Noncompositional

The other day in class, the professor was writing the word “haplology” on the board, but ended up writing “haplogy.” I think that merits a “tee hee.”

A recent entry into the growing field of linguification led me to do some thinking. There seems to be a subtype of linguification that has do to with, in a broad sense, collocations. That is, what sorts of words or parts of words can appear next to each other, in the same sentence, in the same paragraph, or document. Phrases like “word1 and word2 don’t belong in the same phrase/sentence/story” or “word1 rarely/often/always appears near word2″ are examples of these. This LL entry has a large summary of such stock phrases (some of which, however, are not about collocations, such as the “can’t spell x” variety).

There are some extensions: “You can’t mention word1 without also mentioning word2″ is also a slight variation of collocation pattern. Another, slightly less related sort of phrase is exemplified by something I heard on CNN the other day: “You can’t go one sentence without mentioning Barack Obama” [it proves itself!].

What it mean that people like to frame non-linguistic facts in terms of collocational “facts”? An initial hypothesis is this: people have a very naive folk theory about discourse. Namely, any given bit of discourse (from word up to document/conversation) is supposed to be on a single topic and is supposed to advance a single argument. Nothing that would potentially counter that argument (including entities that prototypically exhibit properties contrary/opposite to the topic*) can even be mentioned, let alone used to argue one’s point.

A potential sub-part of this theory (or perhaps just a corollary) is that discourses are saturated with positive epistemic stances. For instance, you do not argue X by saying (not A, not B, not C, not D, etc.). Similarly, a reason for X cannot be “not-A” (e.g., saying that you don’t like profession X because they do not have attribute A is not allowed, because you “rarely utter X and A in the same breath”). This may end up being a property of the linguification family of snowclones/constructions, and about the pragmatics of mentioning words (as opposed to using them), but it seems like a good working hypothesis.

(*From such a belief comes assertions like “‘linguistics’ and ‘practical’ don’t belong in the same/adjacent sentence/phrase/whatever”)

Last night I caught part of CNN’s special 300 Million: Melting Pot or Meltdown, on the booming population of our fair nation. You can look at summary and review of the show, since I can’t seem to find anything about the program on CNN other than this blog entry.

While the content is of course noteworthy, what got my attention was something that the host, Anderson Cooper, said near the beginning of the broadcast. From the transcript:

Right now, we are less than 12 hours away from a milestone with enormous implications. At 7:46 a.m., Eastern Time in the United States, the U.S. population is expected to hit 300 million. 300 million. We have reached this milestone faster than ever before. It took the nation 139 years to get to 100 million mark in 1915. And another 52 years to reach 200 million in 1967. But it will have taken just 39 years to hit the 300 million mark, which means that the country is getting bigger and much bigger much faster.

Note the part that I made bold. We’ve got a comparison being made by the word faster. The item being compared is the (speed) of reaching the milestone of 3300 million people. And the standard of comparison: well, it’s ever before. Now, when you put just before, you can omit the material that might describe what actually happened before. Compare this to Nowadays, threats spread further and faster than ever before. What happened before was “threats spread (far/fast to some degree)”. What’s important in making this sentence work is (i) that we’re talking about generic threats, so there doesn’t necessarily have to be some particular threat that spread both before and now, and (ii), there actually could be such a threat, since threats can spread continuously. A slightly different example would be His apartment is bigger than before. Here there’s not a generic assignment, but a role. That is, there are several incarnations of the role apartment in “his” life (e.g., the one on Broadway, the one on Market, the one back East), and the current incarnation is bigger than the previous role-fillers were. (On another reading, the same physical apartment was made bigger, by annexing neighbouring rooms, for instance).

But to return to Anderson’s sentence, we’ve got a problem. We can’t interpret what we have done before is “reach this milestone,” because (i) there is no generic “this milestone” (since it really means “3300 million,” which is a particular value), (ii) there is no role “this milestone”. (Similarly, you can’t say this apartment is bigger than before to mean that it’s bigger than previous incarnations of the apartment role). Nonetheless, what he said is clear enough, especially if you listen to the next few bits. Basically, we’ve gone from milestone-to-milestone faster than ever before, and this particular time, we got to the 3300-million milestone. And, though this may be obvious, you have to make sure that you are comparing equivalent milestone-distances; you can’t, say, look at how long it took to get from 150 to 250 million, and compare it to the time it took to get from 250 to 300 million.

Now, I’m not sure what principle might tell you that you allowed to say something like that. I mean, you can describe it as a sort of “coercion” from entity to role, induced by the before. It would be sort of (barely) similar to the coercion involved in a sentence like I believed her in five minutes, where the believe is coerced into being an event with an endpoint, rather than a state.

