them.

Female
Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?
My looney bun is fine, Benny Lava!
Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?
Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!
Haikuvaai haikuvaai… I love you endraale…
I told a high school girl, I love you inside me

essentially the same as above. the hai of haiku makes one appearance as high in each instance.

I'd love to see you pee on us tonight! (x2)

the mystery line. i have no doubt that there is in fact singing going on here. and the transliteration sounds frighteningly accurate. but no version of the original lyrics includes this part of the song. so the humorous interpretation goes unchallenged here.

Male: April May eppodhum
You fill me up with doom
Female: veppaththil veppaththil
Quit looking up at me!
Male: Endraalum ennangal
You got a minute girl?
Female: theppaththil theppaththil
The puppy had a fee

i would have never noticed April May here. the monosyllable [meɪ] could be practically anything. furthermore it's rare to hear the two words back to back in English, except in a serial list of the months of the year.

a bigger problem starts to emerge here. throughout the rest of the song, repeated words often get completely different interpretations. here veppaththil --> quit looking and up at me, which couldn't be much more phonetically different. there also seems to be a trend of transcribing the aspirated dental stop as a labial, usually [p]. we'll see more of this later.

Female: Dolphin gal thullaadhaa...
Don't think I do love her
Male: Ullaththil ullaththil
We're looking in a pill
Male: vellaththil vellaththil
We're looking in a pill

another easy-to-miss English word, this time because the stress is on the wrong syllable. then there's more craziness with inconsistent interpretation. i think we're looking in a pill is one of the worst transcriptions of the entire song. it breaks up a repeated section into two unrelated pieces, then does the opposite by itself repeating when the original is clearly different. in the entire two lines, there is very little phonetic matching at all except for the final syllable.

Female: Pollaadha aadavaa...
All of them like the bun
Male: Naan pooppandhu aadavaa?
Now poop on them, Oliver!

while the peeing line remains shrouded in mystery, the pooping line is one of the most accurate (phonetically speaking) of the whole song.

Female: unnaale imsaigal undaagum podhum podhum
Ooh daddy, just say it, you know the hole to put it
Male: imsaigal ellaamay inbangal thaanammaa…
Just sing it! You love me! Your pundit got armor!
Female: ichchendra saththangal undagak koodum koodum...
You send me...offended...you know the hole to put it!
Male: saththangal ellaamay muththangal thaanammaa…
Just sing it! You love me! Your pundit got armor!
Female: Puppuppu poochendae… puyalil poraadum…
Who put the goat in there? The yellow goat I ate?

it's getting worse from here on out. ellaamay --> you love me is at least creative and somewhat thematically right. i don't particularly like your pundit got armor for two reasons: first, it's not particularly grammatical; second, the stress on armor is wrong. then there's the dissimilatory nightmare of who put the goat in there, in which four [p]s become [h], [p], [θ], and [g], not to mention the vowels.

Male: Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?
My loony bun is fine, Benny Lava!
Female: Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?
Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!

(i like to swim in it)
(i like to swim in it)
(i like to swim in his beejay)

this interlude is somewhat interesting, since there isn't any actual singing going on, but the tones of the instruments do evoke the spoken word. someone who knows more about acoustics than i do could speak to this better.

Female: pennoda pulse enna?
A nerd to punk a nerd
Male: paarththene paarththene…
I'm bleeding, fucking A!
Female: stethoscope vaikkaamal...
That stuff is pink colored
Male: solvaenae solvaenae…
Some day I sell DNA

Male: sevvaazhai maynikkul
This boar ain't very cool
Female: ennaiyaa ennaiyaa?
You need a Hindi yew
Male: scanning naan seyyaamal
Got into Seattle
Female: sollaiyaa sollaiyaa
I'll lay a friend of yours
Male: naan paarththaal paavamaa?
I fought a barber man
Female: naal paarththu paarkka vaa...
We know what's in butter rum

this section reveals that in some cases where there are doubled words, the vowel quality does sound at least a little different, which i think is mostly due to the stress and pitch changes dictated by the melody. the English words are easy to miss, unless you know that this song is about medical students (in love. with dance troupes. in a field. it's a little pragmatically strained, no?)

Male: urgent aa operation seygindra case um undu
A jet pack operation...send him the crazy Hindu
Female: anbay dhaan naan seyyum operation case alla…
Whatever, my sadist, all baked and cooked alive
Male: Ellaikkul nil endraal en nenjam meerum indru
I lick you, belinda...the ninja made a movement
Female: Kannaalaa nam kaadhal Kargil war por alla
Tell Donna...no collar...i'll do what body loves
Male: tha tha tha thallaadhay… ilamai yerkaadhae…
I put papaya there...you love me inside there

the first time operation is said, it comes through clear as day. the second time is definitely trickier to hear, as it's a bit more condensed. i'm still a little confused about the phrase operation case, because it would rarely come up in English, unless you were talking about a medical malpractice lawsuit or something. i don't know what the common local name for the Kargil war is, so this might not be much of a codeswitch. Wikipedia is no help here, because all of the native articles on the topic are in character sets i don't have installed on my computer, and couldn't read if i did.

i mentioned before the [tʰ] --> [p] change. put papaya is the most salient instance of this.

