Noncompositional

The construction that I was thinking of that gives say an otherwise unseen valency is: who says?. A variation is says who? (and possibly, as a response, says me/her/etc!, which also features a fixed, inflected form of the verb).

So the valence alternation that is realized in these constructions is : Speaker/NP/Subj + Content/null/DNI. Here DNI is “definite null instantiation,” aka “null complementation” (with definite interpretation). As far as I can tell, there is no other context where say can take just a subject with a definite interpretation of a null complement. And I also don’t know another verb that acts in the same way that doesn’t already license DNI. So, for instance, who knows? works, but I know! is also normal. *I say is bad, even as a response to “who says that blah blah blah?”

(two exceptions to the above: (so) says you!, which also has some strange agreement marking, and also Well, I say!. One may wish to claim some of these are somehow related)

Don’t get mad, please. =) The other construction (which itself has a special distribution with say) will be put up later.

The recent break in posting will, I’m afraid, likely continue for about a week, as I gear up for a couple of presentations at the ICCG. In the meantime, the assignment is to think about the word say. Outside of quotative inversion, I can think of at least two constructions where say acts exceptionally: one imparts say with an otherwise-unseen valency, and in the other, say imparts upon the construction an external distribution that is otherwise illicit.

Yesterday (and on rebroadcast today) linguist and Language Log contributor Geoff Nunberg appeared on the Colbert Report to talk about his new book Talking Left (see discussion on LL here and here). Comedy Central’s website has the majority of the interview, though they omit the funny intro where Colbert makes his way through the entire subtitle, and a few of the first questions, including the inevitable, so, what do you linguists do anyway?.

I’m not entirely sure how to characterize the interview. I have to say, it was not one of the most entertaining I’ve seen on the show. However, it was better than many; I generally find the celebrity interview portion the least entertaining, unless the celebrity isn’t afraid of bringing the heat. Geoff is more mild-mannered, so the dynamic was more one-sided, and thus less interesting to watch. Colbert did a great job of giving a mini-version of the pro-war cliche-fortified talking points, flourishing stay the course and support the troops in every other sentence. I’ve never seen Geoff hold office hours with an annoyingly persistant student, but I’ll venture to say that’s what it might be like.

Why should you read papers in Generative Semantics? Aside from the great abundance of data and lively discussion of thereof, sometimes the prose is just…well, just take a look below.

Here are a couple of passages from Jerry Sadock’s Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts, chapter 6, entitled Some Covert Illocutionary Acts in English.

Thus, both tag questions with falling intonation and queclaratives fail to show the properties of either of the questions or of the assertions that would be predicted on the basis of hypothesized underlying structure (135). I have no particularly clear idea, however, of what the common semantic source for queclaratives and falling-stress tag questions ought to be. Figure (142) represents a sheer guess with no syntactic backing. (p. 135)

It’s good to be upfront about these sorts of things. Next:

G. Lakoff (1966) has argued (apparently) that sentences of the form (186) with stative verbs are not true imperatives, on the basis of the fact that they do not [...].

Hmm…I apparently am not entirely sure of what Lakoff wrote, or what Sadock thinks of it.

As I side note, I recommend Robin Lakoff’s The Way We Were; or; The Real Actual Truth About Generative Semantics: A Memoir in the Journal of Pragmatics (1989, vol 13:6) for a sort of “behind the scenes” look at GS (mostly from one side of it, of course).

Though it is currently trendy for Japanese writers to use foreign words in their prose, this was not always the case. In fact, during the Meiji period, Japanese scholars faced the problem of translating a large amount of foreign (Western) literature into Japanese. In order to accomplish this task, they coined many hundreds of new words from Chinese morphemes. In some cases they took previously-existing compounds and assigned them new meanings. Such is the case for 経済 ‘economy’ and 社会 ’society.’ The former is an abbreviation of 経世済民 (or 経世済俗), which means ‘govern the world and save the people.’ The latter, 社会, referred to a religious ceremony held in the spring and autumn during which sacrifices were made to god(s) of the Earth (this is according to this site, assuming I made correct sense of the Chinese). Examples of what I believe are totally new terms include 主義 ‘ideology,’ literally ‘main meaning/significance’ and 抽象 ‘abstraction,’ literally ‘extract image.’)

