Noncompositional

I know people talk about how text-based communication over the internet is hampered by a lack of cues common in spoken discourse, like intonation, stress, visual gestures, and so forth. People try to find ways to get around this, including use of emoticons, typeface alterations, explicit marking of actions (used to use this quite a lot on IM and IRC isn’t sure if it’s still common is also unsure of its discourse function, but its syntax sure is interesting), and so forth.

But sometimes text provides you with the ability to communicate information in a way that is technically possible with speech, but in reality is unrealistic. (Or, at least, might seem unrealistic to someone like myself). Take parentheses (please!): you can express all variety of auxiliary information in a syntactically reasonable way with them, and the rules of their interpretation lets you completely separate their meaning off from the rest of the sentence. To do the same thing in speech would, in some cases, require some very detailed intonational and gestural fancywork.

One concrete example came to me after I started to look at some linguistic phenomena surrounding the use/mention distinction. I think looking at these sentences should clear things up:

Bertha (a pseudonym) lives in La Paz, Bolivia, and her medical history Bertha provides insight into the effects of chagas. Helen Reed (a pseudonym) lives in Oakland, CA, with her partner and daughter. James Dean (a pseudonym) works at Denny’s and needs Medicaid to pay for the support programs and medical insurance he needs to live and work LAUREL TEAM (A NOM DE PLUME) LIVES IN HUDSON COUNTY Joe, a pseudonym, lives in Oakland, California.

Here the matrix subject refers to some individual, but the apposition construction tells us that a pseudonym probably attaches to something denoting a name. So there is a sort of type clash going on here. Nonetheless, these are perfectly interpretable — and, in fact, when seen in text are (IMO) much more comprehensible than they would be if spoken. The parentheses do a world of good here, and google tells me that most people are smart enough to use them, though the occasional comma gets through. If spoken, I expect it would require some rather salient intonational marking (the typical “comma” intonation), along with perhaps a gesture that marks the same sort of meaning (hand out, palm down, a slight frown, all indicating “some non-central/parenthetical stuff currently happening”). Maybe some mavericks out there will start to implement “air parens.”

Now, if you thought the apposition construction could lead to some odd stuff, check out these:

Julian Swan is a pseudonym who lives in Los Angeles. Winston Wolfe is a pseudonym who contributes to h2g2, Wikipedia and the local print media. T.C. Adler is a pseudonym who, according to the book jacket, is “very experienced in both the worlds of art and the Church.” Mag Cabot is a pen name who’s [sic] real name is Jenny Carroll.

Absolutely beautiful.