Male: Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?
My looney bun is fine, Benny Lava!
Female: Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?
Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!
Male: En madi meedhu saayndha nilaavo?
Anybody need this sign? Benny Lava!
Female: Unnidam vandhu vaayndha nilaavo?
You need a bun to bite Benny Lava!
Male: Haikuvae haikuvae…
Have you been high today?
Female: I love you endraayae…
I love you inside me

so there it is, the amazing behind the scenes story of Benny Lava. a couple more youtube links just to wrap it up. first, there is a video with an actual English translation of the Tamil, although it unfortunately doesn't match up with the music. second, there is a similar video which takes the same song and does transliterated lyrics in Portuguese, which actually appeared on the web over a year before the English one.

now, after all that analysis and repeated watching and listening, i'm off to do something else, singing to myself Tamil that i don't understand.

foreign grass

2007-10-30T14:17:00.000-04:00

this past weekend i watched some of the NFL's first regular season game held overseas (yes, when i'm not actively being a linguist i'm frequently watching sports). the game was at the new Wembley Stadium in London. during the pregame, Fox's announcing crew was getting disproportionately excited about the whole event, as i'm sure their producers and the NFL instructed them to do. the strangest part of their reporting came when Tony Siragusa, the sideline reporter, gave an update on the playing conditions.

now i don't have an audio or video recording of exactly what it said, so i hope i'm not embellishing too much, but he said something along the lines of:

now this isn't a field, it's what they call a pitch...

something in the way he said it just made it sound like "see this rectangular expanse of grass? well this is no American grass. this is crazy British grass, which is so different that they have to call it something else." to be fair, he did go on and explain the difference in the types of grass seed used and the cut and drainage of the field—and these differences did play a factor, as the Giants and Dolphins churned up the ground into little more than mud during the course of the game. it was just the way that a simple lexical choice was preyed upon to create such drama, throwing arbitrariness of the sign out the window. i could imagine him standing next to the back end of a car in London reporting "now this car doesn't have a trunk, it's got what they call a boot! what will they think of next?"

in any event, it bugged me. i'm sure most American viewers barely noticed, and i'm not even sure if the game was broadcast in England. if it was, they were all probably watching Liverpool - Arsenal anyway.

eggcorn alert: "intelligible"

2007-10-29T18:52:00.000-04:00

i was just reading an interview with Erin Andrews (like you do) at a sports blog that i was previously unfamiliar with, One More Dying Quail. nothing out of the ordinary, except a couple places where OMDQ couldn't quite make out what was being said on the recording, and transcribed the following:

...to be honest with you, I have never played a sport, I obviously (intelligible) at all...

I’m just some (intelligible) who goes to coaches meetings and reads a lot of articles and talks to players...

clearly, if the recording was indeed intelligible he wouldn't have bothered writing "intelligible", he'd just say it. of course it should say "unintelligible." it looks very much like an eggcorn to me, with a reanalysis along the lines of in+telligible, mistaking the word-initial in- for the latinate negating prefix. if that were a good faith analysis, then a "double-marked" un+in+telligible would indeed look very strange.

who is Benny Lava?

2007-10-26T14:13:00.001-04:00

apparently this video has been around on the web for a couple months now. in short, it's an indian music video with english subtitles approximating the sounds of the actual lyrics. you can go ahead and watch it now, or just read on and see what my experience was after multiple viewings and listenings and then devise your own experiment.

so i watched it and was absolutely amazed that over 4 minutes of audio could produce that much semi-coherent english (although admittedly some lines are a little more of a stretch than others, and i know some were optimized for their comedic effect). my original thought was to post here and ask whether somebody who was actually familiar with the language that this song is written in could tell me whether there's any codeswitching to english in the song, as i know that's pretty common in the region that this video purportedly comes from.

then i realized i'd been pretty well duped. i gave the song another listen, this time not watching the video or subtitles. surely, if there were sections that were actually in english, as a native speaker i should be able to pick up on them pretty easily. only two snippets stood out at all to my ear: i love you, which i think is a genuine codeswitch, and operation, which i think is just coincidence.

i'm sure someone who has done more study in the cognitive science of language and literacy would have a better analysis than me, but in short i fell victim to the power of suggestion. by reading along with the grammatical (if nonsensical) english subtitles, i genuinely believed in most cases that what i was hearing was very close to what i was reading. but without the words in front of me, all the humorous lyrics were entirely gone, even though i had just read them all less than an hour before. even the assumed protagonist of the song, Benny Lava, almost entirely disappeared. the final vowel in what was transcribed as "Lava" sounds much more like [o] to me during an objective listening.

therefore i can only conclude that Benny Lava doesn't exist...but if he did, he'd say some pretty funny things.

The Office on whomever

2007-10-19T12:21:00.000-04:00

thanks to the magic of the dvr, i just finished watching last night's episode of The Office. there was a brilliantly written scene in which Ryan's usage of whomever sets off a raging grammar debate. since the writers weren't actually taking sides on the issue, but instead doing their best to represent its contentiousness, they were able to successfully portray several points of view and the way that such debates inevitably degrade into snarkiness. even better, they were able to go beyond the he-said-she-said type of argument and really develop some interesting sociolinguistic points. here's the clip if you haven't seen it:

let's break down how this argument goes:

Michael: No, whomever is never actually right.

amazingly we start off the whole debate with what could only be characterized as antihypercorrection (or maybe hyperanticorrection). usually whomever, the form that gets all the attention, gets overused in positions that wouldn't usually get accusative case in English, such as subject of a matrix clause. Michael, true to his character if you're familiar with the show, takes the high road on that and goes to the opposite end of the spectrum. personally, i'm not really picky on the who/whom issue but i do prefer whom-forms when they're the complement of a preposition or the complementizer for.

Creed: ...it's a made-up word used to trick students.

Creed, being the most cynical of the bunch, offers this gem. it's a good, succinct commentary on how absurd the teaching of so-called grammar in school is. although he, like Michael, goes to the extreme with a "deny everything" mentality, anyone who is a linguist and has looked back on the prescriptive drivel that was fed to them in their early years realizes that a good bit of it was, in fact, totally unfounded.

