Noncompositional

It’s funny. There’s been an issue of Time magazine sitting on my coffee table for at least a week now, dedicated to the brain and recent research in neurology and psychology. Until tonight, I hadn’t looked through it much (it’s my roommate’s subscription), but I picked it up while eating dinner and started reading an article about the neural-computational basis for consciousness. I skimmed to the end, and found it was written by Stephen Pinker. This becomes particularly relevant later. I then went back and read the article more carefully.

I then flipped through a few more articles, and found in the middle of one a blown-up quotation (what are those things called?) that mentioned mirror neurons. Now, the mirror neuron is a relatively significant finding in some corners of cognitive linguistics, so I took a closer look. I found that one of the researchers mentioned (and indeed, the one mentioned at the very beginning of the article) was Lisa Aziz-Zaheh, who I met when she spent a year at ICSI. See, it’s really only a few steps until mainstream linguistics gets the front page treatment from Time!

Then, later this evening, I found that Stephen Colbert had interviewed Pinker last night. I watched the interview (which was nice, with some good lines from Colbert; I enjoyed the geek/rich geek analogy), and was amused that the first question from Colbert was about Pinker’s hair, which is admittedly quite noticeable. Noticeable enough that, in fact, it’s pretty easy to find somewhere on the web evidence of yours truly also commenting on the psychologist’s hair (though at a time when it was a bit shorter than it is now).

Since Grant’s useful comment on skeuomorphs, I’ve started keeping my eye out for them. I’m not entirely sure how to characterize the difference between the linguistic and non-linguistic versions of this. Additionally, there is apparently a thing called path dependence, which is common in talk of economics and history/sociology in general, whereby decisions made at some point in time turn out to be non-optimal or non-suitable for some point much later in time, though by that point there’s no way to switch paths. Or, as some people seem to sloganize the concept, “history matters.” This seems like a nice, general concept, perhaps illustrated by my recent difficulties in getting the sysadmins at work to let me use a dvorak keyboard interface (actually, they’ve been very nice about it, but once they had to do maintenance on my machine, and it was a real pain when they didn’t know the key layout; so it’s all on hold for now).

Path dependence may or may not subsume skeuomorphy, though this latter concept seems to be more in the realm of aesthetics, rather than somehow being “stuck” on some path. That is, designers of (say) audio software make the GUI look like a regular stereo interface, knobs and screws and all, to make the experience easier for the user, and also to make the experience more “authentic” (becuase clearly computer software is always a replication of what we used to do without them). It’s all about familiarity. On the other hand, the typical examples of path dependence, like usage of VHS and QWERTY, or the various standards for railway guages, are not about aesthetics, I suppose, and more about the fact that changing is just not very easy. It’s a variation on the “keep things familiar” tune, though in a different domain.

On the other hand, this terminological distinction may simply be…uh, an accident of history, so to speak. In any case, we can always borrow real science terms and talk about “inertia.” Inertia of design features, inertia of symbols, inertia of the familiar.

In any case, a couple of examples I came across yesterday. First, in a (non-new) standup routine Ellen Degeneres commented on the common gesture that people use to get someone to to roll down a car window, namely, miming a circular hand crank. There are two parts to this. First, that gesture is simply carried over from when that was the only way to roll (roll?) down a car window. Second, the new way to lower a window doesn’t involve a very unique or visually salient gesture: you hold down a button. Assuming that it isn’t interpreted as simply pointing downward, there is still the question of disambiguating all of the things that could be accomplished by holding down a button. And even if the only likely thing in context is “roll down your window!”, there’s still factor number one, i.e., there’s already a gesture for that, so this must mean something different.

The second example came when I was watching Star Trek Voyager (one of the very rare good episodes), and the holographic doctor said that he would be ready as soon as he finished “scrubbing,” which appeared to be moving and rubbing one’s hands underneath a dull orange light (which I assume also emits cleansing sound waves, as supposedly the general self-cleaning method in Star Trek is the “sonic shower”). Now, the rubbing was still there, so perhaps scrub is not so much of an anachronism. But if it were simply moving one’s hands underneath the cleaner, it probably would be. I’d guess that the choice of that word was quite conscious, in order to show the viewer how certain mundane things change over the centuries. The significance might have been lost if the doctor had just said “I’ll be there after I finish disinfecting/cleaning/sanitizing my hands”. (Uh, and let’s ignore the fact that this shouldn’t really be necessary, given he’s a hologram: he could just disappear and then come back, presumably all cleaned up)

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?]

I watched a show on the food network today, the topic of which was kitchen gadgets. One of these gadgets was a device by Whirlpool that is supposed to combine the speed and convenience of a microwave with the baking/browning power of the conventional oven. The result: the MicrOven.

