Noncompositional

Let’s say you’re a person studying language, and you observe a word, or a construction, in some language, and think that it is interesting for some reason or another. After much study and hard work, you come to the conclusion that this single word or construction must be polysemous. That is to say, you decide that its distribution in the syntax, or its semantics, or its patterns of usage are such that there is no “it” per se, and you are actually looking at two (or seven) distinct forms. Or, say that you observe some pattern of sounds among the lexical items of a language, and notice that there is some correlation between (say) syllable-per-lexeme count and vowel harmony, or between certain stretches of segments and certain types of semantics (in the former case, perhaps you are on drugs and need to reexamine the data; in the latter case, perhaps you look at words in English that start with gl, or ideophones in Japanese that start with voiced velars). In either case, you think: wow, this is an amazing observation. Perhaps I can even call it a generalization! But then you say: shucks–this generalization doesn’t “follow” “logically” from any “principles” of the grammar (perhaps you are spitting upon uttering each of those words, or perhaps not).

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I offer a few tidbits of linguistic observations made over the past day.

First, a professor explaining to the class how we will be looking at controversial, interesting, complicated, etc. aspects of linguistics, and there is a lot we won’t get to. She says (paraphrasing): We want to make our best effort as possible.

Second, a professor reflecting on issues of theories of derivation in a past decade of research, and referring in particular to a (defunct) view of derivation: That pretty much…has problems. Nice defeat of expectations regarding (I think) specificity of the predicate (”having problems” isn’t really a good enough summary to go with “pretty much.” What did he do when you told him that? — ??He pretty much responded (though cf. the good He pretty much responded like I thought he would)

Finally, an exchange between me and a colleague. We were looking at a computer monitor that was showing a screen saver that involved creating landscape-looking images (mountains and plains) with some sort of randomized curve-generating function. -Me: Must create landscape-looking images. -Him: Hh, that would be a really strange biological imperative. Must…create…landscape-looking…images. -Me: Yeah. Though didn’t whatshisname in… (pause) -Him: Oh god, you mean in…Close Encounters of the Third Kind? -Me: Yeah.

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The first bit of reading for my phonology class this semester is a paper by Edward Sapir (”Sound Patterns in Language” in Language vol 1, 37-51). We received it as a photocopy of what might be from a collection of works, or at least a reprint from the original journal article. At the end there is a passage (by an editor?) that I found rather interesting and amusing.

Besides his book Language, which is read with pleasure and profit by all sorts and conditions of men and is not likely to go out of print in our time, the easiest way to get more of Sapir is in the Selected Writings, U. of California Press, 1949; analysis of his way of thinking will be found in Zellig Harris’s review of this volume, Lang. 27.288 (1951). There was a brillance about Edward Sapir which fascinated and awed all who encountered him, and which is not only evident in his own writings but even lends an extra phosphorescent glow to certain of his pupils’ works. But there are others who sometimes sound like it who actually never were pupils of his: for his contribution was not the developing of any method, but rather the establishing of a charter for the free intellectual play of personalities more or less akin to his own. If their wits happen to be dimmer (and here he had few equals), their blunders may betray the essential irresponsibility of what has been called Sapir’s ‘method’. We welcome the insights of his genius, which allowed no scrap of evidence to escape at least subconscious weighing; where it is possible to check up, we normally find him right; thus we seem captious when we point out that he also said many things which are essentially uncheckable (’invulnerable’) and thus not science.

During this year’s annual meeting of the LSA at Albuquerque, Sandra Thompson (ST) gave a plenary address entitled What are clauses for? Understanding grammar in terms of social action.. In discussion of the talk along with various people in the days following, I found that most people either disagreed with the premise or conclusion of the talk, or were unimpressed or confused regarding basically all aspects of the talk: the premise, the methodology, the argumentation, and the conclusion (if there was such). (And for those who didn’t happen to see the talk, my attempts at summarization fared no better). So I decided to write up my summary of the talk, what I think about it, and all that good blogging stuff.

For this summary, I am going off what I remember from the talk, the brief notes I took during it, and a paper by Sandra Thompson and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen in Discourse Studies (vol 7, 2005) called The clause as a locus of grammar and interaction. The talk followed the paper rather closely, though the former had more data and an additional section on adjacency pairs (though she may have called them “conversational doublets” or something else like that). The paper also compares English data to Japanese. I unfortunately do not have access to the abstract, and the slides are not available online AFAICS (…can see).

