everything's...segmented differently in texas?

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

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"

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

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...

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.