I don’t know mixins because I don’t like mixins (as well as I don’t really like templates).

Mersin State Opera and Ballet hired me to design a ballet “The Harem” in 1998, as well as I had a wonderful chance to design a ballet “Antonius and Cleopatra” in Istanbul state Opera and Ballet in 1989, invited here by a Primabalerina and a State Artist Merih Sumen

Anyone who loves to cook as well as eat will love these great recipes that I consider my favorites

I hear it from time to time, and wonder if people have a different entry for as well as than what I have. Or, are such coordinations due to a replanning of the sentence, after you’ve already committed to as well as, that makes verby coordination sound better?

For narrative purposes, what actually happened has been altered, but the basic situation is identical. I was finishing up checking my email before heading off to, and just as I tell my computer to shut down, someone asks me to check a website for them. They ask this while not looking at what I am doing, and only after they barely finish making the request, they see that the computer is shutting down. What they said:

Do you think you could check [such and such website] for me…as you turn off the computer.

The completion of the utterance is meant to be taken humorously (and was also so-intoned). And, I think, there are two distinct readings. One, which is not what I understood when I received the utterance, has the as… as a temporal modifier of check, i.e., “could you check the website while you turn off the computer?” The other reading has the as attaching “high,” modifying the speech act: “could you check the website…and I ask(ed) you this while you turn off the computer.”

Maybe you can now imagine more scenarios like this. For example, me and Jo are talking to each other, and suddenly realize that we have a joint question to ask of Logan, who is making preparations to exit whatever common room we’re all in. I call over, “Hey, Logan!” just as he exits the room (wearing in-ear buds, so he’s oblivious), and then I continue (to Jo), “as he just up and leaves.”

With any luck I’ll hear several more over the next week.

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.)

Can you please do the dishes?

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

A debate that (from what I understand) raged throughout the 1970s and a bit into the 80s, surrounded the idea of the indirect speech act. (Perhaps even putting it in that way shows bias) The basic idea is that

I wonder if you might lend me that copy of Star Trek: First Contact

Can convey an intention similar (but not identical) to that of

(I request/order/… you to) Lend me that copy of Star Trek: First Contact

Where the first sentence is a more indirect way of doing a command or request: it’s an “indirect speech act.” Depending on your view of how language worked in context (most people in this particular business were still just thinking up discourses in their heads, not looking at actual instances of interaction), people would interpret such indirect speech acts in different ways. But the general idea was that although there might have been some “literal” meaning of sentences like I wonder if …, people would somehow calculate an implicated meaning, namely that the speaker was actually making a request, not just remarking on their cognitive state.

A much-analyzed example of an indirect speech act is the formula can you (please) X? Jerry Morgan argued in 1978 that certain types of utterances that looked like indirect speech acts actually involved “short-circuited implicature.” That is, even though one can take the “literal” meaning of can you X (‘are you capable of X’) and calculate the proper implicature (‘please X’), people don’t do this. The implicature calculation has been short-circuited, and it’s basically just an idiom. An interesting bit of data adduced in discussing this idiom involved the word please:

Can you please pass the salt? ??? Are you able to please pass the salt? * This dish isn’t very salty please.

That is, one might say that please is only licensed when the surrounding sentence is “literally” a request.

What is certainly clear, at least to the dinner participant, is that can you please X is not a roundabout way of requesting anything: it’s quite direct, with perhaps only politeness distinguishing it from commands in the form of imperatives (do X!). It would have been, I think, much more interesting if she had given can you do the dishes as the direct alternative. That would show that even without the cue that comes from please, can you X is for all intents and purposes completely short-circuited.

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)

First, the sentences:

He was there for a good seven years.

An additional three people are required.

A mere four nations recognize that standard.

She collected an amazing and heretofore unprecedented forty million dollars.

