Noncompositional

Play-by-play sports commentators are, I believe, sometimes noted for their novel uses of language. Now, the only sports I watch on TV is baseball, but there are some interesting things to say about the langauge of even the most mundane of sportscasters. Take, for instance, predicate inversion, which I have the impression is used more often in play-by-play discourse than elsewhere (don’t know about baseball vs other sports, though).

Coming in safe at second is Giambi

Out at third is Ichiro

In from center field to catch the ball is Davis

One particular construction that I’ve noticed, which I previously thought was impossible, is using temporal as on the speech act level. Like this:

When you’re a catcher it’s important to make sure you’re always on the same page as the rest of the infield, as Ichiro takes Hudson the other way for a base hit.

What the as is doing is not saying that “it’s important to…” and “Ichiro takes Hudson the other way…” are happening at the same time. Rather, the base hit is happening as the commentator is saying “it’s important to…” This happens all the time with other temporal subordinators like before and while:

Before you leave, when are you coming back next?

While you’re here, I was wondering if you could help me out.

What happens “before you leave” is that I’m going to ask you a question (namely, when are you coming back). Similarly for “while you’re here”: it’s (crucially) during the time that you’re here that I’m making (or able to make) a request.

But I always though that as didn’t have this sort of use. It sounded (and still sounds) ridiculous to say, As you get ready to leave, when should I meet you tomorrow?. But I thought about it some more, and maybe as you get ready, I have a question for you isn’t that bad. Then, taking a cue from the sports-as, I put it at the end, sort of as an afterthought: I still have one question for you, (uh), as you get ready to head out. Not bad. But that’s getting uncomfortably close to a strict temporal use: my having a question and you getting ready are taking place at the same time. Saying “I have a question” isn’t the same as “let me ask you a question,” and certainly not the same as “when should we meet up?” So there’s still some strange limitations on as. Except in spontaneous play-by-play talk, where it seems be a sort of way to transition between commentary and reporting the action: you can never plan very far in advance to use as in this way.

(There is of course a “causal” use of as, which allows “speech-act” modification as you’re staying another week, would you like to use our guest bedroom instead of the sofa? But you can do that with because and (causal) since, so it’s not that surprising to me.)

At a dinner I was at recently, one participant remarked that a roommate would continually make requests indirectly, e.g. “Do you think you’ll do the dishes?” “I wonder if we should do some cleaning this weekend.” [language changed to protect the innocent]. She expressed some frustration with that sort of talk, wishing that the roommate would “be direct” and just say

Can you please do the dishes?

In case anyone was wondering if, maybe, somehow, can you X was still only indirectly a request.

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This post will no doubt reveal to the world that I am not a frequent reader of British news sources. This morning I added a little BBC news widged to my customized google page, and found the headline Zimbabwe leaders agree talks pact. “That’s strange,” thought I. A search for “agree” on the BBC news site revealed several more transitive uses:

EU agrees radical farm reform

Bevan agrees a new dea

Santander agrees £1.2bn A&L deal

Then I decided to actually check a dictionary, and found that the Dictionary.com one (based on Random House Unabridged) lists as sense 10:

Chiefly British. to consent to or concur with: We agree the stipulations. I must agree your plans.

I wonder why Americans decided to do away with this particular valence. Default hypothesis: because it sounds snooty. But I’m willing to entertain other ideas.

A topic of continued interest (primarily by(?) Geoff Pullum) is linguification, or the expression of a particular idea or argument in terms of language. A couple years ago I wrote about one particular type of linguification that often takes the form of

You rarely hear X and Y in the same sentence

and which expresses, basically, X and Y are really different and totally unrelated. In case X is a modifier of Y, then it means Y is anything but properly described by X (e.g., you never hear “politician” and “honest” within three words of each other).

In the June 2008 issue of Language, Frederick (Fritz) Newmeyer writes, in a footnote:

The late Jim McCawley wrote somewhere that he can always pick out theoretical linguists at academic cocktail parties. We are the ones who talk about the Fibonacci sequence, the laws of thermodynamics, and Romance clitic climbing, all in the same sentence.

This reflects what I guessed was a folk theory of discourse, one part of which is the idea that sentences have only a single topic, and that nothing is present in the scope of negation (e.g., “studying Romance clitic climbing clearly has nothing to do with the laws of thermodynamics, which is just as well considering that I know nothing about the latter”). This particular form of linguification relies on the idea that if any concepts are mentioned in the same sentence, this indicates at least that the speaker is interested in all three topics, and perhaps even that the speaker is somehow arguing for a significant relation between them. (Or perhaps just that they are concept-dropping in order to impress their colleagues).

Speaking of fricatives in Bei”zh”ing:

I just got through watching today’s episode of Jeopardy!, and an interesting thing happened between the end of Double Jeopardy! and Final Jeopardy! During Double Jeopardy!, Carolyn D’Aquila had given the correct response “Who is Michael Keaton.” Or so it seemed. Before the final round, Alex Trebek announced that upon review, D’Aquila had been found to say “Michael Heaton, as in Patricia Heaton” (that’s [hi:tn]), and so her some money was deducted.

