Noncompositional

Understanding how a language changes over time is a crucial part (most people would agree) of developing a full understanding what language is (what are possible languages, how could a person’s mental model of a language be organized, and so forth). One part of language change is semantic change, whereby some word (or possibly construction) changes in its denotation or connotation. People are familiar with modern variations on word meanings, like colloquial uses of various evaluative adjectives, such as cool, tight (which has a range of different colloquial uses now than it did a couple generations ago), and sweet. Everyone knows about gay, of course. Less familiar are the history of of the meanings of computer and nice, though I assume that many students of linguistics will have heard about the latter in their historical linguistics class. Constructional examples might include the various uses of subject-aux inversion (Is linguistics interesting?, boy, is linguistics interesting!, physics is far more interesting than is linguistics, may your children study linguistics, and so forth), or in Japanese the use of a “hanging” conditional as a suggestion (where something that means If you run can mean Who not run? or You should run. Compare to English How about if you ran?).

Take the example of spill. A caricature of its change over time might be, “originally it meant kill, but now it means accidentally cause a liquid to come out of a container.” Of course this is clearly a simplification, since it glosses over large swaths of time when it had multiple meanings; and dictionaries are generally no help in getting a sense of how meanings evolved, since the job of a dictionary (like the OED) is to give clear examples of unambiguous uses, not the crucially ambiguous or “creative” (e.g., novel-metaphoric) uses that often give rise to semantic shift.

One sort of semantic change that is not often discussed in detail, but which was certainly recognized by historical linguists like Gustaf Stern, was where changing culture and technology changes, but the language doesn’t. He gives the example of a ship, the modern varieties of which look rather different from what might have been called a ship over a thousand years ago. Nonetheless some continuity was observed enough by language users that the word stuck. Similar, more modern cases include the telephone, which include not just cell phones but also wireless headsets and computer software that utilizes VoIP, and perhaps Japanese 土木学, which means civil engineering though character-by-character it is earth-wood-study. Another interesting one is the verb tape, which is used to mean copy audio/visual information onto some permanent medium: it can still be used even when there is no physical “tape” onto which the recording is done (just search for “tape * on my tivo”, and peruse the results).

It seems to me that such a “change,” involving some continuity of referent, can also be seen for other sorts of signs, like icons. One was recently pointed out in a BBC article on the demise of the floppy disk:

Interestingly, software giant Microsoft seems to be keeping the flame alight for the floppy. Its newly-released operating system Vista still pays homage to it by continuing to use a floppy disk as the icon for saving a document in Microsoft Word 2007.

Though you may not be able to find a manufacturer that produces computers with floppy drives built in by default, everyone will still understand that the floppy disk symbol means save. But in fact this is not new just with the end of the medium itself. That icon has long been used to mean save, even if it was to a hard disk: I hardly expect clicking on a button with the floppy disk icon to default to the floppy drive. Especially since such a drive does not exist on the machine I’m using now. (hmm, that makes me wonder if the verb drive is not also a similar case)

Apologies to anyone who may have found a dead feed over the past few days. Issues with wordpress updates and plugins required a reset of the feed configuration, but all should be working now.

I’ll also take a moment to sing the praises of the GreatNews RSS reader. It really helps in finding the various new articles in all of the feeds you subscribe to (and it’s enormously helpful if you’ve spent a few days without checking any of your feeds, since you can view short summaries all at once, newspaper-style, rather than guessing from each title whether the short summary is worth reading at all).

Though I usually step aside in some of these self-perpetuating internet/blog memes, I suppose that since I’ve been explicitly tagged, I may as well. I now present five things my readers don’t know about me. (I now in turn tag Literal-Minded, SC, and…uh…three bloggers yet to be named?)

(and don’t I don’t pretend that this is a time to divulge super secrets, or to go confessing anything; though I assume that telling you how many pairs of shoes I own isn’t exactly in the spirit of the thing)

1. I am a vegetarian, and have been continuously for about 80% of my life. Exception: when I lived for a year in Japan; it was just too much to avoid eating, well, most food there. Though some vegetarians I knew did manage fine.

2. Supposedly linguists are supposed to be good at all or some of: math, music, art. The last I confess lack of any talent for (my sister seems to have taken all of those genes); the first two I was keenly interested in until I went to university (including several piano recitals) after which they sort of dropped off the map.

3. I enjoy cooking and baking.

4. I don’t really like the number four. You could call it an irrationally-borrowed superstition.

5. Like Matt, I have a pretty high tolerance for whatever physical stresses might result from walking. I also occasionally read while doing so, but am trying to rid myself of that particular habit.

Yesterday David Beaver posted about a discussion he’d had with Elane Chun (of UT Austin) regarding probable causes of the outrage stemming from a well-known talk show host miming Chinese using ching chong and similar forms. I think the conclusions are probably near the mark, adding a slight variation on Answer C: possibly a sometimes-assumed compliance among Asian Americans that they will (and perhaps should) be treated as a non-mainstream group, for a variety of reasons (recentness of immigration, recentness of “on-screen” activity in the media, being a “model minority”, and perhaps others). I, at least, am somewhat pleased when I see an Asian American role in a TV show or movie wherein their Asianness is not made special mention of, or even silently included (for instance, in some aspect of costume or set design). This is not to say that such things should not be included, but simply that the inclusion of an Asian in a production should not necessarily entail a lot of extra cultural baggage.