What we have is “a” and then some adjective phrase, and then a quantified nominal. There are some interesting questions to be asked: first, what is the range of adjectives? It seems sort of limited: a grueling 100 miles, but ?an asphalt-paved 100 miles. All the examples given so far involve some sort of “evaluation” (shock, amazement, disappointment, unprecedentedness, etc.). Maybe someone nice will do a corpus study and report the findings (and of no one does it soon, I might just have to).

Next question: does the whole thing act as a singular or plural phrase, for the purposes of subject-verb agreement? The comments seem to show that, depending on the “context” (how the NP is construed semantically, let’s say – either as a divisible group of individuals or as a lump), you might get singular or plural agreement.

A good 100 people have/*has arrived.

A mere four nations recognize/*recognizes that standard.

A mere four nations is/are not enough

To be clear, it’s not just this funky “a” construction that has this effect: I think 100 people has the power to convince our boss that he’s acting inappropriately. That is to say, “100 people signing the petition” or something similar. The CGEL, unsurprisingly, has discussion of this (pages 501 onward, especially 504 on “measure phrases” as contexts for agreement overrides).

Perhaps, in fact, the idea of “measure phrase” is about right for the funky “a” constructions. That brings us to the next (and very related) question: what do these things mean, anyway? Claire (a commenter on Mark’s more recent post) has the intuition that in

a stunning 19.32 seconds

what we are dealing with is

a stunning record/time of 19.32 seconds

which has an “equative” of, which appears not just in quantified expressions but elsewhere (compare Seven of the 68 took less than 80% of the prescribed dosage over the study period for the reason of lack of response to DJT.). The idea that the “of” is “implicit” would need some further specification, but the idea would potentially be that adjectival modification of a particular type creates a sort of pseudo-measure-phrase out of the quantified nominal. This might then also explain any variability in subject-verb agreement (since there is both the quantified nominal as well as the singular semantics of the implicit measure phrease).

Radek (replying to Claire) gives some more evidence. One bit is something that I also mentioned in my initial comments, about semantic composition. He notes (and I agree) that in a mindboggling 281187 words, which is mindboggling is not the words, but rather “the dummy word ‘amount’.” This is basically what I think, though you don’t necessarily need a “dummy” (unpronounced?) word, but simply a semantic entity — the quantity of words — that can be modified. Whether that meaning has to be represented by some implicit word is a separate question.

Mark, too, I think, was grappling with this when was dealing with the original interesting question, namely what is the constituency structure?

However, I’ll admit that the constituent structure doesn’t feel like

[ [a modifier number] noun]

but rather feels like

[ [a modifier] [number noun] ]

I think this too involves semantic intuitions influencing syntactic ones (but not being a mind-reader, I could be totally off; there are also prosodic factors to consider, and just plain “well, that’s how it looks to me”). The latter structure would capture the idea that what is mindboggling, shocking, amazing, etc. is not the number per se but the quantified expression.

Going further afield, I have the vague feeling that he plays a solid third base and she sings a mean alto are in the same family of slightly-odd modification and determination. Also in this family might be the France of my youth and the always-controversial San Francisco.

[some format editing was done soon after posting...in case you were wondering]

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.

And on that note: it seems likely to me that what we have here is a phrase that was at some point rather dependent on a concurrent snap (either timed with that, or perhaps, for dramatic effect, just before that) to make any sense, but over time the association became conventional enough that the gesture was no longer needed. And in fact you could say like that along with any appropriate gesture that indicates speed, ease, or some similar idea. It’d be interesting to see if, in the absence of any gesture, it is regularly or obligatorily replaced by some prosodic cue.

Then I checked the OED entry for like, and lo and behold, there was a meaning! But it wasn’t what I was expecting:

[...] of the nature, character, or habit indicated; spec. (usu. accompanying the crossing of the speaker’s fingers) as an indication that two people described are very friendly or intimate

The first written attestation for this use is from The Great Gatsby. For me, if I want to express that meaning, I’d have to use the finger-crossing gesture – no amount of facial or intonational gymnastics seems to get it quite right. Which is interesting, since my first associations with that particular gesture are the “hope” and “nyah nyah I can break my promise” meanings.

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.]

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).