Noncompositional

At least, that seems to be the majority reaction to a book by Paul Benedict called Japanese / Austro-Tai, which claims that Japanese is genetically part of the Austro-Tai family. Note that Austro-Tai is a proposed macro-family consisting of Austronesian (Formosan, Malayo-Polynesian), Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer, among others), and Tai-Kadai (Thai, among others). So the book has at least as many presuppositions in it as the infamous Japanese and other Altaic Languages by Roy Miller. And it seems to have taken quite a bashing, at least among stauch defenders of an Altaic connection, like Alexander Vovin.

I came across the book as part of a little research project to see what people out there think about the origins of the Japanese people and language. It turns out that the Altaic theory is still pretty strong among linguists and some anthropologists and geneticists, though the possibility of an Austronesian connection is still pretty strong, especially among Eastern scholars. It seems that many of them believe that the origins of the Japanese are best understood as a mixing between northern (Altaic, perhaps) and southern (Austronesian or Austroasiatic, though usually the former) features, at least culturally. Linguistically, the arguments for either a creole or a southern substratum remain, to my eyes, rather unconvincing. Though, I will admit, there are some interesting lexical correspondences between some Ryukyuan, Okinawan, and Kyushuan words for sea navigation, and some proposed Proto-Austronesian words. Okay, there’s really just one really good one, which was presented not by Benedict but by Osamu Sakiyama in a book with a great title: Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals. The word is proto-Austronesian *paRi, which is reflected in various languages with meanings related to south, southern winds, the southern cross, and sting rays (what the southern cross looks like). And, apparently in many of the Japonic languages spoken in southwestern Kyushu and beyond, there are words like pae and pai that mean south/southwestern wind. So, the medial loss of r is supposed to have happened in Japanese (though, I think that is arrived at via comparative Altaic data, so…yeah); but the vowels, I think, are supposed to have merged in various ways. Clearly some more work has to be done on this one, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, for me the little research project definitely inspired me to become more aware of the (attested) history of Japanese, so it looks like some learning of classical Japanese should be in my future.

In recent lexicographic work, I had occasion to think about the meaning of words related to tourism, including sightseeing. Now, to a fair number of people, I think, sightseeing is a noun (or verb) that appears only in the -ing form. That is, I want to sightsee or something like that would be bad. But I think for many (perhaps even a larger number of) people, sightsee is a perfectly fine O-V compound, akin to housekeep, globe-trot, hero-worship, and stage-manage, typewrite, hogtie, proofread, brainwash, vacuum clean, and top-dress. Of course, some of these are likely no longer thought of as having this particular structure (like perhaps proofread) and some are mostly obsolete or rather domain-specific (typewrite and top-dress).

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Just now I went from a librarything blog entry on database (mis)management (by the way, my recorded collection is slowly growing) to a similar entry on slashdot detailing what happens when the number of comment parents (or their ID numbers, I suppose) gets too big. They had gotten up to 2^24 comments, the upper bound for a mySQL “unsigned mediumint” sort of number, and so no more comments could be posted until the database was changed. When it was, one poster remarked,

I for one welcome our 2 to the power of X overlords.

(background)

Linguists like to have fun, I think. And there are precious few places to have fun while, say, writing a paper (well, depending on the exact topic and the forum in which it is to be published). But among those places where I’ve seen fun being had are: the title or subtitle; the names of principles; the names of theoretical entities; the (made-up/constructed) data being examined [this only being relevant for those linguists who examine at least whole words, and usually whole sentences].

Fun titles are often somehow self-referential. Examples include When nouns surface as verbs (Clark and Clark, Language 1979), What’s this sentence doing showing up in English? (Pullum, York Papers in Linguistics 1973), and Just because two constructions look alike in two languages doesn’t mean that they share the same properties (Weilbacher and Boas, ICCG4, 2006). This is fun.* Then, with slightly different effect, there are some titles that evoke other titles, a sort of “intertextuality.” One example is the recent Newmeyer/Bybee exchange in Language, with titles Grammar is Grammar and Usage is Usage contrasted with Grammar is Usage and Usage is Grammar. Another would be Postverbal Behavior (Wasow, 2002), based off of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.

