Noncompositional

Well, I was going to have a nice long post on a couple of clausal conjunction constructions that I’ve been thinking about lately, but I got caught up with something even more fun - learning about the protection of human subjects in research! In addition to the usual forms and such that a researcher has to fill out before asking someone if some sentence is in fact ungrammatical, students now have to complete a multi-part quiz on the topic. So I was occupying myself with the test, which looks like it’ll take another hour or so of my time - even longer if the web side serving the test crashes like it did a few minutes ago.

In any case, I’ll just make a little note to myself, and if anyone out there wants to buzz in early, go ahead.

Consider the …may…but… construction (first brought to my attention in a 1990 article by Paul Kay called Even (Philosophy and Linguistics 10: v. 13,1)), exemplified by:

She may have been sentimental, but Mrs. Stanford was no flake. (link)

The first clause, with the may modal, indicates concession on the part of the speaker, rather than an assertion that some possibility exists, and the second clause nonetheless holds. Of course I could try unpack “nonetheless” into smaller elements (say, that the second clause asserts that some other state-of-affairs holds that is more important than the first, and that although someone might claim the first clause’s importance, the truth of the second clause overrides that because it goes against normal expectations), but I won’t touch that.

Okay, so what else can go in the second clause? Let’s try questions: Read more »

Like any university (I’d imagine), there are bulletin boards all over Berkeley, where student groups can post hundreds of flyers advertising their events. Recently, a workshop for activists has been advertised, telling people that “Intention and action are not the same thing.” The flyer then exhorts, “become a change agent immediately.” Am I the only one who thinks that this is a workshop that will teach people how to dispense coins and small bills to a populace afflicted with bank-issued $20s?

Note that google has 200,000 hits for “a change agent” and 223,000 for “an agent for|of change.” Call these the money reading and the agentive reading. For me, anyway, “change agent” likes the money reading, and “agent for/of” can only be the agentive reading. Now consider the pair causative agent and agent for/of cause/causation. Google gets only 300 hits for the latter, though this comparison is perhaps unfair. Causative agent, despite being a bit redundant, is a term of art, whereas agent for/of cause is merely redundant.

I’m currently watching a new CBS series, Threshold. The premise is that the US government has a consultant who develops contingency plans for worst case scenarios. When one such scenario arises - namely, first contact with an alien intelligence (or artifact thereof) - a team is brought together to face the challenge. One member of the team, Arthur Ramsey (played by Peter Dinklage), is introduced as a “linguist and applied mathematician.” And he’s also a womanizer and a drinker. Cool! Or so one might think.

Actually, one might groan, expecting yet another use of the word linguist. However, with the first episode almost over, there’s really not much to say about how he’s a linguist, except that he obviously prefers to think about math more than human language. I say this because he has very interesting ideas about expressive aphasia. When a person exposed to the alien artifact goes rather mad and begins to attack people and utter strange sounds, Arthur says (paraphrasing)

(You don’t understand what he’s saying) because you’re not a linguist. To you it’s probably unintelligible word salad, but it’s actually very similar to what you see with people with expressive aphasia.

He goes on to explain that they often say things backwards, so here’s what we have to do to understand what he’s saying: play the tape backwards! Ingeneous.

Other linguist traits: ability to say “hello” in 200 dialects (not sure if he means varieties of a language or if he’s taken the “it’s all dialects” idea to heart), a fondness for pig latin, one use of the word adjective where word would be more natural, and the ability to have fractal patterns “speak to him” (math is just another language, after all). But apparantly the abilities do not doing acoustic analysis of the sounds given off by the artifact - this job goes to the astronautical engineer. I guess Ramsey is more of an S?

It’s recently come to my attention that I haven’t been putting enough attention into this thing. Well, that’s because classes have started and I would like to pass them. So I’ll start off with the oblinks to other places (probably pointless because I’d guess that the people who read my blog are a subset of the people who read the blogs that I might link to).

