Noncompositional

If someone gets a chance to use this or anything like it, please do:

Why did analogy seem to immediately level away that particular sound change? Well, it’s hard to say…

Just finished watching today’s Jeopardy! Something Alex Trebek said at the very end puzzled me.

Going into Final Jeopardy, the third place contestant was basically out of the running. She got it wrong, and went down to near $0. Next up was the defending champion, who went in with around $8000. She too got the question wrong and dropped down to $6000. Then came the last contestant, who went in with (IIRC) $11500. He too got the question wrong, so it came down to his wager.

When it was revealed that his wager was (attempting to recall here…) $4999, Trebek said, “Not enough.”

My first reaction when he said that was, “huh?!” My next reaction was, “not enough to what?” Which, when answered, led me to wonder, “did he want the defending champion to win?” Because pretty much the only answer I can come up with to my first question is, “not enough to lose” (or maybe “not enough to let the defending champion win”). But to phrase it like that makes it seem like him losing is a goal that Trebek would like to see accomplished.

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Consider (source):

McCain didn’t help his own cause by uttering the out of touch homily “the fundamentals of our economy remain strong” in the middle of the chaos.

Cursory examination of the Web-as-corpus (thanks, Google) tells me that not help (out) one’s (own) cause seems to be applicable in a reasonably wide range of contexts, though usually involving some sort of conflict, competition, or argumentation. But, without negation, what do you get? Well?

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What associations do people have, I wonder, with the phrase help (out) one’s (own) cause? I have a rather particular one, which I’ll report on soon.

Am I totally behind the curve on accepting S as well as S (and V(P) as well as V(P))?

I don’t know mixins because I don’t like mixins (as well as I don’t really like templates).

Mersin State Opera and Ballet hired me to design a ballet “The Harem” in 1998, as well as I had a wonderful chance to design a ballet “Antonius and Cleopatra” in Istanbul state Opera and Ballet in 1989, invited here by a Primabalerina and a State Artist Merih Sumen

Anyone who loves to cook as well as eat will love these great recipes that I consider my favorites

I hear it from time to time, and wonder if people have a different entry for as well as than what I have. Or, are such coordinations due to a replanning of the sentence, after you’ve already committed to as well as, that makes verby coordination sound better?

This is essentially just an addition to the commenting going on under this LL post.

Perhaps a good potential contrast would be “could care less”, discussed many times on this blog [i.e., Language Log -RLG...ah, the perils of cut-and-paste] and elsewhere. The question that arises for many is whether this is licensed by the grammar of English, and thus an interesting case of negation not mattering (or rather, equivalent meanings across expressions that differ only in negation; it would be a mistake, I think, to say that in “i couldn’t care less,” that the “not” is meaningless), or if each and every token is the result of a common sort of processing/production error involving certain types of easy-to-miscompute meanings. That is probably a false dichotomy, but it’s nonetheless how I read ML’s “whether such cases are constructions, fixed expressions, idioms or whatever, as opposed to natural mistakes that people often make in using a psychologically difficult combination of elements and structures” (Caring Less with Stress, 2004.07.08).

One might point out that asking if something is “part of a language” in this context is asking a rather special sort of question that might well assume certain things about competence/performance, and at least the abstract existence of a language with a grammar that exists across speakers but also is individually instantiated in the mind of every speaker of “that language” (again, all useful analytic constructs, but you have to look at cases where they don’t capture exactly what you want to say).

Another (not incompatible I hope) question to ask is, how is language constituted in the mind of every individual, and how does that constitution change when exposed to tokens of “couldn’t care less” or “reality…truth”? If any part of what we do when we speak is imitate and approximate others (both based on distant and recent past experiences), something looked at in great detail for speech sounds, but also for lexical entries and syntactic configurations, then it need not be the case that every instance of over- or undernegation is either a performance error OR the trivial instantiation of a fully-licensed construct of the grammar. In fact, the latter option is, if I understand what people like Bob Port are saying, not really something to be considered for the individual. One might also want to bring in notions of hypo/hypercorrection from John Ohala’s work, though in the case of negation the hyper/hypocorrection story makes sense. With “reality being further from the truth,” you’d want some other notions.

Okay, this I just had to share. It’s on the boundary, I’d say, between mess-up and something a competence-grammarian should account for (I’m currently waiting for Mark Liberman to get back of my latest comment on that topic).

And like you, I have significant difficulties with women. Most of my friends are and always have been men. (link

I really want to know how most people (whose brains haven’t been fried on syntax and semantics) react to this sort of sentence.

I just saw a story on the Today show about Pranav Veera, in the news recently due to being six years old and having a 176 IQ. The story showed the reporter quizzing Pranav on various topics of the child’s interest (order and terms of US presidents), as well as several other varieties of trivia and date-related math questions (e.g., December 12th 2003 was what day of the week?).

I got really curious when the reporter said that Pranav’s intellect was not just about memorization and arithmetical ability: he actually had a grasp of logic that (some) adults don’t have. I was looking forward to how they would show this — for about one second. Then, cut to the reporter asking Pranav to recite the alphabet backwards.

Thanks, Today. Really informative.