Andy: Actually, whomever is the formal version of the word.

by far the best line of the whole piece. the writer is language-savvy enough to know about registers of speech and furthermore the fact that hypercorrections (like using whomever to the exclusion of whoever) are often believed by speakers and listeners alike to denote some kind of higher social level.

Oscar: Obviously it's a real word, but I don't know when to use it correctly.
Michael: Not a native speaker.

finally some honesty from a character. since nobody actually receives accurate grammatical training unless they take linguistics courses in college, few people know if what they are saying is proper, improper, grammatical, or ungrammatical (of course there is overlap among these categories). there is a running joke of Michael considering Oscar as foreign because he is hispanic, so he calls him a non-native speaker. this couldn't be further from the truth. what is true is that so many native speakers of a language really have no clue how their grammar works.

Kevin: I know what's right, but I'm not gonna say...
Ryan: Do you really know which one is correct?
Kevin: I don't know.

ah, the disgruntled prescriptivist, caught in his own lies.

then a great debate about subjects, direct objects, and indirect objects ensues. no one is really sure what they are (our English teachers at work, once again), until Toby correctly analyzes that whomever in Ryan's original sentence was the indirect object. then he blows it, saying that's "the correct usage of the word." this, of course, is too limiting an interpretation of where whomever is allowed in English, which is basically anywhere that it doesn't receive nominative case. but we couldn't just leave it at that, an inaccurate conclusion. people gotta get angry over grammar!

Michael: No one, uh, asked you anything ever, so, whomever's name is Toby, why don't you take a letter opener and stick it in your skull.

and of course the writers saved the one, truly incorrect use of whomever for Michael, who utters it as a parting blow.

so there you have it. file The Office along with The Simpsons and Family Guy under "linguistic instruction fodder."

ARGHjectives

2007-10-08T17:59:00.000-04:00

under the category of "you gotta be kidding me i hope this was an innocent brain fart," today courtesy of Deadspin:

It was only a matter of time, really, until the adjective "to Vick" became an acceptable taunt between rival college football fans.

a commenter gets it pretty right:

"to Vick" is the most adjective verb ever

c'mon guys. even if you were taught by a misguided middle school English teacher who has no idea whatsoever what the term lexical category means, much less the fact that it is related but not equivalent to the common notion of parts of speech, you should know that "to X" is not ever ever ever an adjectival form.

geek linguist note: it should, however, be duly noted that in the [±N] / [±V] system of organizing lexical categories, adjectives are [+V]. that doesn't make verbs adjectives though.

short takes from the interblag

2007-09-25T21:40:00.000-04:00

a couple quick things i noticed today on my daily catching up with the internets:

you said what now? problems with foreign parsing

i read several sites in Italian to keep up on the world of soccer. a rather strange article surfaced on one of them today. it was about the International Gay and Lesbian Football Association, which so far in the article had only been referred to by its acronym IGLFA. as i skimmed through the article, i ran across this line, describing the organization:

Iglfa, l'associazione calcistica per donne e uomini omosessuali

i did a double take when i read it, because as i read i parsed "IGLFA, the football association for [women] and [gay men]." that would be a very strange group indeed! (the fact that this association exists at all sort of baffles me, but that's a completely non-linguistic matter and i won't take it up.) of course what i should have read was "the football association for gay [women and men]." i think i wouldn't have had any problem coming up with the appropriate reading if the sentence was in English and with the word order i just gave. but the fact that the adjective, modifying the entire conjoined phrase, comes last in Italian threw me off. however my brain dealt with the construction, it automatically presumed that the first conjunct [donne] was over and done with, not to be modified any further.

more matters Italian, "after the jump"

also from the Italian blogosphere, another usage that surprised me. it's recently become common for the front page of a blog to display only the beginning of each post (although i don't employ that here on my own blog). where the short version of the post ends is up to the writer, and they often mention what else is coming after the jump, i.e. if you click through and read the rest of the post. i thought this was fairly idiomatic, but it has made its was directly into Italian, as today i read a post that said

Dopo il salto il video con tutti i gol della sesta giornata di Serie B

Brit vs. US "slang qualifies as a whole new language" trope

bizarre article over on The Beautiful Game (via Deadspin)—they can't decide who is making up these crazy soccer terms. apparently they think it's the Brits, who are doing so just to mock the Americans. no one is sure how credible it is, and the fact that calling half a dozen slang terms the MLS's "own language" is in the context of something hopefully joking means the notion isn't a total loss. oh, and some of the "lexical entries", if you will, are pretty good:

KNOCK LIKE A BEAR KISS - The phrase used to describe when a tackle is more clumsy than dangerous, and appears to be worse than it actually was.

it took me all day to figure out that the apparent word salad [knock like a bear kiss] is an NP.

*also, if you didn't get the title reference, you really should read xkcd

rocketboom gets linguistic

2007-09-20T19:32:00.001-04:00

i am an infrequent viewer of rocketboom (at least since Amanda Congdon left the show, not that Joanne is bad, but i digress...) but i checked out today's show when i saw the title. it features several of the examples you find in your average LING 101 class designed to amaze/amuse/put to sleep the undergrads. among them:

structural ambiguity - "the woman saw the girl with a telescope." a classic. unfortunately mislabeled as lexical ambiguity
the @!@#$!&% buffalo sentence - i hate this. some people think it's the best thing ever.
semi-homophony in chinese - i bet chinese speakers hate this way more than the buffalo sentence.
garden path sentences - again the canonical example: "the horse raced past the barn fell." no mention of what they are, and no explanation other than a crappy mspaint drawing that actually misinterprets the sentence.

the horse raced past the fallen barn? um, close?