A blend between microwave and oven, this word is particularly interesting because the original name (and still the best?) for the cooking devices that use microwave radiation is microwave oven. The coining of that term clearly did nothing to change the overall semantic coverage of the word oven — it still refers to the conventional kind, and it can’t be used on its own to refer to a microwave. I might hesitate if asked whether a “microwave oven” was a type of oven. Another example would (for some people) be short pants (aka shorts), which may or may not be a subtype of “pants”. [Note that I'm pretty sure that simple microwave came to be used to refer to the devices rather soon after they were commonly called microvawe ovens. At least this is what the OED leads one to believe.]

Contrast this with toaster oven. Now, the basic way that regular ovens and toaster ovens work is often the same (though I’ve never seen a gas-powered toaster oven). If someone asked if I had an oven, but all I had was a toaster oven, then I might say, “well, no, but I have a toaster oven — good enough?” But if all I had was a microwave oven, it would probably seem preposterous to say, “well, no, but I have a microwave — that’s just as good, right?” At the very least, there would be more situations where it would be preposterous, because the overlap in function between conventional ovens and microwaves is much smaller than with toaster ovens.

I think the more common situation for N-N compounds is that what the compound denotes is a subtype of the right-hand noun (ski lifts, correspondence courses, video games, conflict diamonds). Closer to the area of recent technology, consider mobile/cell phones, which are considered types of phones, and which can be called such. Or think of the (electronic) card key, which has managed to hold on to the term key since it has the same basic function as normal keys, even though it works in a rather different way. (On the other hand, they are more often called key cards, perhaps partly because they are often seen along with other “cards,” like ID cards. But this usage has not seemed to change the meaning of plain “card” – if asked to empty my wallet of cards, I might think, “but I don’t have any cards in my wallet.”)

Returning to talk of function, a microwave oven has, at least in my life, a rather different function from other sorts of devices that you stick things into in order to heat them up. In fact, I don’t think there are many dishes that I could prepare equally well in either device. Yes, I could make microwave brownies and melt butter in a conventional oven: but why would I? [okay, my microwave is currently broken, so if I didn't have any pots...] I would think that most people think somewhat similarly. And for those people for whom shorts are not a type of “pants,” perhaps the same could be said. And if I thought like mulling it over more and thinking of more compounds like this, maybe I could see if such is the case for a majority of the microwave oven-type compounds.

[Looking at my shelf of syntax and semantics books, I just thought of some nasty pseudo-examples: trace theory (see Skeptical Linguistics Essays) and, to give equal time to multiple camps, cognitive linguistics (see...uh...some people, I'm sure). Oh, and Chinese grammar (okay, that was out of line)]

Last night I caught part of CNN’s special 300 Million: Melting Pot or Meltdown, on the booming population of our fair nation. You can look at summary and review of the show, since I can’t seem to find anything about the program on CNN other than this blog entry.

While the content is of course noteworthy, what got my attention was something that the host, Anderson Cooper, said near the beginning of the broadcast. From the transcript:

Right now, we are less than 12 hours away from a milestone with enormous implications. At 7:46 a.m., Eastern Time in the United States, the U.S. population is expected to hit 300 million. 300 million. We have reached this milestone faster than ever before. It took the nation 139 years to get to 100 million mark in 1915. And another 52 years to reach 200 million in 1967. But it will have taken just 39 years to hit the 300 million mark, which means that the country is getting bigger and much bigger much faster.

Note the part that I made bold. We’ve got a comparison being made by the word faster. The item being compared is the (speed) of reaching the milestone of 3300 million people. And the standard of comparison: well, it’s ever before. Now, when you put just before, you can omit the material that might describe what actually happened before. Compare this to Nowadays, threats spread further and faster than ever before. What happened before was “threats spread (far/fast to some degree)”. What’s important in making this sentence work is (i) that we’re talking about generic threats, so there doesn’t necessarily have to be some particular threat that spread both before and now, and (ii), there actually could be such a threat, since threats can spread continuously. A slightly different example would be His apartment is bigger than before. Here there’s not a generic assignment, but a role. That is, there are several incarnations of the role apartment in “his” life (e.g., the one on Broadway, the one on Market, the one back East), and the current incarnation is bigger than the previous role-fillers were. (On another reading, the same physical apartment was made bigger, by annexing neighbouring rooms, for instance).

But to return to Anderson’s sentence, we’ve got a problem. We can’t interpret what we have done before is “reach this milestone,” because (i) there is no generic “this milestone” (since it really means “3300 million,” which is a particular value), (ii) there is no role “this milestone”. (Similarly, you can’t say this apartment is bigger than before to mean that it’s bigger than previous incarnations of the apartment role). Nonetheless, what he said is clear enough, especially if you listen to the next few bits. Basically, we’ve gone from milestone-to-milestone faster than ever before, and this particular time, we got to the 3300-million milestone. And, though this may be obvious, you have to make sure that you are comparing equivalent milestone-distances; you can’t, say, look at how long it took to get from 150 to 250 million, and compare it to the time it took to get from 250 to 300 million.

