PS, I want someone who is a strong advocate for twenty-X and who is an advocate of syntactic or phonological deletion accounts of right-node raising to say something like two thousand five to/through 11.

There was this woman who was carrying the smallest umbrella I’ve ever seen! They were less than the width of her shoulders!

No idea why I thought that was allowed.

Russell doesn’t update his blog much.

But this is by no means universal. Many an update on my home page look like

Russell updating your status is boring

And many other sorts of formats. But what about the comments you can leave in response to others’ status updates? Those too begin with a linked, correctly capitalized name, but I have yet to see (or at least remember) a comment that used that name as the subject of a sentence. They all look like

Russell that’s great, Bill!

and not

Russell thinks that’s great!

Russell wonders why.

I thought it might be because the main status field tells you your name will appear in the beginning of your feed, while the comment field doesn’t. But that’s not true. It doesn’t seem like the different prompts (what’s on your mind? vs write a comment) would necessarily do it. Maybe it’s about topicality: the status is about the status-holder/typer, but the comment isn’t necessarily about the commenter.

Or Maybe it’s more historical? Earlier, all status updates started with “[name] is”, but even with the demise of that restriction people still like to exploit the fact that their names appear right before their custom text. I don’t know when comments started being implemented, but perhaps they came in after any facebook-enforced subjecthood requirements, so the custom never caught on.

Or maybe it’s something more genre-like: the status is an broadcast announcement, so it makes sense for it to be a sentence about you, while the comment (while also potentially readable by everyone) is more personal and so a more flexible information structure and syntax is needed?

Students and police are intensifying their efforts to curb what officials are calling an unusual string of sexual assaults being reported on the Southside of campus.

You know what they say about descriptivists (scratch ‘em and you find a prescriptivist), and I have to say I do not like the Southside of campus. With Southside as a single (compound) word, complete with compound stress (on the first element), it functions as a proper name, and does not have the complementation pattern that side, the head of the compound, originally had. Maybe reasonable people could disagree with me on this.

At the same time, I noticed that the proper preposition of southside (and northside) is on. One lives and eats on southside, not in or at southside. Why should that be? Other districts of Berkeley properly take an in: Elmwood, Claremont, etc. Well, maybe it’s the fact that side collocates with on. A little cute, perhaps, but I don’t really have a better story.

My plan is to present the original sentence to a bunch of undergrads tomorrow to see if they have the same reaction I have. If it ends up interesting, there’ll be a report of it.

Here, we demonstrate that exposure of 15-d-old mice to 2 weeks of an enriched environment (EE), that includes exposure to novel objects, elevated social interactions and voluntary exercise, enhances long-term potentiation (LTP) not only in these enriched mice but also in their future offspring through early adolescence, even if the offspring never experience EE.

The effect lasts about three months in the mice exposed to the EE, but wanes much earlier in their offspring (and is not found in the next generation). At one point the authors note that

[T]he phenotype ends at an younger age in the offspring of enriched mice than in their parents

Then comes the fun part. A few sentences later, they say this:

Defining why the effect ends when the offspring are younger than their parents will require further experimentation

Totally sweet example of the omission of everything in the comparative clause except for the contrastive bit. Actually, it took me a couple reads to make sure of what they were saying, despite the same information having been just presented.

Processing the sentence was made more difficult (in my case) by the fact that the first time through I read “younger” as “older,” yielding a truly incomprehensible proposition (which, it should be noted, is still as grammatical as the actual sentence, just with a different meaning).

So…ever wonder if you’ve done something when you were younger than your parents? Or older than them?

If you feel pain, faint, or dizzy, stop exercising immediately.

Though I’d read that warning dozens of times on many occasions, this time it garden-pathed me. The structure is [if you [feel N, A, or A]], which involves coordination of a noun with two adjectives (or their phrasal projections). But thanks to the lexical ambiguity of faint, I parsed it as [if you [feel pain], [faint], or], at which point I was expecting another (finite) verb phrase, but instead got dizzy instead.

I’m guessing I parsed faint as a full VP for a few reasons, including possibly a higher frequency of the verb than (this sense of) the adjective, and perhaps more tellingly, the unlikelihood of conjoining a noun and an adjective as a complement of feel. There’s potentially nothing ungrammatical about it — and as complements of be, or predicative arguments of verbs like consider, it’s no problem. But it seems that even for a verb as light as feel, N+A conjunctions seem a little weird.

A look through the COCA revealed two potentially real hits for “feel N and A”

he also is made to feel outlaw and inferior — instead of ill.

You couldn’t help but feel empathy and sorry for the mother.

The first is potentially an adjectival variant of outlaw, but the second is legit — and boy does it sound strange to me. But, in accordance with the Zimmer principle, if you add some words, it improves: You couldn’t help but feel not just empathy but genuinely sorry for the mother.

I’m pretty sure the treadmill sentence is syntactically well-formed, or at least I’d like to say so. But there’s definitely something fishy going on with the coordination of unlike types, depending on what the governing context is.

