Noncompositional

My near-daily travels down the peninsula to Stanford for the LSA institute this past month gave me an intensive course in Caltrain, the communter rail that serves San Francsico, San Jose, and the cities in between. I noticed as the train approached Millbrae station something interesting in the announcement. Millbrae is the only transfer station between Caltrain and BART (the rail service for San Francisco and the East Bay). The Caltrain operator would usually say something like

Now approaching Millbrae station. Millbrae is your transfer point for BART, SFO, and the East Bay.

This would be made when heading either south or north. I found it a little odd that BART would not necessarily be a transfer point for, say, San Francisco. After all, as far as I can tell, there aren’t any other places where a person might actually want to chose between going to a BART station or a Caltrain station - they kind of service different parts of the city, at least if you’re walking or biking. So it seems like either they wanted to save a little time, or just didn’t want to reinforce the idea that you could travel to important locations in SF via BART (in fact, several more locations than you could get to on Caltrain).

Now, something else interesting happens on BART. Actually, it doesn’t “happen,” it’s printed on their system maps. In addition to BART lines, other rail systems like Amtrack and Caltrain are shown, with thinner lines and smaller station labels. interestingly, all the Caltrain stations south of Millbrae have station labels (Palo Alto, Redwood City, and so forth), but none of the stations north of Millbrae, where BART has service, have station labels. Nice one.

Well, it’s crunch time at the summer camp. As GW put it, it feels like the whole institute is winding down…if you’re an instructor. If you’re a student, it’s time to get working, or reveal to your peers the fact that you’re a studious person and that you have everything under control. With that in mind, some randomness.

First: try to find an edited dictionary with a definition for the the everyday meaning of backwash. Maybe you’ll try harder than I did, and succeed. But, I do find this definition hilarious: a condition, usually undesirable, that continues long after the event which caused it. Yes, that is exactly what backwash is. I mention this because, on Stanford the other day, I passed a group of 60-something men and women, and one of the women said something like, “Can you believe her? She actually spit into the drink to keep me from having more! I look in and there’s backwash!” The reply came, “What? No, lies are being spread here!” It just sounded strange to hear “backwash” from someone with all white hair.

Second: as one of my (upper) classmates has said, “scratch a descriptivist, find a prescriptivist.” And it’s certainly true, especially if you do morphology, syntax, or semantics, that to notice the “cool” stuff, it really does help to have a strong idea about what is “right.” Just the other day, one of my (linguist) friends said (about some beverage or something) that’s my favorite drink I’ve ever had. Now, favorite is end-of-scale, I think, so it is similar in a broad way to superlatives, and so should be able to appear with ever. But, “intuitively” it shouldn’t. Or anyway, there’s something makes that use interesting to examine.

Finally: recently I met up with The Tensor and Polyglot Conspiracy for lunch - very cool. In fact, several secretive blogger meetings (including also the proprietress of Anggarrgoon have been held in wide-open public areas. The results will either soon or never be made public.

Before I head off to bed, a victory notice: sweep can take the instrument as a direct object. Some rather vocal group in my Computational Lexical Semantics class was rather dubious about my example (something like “he swept the broom vigorously back and forth” and “sweep the eraser across the chalkboard”).

The syntax/lexical semantics literature doesn’t back me up. The deadly * of ungrammaticality is placed before She/John swept the broom by Heidi Harley and Raffaella Folli in published work (Studia Linguistica) and in handouts, and also by Doris L. Payne, Leonard Ole-Kotikash and A. Keswe Mapena Ole-Lekutit (in the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics). The ungrammaticality is also remarked upon by Teun Hoekstra in a Lingua article: “Thus, although one can eat, sweep or mow something, there is no sense in which one can eat oneself, sweep a broom, mow a scythe, etc.”

Man, I am so in trouble…wait.

He moved backward, and she swept the broom furiously into the doorway after him. (link)

She swept the broom viciously along the weatherworn boards. (link)

Sweep the broom across the surface of the water. Explain that whales swim and feed all day on swarms of krill. (link)

Tips and tricks: Sweep the brush across the powder a few times, then tap off any excess. (link)

Sweep the sponge across the compact and, beginning at the centre of the forehead, blend out toward your hairline and then down along the sides of the face… (link)

It was peculiar, because the people had to bend down to sweep the broom across the floor. (link)

STEP 7: Sweep the broom in a circle together until the story is finished. (link)

Anyway, by the end of the discussion I’d managed to convince a few people that it was a legitimate valence, probably comparable to the valence of kick in which the object is the leg being kicked out.