Now, I’m not sure what principle might tell you that you allowed to say something like that. I mean, you can describe it as a sort of “coercion” from entity to role, induced by the before. It would be sort of (barely) similar to the coercion involved in a sentence like I believed her in five minutes, where the believe is coerced into being an event with an endpoint, rather than a state.

[edit: In an extended brain-o, somehow most quantities were divided by 100 in my head when I wrote this. This has been fixed, with reminders to my brain to be more attentive next time.]

Since immediate concerns bar me from further yeah, no discussions (for now), I’ll just mention something odd that I heard while watching CNN today, but that seems to be not uncommon: any in a particular positive context. What context? Here’s Google:

• COOPER: That was JonBenet Ramsey’s aunt, talking about the big development today in the case. John Karr has been cleared of any charges in the murder, after his DNA did not match the DNA found at the crime scene.
In 1923, the handsome, neat young man killed two men in three days, one of them at the Halfway House. Birger claimed self defense and was cleared of any charges on both occasions, but the second time he took a bullet in his lung and spent some time at Herrin Hospital recuperating.
• Years ago he was used as a scapegoat by his crooked senior partner, and although he was eventually cleared of any charges, his wife left him and his name remains dirt among his peers.

So far, my reaction is: huh.

A recent Word on the Colbert Report had Stephen engaging in a little bit of lexicography again. This time, he tackled the word shall, which featured in a confrontation between two senators (George Allen of macaca fame and Richard Durbin) regarding how the former’s adaptation of the latter’s bill used shall, rather than will. The video is online, but here’s a preview:

Did you know there are also red words and blue words. “Shall” is red. It’s strong, and authoritarian, like the Republicans. [...] “Shall” embodies traditional Republican values, like stick-to-it-iveness and telling other people how to live. [...] Shall is godly, as in thou shalt not kill. If God were a Democrat [...] He would have said, “thou will not kill,” meaning, “you shouldn’t kill, so you had a bad childhood, so it’s society’s fault. [...] Think of all the time you hear “Democrats” and “will” in the same sentence. We will cut and run.”

Note the linguification at the end (which actually mistakes an co-occurrence of the words “democrat” and “will” in a single sentence with an instance of a Democrat actually using the word “will”.)

And for some related shall/will funnery, there’s this earlier post.

Yesterday on one of my favorite shows, Good Eats, I heard an interesting coordinate structure out of the host’s mouth. The topic of the episode was mayonnaise, and Alton was discussing the properties of emulsions:

How can there be so many opposing forces crammed together, and yet still be stable?

Not to infringe on the territory of those interested in coordination, but notice that the second part, after the and yet is non-finite, so this looks to be a coordination of verb phrases or perhaps TPs, if you believe in sanitary syntactic structure (compare it to in one city there can be a lot of student-oriented stores and still be good places for families, or how can there be unity and still be diversity).¹

However, expletive there cannot be followed by an adjective: *there was still (very) stable. So how is the second phrase licensed? The above sentence does sound a bit weird (weird enough for my pay-attention-to-this-construction alarm to go off). But it gets about ten million times worse if you rearrange the conjuncts: *how can there still be stable even when there are so many opposing forces? A sort of off-the-cuff analysis would be to say that this is really coordination of clauses, and that there is a missing subject in the second “clause”:

…and yet the emulsion still be stable?

But that is pretty darned degraded. I did manage to find cases like

He argues that a person could be morally responsible for a particular action and yet it still be true that that person could not have done otherwise

where the subject, actually an expletive it is realized in the right location (for more parallelism, just imagine that the first conjunct is also a there be construction). But then there is the question of why you have non-finite be in the right conjunct: if they are both top-level (utterance-level) clauses, then (AFAIK) they should both have finite verbs. So you’d have to say that some auxiliary (and I dare you to tell me which one) is also omitted.

My tentative guess is that this is a syntactic blend (call it a performance error if you like, but my feeling is that it is the sort of semi-grammaticalized “error” that should be accounted for even by those who think the competence-performance distinction is worthwhile). Say, a blend of (how can) this emulsion have so many opposing forces crammed together (in it) and still be stable with how can there be so many opposing forces crammed together (in this emulsion). And of course the there be construction and the have construction are very similar semantically, so taking the syntax licensed by one (have) but using the actual form of the other is more likely.

(to clarify: they have missiles pointed at them is paraphrasable as there are missiles pointed at them; the first sort of means “missiles are pointed at them; this is related to them”)

1: Note also the lovely speech-act construction not to VP, but [stuff], which also involves some coordination of unlike types. It’s pretty specialized: it’s really strange to rearrange the conjuncts (seems rather obvious why); also, you would probably have a hard time leaving out the not; but you can use just instead.