First, over at Literal-minded, Neal has posted on gradable adjectives, and in particular on their (non)comparability depending on which scale they evoke, and whether the scales are closed- or open-ended, and so on. He mentions a recent paper by Chris Kennedy and Louise McNally on gradable adjectives (in a recent issue of Language, if you’ve got it). I only bring it up, well, first because it’s interesting, and second, because I also began reading this paper a few days ago on a hunch that it might be useful for looking at the interaction between quantifiers like less/few and their interaction with aspectual verbs. Of course that issue isn’t addressed directly in the paper (that I’ve read - I don’t imagine it is, though), but the paper is an interesting read.

Second, over at phonoloblog, this post on [nt] reduction in words like continental. My point here, though, is not the content of the post itself, or even the content of the comments, but instead the use of “indeed” by Bert Vaux in his post, as he confirms that he did indeed work on a related problem with a student. I’d like you to read the relevant comments (first Bridget’s then Bert’s), and then consider the possibility of first Bert posting a comment with content similar to Bridget’s, and then later Bridget prefacing her comment with “Bert (Vaux) and I did indeed discuss this” or “I did indeed work with Bert on…” or whatever. I think it sounds odd. (Of course I’m assuming something about the professional relationship between the people involved. It may not be true, but then just pretend it’s true of some other pair of people.)

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Remembering Murray Emeneau.

Unfortunately, I never personally knew him, but I do feel a certain something at the fact that mine was the last undergraduate graduation ceremony that he attended.

As I’m still getting used to the grad student life, plus getting my schedule all together, posts will continue to be a bit irregular. So here’s just a short roundup of interesting things I’ve seen over the past couple days:

For some humorous accounts of what certain languages actually are, check out this site, including some nice ones like (via language hat):

• English is essentially a West Germanic language that’s trying very hard to look like a Romance one.
• English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.
• French is essentially Latin spoken by a drunken Roman soldier.
• Modern Chinese is essentially Classical Chinese without any manners.
• Japanese is essentially Tagalog spoken by Koreans trying to do an impression of Americans from the point of view of Chinese people.

Sometimes Google news doesn’t get the headline right. Case in point, this headline: Note: Some graphics are oversized and require scrolling. I’m note sure how Google managed to extract that from this web page. The text appears in an inset to the main article with more info, related links, and so forth. Near the bottom of the section that links to more images is the extracted title of the article. It appears almost directly before a subheading of the inset that reads “SPECIAL REPORT,” but the actual body of the article, which is actually embedded in a table embedded in the main page’s table (love that formatting stuff) starts several lines further down.

Finally, on a not-so-light note, there’s been some activity in the blogosphere regarding the framing of certain recent goods-acquiring activities happening in the south: discussion here. Suffice it to say: dang.

Is there a difference between these three concepts: sentences, utterances, propositions. This is the first topic tackled in a series of handouts on the practice of formal semantics in a generative grammar (created by Chris Potts at U Mass). Of course, you already know the answer the handout will give: yes, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

So, what are they? Well, maybe utterances are easiest. They are physical events, located in space and time (as events like to be). They involve two “participants” - an agent who produces a linguistic object and that linguistic object itself. Good so far. What’s a sentence? It’s some abstract entity “produced by the grammar,” though divorced from the notion of a speaker (or writer, or whatever) and from meaning. Okay, good, good. And a proposition? Well, it’s basically some sort of “idea” that can be (quoting Potts) “specified with language.”

How can we tell they’re different? We show that they don’t map one-to-one with each other. Some of these are easy. For instance, a single sentence (read ‘grammatical entity produced by a speaker’s grammar’) can be used in multiple utterances. For instance, the linguistic entity,

[I didn't quite catch how many traces there were between your main verb and the direct object]

can be used on multiple occasions, i.e., for many different utterances. Great, so one sentence corresponds to many utterances. Same goes for propositions: the proposition Chomsky fooled all of you! can be expressed by either “Chomsky fooled all of you!” or “I fooled all of you” (spoken by Chomsky), and so on. And a single utterance can contain multiple sentences. I guess. I mean, it depends on your definition of utterance. But let’s be nice and consider that “I like him: he’s nice” contains both sentences [I like him] and [he's nice]. Great. More? Okay, there’s lots more, but let’s get to the fun part.

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