Noncompositional

I was reminded today of the results of a geography quiz/survey reported on by National Geographic News. Basically, the geographic and demographic knowledge of young Americans is abysmal, despite geography being a core part of primary and secondary education (often under the category of “social studies”). The article links to the website of a campaign called My Wonderful World, which aims to “expand geographic learning in school, at home, and in the community [...] to give our kids the power of global knowledge.”

This reminded me of the plight that faces the field of linguistics, which so far has been mostly unable to get itself into the pre-college curriculum. Of course, it’s probably not exactly easy to convince people that knowing how to recognize grammatical functions and phonological alternations is important (and certainly not compared with knowing the locations of nations we’re currently occupying…or, say, the states that we live in). But in any case, I watched the 60-second ad available on the site, transcribed it, and then altered it as little as possible, to create the following. I recommend checking out the actual video first, though…

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Stateside is just a cool word. But first some background.

Spacial relations are sometimes said to involve a figure and a ground, or alternatively, a trajector and a landmark. If my bike is in front of library, then the bike is the profiled figure with respect to the ground of the library. Similarly for we are under that airplane, we are the figure with respect to the airplane, which the the ground against which we are determining our location. Given this, then prepositions like inside and under are analyzed as determining exactly what sort of spacial relation holds between the figure and the ground: containment (inside, outside), vertical position (over, under), physical contact (on), and so forth. There are of course some more complex prepositions, like astride, diagonal, and opposite (not to say that the semantics of something like over isn’t complicated as all get out). For these guys, the spacial relation is more specific that something like at or near.

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Over at Heideas, Heidi was discussing a certain interesting predicate in English, be friends with, which looks morphologically plural, but which can appear with a singular subject. More accurately, it can take one side of a symmetric relation as its external argumeny. (For symmetric situations, you can express the sides separately (I am his friend, I met him in the park), or as a collective unit (We are friends, We met in the park)).

In the comments section, Mark Liberman notes that

The process seems to be one that generalizes to other plural predicate nominals: “is colleagues with”, “is lovers with”, “is co-workers with”, etc. These seem wierd to me in a way that “is friends with” doesn’t, but they’re out there.

Regarding the first point, this is a bit of an overgeneralization. Generally the X be NP[pl] with Y construction requires the relation to be one that is social and not on a temporary basis, or not contingent upon factors external to the participants. Well, I’m not sure if that’s exactly the right generalization, but it’s meant to account for the fact that you can be friends, colleagues, partners, buds, pals, co-stars and even enemies or rivals with someone else. But you can’t be competitors or contestants with someone.

Then again, you can also be brothers, sisters, and cousins with someone, and this isn’t exactly a social relation, but it’s about as symmetric as you can get, and permanent as well. But it’s pretty clear that be friends with is the central example of this particular construction. It’s attested well back in the language, and dictionaries have an entry for it, though sometimes it is for the collocation make friends with.

A recent Jet Blue radio commercial features a (probably) staged telephone conversation between a potential flyer and someone from customer service. The service rep says that now all people on Jet Blue flights have extra leg room because they’ve removed a row of seats, giving everyone an extra few inches. The caller then asks, “If I don’t have an extra leg, can I use the room for something else?”

There is then some back and forth between the two, and eventually everything is clarified. Then the caller, being exlanatory/self-deprecatory, remarks that he tends to “take things literally.”

Though the caller may indeed take many things literally that aren’t meant to be, perhaps in this case he should have said that he tends to screw up interpretations of series of adjectives. No doubt his friends avoid talking to him about their Turkish history teachers and fake leather wallets, hoping to avoid wasting precious minutes explaining what they’re actually talking about.

The question is, assuming that most people understand this fellow’s self-characterization, what the heck does “literal” mean? Now, in the context of the commercial it’s clear what is meant by “literal,” since the source of the guy’s misunderstanding obvious. I just wonder how many people, asked to give examples of misunderstandings due to taking things too literally, would provide cases of attachment ambiguity. (”Oh, the guy you were spying on had the telescope? I guess I just take things too literally…”). Perhaps a native interpreter can provide intuitions.

As a side note: the service rep, when she gets that ridiculous question, admits that the words “extra leg room” do “imply” the meaning that the guy initially had. That’s also interesting, since when I think of something implying another thing, both things can be true at once. But in the extra leg room case, one reading can’t really imply the other. My guess that this is related to, loosely speaking, “perspective.” That is, for the rep there was a the “core,” intended meaning, but there was an additional one that was slightly covert, i.e., “implied.” Somehow I’m reminded of the semantics of a (medicinal) “side-effect,” which of course can become the main effect if the drug is repurposed.

In continuing the tradition of very short posts, here’s an update: I’m currently near Georgetown University for the Roundtable on little words. It’s (to me, anyway) a novel take on what conference themes can be about, and so far we’ve had a lot of interesting presentations.

And in non-linguistics, I’m getting my second-ever taste of snow in an urban setting. Actually, it was really only snowing on the day that I arrived, but it was a novelty nonetheless. Also interesting is watching the local news shows; something about theme seems different from what I’m used to, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. But I probably won’t have enough time to figure it out before I have to get back to the west coast.