Noncompositional

Just now I went from a librarything blog entry on database (mis)management (by the way, my recorded collection is slowly growing) to a similar entry on slashdot detailing what happens when the number of comment parents (or their ID numbers, I suppose) gets too big. They had gotten up to 2^24 comments, the upper bound for a mySQL “unsigned mediumint” sort of number, and so no more comments could be posted until the database was changed. When it was, one poster remarked,

I for one welcome our 2 to the power of X overlords.

(background)

There is a great literature out there on syntactic blends, most of which I’m frightfully unaware of (but see this LL post by Mark Liberman, the article he cites by Dwight Bolinger (a good and quick ready), and some recent work [like this piece] by Liz Coppock at “that school down the peninsula”). I suppose one of the most infamous of these (or at least the one that has caught some attention recently) is the double-is or is-is construction, as in

The thing is is that this only happens when unplugged.

which (some have said) blends “what (the thing / it) is is that…” and “the thing is that….”

Well, I noticed something searching on the ol’ internet the other day, and I’m not quite sure how to categorize it. It starts with two English idioms: (be) more like it (MLI) and (be) what I’m talking about (WITA). They are similar in meaning: they say that something (an item, an event, a situation) is very close to some ideal, perhaps closer than might have been expected, or closer than previous versions of it (whatever “it” is) had been. Nearly always, they are anchored with respect to “now” (adjusted for viewpoint) and “me.” MLI seems like it might be more flexible with respect to times and points of view than WITA. But back to that later.

Now, blends…well, maybe you can see where this is going. I’ll just give the hits from google:

Read more »

The always-entertaining Geoffrey Pullum has recently remarked on the seeming weirdness of English proper names and definite articles. He notes that though human-referring proper names do not normally appear with determiners, there is a niche of productivity. When the name is modified attributively (like sharp-eyed, attentive-to-language), then a determiner is all required. Except when introducing a character in subject position in which case you can say something like Foolishly brave Qarn Trippian stepped out from the dragon’s cave and triumphantly waved his bloodied hand. (I suspect that some people might also be willing to ignore the formal requirement, as long as you’re introducing a new character, as in and who did I run into but always ridiculously funny Brian Regan. But I could be wrong.)

There are other places in English where the structure determiner-modifier-HumanName can appear, as noted in the LL post. These are cases like the Qarn I knew back in monster-killing camp and the Qarn of Targor, not the Qarn of Pindrell, which are sometimes talked about in terms of conceptual coersion from proper noun to common noun. A more familiar example might be the use of possessives when disambiguating between acquaintances of different people who happen to have the same name (”I saw Jim the other day” — “Oh, the guy in your Onomastics class?” — “No, Julie’s Jim. You know, the one she always has lunch with”)

Read more »

A recent posting to slashdot talks about a conflict between the Mapuche people and Microsoft. It seems that the leadership of the Mapuche people are unhappy about Microsoft’s latest translation of Windows. From the CNN article:

But Mapuche tribal leaders have accused the U.S. company of violating their cultural and collective heritage by translating the software into Mapuzugun without their permission. They even sent a letter to Microsoft founder Bill Gates accusing his company of “intellectual piracy.” “We feel like Microsoft and the Chilean Education Ministry have overlooked us by deciding to set up a committee (to study the issue) without our consent, our participation and without the slightest consultation,” said Aucan Huilcaman, one of the Mapuche leaders behind the legal action. “This is not the right road to go down.”

Predictably, most of the slashdot crowd was dead set against the Mapuche position. Given that in that part of the web, the slogan “information wants to be free” is something of a mantra, the predominant view was that trying to regulate the usage of a (human) language was the most radical type of intellectual property stupidity. Some discussants on slashdot also mentioned (reasonably, I think) the fact that the Mapuche leadership hasn’t acted (publicly) against some other online dictionaries (though this may be because they were consulted in their creation). They are also working with Chilean leadership to help revitalize and increase use of the language — though among non-speakers of the Mapuche community, not of the larger national community. This also caused confusion among the slashdot crowd — wouldn’t a localized version of popular software do nothing but help the revitalization process? In the end, it’s unclear from the news article exactly what the tribe leaders want, from Microsoft in particular or from anyone in general, who wishes to do something related to their language. It has, of course, been studied by both South American and international scholars, and I don’t know what sort of agreement those scholars had with the people who they consulted with.

The question of who “owns” a language, as I have learned in my field methods class, a very important issue for linguists and other (ethnographical/anthrolopological/etc) fieldworkers who work with politically disenfranchised people. There are many stories of groups of native people who are distrustful of university researchers who, it is feared, want to go into the community, extract knowledge about the culture and language, and then retreat to the university to publish cultural information in obscure places (like, say, academic journals) in obscure ways (like, say, using the jargon of theoretical linguistics). For a community attempting to keep their language alive, it might seem foolish and/or insulting to invest time and effort so that that an outsider can learn their language/culture, only to give nothing back to the community while profiting from that knowledge. It may also seem like a slight against them that much or any of their cultural knowledge is now fodder for academic discussion. And for this reason, many communities (I have heard mostly about those in California, but it may well be true for many other American groups) work out very (sometimes legally) explicit deals with those linguists who they work with. And those linguists are often expected in turn to help the community in working with their language, if such help is desired (such as publishing accessible grammars and dictionaries, or training native linguists or teachers, or making recordings and texts publicly or tribe-internally available).