so yeah, that's all. five bucks says language log has a multi-page detailed explanation of this tomorrow.

my morphosemantically creative fridge

2007-08-26T22:43:00.000-04:00

one of my recent move-in tasks was stocking my kitchen. as i loaded up my freezer after my initial grocery run, i noticed the temperature control knob. it was, rather prudently i thought, turned to the position marked "Recommended setting." what baffled me were the two ends of the spectrum:

i'm certainly glad that the warmest option is cold, but the coldest option is not coldest, but colder. yet there sits the knob, somewhere between the two. how is that even possible?

disclaimer: i am not a semanticist. nevertheless, i thought as a native speaker i understood something about the degrees of adjectives in English and their corresponding meanings. to be sure, adjectives like cold can indicate a reference point at various places along the absolute scale of temperature. for example:

it gets cold in February. (0-30 degrees F)
it was cold yesterday [in August]. (50-65 degrees F)
red dwarfs are cold stars. (3500 degrees F)

i have some idea where on that scale the cold setting on my freezer should be: probably something like 20 degrees F. here's where things get tricky. slave to scalar implicatures that i am, if you ask me what colder means in this context, it means "anything on the absolute scale of temperature below the point marked 20 degrees F." members of the set include 0 degrees F, 10 degrees K, -10 degrees F, and 19.8 degrees F, just to give a few examples. members not within the set include 50 degrees F, 0 degrees C, 21 degrees F, and 20 degrees F. remember number lines from when you learned inequalities in pre-algebra? this scenario looks like this:

colder is a ray on the number line in this scenario. but by defining the rightmost position that the knob can turn to as colder, suddenly colder must be defined as a point on the number line.

this is productive in some ways. as you can see from the number line, it effectively places a lower bound on the range of temperatures that the freezer can be set to. (the fact that no numerical values are given is another issue, but i think it's safe to use my knowledge of the world to say that 10 degrees K is now outside of this set, whereas 10 degrees F is definitely within the set)

what arises now is the horrible morphological problem that makes my head hurt. we have determined that the possible range of temperatures in my freezer is

{ t : colder < t < cold } , where cold and colder are constants

this is an okay definition except that it flies in the face of morphology. every adjective in English has three degrees: positive, comparative, and superlative. in the morphology they are either represented by bound morphemes (X, X-er, X-est) or by paraphrasis (X, more X, most X). the morphology-semantics interface tells us what these degrees refer to. positive and superlative adjectives denote points, or single-member sets; comparatives denote rays or line segments, sets with multiple members. so for any cold, colder, coldest scheme, the cardinality of the sets should be as follows:

|cold| = 1
|colder| > 1
|coldest| = 1

therefore the problem with our definition of the set t above is the assertion that colder is a constant. this definition entails that |colder| = 1, and therefore clashes with the morphosemantics.

fun thought exercise to leave you with. ask yourself: give a name to what is between cold and colder. try to say it out loud. you'll probably say "cold" and halt, longing for some morpheme to tack onto the end of it that means "between the positive and comparative form of this adjective." what's remarkable about that is the fact that we're willing to admit that this distinction might be possible, so the semantics is not broken here. the morpheme just doesn't exist in the lexicon, so you can't produce it.

oh and a parting shot for real: if whoever made the damn knob just labeled it coldest, you wouldn't even be reading this.

back at it

2007-08-23T21:12:00.000-04:00

summer break is officially over. i've moved into my new home in Ithaca, NY and the department of linguistics at Cornell. as a first year grad student i'm treated to the "core courses" of syntax, semantics, and phonology. also on the schedule for the coming semester is Latin comparative grammar and a seminar on the morphosyntax of case. all fun stuff, and should be plenty food for thought (and blog posts).

my first class this morning was syntax, where we got a general overview of what the point of syntax is anyway. one of the points we covered was the difference between descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy. i volunteered to define the two, and did a real good job of botching the definition of explanatory adequacy. an omen, perhaps? or maybe just the underlying reason as to why this blog isn't called explanatorily adequate*.

*lies, it's because descriptively adequate sounds cooler.

phonological constraints in bracketology

2007-06-30T16:38:00.000-04:00

i haven't posted in a long, long time. this past week it's because i've been growing roots in front of my tv and computer watching Wimbledon all day every day. (it's the first time i've had a chance to watch opening round coverage, and my goodness, if you're a Wimbledon fan like me and my family, it will consume your soul.)

anyhow, the Wimbledon singles draws are some of the largest single-elimination bracketed tournaments that i know of, as both the gentlemen's and ladies' singles draws start with 128 competitors. despite the rain delays which England is prone to this time of year, we're approaching the start of the fourth of seven rounds of the singles tournaments. if you run through your powers of two, you'll discover that in the fourth round there are 16 players remaining. in the fifth round, there will be 8 players remaining.

but the fifth round isn't ever called the fifth round, because the nomenclature for tournament rounds works from both ends. the seventh round will be contested between two individuals for the championship, but we call it the finals. then working back up the bracket there are the semifinals, quarterfinals, and so on.

but really "and so on?" not in English. but yes in other languages. i'm most familiar with Italian, in which the rounds in tournaments are referred to (in reverse order from the finals) the finale, semifinali, quarti di finale, and ottavi di finale. but following the same model in English, what would we call the fourth round of Wimbledon? the eighthfinals--gross! nobody likes two fricatives next to each other. so it's the fourth round, round of 16, or even the sweet sixteen, unless you're a purist who doesn't use that term except in the month of March.

omit needless...