[update: almost forgot -- BROOD has a discussion on this from exactly five months minus one day ago]

In my more advanced age, I had a rather different reaction to the Target Christmas commercial with a bunch of elementary school students reciting, “There’s no place like Target / at Christmas to save.” Since it’s in verse, the order isn’t so exceptional. What’s interesting is trying to figure out the semantic parse — and if any of the various parses actually means anything different from any of the others. What’s clear, I think, is that to save is an infinitival relative modifying place. What’s up for grabs, I suppose, is whether at Christmas hooks up with save or with be, and if like Target modifies place, place to save, or place to save at Christmas. I think basically all of these mean about or exactly the same thing.

Also cool: the phrase at Christmas. Generally at prefers point-like times and/or events, or times that are metonymic for events. So at 4 o’clock and at Burning Man are okay, but at Tuesday is bad. It seems like at [holiday] generally works, but it seems more natural with post-September holidays: Chirstmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween…uh, and New Year’s Day (yeah, that’s post-September). Anyway, the Target commercial also clearly doesn’t mean “on Christmas Day”, since they presumably wish you to save in the weeks leading up as well. Not sure how general this gets (could be for purposes of meter, it’s “Christmas” rather than “Christmas time/season/etc”).

Also, I think I hope it doesn’t rain at my birthday is strange, unless my birthday stands for some event being held for the birthday. On the other hand, it never rains at Christmas/Thanksgiving seems basically normal. And someone could say that even if they never do anything special on those days.

I was on an airplane the other day, and as one person was about to stow a bag in the overhead compartment his cotraveler gave him a glance, to which he responded, “do you need something out of this bag?”

The sequence “need+NP+PP” potentially has two parses. The first is so-called raising to object: I need you far away from me, I need another flower pot in my garden. In this case what you need is for some state of affairs to hold: “you are far away from me,” “another flower pot is in my garden.” The other parse involves simply an NP complement, with that NP containing the PP: I need the book on that bookshelf, Do you need the cup in my hand? These are paraphrasable with relative clauses; the book that’s on the shelf, the cup that’s in my hand.

When I first heard do you need something out of this bag, it really sounded like the second parse (and I still think that’s what it is). It seems like the guy was asking if his friend needed an item that was in that bag, not if she needed it to be the case that some item ended up outside the bag. That is, he could have said, “Do you need something from this bag?”

Put another way, I find it unlikely that he was asking, “Do you need some (particular) thing to be outside the bag?” especially since what’s involved is ending up holding or using that item, not just it being outside (to keep it safe from tumbling around in the overhead compartment, e.g. Not to say that he couldn’t have said what he said and meant the raising-to-object interpretation; I just think he didn’t.

So the question then becomes: when/why can you use “out of the bag” as a nominal modifier like that? If you say “something is out of the bag,” it ain’t inside it! In general it seems like “N out of Y” can mean “N that is outside of Y, or that could contextually-saliently end up outside of Y.” (I’m talking only of physical things: I haven’t thought about plotlines that look like they’re right out of Star Trek). So you can say “something out of this bag must have gotten left behind when we were in security.”

This generalization will no doubt founder upon the massive amount of data I haven’t considered. Thankfully, I have a lot of free time to figure this out…

For example, in the item description she busts out with the following paragraph: “If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me! I do have cats, but I keep them away from the fabrics/craft area.” Uh… non sequitur much? (link)

Your writer’s true colors are revealed when they refer to a Big Mac as “charred flesh”. Ummm, vegan much? Thank you, and have a nice day. (link)

Uh, okay. Prejudiced much? (link)

Beetle: uh, hmmm…literate much? (link)

Not part of my idiolect much? I have to admit that this is not really part of my speech, and I don’t have a good grasp on how to use it and what phrases can the much-ified (thus leaning on the crutch of there sometimes being as uh/um before the item in question). And it sure seems like there must have been some popular or cult individual who popularized this sort of thing – any ideas?

And it could be that I’m not really all that sure what these things mean, at least in the semantic details. That is to day, in something like busy much? or come here much?, you’re asking about frequency. In enjoy movies much? you’re asking about degree/extent (or possibly frequency…I suppose). In something like non sequitur much? is the person (sarcastically) asking about the frequency of non sequiturs (by some individual), or is that not really what’s going on?

So, this is all to the good, no? I suppose…but then again, I find I usually pronounce the name of the city Shanghai so that the first vowel is that of hang or fang, not that of father. This despite knowing full well the Mandarin pronunciation (which, as the official language, I would take to be the expected way for a foreigner to say the word, rather than in Shanghainese). In this case, the low mid-vowel is both the more proper and more foreign sounding option, and yet I do not frequently use it (at least, I don’t think I do, unless speaking with, say, a Chinese-speaker). Is Shanghai really that different from Beijing? And this is to say nothing of Seoul (which I render with a single syllable). Maybe I’m just a super-Anglicizer, and in the case of Beijing it happens to work out.

And for some sane arguments in favor of Beizhing, I recommend this entry in Beijing Sounds.