In some ways, I wonder if there is a very slightly analogous issue with sign languages. After decades of persuading everyone that sign languages are true languages, on a par with spoken languages like Russian and Hindi, now there is the need to take a broader look at the differences between signed and spoken languages. Of course this must now be done with some caution, without disturbing the status built up for sign languages. Yes, each ethnicity and nationality, even after moving to a melting pot like the US, retains some (or much) of its cultural items, but nonetheless is still on a par with every other group in the nation. But you could still give up some of that cultural stuff and still have some sense of identity with your ancestor’s culture. But, you might not want to. But, …. and so on, and so on.

[Perhaps you're wondering about the title of this post. Well, I was reminded of an activity that I did in fourth grade, where we students were paired up and then asked to prepare a news broadcast in another language. But most of us were monolingual, and so we were encouraged to mimic the accent and words of our target language. Other members of the class would then have to guess the language. Looking back, this strikes me as a very very strange exercise, and I'm not entirely sure what the goal might have been. But I did learn something significant: to have any effect on the audience, there has to be some common ground. Being the strange sort of lad that I was, I decided to do a Tibetan broadcast. I'll leave it to your imagination what exactly the reaction was. But I have to wonder, what sort of feedback would ching chongs have gotten?]

In a couple of previous posts I explored a bit of the meaning of the sequence no yeah (and yeah no) as (roughly) a part-denial/part-affirmation technique. Though I haven’t thought about it in super-great detail since those posts, I did realize something rather obvious this morning. Namely, there is some severe lexical restriction going on. For the yeah-no version, it basically really is the lexical items yeah and no that go into this phrase. The yeah part can sometimes be replaced with words into the same family: yup and uh-huh also are sorta okay. Yes, though, is pretty bad. Similarly, for no-yeah, you can also replace the no with some other words. But in general, the first word can be fiddled with, but the second one is more fixed. So it can’t simply be that a combination of affirmation and denial get you the semantics and pragmatics of yeah-no and no-yeah: you need, it seems, to take into account the meanings of those particular lexical items.

And then this brings up the potentially thorny issue of “pragmatic compositionality.” That is, though there are constructions that specify idiosyncratic (truth-conditional) semantics to certain combinations of words or phrases; but are there any that assign unpredictable pragmatics to a combination of already pragmatically-rich lexical items? Actually, I can probably already answer that question in the positive, since Japanese yo-ne has a usage that is really hard to get just by combining yo and ne. (Yes, I know, many have tried, and I reviewed some of that literature for my honors thesis a few years ago; let’s just say that any claim that yo-ne is compositional must first have a full account of the two words individually, which I guarantee doesn’t exist.)

[And, after some consultations with colleagues, another possibility is the may...but construction. It contains a may which expresses concession, even though usually it has either has permission-giving (deontic) or possibility-asserting (epistemic) meaning. Granted, in this construction its use is epistemic in a certain way, but surely in a slightly different way than normal. However, the meaning of but remains what it usually is, so far as I can tell.]

Even if you’re not a philosopher of language, I think you could still find sentences like this interesting:

WHO KNEW? It turns out I’m a pseudonym of Glenn Greenwald’s. The things you learn from blogs.     Interestingly, Glenn Greenwald blogs at a site he named Amygdala, as well as at Unclaimed Territory.

That is, “I”, i.e., whoever the author of the blog is, i.e., the name of that author, is a pseudonym.

Of course, you could skip the last step if you think that pseudonym really has a meaning closer to “constructed identity” or “constructed self,” as opposed to simply “fake name”.

Well, I have returned from the LSA meeting in Anaheim to my humble abode, and have rediscovered: temperate weather, potable tap water, people who don’t study linguistics.

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Browsing through the website of the LSA, I noticed a series of pamphlets that answer some frequently asked questions. Some have been around for a while, like the Why Join the LSA? and Why Major in Linguistics? ones. But there are over a dozen more, all on good topics that everyone should read, to allow their lives to become more linguistically enriched. They’re short and well-written, and hint at the depth of research that supports the statements made in the pamphlets.

As a side note, what exactly is the semantics of frequently asked question? I know it appears in places where even the author admits that the questions answered are not frequently, if ever, asked, indicating that the literal meaning is still alive (otherwise why make disclaimers). But it could also just mean “questions that, if people felt like asking questions, would be common questions”. But if you look at the pamphlet titles, not all of them are questions, like Linguistics and National Security and Bilingualism. But I suppose that’s just semantics quibbling. [hmm...a new topic for a pamphlet? What is Semantics, really?]

One also might wonder who is frequently asked these questions. I’m sure linguists are (I’ve been asked six of them…outside of a classroom), including the people who wrote and commissioned the pamphlets. But how many has the LSA, as an institution, been asked? Of course, the website does not state that the LSA has been asked the questions per se, though I suppose the Why Join is reasonable.