2007-06-09T22:45:00.000-04:00

today's Pearls Before Swine takes Strunk and White's infamous "omit needless words" doctrine to its limits:

so be sure to omit needless...whatever. because if you don't, your speech and writing will be unclear and people will think that you're uneducated. omit needless concerns that people (and goats) will think you're crazy and not want to be around you if you adopt this policy.

take that, ZYZZYVAS!

2007-06-09T14:21:00.001-04:00

zzyzx originally uploaded by brhino!

credit to my friend Brian, who found this sign on his road trip back to the west coast and snapped the picture. i almost have to believe that whoever named this "road" did so solely to make sure that it was dead last alphabetically. and it certainly beats out ZYZZYVAS, the alphabetically last entry in the Scrabble OWL4. and it actually has a semi-practical pronunciation...at least i would say [ˈzɪz.ɪks].

so i guess this gives an answer to the old "what's in a name?" question: whatever orthographic folly you want, if all you're naming is a dirt path in the middle of nowhere.

[update: sigh, i guess there's a wealth more of information on this place, as well as a number of other things inspired by the name. and it's not pronounced how i thought either, although i think the actual pronunciation goes somewhat against my orthography-phonology intuitions (although admittedly, English is just completely screwed up and such intuitions generally mean very little). ah well.]

alleged until proven guilty?

2007-06-04T10:56:00.000-04:00

there seems to be some new shift in the use of allegedly in journalistic reporting, beyond what has already received attention in the past over at Language Log. apparently now to have "allegedly" done something means that the action in question is still under some sort of investigation, regardless of the provability of whether it occurred. take this quote from a report on the UEFA website about this weekend's Euro 2008 qualifying match between Sweden and Denmark that was abandoned by the referee:

German referee Herbert Fandel abandoned the Group F qualifier in the closing stages with the scores level at 3-3. He had awarded a penalty to Sweden and given a red card to Denmark's Christian Poulsen when a spectator came on to the pitch and allegedly assaulted him.

if you don't regularly follow European football (or if you weren't stuck in an airport watching CNN Headline News, which covered the story three times in an hour), i offer you the following clip. perhaps the matter is still under investigation (both by UEFA and police), but i see no "alleged" assault taking place here. it seems more clear-cut than that.

codeswitching envy

2007-05-27T12:20:00.000-04:00

i've lifted this quote wholesale from the facebook wall of my Italian cousin who is coming to the US in the fall to begin his freshman year of college:

hahaha yeah man it was so cool. minchia the autista was fumating a cigaro and he had ray-ban aviators! cazzo era un grande. allora, how is it without me now?

for some reason or another, i find this so incredibly amusing. i think it might be derived from jealousy. i can only codeswitch out of Italian (because my vocabulary is so damn small), not back and forth like this person. my personal favorite is the morpheme-level switch in fumating. i gotta find a context to use that one.

this is a *postest. wait, no...

2007-05-26T20:29:00.000-04:00

today i again had occasion to lament the fact that it's impossible to add superlative endings to nouns in English like you can in (at least some) Romance languages. so i'm sitting around on Saturday morning, watching Serie B calcio (like you do), when the Italian announcer on Rai International says:

c'era una occasionissima per la Juve!

the only way to render this in English is to say something like "that was a great chance for Juve!" something like "that was a chancest..." or even "that was the chancest..." (since English superlatives like to take definite articles) are both horrible. in lay terms, chancest is just not a word. more precisely, the rules of English morphology and in particular the features of the superlative suffix -est prohibit it from being attached to nouns.

although -est most frequently is suffixed to adjectives, it's common knowledge that not all positive adjectives mesh nicely with it. thus there are sets such as:

sweet / sweeter / sweetest
sour / *sourer / *sourest
elite / *eliter / *elitest

these two examples can rule out semantics (sweet and sour are both taste sensations) and phonetics (sweet and elite both terminate in a stressed syllable [it]) as reasons that -er and -est are prohibited here. they are some of the most fickle morphemes English has. the semantic concepts of sourer, sourest, eliter, and elitest are still representable in English, but rely on periphrasis.

sour / more sour / most sour
elite / more elite / most elite

so how well does most pair with nouns? not great. taking our chance example from above, applying most gives equally bad translations:

*that was a chancest for Juve
*that was a most chance for Juve
*that was the most chance for Juve
that was the most chance that they'll get today

the fourth and final example, with a restrictive relative clause introduced by that and modifying most chance works. its semantics are slightly different. it turns chance into a mass noun, which allows most to exert a quantificational force over it. consider the semantics of the following:

the best chance they'll get all day
the most chance they'll get all day

they are very similar, but i would say not identical. the syntax certainly teases apart when using a concrete count noun that cannot have a mass noun interpretation.

the best book i read all summer
*the most book i read all summer

[i might be able to utter the second of these sentences, given the right context and a bit of sarcasm thrown in. for example: "so you had to read War and Peace for your summer reading assignment?" "yeah, that was the most book i read all summer!" in this case, though, the most book means the longest book, not the highest quality book.]

i think i've run out of comments and written myself into a corner to boot. this is a pretty long post. but i don't think that can make it a most post or certainly not a postest. not in English at least.

clicks are hard to do

2007-05-25T17:37:00.000-04:00

i caught a bit of Fresh Air on NPR as i was running an errand this afternoon. they were replaying an interview from about a year ago, featuring Nicholas Wade, a science reporter from the New York Times. the segment is entitled "DNA Analysis Illuminates the History of Man" and one part of it is dedicated to the spread of language in and outside of Africa as early human populations moved around that part of the world and genetically diverged from one another. Mr. Wade is obviously not a linguist, but said nothing really objectionable until this, regarding why there are a small set of languages that exhibit click sounds:

clicks are quite hard to do...it's very hard to do a double click, which several of these languages have. so it looks like once you have clicks you can lose them, but it's very hard to see anyone inventing a click from scratch. so if that's the case clicks have only been lost and not gained, and they must be of great antiquity.

