Noncompositional

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I’ll also use this opportunity to plug my sister’s new website, Eyeburst, showcasing her art and writing, which I highly recommend.

Part of journalistic writing involves a use of the word to that means roughly ‘will.’ For instance, a recent Chicago Tribune headline reads Major urban areas to get Homeland Security grants, and the Guardian reports that Oxford colleges to keep control of admissions. This is possibly an extension of the “scheduled to” meaning of (be) to, but it often has a distinct meaning in headlines.

This can appear within speech act verbs, like this recent Bloomberg headline Inco Indonesia Says Fire to Crimp Weekly Output by 1 Mln Pounds.

New, another fact about headlines is that if the matrix and immediately subordinate subject are identical, then the second mention is optionally omitted, resulting in: headlines like Iran says will not negotiate on uranium enrichment. Sometimes this results in headlines that I find a bit odd, like India’s United Breweries says wants to keep Taittinger jobs.

How about when the special to is the main predicator in the subordinate clause? Well, the result is this headline that I saw today: Sun Micro says to cut up to 5,000 jobs. The unfortunate thing is that say to already has its own idiomatic meaning (’tell/suggest to someone that they blah’), which results in a very strange headline indeed. Some more examples: KDDI says to offer Sony Walkman phone in Japan, Shanda says to develop online game with Disney, Pacific Ethanol Says to Build Oregon Fuel Plant. These all involve say, mostly because that’s what the initial headline had, but also because it’s easy to search for.

What’s interesting is that it’s totally unclear how one should read a headline like this. If you use “normal” intonation, it sounds like the ’suggest’ meaning. One possibility is to put a pretty big pause between say and to, sort of like there were a colon there. But this still sounds undeniably odd. It’s probably best to do what some organizations did and kill the say, as in Sun to cut up to 5,000 positions.

But now you can read all sorts of normal headlines as having rather funny meanings: consider Dept. of Homeland Security Says to Stop Using IE and Tsunami expert says to expect the unexpected.

Before leaving on a two-week trip through the main island of Japan with my girlfriend Lindsay, she predicted that there would be many cases of a Japanese person expecting her to be able to speak Japanese (looking East Asian as she does), and me not able to, and confusion arising when these expectations are defeated. I suppose I thought that it would happen from time to time, but not all that often. In particular, I imagined that I would be initiating a majority of the conversations with the locals, and so there would be no confusion regarding who of us is doing the speaking. There were two things I should have realized, though: first, we are obviously a couple, and so effectively a single person, and so to some degree either of us could be addressed regardless who was previously established as speaker, and second, (surprise!) sometimes we would start on the addressee side of the conversation. Then there was the thing that I perhaps couldn’t have expected: some people are very persistent in assuming that the East Asian-looking person should be speaking the Japanese, while the non-native person remains silent.

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Why, one may wonder, have there not been many updates of late? Well, one may answer, it is because end-of-the-semester term papers can take a while to write. And when one is leaving for a foreign nation one week before the due dates of these papers, the end of the semester becomes even more busy.

But, I managed to finish all my papers, and with a whole day to spare! And despite the many sleep-deprived nights (mostly weekends), or maybe because of them, I’m quite pleased with some of the textual results. I ended up writing three of the four papers with largely the same set of data, but the process of writing each of them helped me think about the problem in, well, three different ways. So it was good for me, anyway. Here’s hoping it’s good for those who will be reading the papers.

And now the lack of updates will continue, for I am off to Japan for two weeks. Now, I could do a sort of travelogue sort of thing, but…well, that’s not what a vacation is for. But if I find myself bored and in front of a connected machine, maybe I’ll write a bit.

Until next time, you can add the construction remember X by Y to the “likes to be separated” list: something to remember it by, but (?)I remember it by… Okay, it’s not as clear as some of the others, but something about the semantics wants it to appear in certain constructions, like relative clauses.

My apologies to those who happened upon the site today and were met with a database error message. The problem has miraculously resolved itself and will hopefully not come back (though I’m fairly sure what the cause is, and if it does come back it may be a few hours after I notice it before it is fixed).

Until next time, consider why preposition-deletion should be licenced in the same locations as NPIs are:

Do you have the faintest / any idea who that guy was? I have no idea who that guy was. *I’ve got an idea who that guy was. I’ve got an idea of who that guy was. ?I’ve got some idea who that guy was.

(Before anyone tries to give me counterexamples: don’t worry, I’ve already found about 30 of them in the BNC. This, however, dwarfs the 1000 or so that are under negation or in otherwise nonveridical contexts (or however you like to talk about NPI licensing.))