It’s hard for me to take a clear position on the Microsoft-Mapuche conflict, since the facts are about as clear as mud. Though in general I’m a fan of free information, that’s normally in the context of everyone involved having the same ideas about what can possibly count as “information,” and what sorts of things are potentially classifiable as “private.”

A particular snowclone got my attention a few months ago, so I thought I might as well make public note of it. There are two basic forms that I’ve noticed:

• A play X to B’s Y
• A be X to B’s Y

Examples of the first are, I suspect, rather old, dating back at least as far as to whenever people talked about operating musical instruments or playing dramatic roles “towards” another such performer. The more mundane of these are like this example: a woman plays the bass lines to my guitar riffs… and vice versa. They get more fun when you have metaphoric uses of this same construction. This metaphoric use is also quite old, I think (see examples at the end of the post), but some more modern uses might be called for:

For now it’s winter and the building plays the perfect backdrop to my homage to the tree in this city. All the same, I have the same crippling burden of knowlege and ego to go with it, and scripture constantly plays the hammer to my self-loving nail. So I went home to ask my roommate, he’d know. The poor guy plays the Felix to my Oscar, and OUR show gets weirder each season.

Particularly in the second two examples, what this construction lets you do is give roles to two entities, and then the names of the roles evoke a larger situation where the roles interact in commonly understood ways. Hammer on nail, Felix on Oscar, and so on. (The first example is a more straightforward extension, not relying on any additional cultural frames aside from just “having special roles to be (metaphorically) played out.)

Things get much more interesting when you get rid of play and just allow be. Examples: Read more »

Linguists like to have fun, I think. And there are precious few places to have fun while, say, writing a paper (well, depending on the exact topic and the forum in which it is to be published). But among those places where I’ve seen fun being had are: the title or subtitle; the names of principles; the names of theoretical entities; the (made-up/constructed) data being examined [this only being relevant for those linguists who examine at least whole words, and usually whole sentences].

Fun titles are often somehow self-referential. Examples include When nouns surface as verbs (Clark and Clark, Language 1979), What’s this sentence doing showing up in English? (Pullum, York Papers in Linguistics 1973), and Just because two constructions look alike in two languages doesn’t mean that they share the same properties (Weilbacher and Boas, ICCG4, 2006). This is fun.* Then, with slightly different effect, there are some titles that evoke other titles, a sort of “intertextuality.” One example is the recent Newmeyer/Bybee exchange in Language, with titles Grammar is Grammar and Usage is Usage contrasted with Grammar is Usage and Usage is Grammar. Another would be Postverbal Behavior (Wasow, 2002), based off of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.

Read more »

Some predicators can appear with an expletive it and clausal extraposition. It used to be believed that people were born with a set number of brain cells, It is often the case that you don’t know what to write in your blog. (Some verbs (many of which also happen to be raising verbs) require it, such as seem, happen (by coincidence), appear. But I don’t care about those right now.)

Now, it seems rather odd to question the would-have-been extraposed clause: ?What is it usually said in these situations? and ?What was it believed back then? sound weird. I’m not sure why; and I’m not sure whether or not they actually occur. I couldn’t find any in any of the print corpora I have access to, and these are not trivial to search for on search engines. Maybe some others have strong intuitions.

Relatedly (and to be faithful to the title of this entry), why does it seem to me that clause-marker that can be stranded like a preposition: What did he say that?; What, exactly, was he claiming it was the case that?. Maybe it’s just a symptom of being a linguist that I think these are acceptable. I have yet to ask a layperson what they think of them (and, again, they are pretty obviously not in the BNC, nor are they easy to search for on the internet).

Looking through the preliminary program [pdf] for January’s LSA meeting, I noticed an interesting session topic on the 5th. Among the nine parallel sessions, poster sessions, and two special sessions during the afternoon is a three-talk group under the heading “That”. Can’t get much more specific than that.

But in all seriousness, the talks to be presented therein should be very thought-provoking, if I am correct in their topic, namely, various distributional facts regarding complementizer that. Some subset of the work done in particular by the speakers from Stanford has been presented at various meetings around the SF Bay Area, and the sorts of facts that end up accounting for when that gets used turn out to be pretty cool (though I’ll be darned if I can remember exactly what they are…guess that means I’ll be going to that session).

Next year, who knows? Maybe there can be a session on Japanese sentence-final particles (though, on second hand, I’d be willing to bet that any session devoted to “Japanese pragmatics” would basically be about that, if not in name.)