now i remember my introductory phonology class and i remember saying "these sounds are hard to do" during our unit on non-English sounds. but to say objectively that sounds are hard to do is ridiculous. sounds are either possible or impossible (and some are impossible, just because the vocal tract doesn't create the shape that would cause such a sound). non-native sounds can be difficult for people to do. for example, i cannot, no matter how hard i try, produce a trill r, but if i had grown up in Italy, where the trill r is part of the native language, i would be able to produce them perfectly. Wade's assertion that clicks wouldn't be invented because they are hard to do is preposterous. furthermore, they must have been started by somebody, and there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason why these earlier humans would be more likely to "invent" the click than modern humans, who wouldn't do such a silly thing. it's true, native speakers of English aren't going to be going around trying out clicks and inserting them into their speech and saying "hey this is the Cool New Thing in phonemes, so everyone should adopt it." i suppose the bottom line of the story, which was that the peoples who do speak click languages have highly similar genetics, is valid and useful to both anthropologists and linguists. it also has scientific basis for uniting and distinguishing these peoples, but i guarantee that they don't pride themselves on the difficulty of their language.

more lolguistics

2007-05-11T21:40:00.000-04:00

i don't know whether i should promise that this will be my last post on lolcats, because there has been a flurry of new content about it recently. a surprisingly large group of people have taken interest in actual linguistic analysis of the lolcat idiom. the latest comes from David McRaney at Zero Sum Mind. the fact that his article concludes with this chart indicates the seriousness of his study of lolcats and related memes:

The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.

these are, of course, constructed dialects, not actually languages. terminology aside, this is a fascinating opportunity who are interested in dialect and language change.

It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information. Strunk and White would probably be appalled...

the linguists hope for nothing less.

literecy cat ≠ linguist cat

2007-05-10T14:26:00.000-04:00

the lolcats phenomenon is ridiculous, if not a bit amusing. (i think the real reason i enjoy it is because it pokes fun at those people who take photos of their cats and post them to flickr ad nauseam.) recently the phraseology of lolcats has been noticed by linguists, and it's been asked whether there is an actual rule-based lolcat dialect, and therefore, sentences which are ungrammatical in lolcat. i think this is true, even if the rules were historically derived from snowclones. there are morphological changes, such as simplification of the paradigm of have (has is used in for all persons and numbers). there are syntactic changes, including modifications to the ways that modals combine with predicates (i can has X, i is be Y, etc.). so i was all ready to conclude that yes, cats can has grammar, when this appears on I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER, the canonical lolcats site:

dammit! here i am, ready to call lolcat a real, if contrived, dialect of English, and this guy has to go fly in the face of it. things that are wrong with it:

it doesn't know what grammar is. the sentence "Literacy Cat is amazed at your perfect grammar" is itself a perfectly grammatical sentence of standard English. deliberate misspellings have been conflated with ungrammaticality.
it enforces the concept of a standard. even though it doesn't say so explicitly, it implies that lolcat is "not perfect" and therefore stigmatizes it. (please though, don't take this as an endorsement that should there be people out there actually speaking lolcat that we shouldn't stigmatize them. there are no native speakers of this dialect, and deliberately invented dialects shouldn't have equal status as native dialects. it's just the principle of the matter.)
literacy is not language. everyone in the world, with a handful of exceptions, can and does speak a language. most of the world cannot read or write. i guess literacy cat really isn't qualified to be making linguistic generalizations. it's just that no one else realized that. and that is be my problem with stuff like this.

ohi:yoˀ update

2007-05-10T14:14:00.000-04:00

an update to my previous post. on my return drive from Ithaca i saw more signs with IPA-looking stuff. besides the signs at river crossings, there were ones notifying me that i was entering the Allegany Indian Reservation of the Seneca Nation. turns out that the signs below are actually just printed in the Seneca language. Seneca has a fairly small set of phonemes, all of which are present in English except for contrastive long vowels and nasal vowels.

apparently since Seneca had no native orthography (that is my conjecture, i don't know that for certain), a slightly modified IPA became its de facto writing system. i'll leave commenting on that process to the socio-historical linguists.

welcome to New York, linguist

2007-05-07T20:11:00.000-04:00

i am currently in Ithaca, New York, my soon-to-be home for the next five years. i'm here doing apartment hunting for when i move here in the fall to start my grad work in linguistics at Cornell. as i was driving in along interstate 86 this afternoon, shortly after entering New York there are two spots where the road crosses the Allegheny River. at both of them, there are signs that read:

Allegheny River
ohiːyoˀ

i did a double take as i passed the first one. did that say what i thought it said? a (fairly narrow, all things considered) IPA transcription of the native pronunciation of Ohio, the original name of this river? if there hadn't been a second, identical sign a few miles down the road, i might not have fully believed it.

while this is cool, i honestly have no idea what the NYDOT thinks they're accomplishing with these signs. it's safe to say that the percentage of the population that knows IPA is effectively zero. even though the basic pronunciation can be surmised by someone who doesn't know IPA, because the symbols are fairly common, they will certainly wonder at the little dots and squiggles around some of the vowels. i suppose piquing the driving masses' interest in linguistics with such signs could be useful if there were any explanation for them whatsoever, but they are completely devoid of context unless you have the pre-existing knowledge necessary to make the couple of logical steps to relate them to the sign announcing the passage over the Allegheny.

i don't know who lobbied to get those signs put up, and they still seem rather silly. but maybe it's just a sign that New York is a good place to be a linguist.

Strunk'd!

