Noncompositional

It seems like one of those things that keeps getting “casually discovered”–that is, that I hear mention of at least once a year–is the result of applying the agentive -er suffix to particle verbs like pick up and clean out. What’s interesting is that the most common result (according to some study [studies? -I've only seen a 1978 manuscript by Moira Yip cited wrt this issue]) is picker upper and cleaner outer. There are some interesting observations made by David Mortensen in this post of his now archive-only blog.

But how about this: what do you do with take advantage of? Well, today, I somewhat consciously produced taker advantage ofer. A quick search on Google reveals:

Kira I Am: does it say that kkira is the numbe rone drunk girl taker advantage ofer? link

Yes! This seems to be a one-line extract from some sort of IRC or similar chat session. I especially like the semantic undergoer expressed as a pre-modifier.

In any case, this seems like an interesting test case for models of realizational morphology, as there is more than just a head verb and a particle. Exactly which bits of the word are eligible for the morphological process?

From time to time, I’ve observed that I mishear /p/ as /h/, in particular in initial position. It doesn’t happen all the time, but occasionally it does, and it hinders understanding (it might be that it happens more than I notice it, but in many cases it doesn’t really matter for parsing). Now, me and my office mate have a running joke that I do this because of my experience with Japanese, in which /h/ and /p/ alternate in certain morphophonological environments (in addition to h/b and b/p alternations). Historically this is due to intervocalic weakening of /p/ to /h/ via some intermediate steps.

One day, another colleague was walking by, and during a conversation with him, he evidently misheard one of our /p/s as as /h/ — and, crucially, he is very familiar with Japanese. So the theory lives on…

I wonder if others have experienced anything like this (assuming that there is a “this” to be experienced).

It seems as though we have Lewis Carroll to thank for the word chortle. He coined it in his poem Jabberwocky, apparently as a blend of the words snort and chuckle. We also have him to thank for the application of the word portmanteau to linguistic forms that contain multiple parts–though the morphologist’s use of the word usually refers to morphemes with specifications across multiple grammatical categories (number/gender/tense/etc.), while in common (?) parlance a portmanteau word is a blend of multiple words, like chortle.

I participate in a weekly syntax reading group (though my participation is decidedly less frequently than weekly). This semester our desired topics all ended up starting with the letter A: adverbials, argument structure, adjuncts. After several weeks of readings, we were reaching a point where we felt satisfied with our coverage of material, and were thinking about what to read for the next meeting. Someone suggested we should move on to the Bs, which immediately brought up binding, and so we moved on to the Cs (control? case?). Then someone suggested that we instead just go for the Zs, at which point the only possible suggestion was zeugma.

We then got sidetracked into a little discussion of exactly what zeugma was, and an example was brought up that was sited at a campus health facility. It went something like

Please do not place or take away anything in this box

Nice. This might actually be a good argument for undergraduate syntax students for seeing exactly why the structure of this sentence is…well, strange. And of course also an example of the sort of thing that, while unexpected if you’re a syntactician, is basically understandable (maybe we can find out how long the sign has been there, and how often its message is misunderstood).

The next step is, as someone suggested at the meeting, to call of the facility and say, “I’d like to report a very serious case of zeugma.”

[Yes, yes, this is not a typical case of "zeugma" as (I think) most linguists understand it; there isn't any lexical ambiguity with both meanings realized by different conjuncts, nor have two incompatible valences of a single verb been combined into a single clause. But I think we can expand our definitions a bit, can we not?]

The other day in the class I’m TAing, the professor said, “by the end of the semester, there are ten questions that you should be able to answer like that.” That got me thinking, what is up with the phrase “like that” and its meaning, namely ‘with ease’. For one thing, it’s really hard to represent in writing. You could use typographic emphasis: he can do it like that. Or you could add a word to make it clearer: she finished it just like that. Or, you could notice that it’s sometimes (often?) accompanied by a snap of the fingers, so could have: “You should be able to answer it like that,” he said with a quick snap of the fingers.

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.

Before I head off to bed, a victory notice: sweep can take the instrument as a direct object. Some rather vocal group in my Computational Lexical Semantics class was rather dubious about my example (something like “he swept the broom vigorously back and forth” and “sweep the eraser across the chalkboard”).

The syntax/lexical semantics literature doesn’t back me up. The deadly * of ungrammaticality is placed before She/John swept the broom by Heidi Harley and Raffaella Folli in published work (Studia Linguistica) and in handouts, and also by Doris L. Payne, Leonard Ole-Kotikash and A. Keswe Mapena Ole-Lekutit (in the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics). The ungrammaticality is also remarked upon by Teun Hoekstra in a Lingua article: “Thus, although one can eat, sweep or mow something, there is no sense in which one can eat oneself, sweep a broom, mow a scythe, etc.”

Man, I am so in trouble…wait.

He moved backward, and she swept the broom furiously into the doorway after him. (link)

She swept the broom viciously along the weatherworn boards. (link)

Sweep the broom across the surface of the water. Explain that whales swim and feed all day on swarms of krill. (link)

Tips and tricks: Sweep the brush across the powder a few times, then tap off any excess. (link)

Sweep the sponge across the compact and, beginning at the centre of the forehead, blend out toward your hairline and then down along the sides of the face… (link)

It was peculiar, because the people had to bend down to sweep the broom across the floor. (link)

STEP 7: Sweep the broom in a circle together until the story is finished. (link)

Anyway, by the end of the discussion I’d managed to convince a few people that it was a legitimate valence, probably comparable to the valence of kick in which the object is the leg being kicked out.

There’s a show called Cash Cab. Comedian Ben Bailey drives a cab in New York and offers to give people a free ride for as long as they can answer trivia questions without getting three wrong - and they get cash for each correct answer as well.

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.]

Today the Linguistic Society of America’s summer institute began at good old Leland Stanford Junior University (”graduate program language requirement” or “exotic foreign language requirement”?). In order to register laptops with university tech services (so as to be able to connect wirelessly to their high-tech but sometimes-sluggish network) some machines have to run Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool. I think I hardly could have been the first linguist at the institute to notice the hilarity of the name of this little tool (and certainly not the first in the history of the department — and I’m sure many non-linguists will also see where I’m going with this).

Yes, it’s everyone’s favorite: chunking/modifier-attachment ambiguity. Is it, as I suspect, a Tool for Removing Malicious Software? Or is it, more hilariously, a Malicious Tool that Removes all sorts of Software?