The first thing I thought of was one of my very first assignments in undergraduate phonetics, which involved as-narrow-as-possible transcription of some clips of people speaking English. One of the clips was of someone saying “two candidates,” but the initial sound of “candidates” was [x], the voiceless velar fricative. It was close enough to a [k] sound (plus, once you’ve done word recognition, it’s hard to notice that it’s not a [k]) that it took several listens to catch it. It certainly wasn’t anything like an [h], but you gotta wonder. In fast speech, could a /k/ become an [h]? How about in the particular phonetic context of “Michael _eaton”? Did the Jeopardy! officials hear an [h] or an [x]?

(and yes, I realize the irony of attempting to disambiguate “hard j” and “soft j” by using zh in the context of Mandarin)

I suppose I shouldn’t really care that nearly every time someone one the news utters the name of the capital city of China, they use a “soft j” (aka [ʒ]), rather than the standard Mandarin “hard j” ([ʤ] would be the closest sound in English). I mean, it’s not that big a deal, and hyperforeignization is, after all, a fact of linguistic life. Probably serves me right for trying to be bilingual.

[Update: Ben Zimmer's pointer to Bill Poser's similar comments reminded me of another set of cases: pronunciation of Chavez with initial "sh" (as in, say, Cesar Chavez Street (formerly Army St) in San Francisco). The same probably goes for several other cases of "ch" in Spanish (machete anyone?)]

In certain circles, one of the more (in)famous bits of English syntax is the resultative construction, illustrated (again (in)famously) in:

Gazelles hammered the metal flat.

Where the adjective flat is added after the full sentence, indicating the resultant state of the direct object (the metal). Other possibilities are there: skin the cat bare, push the door shut, shoot the flamingo dead. This is a particular class of resultative: the type where you can remove the adjective and still have a well-formed transitive sentence. There are other varieties: run your shoes bare, where *run your shoes is bad; laugh yourself hoarse, with the characteristic “dummy” reflexive object.

The other day I found my way (ahem) to the EcoGeek blog on Yahoo!, and saw an article on a new type of washing machine that uses much less water and a lot more little plastic chips (that is, >0) to clean clothes without as much waste. The teaser line reads:

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It’s interesting what sort of posts get commented on at LL. One of the more popular posts of late (and one which continues to get comments an amazingly long 2 days after the initial post is the one mentioned last time, on what may or may not end up being called “funky a” as in, say the title of this post, or earlier in this sentence.

I think the study of the sentences involved illustrates the importance of considering syntactic and semantic features of a construction separately. There are several facts involved, like the strangeness of a plural nominal with a singular determiner, and the fact that adding a non-determinative number expression to nouns then requires the addition of an adjective, and potentially following that a particular determiner. On the meaning side there’s the fact that the adjective seems to modify the amount of the item, not just the amount or just the item on its own. Depending on your view of syntactic and semantic dependences (either syn-syn, sem-sem, or syn-sem relations), each of these facts might lead you to a particular analysis (maybe semantic dependency is always parallel to syntactic dependency, or syntactic selection is always local, etc).

Here’s another addition to the facts. As threatened last time, I did a search of the BNC for “a/an [adjective] [number] [noun]” (with some allowing for non-adjacency, say if the adjective takes local complements or has adverbial modification). Here’s what I found regarding possible adjectives (each list in order of decreasing frequency of participation in the pattern; I stopped looking after the frequency dropped below 7 or so, but scanning the list, it doesn’t look like there are huge categories that I’ve missed):

Mere/Massive-class: mere, good, full, massive, steady, level, small, whole, standard, paltry, meagre, healthy, normal, large, bare, generous, low, scant, nominal

Additional-class: additional, extra, initial, final, closing, further

History/estimation/-ed: estimated, unbeaten, typical, standard, normal, unprecedented, likely, recent, reported, proposed?

Modification of the head: clear, quick, free, bad, difficult, nice, busy, winning, long, hectic, gruelling

Color commentary: staggering, comfortable, astonishing, incredible, modest, remarkable, amazing, superb, fine, typical, respectible, excellent, splendid, disappointing, sensational, magnificent, solid, outstanding, whopping

Total-class?: possible, potential, maximum, minimum, overall, total, net

I’m not wedded (wed?) to the categories, but it seems like each one is slightly different. I’d guess that some might be merged. The “modification of the head” category has basically all units of time or distance as the head noun (a bad few years, a hectic five laps), and as such, I think the adjective is applicable to each unit of time/distance as well as the whole amount: so in a grueling five years, not only are the years grueling as a whole, but also as individual years. This is not the case for the other classes, except maybe the Additional class (in an additional three points each point is also additional)