[edit: In an extended brain-o, somehow most quantities were divided by 100 in my head when I wrote this. This has been fixed, with reminders to my brain to be more attentive next time.]

Working at a lexicographic outfit, one becomes rather quickly acquainted with some unfortunate inadequacies of many print dictionaries. A paradigm case is the word risk, noun and verb, a rich semantic analysis of which is given in a series of papers by Sue Atkins and Chuck Fillmore.

But sometimes the missteps that dictionaries take are not quite of the need-to-write-an-academic-paper-about-it caliber. Take, for instance, the definition of the cardinal number 2 in the 10th edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (now the Concise Oxford English Dictionary). It reads,

equivalent to the product of one and one; one less than three

The product of one and one? What could they be thinking? Okay, maybe their entry for product will clear things up. Here are the relevant bits:

a result of an action or process [...] MATHEMATICS: a quantity obtained by multiplying quantities together, or from an analogous algebraic operation

Hmm. Well, the part that should have been most relevant (i.e., multiplication) clearly doesn’t help their case. I suppose one could make up a story about product of X and Y meaning “what you get when you put X and Y together.” But that’s certainly not the use that is primed in the domain of mathematics. Oh well. In later editions, the definition seems to have been changed.

The next mistake is interesting. One particular edition of the American Heritage dictionary (I don’t have it on me now) gives this as the first meaning of information:

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Though the jury is still out, I have been informed by a non-Californian (well, a deep-Southerner-turned-Californian) that I, in fact, do have several of the Great California Vowel Shift. Namely, the lowering and/or backing of front vowels before oral consonants. So I (apparently) don’t pronounce did like dead, but it’s (barely perceptibly) somewhere in between the two. I’ll have to surreptitiously record myself to find out, though I did notice that perhaps my low front vowel (the one in that) is usually laxer and further back than the “standard,” which is part of the perceived vowel shift.

And for something totally different, I present, for your viewing entertainment Stephen Pinker vs George Lakoff in a battle for American progressives’ hearts and minds.

Though “valley girl” talk is a well-known dialect feature of (some parts of) California, I find it’s not extremely common around where I live, nor does it seem to be for the rest of the East Bay, even among my (current and past) friends who’ve grown up in northern California. But once in a while, I’ll hear it around campus and in coffee shops, and I’m absolutely fascinated by it, because it seems to be legitimately spreading. (It could be that I just don’t hang out with the appropriately vocalically-vulnerable people.)

Of course, you don’t have to be from the valley, or even be a girl (or a woman), to show the characteristic tendencies. I highly recommend the sound files on Penny Eckert’s site, which shows, I believe, mostly schoolchildren from the southern part of the San Francisco peninsula. I personally exhibit (almost) none of the uniquely Californian vowel shift. (The only possibility is a palatalized /n/ before /i/, which might be the result of /i/-heightening (though not in the environments noted on Eckert’s site.) And this may be a good thing, since according to some, when I try to imitate the changes, I sound like I’m “from the Castro.” Whatever that might mean…

(And yes, I’ve certainly heard men (who I guessed were not from anywhere in San Francisco) in the 18-35 range with some of the vowel changes. It totally boggles my head to hear it, though.)

And relatedly, I know a couple of young kids (both under 6), one of whom seems to consistently have /E/ for /I/ (pronouncing the name Nick as /nEk/). The other one, who is older, seems to most people to have the standard English that you get out here in California, but the other day I noticed her announcing the age of one of her friends as /sEks/ - that is, 6. It may be to early to see if this actually a result of the /I/-to-/E/ change noted on Eckert’s site, but it would be pretty interesting if it were.

(for some more samples and text on Californian speech, there’s the Do You Speak American coverage of California, which is passing good.)

Recently, Slashdot pointed to a little experiment held to determine how well bloggers would do on the new essay portion of the new SAT. The results are summarized here. The analysis was interesting, and perhaps predictable. One grader writes:

Overall the quality of the essays was not far above that of high school students writing their first practice essays. The biggest differences I noticed were in grammar and diction: most of the entrants wrote in complete, generally grammatical sentences, and there were fewer awkward turns of phrase and poorly-chosen “vocab words” than I see in student writing. The organization and logical flow of the essays, on the other hand, was on the whole surprisingly sloppy. Many people seemed not to understand that the assignment was to write a persuasive essay *with a clear point of view*. Often writers tried to be clever with roundabout ways of coming at the question, but it only made my job as a grader more difficult, and grumpy graders don’t give fives and sixes. If anything, the bloggers were *worse* than high school students in getting to the point and staying on topic. They also tended to equivocate more, to argue the merits of both sides, which, though it might mark you as a reasonable person in normal discussion (in real or online life), actually hurts your SAT score.

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