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I’m waiting for my flight at Albuquerque back to the Bay Area, so I thought I’d take a moment to write up some impressions of the 2006 LSA meeting.

First, the desert is dry and brown. This did not do anything good for my northern California aesthetic nor my skin. Second, there’s not much to do in town. I came here with Lindsay, and we went to several museums and restaurants, which was nice, but I don’t think that staying an extra day would have let us do anything we regretted skipping. Finally, it’s flat. I like hills.

As for the conference itself, there were several interesting talks that I attended, including a couple of symposia/workshops on topics like connectionism and ellipsis. In a couple of conversations with several of my peers, as well as fellow language bloggers, I found that maybe there was some confusion about one of the plenary addresses, Sandra Thompson’s talk on a discourse-pragmatic approach to defining the clause (even that short explanation may not be what some people thought the talk was about). So in a future post I’ll detail my thoughts on that.

And, as mentioned, there was the second annual linguistic blog dinner, this time with rather fewer people - a summary forthcoming.

Finally, a thanks to Albuquerque airport for free wireless internet - and a boo to the Hyatt and T-Mobile for their pay-to-play connection.

No linguistics here, just some griping regarding wordpress’s new WYSIWYG post editor. First, it’s annoying, as many such editors are, with strange spacing and line-inserting properties that make you format paragraphs in ways you might not want to. What’s really interesting is how it interacts with a firefox extention that does spell-checking. The extension, when activated, will highlight in red all words in text fields that are misspelled. Clicking on the words will give a list of alternatives. When you’re done checking, you deactivate the checker and the red highlighting goes away. Interestingly, when you are using the WYSIWYG editor and use the spell-checker, you get the red highlighting, but the list of alternatives doesn’t show up. And then, the highlighting stays around after the checker is deactivated. What does this mean? It means that if you post the entry with the red highlighting, the actual post will have red text (with some really messy HTML). Never mind that the editor itself doesn’t let you change text color: somehow the spellchecker does it for you. That’s some weird stuff. (It should be obvious that I no longer use the new version of the post editor)

First, sorry for the small feed hiccup that some of you may have experienced. I’m still working out the transition to Wordpress 2.0. (and if anyone out there is getting this weird error message on the draft preview panel about page redirects, and knows why, I’d be glad to hear about it)

As I mentioned last post, I’ve been (re-)reading GRRM’s fantasy series A song of ice and fire. Now, Martin’s books take an interesting format, eschewing traditional chapters, which might normally be around 20 pages each in a comparable novel, in place of somewhat shorter (10 to 15 pages) sections. These are unnumbered and headed simply by the name of the character whose POV the section is written from. This makes for a somewhat faster-paced story, and also leads the reader to consider why each section is important to a particular character, rather than just the next section of plot. (Of course, this does not mean that every section from character X’s POV is primarily about X - there are some characters who seem as though they will never get a POV, so sometimes a section will be from the POV of someone who is near X, but most of the text is devoted to the actions and dialogue of X)

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It’s been a very dreary new year so far - I think the sun’s been out twice over the past two weeks. For those who like to see the sun from time to time, it’s been rather drab. I move that we should celebrate the new year when spring comes around. Then we could make use of the Japanese words 迎春 and 新春, meaning ‘greet (the) spring’ and ‘new spring,’ which they still use over there to talk about the new year, even though most people recognize the turning of the calendar on January 1st.

As for resolutions: I’ve got just the one - use the dictionary more. In case some linguists didn’t know, those lexicographers know a lot about language, and some new discoveries you’ve made might actually be recorded in one of them big books. Amazing! For instance, I’ve recently been reading a series of epic fantasy books by George R. R. Martin called A song of ice and fire. It’s set in a period reminiscent of medieval Europe, and in particular is said to resemble the War of the Roses (though with dragons, demons, and other more modern inventions). This means we get some fun “old-sounding” English throughout the dialogue. One such example is the use of as as a sort of relativizing subordinator, as in The king is like to exact revenge on those lords as allow the rebels to make camp in their own domains.

Curious as to when (and where) this use of as was in use, I checked the OED and lo, all was revealed unto me.

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