Noncompositional

A few days ago I happened to catch a show on the Game Show Network on some of the worst moments in game show history. One of the segments was of an episode of Family Feud. Dawson was host, and it was the Fast Money portion of the game (where two members of the winning family are chosen to each answer the same five questions for a chance at the grand cash prize). The two players were teenagers, and both of them couldn’t find a response to this prompt:

Name something to which you might lose your keys.

The first player heard the prompt several times before Dawson gave a longer explanation (”you know, you have things, and you have keys that you need to use them: what is one of those things?” or something like that). The second player gave a false start to the question, and then said, “What? What does that mean?” Dawson gave another explanation, to which he got a response, and a “Oh, so that’s what they want” from the kid.

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Little did I anticipate that a “samurai shampoo” would get a fair hits from people searching Google for it. I’m not sure if they were misguided in thinking (like me, initially) that the show was indeed called that, or if they were actually interesting in shampoo for or named after samurai (or, another possibility, that they wanted to see how many people had made the mistake in thinking that the show was actually called that).

Also, I found out that this site is linked from Yahoo’s linguistics blog directory, which means someone submitted it, I guess (I’m not totally sure how these things happen). Interestingly, this site is a

linguistics and language blog from a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, covering topics from East Asian languages to abuses of English grammar.

It’s not as though every site on the directory has a mention of the (mis/ab)use of English or some other language, though I wonder if it was some feature of my site when the submission was made that led to that description, or if it was sort of a “it’s about language by an academic, so it must be about misuses” sort of thing (of course I’m glad for the link either way). (Hanzi Smatter and The Language Guy, correctly, both get a “misuse” tag, though so does languagehat, and not Language Log, despite explicit commentary on the matter.)

Well, my first semester as a graduate student has come to a finish. That is all.

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Paul Postal (I think) has a paper from a while ago on reference of pronouns. I’m not sure how he phrased the problem, but basically the observation is that pronouns can refer to roles or individuals (or both at the same time). Consider:

• Sam’s divorced his (ex-)wife three months after he married her.
• I was in Jill’s house before it burned down, but I guess you’ve only been in it after they rebuilt it.
• If you cut off a lizard’s tail, it will grow back.

Basically, the pronoun her refers to the individual (with current role ex-wife), and doesn’t care that now she’s an ex-wife but before she was the wife-to-be. On the other hand, the pronouns in the other sentences refer to the role of Jill’s house and lizard’s tail, but not the individual that had those roles - the same house that burned down wasn’t rebuilt. Of course, most times pronouns refer to both. But these are all third-person pronouns. Could you get this with 1st-person pronouns? You’d think not: I mean, “I is I is I” (or is that “I am me is me”?)

Well, Ricola has managed to do it, though across speakers. Ricola has this deal where they have a person out there who is coughing up a storm, and if you offer them a Ricola cough drop, you “could win a million dollars!” They have a radio commercial, where at the end you have this:

Man: The cougher could be a guy… Woman: Or I could be a woman.

Weird! It looks like I is the cougher, because otherwise the utterance is totally out there. Okay, there are cases where it’s fine: where the speaker isn’t sure what gender they are, or where their identity (and voice) are concealed, and they are giving hints in a 20-question style game (”Are you a famous woman?” –(voice scrambled) “I could be a woman”). Of course this is combined with the fact that the speaker is identifiably a woman. Could that second line have been done by a man? I’m gonna say “no.” How about if you replace “the cougher” with just “I,” where it’s understood that we’re talking about the cougher. Then I think maybe - maybe - they could both be guys. It would be totally funny, of course.

Now how about this:

Man: The cougher could be a guy… Woman: Or could I?

Good luck with that one.

(Yes, the below post was getting a little long).

Consider these sentences:

• The US will put an end/halt/stop to terrorism.
• The US will put terrorism to an end/halt/stop.

And the passive versions:

• Terrorism will be put an end/halt/stop to.
• An end/halt/stop will be put to terrorism.
• Terrorism will be put to an end/halt/stop.
• *An end/halt/stop will be put terrorism to.

I hope you said “guh” to that last sentence. Even if you found some of the other passives eminently awkward (your high school English teacher would have scrawled “awkward” on your forehead for using “terrorism was put an end to”), the last one is far and away the most horrible sentence of the bunch. What’s up with that?

(Quite a bunch of posts recently. I’m in the home stretch - basically just two squibs left, using mostly the same data. That data will be the topic of this post.)

