Noncompositional

My interactive data collection, sharing, and distribution system has revealed a verbal communication expert who suggests that satisfaction providers should engage in rapidly-productive phase-shift operations in order to enhance their ability to implement transparent conveyance of information critical to their user base.

And if they don’t, then Don Watson says they may be abusing human rights.

In a recent post at languagehat, entitled The Chinese Babel, an NYT article detailing some of the more extreme cases of linguistic diversity in China is presented. This seems like a good time to mention some of the more interesting points in a book I’ve been reading recently, The Languages of China by S. Robert Ramsey. This is an overview of the many Chinese languages spoken on the mainland (including mini-grammars), as well as the many non-Sinitic languages spoken within the nation’s borders. A history of the Chinese language and its study is also given a large chapter, as well as recent history regarding the rise of 普通话 as a national standard.

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The background images of the Relaxation theme I was using earlier had the annoying property of being rendered later than the text, which annoyed be. I don’t think the load times were bad at all, but it just looked bad when loading, to me anyway. So I’ve just been doing some experimentation with background-image-less themes, and while I was at it looked for liquid themes (i.e., those with non-fixed-width CSS styles, so it resized based on the size of the “viewer port” (browser window) and wasn’t mean to those with really large or small screen resolutions). You’re looking at the Steam theme (with some significant modifications). Anyone with any gripes about the theme (especially colors or font styles — I have horrible sense), let me know.

A recent post by Matt ponders some historical Japanese phonology, particularly the loss of (some instances of) intervocalic /m/ and the fusion of /au/ to /oo/ (written <ou> おう) in modern Japanese, though only rarely pronounced such. I’d guess that the change was, put simply, [ɑmu] > [ɑ̃ũ] > [ou] (> [o:]).

In fact, through my study of Japanese as a second language, even before I started to learn about language change and common paths of phonological change, I noticed a certain type of pattern of sound change in Japanese occurring both in history and synchronically. Namely, weakening of labial stops. In addition to the the above change, also mentioned in this languagelog post by Bill Poser, there is also the well-known p > ɸ > f changes from Classical to Old to Modern Japanese, which gives kawa from kapa (river), and lies dormant in compounds like tabi-bito ‘traveler’ (didn’t get that? Look up rendaku). p is also preserved in non-intervocalic environments like geminates and post-nasally. And of course, I need not mention the loss of w before all vowels but ɑ. Read more »

Hanging around linguistics people gets you some interesting tidbits. For example, try searching newsgroups for patterns like “accentuated her” or “accents his.” Go ahead and try it.

That particular bit came up in a discussion regarding the domain of emphasis (highlighting, underscoring, accenting, playing up, stressing, and so on). And in that discussion a term was mentioned that I’ve been hearing a lot lately, but which has been around for a while: semantic prosody. The old example is the verb cause, which likes to appear with (subordinate) events that have some negative evaluation (caused the accident, catastrophe, storm, the disaster, the explosion, a meltdown, a scandal), though positive events are not ruled out by any means. There are many other cases where certain types of complements or modifiers are preferred, something that comes out when doing a collocate search in a corpus. Read more »

…or, “some hint at why Russell could possibly have named this blog noncompositional.”

There are several (oh, call them) verbal constructions in English that incorporate a head verb with it. This it may or may not be referential, but it has certain other properties. It is destressed and cannot be fronted for passivization, nor questioned (i.e., there is no wh-…V for the V-it). Some examples:

All I have to say is, that dude better watch it with dumb comments like that. Hold it right there, man, just cool it for a sec. The article shows pictures of young, tattooed gang members kickin’ it – frolicking, laughing, roughhousing and just having a swell time. So I just kind of winged it and talked about how special the cat was. So live it up this week and treat yourself to the pleasures of low-fat foods. Pat, do you want to take it from here? Yeah - yeah, no, look it, here’s what happened, here’s what happened.

For none of these is it clear that there is any antecedent that the it is referring to, but certainly some of them seem referential. In particular, live it (up) and take it have to do with processes or activities, the agents of which are often the subjects of these verbs. Wing it, although a very high-frequency collocation, may not strictly belong in this category, since it can take a more specific complement, like the speech. (Interestingly, this is originally theater slang, where the person who “winged” it learned the part in the wings, on the spot). Read more »

And what’s the first thing any good semanticist thinks of when she hears the word weekend? Well, hopefully something not all that different from what anyone else with the 5 day-2 day week thinks. Unless there’s blog content to be thought of, and then the idea of Frame Semantics might come to mind. That is, the what a weekend is can only be defined relative to a frame of some periodic interval of work-rest alternations, where the resting portion is significantly shorter than the working period (and you also need some sort of time-as-movement and/or time-as-process metaphor, but putting that aside…). Why bring it up? Well, a new blog, the mind and language has turned up, authored by Amy, who is taking a class of the same name at UC Berkeley this summer. Among the first topics covered in that class is Frame Semantics, and if anyone is in need of a quick-and-dirty intro to the idea, then anyone (to borrow a Mandarin construction) should take a look at Amy’s blog.

And on that note: I’m off! See you on Tuesday!

Bit of a change in the permalink structure. Instead of archive/yyyy/mm/dd/[post-name], it’s /yyyy/mm/[post-name]. Sorry for any broken links or feeds. I’m trying to redirect traffic appropriately, but stuff may not work for a bit.

[update: Old-style permalinks should now be redirected to the correct locations. And sorry to anyone who received a huge "backlog" of posts. I'm not sure if this is due to the permalink structure change or the redirecting procedure I implemented (basically a mod_rewrite command in the .htaccess file). If anyone who happens to read this knows if this will be a problem, or if you just want to complain about what I just apologized for, drop a line (rleegold at google's mail service).]