Noncompositional

Multi-level coordination is when you get something like this:

She has been around the world, climbed the tallest mountains, but won’t eat a simple sea cucumber.

Where the first two coordinated verb phrases are inflected to be complements of have (has been, has climbed) while the final one is not (*_has won’t eat_). For many examples and discussion thereof, you need look no further than here.

Just the other day I happened (by complete accident I assure you) to have my set-top box set to the Disney Channel (by no, or at least little, fault of my own) when a children’s show called Bunnytown started. The first thing I heard was some bunny addressing TV land, saying something like (IIRC):

Are you tired, sick, or have the flu?

You know, this sort of stuff is what the TV ratings system was designed for: TV-7:L-NCC (that’s “7 and over, due to language – non-canonical coordination). Parents need to be able make informed choices about the language they expose their kids to, and as a non-parent, I should think that some kids just aren’t ready for, prepared to deal with, or have the linguistic self-awareness to understand, complex coordinate structures, let alone from cute bunnies.

As far as eggcorns go, I admit that this is a stretch. In fact, it probably isn’t one at all. It’s probably better analyzed as some sort of idiom blend between formal aspects of “take X for granted” and meaningful aspects of “take advantage of X”. I first heard this while listening to parts of the Switchboard corpus, but in that case the speaker corrected himself.

A: It’s interesting, I really hadn’t given any thought at all to things like buttons and seams, but I guess I’ve just begun to take that for advantage that buttons are not going to be sewn on, I mean, took that for granted that buttons are not going to be sewn on very well.

A google search reveals a small number of attestations (below). These all seem to be paraphrasable with “take X for granted,” but with the restriction that what you are taking for granted is something positive, and something which “gives you an advantage” or which could potentially be (improperly) taken advantage of. Compare this with the possibility, probably only available in formal writing, of “take X for granted” meaning “assume” (e.g., From here on I will take it for granted that {Bi: i in I} is a partition, and rely on this in statement and proof of results.)

The big issue is that “granted” and “advantage” really don’t sound alike, except for the rhyme of the stressed syllable and following bit of the next syllable ([ant@]).

Put the energy to good use, but don’t take it for advantage and push the horse too hard too fast. (link)

Brandy: It’s pretty good. Some schools should have it because people talk a lot about people. I’m not sure exactly why but maybe if someone got to understand what someone else was going through every now and then, they wouldn’t take it for advantage but they would try to understand a person and actually reach out to them instead of hurt them. (link)

Always willing to lend a helping hand but dislike those who take it for advantage (link)

this movie is so awesome it makes me think how good we all have it and take it for advantage i like it even though it ends differently than the book its still way cool and all philosophical like ([link(http://www.gnovies.com/discussion/fight+club.html))

What a wonderful gift God has given to us and we take it for advantage everyday (link)

Treasure your friends and do not take them for advantage. (link)

Anyone who’s spent any time reading the blog (or the scholarly work) of Neal Whitman knows that English has a whole bunch of messed up coordinate structures. My personal favorite is friends in low places, aka Right-node wrapping. But also up there is the combination of quotative inversion and coordination. For instance:

“No problem,” said the stewardess and promptly dropped a second tray of food onto my foldout table, without taking away the original one. link

The interesting thing being that the stewardess, who is the one doing the saying, after the verb due to a particular narrative convention, but nonetheless acts as the subject of the sentence with respect to the coordination: the stewardess is also the one who dropped the second tray of food.

If you’ve been thinking about the title of this post, you’ll probably see what I’m getting at. The same sort of issue arises with so-called locative inversion, as in:

down came the rain and washed the spider out

out came the sun and dried up all the rain

I have to admit that I find quotative inversion plus coordination to sound strange, and outside of this particular nursery rhyme, I think I’d find locative inversion equally jarring. But there it is.

Today’s Teen Jeopardy’s final question/answer was (paraphrasing)

This is the only [US] state that, when written correctly, has a diacritical mark [see below]

After going through my inventory of diacritics and possible parts of state names other than the proper name part (as in The State of California, or something like that), I came to the conclusion that it must be Hawai’i. And indeed this is the response Alex was waiting for.

It’s really too bad, because as far as I can tell, the ‘okina should be, and usually is, considered a separate character (a “letter”), expressing the glottal stop. It is not a diacritical mark, which intuitively is supposed to alter the pronunciation of a letter, not indicate a separate sound. Of course there are many cases where an a diacritic in fact does something rather more (e.g., the cedilla in several Turkic languages). And IIRC there are orthographies in which a true diacritic is used to mark glottal stops. But the ‘okina is not (in) one of them.

[edit: Some websites report the exact final Jeopardy answer as: "It's the only state name that when spelled officially contains a diacritical mark."]

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?]