2007-05-05T14:35:00.000-04:00

i have piles and piles of books in my bedroom at home, so earlier this week i was going through and cataloging them with Delicious Library. as i was going through one pile i was a bit surprised when this title jumped out at me:

it was given to me as a high school graduation present by someone misguided enough to pay it any heed. just to comfort myself, i made a few changes to the item details. i think it's more accurate this way.

anyone who has advice as to the best way to dispose of this monstrosity, feel free to leave a comment

the blog returneth

2007-05-02T21:58:00.000-04:00

i noted as a caveat in my inaugural post that there is no fixed schedule for posts here, although i do acknowledge that this latest hiatus was longer than what i planned. i think i easily spent two weeks' worth of linguistic writing by cranking out my 20-page syntax final paper, "Structure and Syntax of English Imperatives", in the final 48 hours before it was due. it turns out imperatives are pretty strange syntactically. i may post an excerpt here about the existence of pro in English and maybe expand on it.

i might have returned to blogging a bit sooner except just following the linguistics paper came graduation festivities and move-out hassle. now i should have some decent free time to write, and i do have ideas for posts at the ready. first up should be one that i started a couple weeks ago, on the latest addition to the class of conjunctions in English, slash. then some markedness and avoidance stuff, little pro (as mentioned above), and—every linguist's favorite—bashing Evil Prescriptivist Treatises.

waesucks for the late-night paper writer

2007-04-18T14:25:00.000-04:00

a couple nights ago i was up late working on a final paper about Latin interjections and their use in one of Terence's comedies. the first part of the paper was devoted to grouping the interjections based upon their semantics and looking for any commonalities they may have. i was dealing with the set of interjections representing "woe, grief, or dismay" (which in fact, do have some interesting phonological features: most of them contain diphthongs and none of them contain obstruent consonants). one of the three Latin interjections in question was vae. since i had just used the word woe a few sentences prior, i headed to the OED to verify my sudden hunch that the two are in fact cognate.

one of the points i made in a footnote of my paper is that English woe is a bit more productive than Latin vae because it is no longer strictly an interjection, but has gained new life as a noun. apparently, woe had quite an interesting life in the early history of English, when it was very productive, combining with other words.

the absolute best of these, in terms of sheer entertainment value? waesucks!

if waesucks hadn't died out and instead had gone on through the sound changes which altered the two morphemes which comprise it, in modern English we would have some word woesakes. as it is, the word appears not to have made it to the 20th century (but is attested as late as 1867). that, i'm afraid, is the 20th century's loss. some other fun facts:

it's pronounced just like it looks: [wesʌcks]
waesucks appears to select a CP as its complement, and in the examples which the OED cites this CP is always headed by for
both WAESUCK and WAESUCKS are good in Scrabble, so remember that the next time you see ACEKSUW on your rack

a piece of pasta

2007-04-13T16:50:00.001-04:00

today's Frazz muses on plural and singular forms of words that have been borrowed into English:

for a Bryson Elementary student, this girl has quite the knack for spotting such words, and is basing her assumption on such common pairs as cactus~cacti or syllabus~syllabi (to avoid the issue that standard English plural formation works perfectly fine with these nouns, yielding equally valid* cactuses and syllabuses). she's unfortunately made her morphological leap of faith based upon the wrong language. although ravioli looks like a Latin plural, it is—just like the food it represents—purely Italian. thus the singular should be raviolo. raviolo is actually quite well attested: 95,000 Italian Google hits and citation in Wiktionary, which is even so bold to say that raviolo is the English singular form!
*apparently the Firefox spellcheck doesn't think so, but the OED backs me up.

i already knew that words for different types of pasta inflected for singular and plural in Italian, from the first time that i heard the phrase un gnocco (which rather startled me at the time). it seems that virtually all of the food terms borrowed from Italian to English are in the plural for some reason.

uno zucchino ~ due zucchini - English zucchini/zucchini(s)
uno cannolo ~ due cannoli - English cannoli/cannoli(s)
uno gnocco ~ due gnocchi - English gnocchi/gnocchi

i only got used to using the singular forms after i had spent some time in Italy.

but what about spaghetti? the singular form exists in Italian, but is rare. but given the proper context, it can be used, such as:

c'e solo uno spaghetto sulla piata
"there's only one piece of spaghetti on the plate"

aha! there's the difference! words falling under the semantic category of pasta are count nouns in Italian, but are treated as mass nouns in English. to refer to just one piece in English, a partitive construction is required. but in Italian, a simple singular will suffice. this fact also can account for why the plural form was borrowed into English, since mass nouns almost always exhibit plural morphology. it doesn't quite explain zucchini and cannoli, which are clearly count nouns, but perhaps if spaghetti made its way over to English first, their plural forms followed simply by analogy.

the real question is if whether we had borrowed zucchino and cannolo whether we would refer to multiples of them as zucchinos and cannolos, or if we'd louse up their plural formations as we have with so many other words. if we were real sticklers for retaining native morphology we could have such fun words in English. to close, some of my favorite foreign plurals that lost out to Latinate or regular English plural formation:

hippopotamus ~ hippopotamoi
octopus ~ octopodes
prospectus ~ prospectūs

doubly headed DPs (or, why linguists can never explain themselves to writers and editors)

2007-04-13T15:49:00.001-04:00

i swear this isn't a sports blog, but i'm a sports junkie and thus we have yet another post that's inspired by sports journalism of one type or another. this comes courtesy of a quote from The Mining Journal via mgoblog:

“It was The Eric Puls’ Show,” Marquette head coach John Tiziani said.