There’s a show called Cash Cab. Comedian Ben Bailey drives a cab in New York and offers to give people a free ride for as long as they can answer trivia questions without getting three wrong - and they get cash for each correct answer as well.

One question that came up today had to do with games. I have to admit that I don’t really remember the question, except that it was something like, “Inspired by light guns … [blah blah blah] … this game is known as WHAT?” The two guys in the cab seemed stumped, thought about it for a while, and just before time ran out, answered, “Space Invaders!” Way wrong. Bailey responded, “Sorry! It’s laser tag.” One of the contestants (who seemed to be in his late 20s) then said, “Oh, an actual game.”

Nice. We can see something interesting about prototypical games for these two guys and in particular the one quoted above. And not just prototypical games, but “games” as mentioned in different contexts. Now, I’m not sure what sort of context a quiz question is, but it’s probably close to neutral (the ever-elusive message-in-a-bottle-received-while-on-a-deserted-island that (many) semanticists and (some) pragmaticists wish they could get a handle on). Whatever context it was, it led them to interpret “game” as “video game” (could have had something to do with the actual content of the question…I really should have been, uh, paying more attention? Instead of doing coursework?) while the question was asked. But then when the answer was revealed, somehow a game like laser tag is more like an actual game: a game game, if you will. Now, laser tag is pretty video-game like in concept - but you just run around and such. Seems to suggest that an “actual” game is one that involves physical activity. Makes you wonder if, say, Battleship would have been an “actual” game. It involves interaction with things that are not displayed on a monitor, so much closer to physical activity than space invaders.

[The title should have reminded you of a certain paper by Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell on how to find good salad recipes.]

Well, it’s past the halfway point for Linguistics Summer Camp–that seems to be what people are calling it, though for me it’s a bit different, as I’m commuting from my home four times a week. All the classes are great - but some are much funnier than others. One of the funniest moments came the other day in Gregory Ward and Betty Birner’s class on word order variation. At one point, the latter wanted the class to recall the various types of information-structural status that referents could have, according to a 1992 article by Ellen Prince. She said something like, “Now, I’m sure you all remember Ellen Prince’s ‘92 breakdown.” There was a moment of silence before a wave of laughter. Following which Gregory Ward reassured us all that “she’s much happier now.”

Other fun moments in various classes:

On natural types: “Aristotle’s nice, but that was 2400 years ago” and “The water’s coming along, saying ‘I’m just a natural sort of guy’.”

On accounting for constituents in a sentence: “I guess I don’t have to account for the pad thai.” “Well, it came from a recipe!” “Yes, an old family recipe. Not MY family, though. We called it pasta.”

(Yes, that was a reference to a recently-released movie that I happened to have seen recently)

This post is part of a probably vain attempt to increase my wakefulness so I can continue to do coursework. I’ve mentioned before strangenesses related to the word say. I noticed another earlier today (or perhaps it was yesterday). Consider these:

I practice acceptance, which is to say: I occasionally acknowledge the obvious. SF Chron

MS. PERINO: What I can tell you is how the President reacted today, which is to say that he does feel terrible for them, he thinks they’re going through a lot right now, they’ve been through a lot. Press Gaggle

There’s a very widely-believed explanation going around that what Hamlet meant by “nunnery” was a “house of ill repute,” which is to say, a brothel. That’s All I’ve Got to Say

Random House/Dictionary.com has an entry for this particular turn of phrase:

that is to say, that is what is meant; in other words: I believe his account of the story, that is to say, I have no reason to doubt it.

This is apparently a rather old construction, with an OED attestation in c1175, and with nearly the same sort of meaning throughout. In informal search of which is to say shows that the relative clause version has been around at least since the 1600s. Also dating from Early Middle English is the shortened version, that is.

Efter schrifte, hit falleth to speken of Penitence, thet is, dedbote

It’s not until much later (the OED gives 1865, so probably a bit earlier) that that is allows itself to be tagged onto the end of the material it goes with (the material it’s glommed onto, that is).

Today the Linguistic Society of America’s summer institute began at good old Leland Stanford Junior University (”graduate program language requirement” or “exotic foreign language requirement”?). In order to register laptops with university tech services (so as to be able to connect wirelessly to their high-tech but sometimes-sluggish network) some machines have to run Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool. I think I hardly could have been the first linguist at the institute to notice the hilarity of the name of this little tool (and certainly not the first in the history of the department — and I’m sure many non-linguists will also see where I’m going with this).

Yes, it’s everyone’s favorite: chunking/modifier-attachment ambiguity. Is it, as I suspect, a Tool for Removing Malicious Software? Or is it, more hilariously, a Malicious Tool that Removes all sorts of Software?