In their modern meanings, these compounds were born in Japan and then imported by the rest of the sinosphere, including Korea, China, and (occasionally) Vietnam. When I first learned that so many intermediate-level Sino-Japanese words were actually invented in Japan, I was a bit surprised. How many, exactly? I had thought maybe a few dozen, or a hundred tops. Turns out there are quite a few more, at least according to this list on Chinese Wikipedia. You’ve got words like subjective, library, constitution, system, background, necessity, cash, time, space, and absolute. If the list is correct, these were all coined in Japan. Seriously: words that I would have bet were native to Chinese, like 必要, 時間, 空間, and 現金 are there.

I begin with a story.

Once in China there lived a man who loved to raise monkeys. He loved his monkeys so much that his family left him and he was left with his pets. Thankfully for him, he could speak with these monkeys, and so knew exactly what they wanted; and he always provided. But one day, he realized that his funds had been depleted so much that he could no longer afford to feed them their favorite food (nuts) as much as they wanted. So he told them one morning, “from now on, I will only give each of you three nuts each morning, and four each evening.” The monkeys were not pleased, and pleaded with him to reconsider. After thinking a while, he presented a new plan: “all right, I will give you four each morning, but then only three in the evening.” The monkeys were very pleased with this plan, and did not complain further.

And so today in Chinese, the phrase 朝三暮四 (zhao1 san1 mu4 si4, ‘morning three dusk four’) indicates someone who constantly changes their opinion, or who is unreliable or irresponsible.

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My original thoughts about set-comparisons being important for the NP-and/or-Clause construction were not quite as…accurate as they could have been. Certainly setting up comparisons of quantity makes the construction very good, there are other uses, as became clear to me after some conversations with colleagues. Comparative adjectives aren’t quite as good, but they can squeeze by: a raunchier title and a lot more people would have bought this book. Plain quantities work, as I mentioned last time, but they don’t necessarily have to involve an implicit comparison with an actualized state-of-affairs: 20 sentences and our proposal should fit on one 8 1/2-by-11 page. Finally, some plain, no-quantity, no-explicit-comparison NPs work: a successful book under his belt and he would have been hired for sure. Interesting thing about this last one: what exactly are the possible interpretations of the NP? Does “he” have to be the author of the book? Is there any other possible relation: the book is about him, the book mentions him, he sells the book, …? A glowing biography and no one would dare to question her authority (where she is the topic of the biography)?

What are the restrictions, if any, on the “[noun (phrase)] [conjunction] [clause]” when it has a conditional interpretation? The most commonly cited illustration of this construction is one more step and I’ll shoot. IIRC, the CGEL describes this construction as a fragment plus clause, with various (pragmatically-derived/enriched) interpretations, not all of them conditional. But it seems like some very particular noun phrase must be in the first slot in order to get the right interpretation.

In particular, it seems that any NP that contains “set-modification” words works: more, another, additional, less, fewer. These can of course be modified with numbers. And, just plain enumerated sets are mostly fine, though they are interpreted as having a meaning of “more”: (just) three hybrids and I’ll be satisfied (e.g., someone wanting to see three more hybrids drive by before going on to do something else).

Some things definitely don’t work. You can’t say a lot of illicit magazines and I’ll punish them to describe a situation where you promise to punish someone if it is discovered that they were hiding a bunch of Playboy magazines. It seems really strange, though barely possible, to out of the blue say Noam Chomsky, or I’m outta there if you want to say that you’ll only attend a lecture if Chomsky is the lecturer (or the topic, or present in the audience, etc). This works if Noam Chomsky is an answer to a question, in which case it evokes the entire omitted proposition; then the conjunction would be between like types (Who do you want it to be? –(I want it to be) Noam Chomsky, or I’m outta there. Though, now that I think of it, this isn’t your straightforward conjunction either; it means something like NC had better be there, otherwise I’m outta there.)