there's something wrong with how coach Tiziani's quote has been transcribed. looking only on the surface, the answer is quite simple: there is an extra apostrophe where there shouldn't be. but that little squiggle carries different weight on different levels. it is orthographically overt, phonologically null (to some at least...i would read [pʊlz] rather than [pʊlzəz]), and syntactically rich. it is, after all, a determiner.

i remember thinking that it was crazy when i was told that the genitive ending in English is actually a determiner akin to the, his, a, etc. yet the Mining Journal's extra apostrophe gives just the data necessary to prove it so. consider:

The Eric Puls Show (1 Det)
Eric Puls' Show (1 Det)
?Eric Puls Show (0 Dets)
*The Eric Puls' Show (2 Dets)

(1) and (2) are both perfectly fine syntactically, even though they carry slightly different meanings. (3) is not so good, and (4) is right out, and for good reasons. there is only one DP, but two determiners: the and 's. a clear violation of one of the central principles of X'-theory, namely that every X⁰ head must have one and only one maximal projection and that each X^max phrase must have one and only one head.

this is all well and good for syntacticians. now try to explain it to Mr. Bronz of the Alpena News who wrote this article. or to the editor of the Mining Journal. after all, he left the extra apostrophe in (or worse, added it himself). chances are quite good that they have no conscious knowledge of what a determiner is. then you have to convince them that 's is one. then you have to give them a crash course in phrase structure. by this time, they'll have erased and re-inserted the apostrophe three or four times. and if you're lucky they'll finally cave and say "yeah, there was an extra apostrophe. it's gone now. (crazy linguist...)"

tu sai che Kobe Bryant parla italiano?

2007-04-11T00:11:00.000-04:00

well, i sure didn't, until i was browsing the homepage of Gazzetta dello Sport this evening. near the bottom of the page was a link to a video interview entitled Kobe Bryant si confessa (in italiano). i presumed that the interview must have been done through an interpreter, or that Bryant's answers were dubbed over.

i was quickly proved wrong. it turns out that Bryant is in fact a decently fluent speaker of Italian, since he spent a good chunk of his childhood there while his father played in the Italian top-level basketball league. Kobe hasn't had a whole lot of occasions to speak Italian since his family moved back to the US when he was in high school, so he was, as he predicted at the start of the interview, a bit rusty. as the questioning wears on he is more and more tempted to codeswitch, and he exhibits some interesting phenomena which people who are interested in such things should definitely take a look at. most noticeable are his variations when using proper names. whenever he utters a name in isolation in an otherwise Italian sentence, he pronounces it with what could loosely be termed an "Italian accent." breaking it down phonologically, what he's really doing is using only the vowel quantities present in Italian to approximate the English pronunciations. but when he begins to list several American names, the Italian phonetics slowly drop away, and furthermore if he drops all the way back to the American pronunciation, he tends to speak in English when he continues, resuming Italian at the beginning of his next sentence.

Bryant follows good precedent, as far as i know. i've only heard one other American basketball player talk about the game in Italian. last spring, SportItalia had Dan Peterson, an American who coached for many years in the Italian league, doing commentary for the NCAA tournament. his color commentary was peppered with English, much like Bryant's. his most noticeable tendency was to start his Italian sentences with "well..." other than that, his codeswitching ability led to the creation of a new catchphrase: if you don't like the call that was made, just yell "hey, arbitro!"

ESPN fags out on fagging out

2007-04-10T14:04:00.000-04:00

SportsCenter has taken absurd taboo avoidance to new heights.

late last week, the big linguistic scandal in the sporting world was CBS commentator Billy Packer's comment in an appearance on PBS's The Charlie Rose Show in which he used the phrase "fag out" in reference to the fact that Rose never followed through on an offer to act as a runner at the NCAA basketball tournament. people who take such things far too seriously raised a huge outcry that the remark was a slur against homosexuals. ESPN naturally jumped on the story, producing both an online article as well as a brief segment on SportsCenter.

here is where things get ridiculous.

the SportsCenter segment proceeded generally as follows. the story was introduced, mentioning that Packer had used a potential slur on Rose's program. they then play the clip including the use of "fag out" in its entirety and unedited. shortly thereafter, a later quote from Packer justifying his previous statement was put on the screen. it read:

I said he fagged out on me and it had nothing to do with sexual connotation.... I can assure you I will use that phrase again and I won't think twice about it. My meaning is genuine.

and the anchor read it off of the screen as:

Quote: I said—...the phrase in question—and it had nothing to do with sexual connotation...

what the hell!? it's ok to present video footage in which the phrase was produced; display a printed quote in which the phrase is written out; yet heaven forbid a real human being should say it live on tv, even preceded by visual and aural reinforcement that he is quoting another person's words?

congrats, ESPN. you really fagged out on this one.

words of introduction

2007-04-10T13:51:00.000-04:00

welcome, welcome, one and all. here begins my foray into the linguablogosphere. the plan is for it to not suffer the same fate as my other blogging attempts, which if they are not dead are at least in some sort of persistent vegetative state. they all wound up that way because after a couple months the novelty wore off and they became little more than obligations. therefore, the goal of Descriptively Adequate is to be a little more freeform, without any regimented posting schedule. with any luck that means that it will live a long healthy life, and it will pleasantly surprise you, the reader, when new posts arrive.

although my own linguistic musings certainly have their own flavor (i've been accused of being a derivationalist, and Noam Chomsky is not my best buddy), i would be remiss in not acknowledging some inspirations for this project, namely Language Log and Polyglot Conspiracy.

with that, time to move on to actual posts (i've got a couple in the writing queue already). also in the works are changes to the site's appearance (because geez, these blogger templates are either ugly or old), but that will require some serious css-wrangling over the next few days and weeks.