According to one well-known account of argument structure (Jane Grimshaw’s 1990 monograph Argument Structure), some types of nouns have argument structure (nearly) identical in type to verbs. That is, semantic arguments in the lexical conceptual structure (”frames,” in some terminology, though they would be highly deficient frames) are linked to a separate representation that provides a link from the lexicon to the syntax. All elements of the argument structure must be realized (locally, I suppose) (except in certain constructional environments, like generics, instructional imperatives, so on and so forth). So is the case with nouns. And what sorts of nouns have argument structure? Those that denote “complex” (temporally/aspectually, I suppose, though she never says outright) events. She provides some examples that are questionable and probably would like a better analysis, but that’s for another time. Right now consider one event nominal (which may or may not be complex), use:

• The use of Martian technology to influence Terran politics is strictly prohibited.
• His use of new technology was impressive
.

Use shows some hallmark properties of being an arg-structure-having noun (obligatory complements, event control, and so on). But use has an interesting use as a sort of secondary predicate with the verb put:

• I believe that politicians are putting Martian technology to improper use

Roughly, the frame X put Y to use means that X causes some state-of-affairs such that someone uses Y. This someone must be under the control of X, who directed them to use Y to the advantage of X. So if management is finally putting the new computers to use, if they’re not using it, their subordinates (who they are “using”) are, to their benefit. On the other hand, if I convince my friends to use Red Hat Linux instead of Windows, then I did get them to use Linux, but I cannot be said to have put Linux to use. Just wanted to establish that “impliciture” (which is actually not an impliciture, but part of the semantics of put+use, or so I would claim).

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(Welcome to those searchers who have come in search of “Samurai Shampoo.” If you were looking for information on the anime, I hope this page if useful.)

I was recently introduced to a Japanese anime called Samurai Champloo サムライチャンプルー. A product of Watanabe Shinichiro (of Cowboy Bebop fame), it’s a period film in the Edo period. It centers around (as far as I can tell, since I’ve only seen two episodes) three people - two masterless swordsmen and a waitress and their antics as they go on quests and such (I can’t really say what the arc of the first season is yet, obviously - check websites if you really care).

When I first heard the name, I thought, “what the heck is (a) champloo?” It sounded like shampoo, basically, but I thought that couldn’t be right. It turns out that champloo is a type of dish native to Ryukyu. You basically take a bunch of vegetables and tofu, mix ‘em up and fry ‘em, and you’ve got it. There’s some interesting talk on the Japanese Wikipedia page for the food. It reads

Additionally, the word champloo also exists in Indonesian and Malaysian (languages), where it means the same thing as Japanese chanpo (’mix,’ ‘mixed food’). Further, Korean also has a word of the same meaning, chanpon. It is thought that each of these words has a common origin, though there are various theories on the exact source. One theory is that it is from the Fujian greeting 吃飯 or 吃飯了 (’have you eaten?’, ‘hello’), or possibly from the word meaning ‘to mix’ from the same language （In the Beijing dialect there is a character with a reading of chān which means ‘mix’）. Or it may be from the Portuguese or Dutch word for ‘mix,’ champon.

Well, the etymology is…interesting… but in any case, this still didn’t tell me why the show is called what it is. Clue number one: one of the characters is from Ryukyu. Then I went to the official Japanese site, where it says that this character, Mugen, practices a highly idiosyncratic style of swordfighting called, surprisingly, チャンプルー剣法 (champloo sword-technique), which basically means that he has a whole bunch of mixed up techniques combined into one (that looks vaguely like capoeira, according to some). So there you go. I also prefer to think that the getting together of these three main characters also constitutes a type of champloo dish. Yum. And no shampoo in sight. It’s a period piece, after all.

Ah, the law. You know, they’ve got a lot of words in there, and if people who write laws (or legally-binding documents) aren’t careful, the pristine, unambiguous, straightforward language of the law could get contaminated by the ugliness of conventional meanings, like conventional connotations and Gricean implicature. But surely no one, least of all honored lawyers, would exploit a brief lapse of judgement of a law-writer to maneuver themselves into an advantageous position. Surely…

An article in Saturday’s issue of the Wall Street Journal tells the story of one Victor Washington, former NFL athlete, who after several years in the game, left the league due mostly to continuous knee problems. He filed for disability benefits:

Mr. Washington filed his claim in May 1983. Orthopedists hired by the NFL plan enumerated his painful problems, such as arthritis, degenerative joint disease and an inability to fully extend one knee. A Rutgers University professor of psychiatry hired by the NFL wrote — according to later court files — that depression and difficulty with concentration, “combined with his physical injury and significant pain (both knee and back) indeed render him disabled by his football related injuries.”

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