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Working at a lexicographic outfit, one becomes rather quickly acquainted with some unfortunate inadequacies of many print dictionaries. A paradigm case is the word risk, noun and verb, a rich semantic analysis of which is given in a series of papers by Sue Atkins and Chuck Fillmore.

But sometimes the missteps that dictionaries take are not quite of the need-to-write-an-academic-paper-about-it caliber. Take, for instance, the definition of the cardinal number 2 in the 10th edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (now the Concise Oxford English Dictionary). It reads,

equivalent to the product of one and one; one less than three

The product of one and one? What could they be thinking? Okay, maybe their entry for product will clear things up. Here are the relevant bits:

a result of an action or process [...] MATHEMATICS: a quantity obtained by multiplying quantities together, or from an analogous algebraic operation

Hmm. Well, the part that should have been most relevant (i.e., multiplication) clearly doesn’t help their case. I suppose one could make up a story about product of X and Y meaning “what you get when you put X and Y together.” But that’s certainly not the use that is primed in the domain of mathematics. Oh well. In later editions, the definition seems to have been changed.

The next mistake is interesting. One particular edition of the American Heritage dictionary (I don’t have it on me now) gives this as the first meaning of information:

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Why should you read papers in Generative Semantics? Aside from the great abundance of data and lively discussion of thereof, sometimes the prose is just…well, just take a look below.

Here are a couple of passages from Jerry Sadock’s Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts, chapter 6, entitled Some Covert Illocutionary Acts in English.

Thus, both tag questions with falling intonation and queclaratives fail to show the properties of either of the questions or of the assertions that would be predicted on the basis of hypothesized underlying structure (135). I have no particularly clear idea, however, of what the common semantic source for queclaratives and falling-stress tag questions ought to be. Figure (142) represents a sheer guess with no syntactic backing. (p. 135)

It’s good to be upfront about these sorts of things. Next:

G. Lakoff (1966) has argued (apparently) that sentences of the form (186) with stative verbs are not true imperatives, on the basis of the fact that they do not [...].

Hmm…I apparently am not entirely sure of what Lakoff wrote, or what Sadock thinks of it.

As I side note, I recommend Robin Lakoff’s The Way We Were; or; The Real Actual Truth About Generative Semantics: A Memoir in the Journal of Pragmatics (1989, vol 13:6) for a sort of “behind the scenes” look at GS (mostly from one side of it, of course).

Over the last few years, I’ve had many occasions to test my linguistic intuitions against the intuitions of the internet-as-indexed-by-Google. In particular, internet searches (and corpus searches in general) are very useful whenever confronted with a syntax (or semantics, or maybe even morphology) article that proclaims some bit of language to be ungrammatical. I suggest everyone do it at least once per article.

Now, sometimes you’ll look at a structure marked with a * and wonder, “could anyone ever say (write) something like that?” So you search in (say) Google, and you find about two dozen hits, most of them irrelevant. But a couple are good, and so you either hang your head in dismay or shout a cheer of, “ha! take that, false giver of *s!” And I’ve noticed something that may or may not actually be true overall, but somehow it seems right: more often than any other genres, science-fiction, fantasy, and fanfiction in general contain the aberrant innovative structures.

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Part of my Chinese class involves translation of short paragraphs from English into Chinese. The paragraphs are in the workbook that accompanies this textbook). Normally they are very good exercises, and the paragraphs are written in a way to make you think about how to use your relatively limited skills in Chinese to render a good translation. But sometimes they do something that’s…well, a little wrong. Below is one of the paragraphs that we translated in class today:

Recently, there has been more news on students bringing guns to school and threatening their teachers and classmates. Parents not only blame the school for not being able to educate children well, but also blame the media for having a bad influence on their children. However, many parents have never thought that they themselves are mostly responsible for their children’s behavior.

The interesting part is the last clause, that they themselves are mostly responsible for their children’s behavior. A student might have at least two problems at this point. One is that the book has not introduced a way to express the idea of being responsible. Instead there is a way to express take responsibility (for X). Unfortunately, the student might not be sure that there was any clear way to modify “responsibility” except for perhaps 負最大的責任 ‘bear the biggest responsibility’ (note: I’m not sure if this means the right thing, though it’s commonly attested on Google).

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