Noncompositional

In the March 19th issue of the Economist, there is an article “Kamikaze Politics” about political scandals in Japan, which has the following two sentences.

At midweek a new deputy governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, looked likely, at least for a while, to fill the vacuum—an unnecessary one, since candidates acceptable to both sides have been there for the choosing all along, notably Haruhiko Kuroda, head of the Asian Development Bank. By not putting him forward, Mr Fukuda showed himself unable and unwilling even to pick up the phone to the opposition.

Pick up the phone to? What’s that?

A cursory examination of google search results indicates that this seems to be a UK and Australian thing to say. If it happens in America, I’ve certainly never heard it. It’s a nice example of a multiword expression. What’s interesting is that it’s a communication verb that incorporates the means of communication (like phone, fax, email, and write) but which, perhaps due to syntax of the words in the expression, requires the person called to be expressed with the preposition to (like talk, speak, and write).

(yes, write goes in both places: I write (letters) to my aunt every week, but I write my uncle every month)

This is the result of a train of thought that went like this. The other day I was in the linguistics department and looked at a sign that’s been at the base of a set of stairs for a few years now. It said something like, “Step up your fitness level: take the stairs.” I wondered, for some unknown reason, how this would be expressed in Japanese. Of course I really have no idea (though I’m sure that such a sign is possible, or even probable in Japan…though on the other hand, there are many places where Japanese people use staircases where Americans would use or at least expect an escalator or elevator; well, at least in places where “accessability” is important).

Not really knowing a word for fitness other than kenkoo ‘health,’ I just figured that probably, on signage like this, English was more the way to go: fittonesu reberu. Then there’s the question of raise. There are a few words like ageru which correspond to raise in some contexts. But again, why do that when you can go English: appu!

And then yes, we had reberu appu, or level up. That got me to wondering: how many uses of level up (including the pseudo-exclamative “level up” as well as the verb “(to) level up” in both transitive and intransitive senses) are original to the American gaming community, and how many (if any) are the result of Japanese influence - or are all Japanese uses taken from elsewhere?

On a recent trip to Barnes and Noble (I have a gift card) I happened upon a book in one of the bargain sections called (IIRC) Where’s that word from? I looked inside the front jacket and saw what I expected, namely things like “did you know [word x] actually came from the Old [English/Norse/etc] word [blah] that means [amusing thing]? Find out all about this and many other words in this collection of…” I figured that it would be a series of one- or two-page-long descriptions of maybe a hundred words, with some light commentary and anecdotes, or whatever. So I turned to a random page in the middle, and was slightly surprised to find that a more appropriate description of the book would have been English Etymological Dictionary, because that’s what it was: a list of words with a short definition (the sort helpful only to an already-literate user of English) and a line about the proximal source language (Middle French, Latin, etc.) and word. Then I looked at the front matter, and found a description of the history of the English language, not surprisingly. Only the author talked about “Indo-Germanic (or Indo-European).” Then I turned to the publication information: yep, 1974. And probably the really original publication date was rather earlier. Sweet repackaging, guys.

At the moment I’m trying to recover the exact publication information, including the editor and original title, but for some reason I can’t find it out. Might be another trip to B&N for me.

I was surprised and very happy about the sudden interest on LL in “yeah no” (initial post and the aftermath)since I’ve also been paying attention to the little guy in some recent research (following up, in a sense, from two earlier posts of mine here and here. I won’t reveal too much now (have to keep you in suspense!) but there’s one use of it which is really cool, and which is illustrated by LL’s own Geoff Nunberg on NPR.

Get yourself an archived recording of Talk of the Nation on June 2nd, 2004. It’s a discussion between Neal Conan and Geoff Nunberg on his then-new book Going Nucular. At about 10m30s into the session, they’re taking calls, and you’ll hear this:

JIM: Well, three categories here. I’ll do them real quickly. First I guess I’ll call it the category of the cachet of erudition. ((dozens of seconds omitted; some talk of the word robust included near the beginning))

CONAN: Any thoughts on those, Geoffrey?

Mr. NUNBERG: Yeah. No. I think ‘robust,’ for example, is an instance of one of those vogue words that for one reason or another is just picked up and people like the sound of it. You’re right. I don’t know if it’s erudition but there’s a kind of pleasure in saying a word like that and everybody plugs into it.

This sort of thing happens not infrequently on NPR (and other radio talk shows, I presume). It might even be getting to the point where “yeah no” (and sometimes just “no”) is almost just a question-uptake marker more than anything else. Listen for it. Other good places to listen for it: asymmetric social contexts, especially where one person constantly feels the need to maintain a non-disagreement or positive-alignment stance with other people there, either just in order to be nice (think job interviews) or to prevent themselves from being misunderstood (think any academic context).

It’s too bad that neither Burridge and Florey, nor Moore’s thesis from what I saw, take up the task of comparing “yeah-no” and “no-yeah” to the use and distribution of yeah and no individually. Maybe I’m just too much of a lexical semanticist. But, if they had, they might have found what I did in going through a bunch of LDC mixer corpora (as well as some more natural conversations): namely, that in most but not all cases there’s not a whole lot special about the combination in and of itself. It doesn’t seem to fulfil any core function that either “yeah” or “no” aren’t observed to do on their own (assuming you assign some combination of propositional and discursive meaning to each yeah and no when they do appear on their own, and also when they appear in combination). There may be cases where it is appropriate or even ideal to use both, as many of Mark’s readers pointed out (like in responses to negative or leading questions), but the resulting “meaning” is not really anything beyond what you might expect by putting the two together. I think that’s the case with most of the examples in the two LL posts. However, Australia could be a completely different story. In particular, if you have access to the Burridge and Florey article, check out the “athletic” use, which to my ears is actually rather strange.

Finally, it may interest my more sociologically- or CA-minded readers (all none of them?) that this sequence of words was analyzed by Schegloff in a 1992 paper, “Repair After Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation”, Am. J of Soc. He also looked at just “no” in “Getting Serious: Joke->Serious ‘No’” (2001, J of Prag.), but this “no” can also be combined with “yeah” resulting in a very similar effect. This is the use that I don’t think any of the LL-responders has mentioned, where you say something joking as a sort of ice-breaker, and then “(yeah) no I just wanted to ask you about….” This is as opposed to Mark’s (right-on, by the way) characterization of the “no” as indicating “divergence from (perhaps shared) presuppositions or expectations” — note the similarity to “intersubjectivity” in Schegloff’s title.