Noncompositional

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?

Recently I was handed an article on the difficulties in Boston of recording various presidential candidates’ names on Chinese ballots. The problem is laid out fairly enough in the article. Basically, all (or nearly all) characters used in Chinese have an attached meaning or set of meanings. This means that when rendering a non-Sinitic name in Chinese, one necessarily presents a string of meanings along with a string of sounds. The result is the sort of thing described in the article: “Barack Obama could be read as ‘Oh Bus Horse.’” No actual Chinese is given, but I expect that the possibility being referred to is 哦巴马 o ba ma.

This would actually not be my first choice in transcribing (I won’t mention the annoying confusion with “translation” exhibited by the article in question) Obama’s name. The first character is pronounced as a short open [o], rather than the [ou] that is actually in his name. And it seems that, although 哦巴马 has some very limited use, “Obama” is commonly written 欧巴马 (ou ba ma; Mainland, Taiwan) or 奧巴馬 (ao ba ma; Hong Kong). The Mainland version seems closest to me; the Hong Kong initial ao is mysterious: maybe it’s just convention to use that character, or maybe in Cantonese it has a different enough pronunciation that it makes sense. So why refer to the minority choice in the article? It seems that the meanings of the other variants are just as amusing: the Mainland character ou has basically been bleached of its native meaning, and mostly just stands for ‘Europe’. The HK variant means ‘mysterious’ or ‘back corner (of a house)’.*

And how about the rest of the name? The article says that The ma part does mean ‘horse’, and that’s spot on. Use of ‘horse’ to stand for ma-type sounds is standard. I’ve never seen ‘mother’, ‘hemp’, ’scold’, ‘[question particle]‘ or any others used. (FYI, the name for Malaysia is 马来西亚 ‘horse-come-west-asia/inferior’). But I’m dubious about translating ba as ‘bus’. It certainly is in the word for bus, namely 巴士 (ba shi) but whether the ba part alone can mean ‘bus’ I’m not sure about.

A curious omission is Sen. Clinton, whose family name is 克林顿 (ke lin dun), overcome-forest-pause. Of course, the ke part is almost always used for foreign names, except perhaps in 克服 ‘overcome’. At least, that’s my impression from reading what Chinese news publications I can understand. I’d be curious to know how native speakers react to seeing the character, e.g., if they expect a foreign name in its vicinity if they see it.

One of the most ridiculous transliterations described is that of current Boston mayor Thomas Menino, whose name could apparently mean “Sun-Moon-Rainbow-Farmer”, “Imbecile” or “Barbarian-Mud-No-Mind-of-His-Own”. Whoa. I don’t even see how the first two versions could exist, since his full name should need at least six characters, and (1) no characters that I’m aware of with meanings “sun” and “moon” have anything like the right pronunciation, and (2) “imbecile” is an unlikely interpretation for an (essentially) random string of six characters. The last option seems more likely for Menino: it probably starts 蒙泥 meng ni, with meng somehow meaning ‘barbarian’ instead of being an abbreviation for ‘Mongolia(n)’. But, again, this would buck the general trend: the mayor is usually referred to as 马尼诺 ma ni nuo ‘horse-nun-promise’ or 梅尼诺 mei ni nuo ‘plum-nun-promise’.

One has to wonder how much of an issue it is. When someone is reading about a candidate, how much do the characters used to represent the name affect judgment? I suppose when you’re a presidential candidate, or a Secretary of State, you probably don’t want to take any risks. The most realistic suggestion reported in the article is for the candidates themselves to suggest how their names should be written down, perhaps taking their cue from what popular Chinese publications are doing. And, I would add, having their names down in Roman letters as well.

*Sometimes I wonder of decisions about which characters to use are motivated by how their pronunciation would end up in pinyin. Using 哦巴马 (the nonstandard variant) gets you o ba ma in pinyin. I’ve seen some other examples like this, where the closest similarity to English (or whatever other language) is not in pronunciation but in pinyin/Roman spelling. But at the moment I can’t recall any of the particular cases.

Someone asked me the other day which was the normal way to talk about meters in Japanese, as in “the plant is over two meters tall.” He wondered if it was meetaa or meetoru. I knew I’d heard (and possibly used) both before, but I wasn’t sure which was more common, so I guessed meetaa. Should have checked the dictionary first.

Consulting with the Daijirin, a large American Heritage-style dictionary (as opposed to the Koujien, which is sort of OED-ish), I found an interesting difference between the two. Both meetoru and meetaa have two senses. Meetoru’s first sense is the unit of measurement, and all related things: meetoru-hoo is the metric system ‘meter law/rule’. Meetaa’s first sense is “measurement device,” as in gasu meetaa ‘gas meter’ and paakingu meetaa ‘parking meter’. Did this bring me back to an earlier post? Yes it did. But this is rather minor, parallel to the pair sutoraiki ‘labor strike’ and sutoraiku ’strike (baseball/bowling)’.

(In fact, the “strike” pair is rather interesting because the final vowel is devoiced; if the two words had meanings similar enough that appeared in the same contexts, people might have some serious issues telling them apart.)

But remember that each of these words had two senses? Well, the second senses of each meetaa and meetoru says, basically, “see [the other word], sense 1.” Great, I thought. But it’s actually not that, uh, “simple,” because while meetaa indeed has both meanings, meetoru is always the unit of length: there is no gasu meetoru, at least according to one person I spoke with.

It is perhaps well-known that natives of San Francisco are very particular about their city’s appellation. There is the abhorrent Frisco and the marginally-better-but-still-hateful San Fran. The longer San Francisco and initialism SF are just around okay. The preferred term is, of course, the City.

I personally find the first two listed nicknames rather bad-sounding, though likely due to being informed of their taboo status before having moved up to the area. I stick to SF or San Francisco. I have only once ever said the City to refer specifically to San Francisco, and it was completely by accident (I swear). Otherwise, I actually find the use rather, shall we say, pretentious. This makes reading the SF Examiner (a daily free newspaper) rather annoying, as they seem to have a policy of always referring to San Francisco as The City. The only exceptions I’ve seen are names that include “San Francisco,” as in San Francisco Fire Department. Some examples from recent articles:

… during a March 30 meeting as part of an ongoing effort to tackle one of The City’s biggest quality-of-life issues. (link) “We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress,” Newsom said in April about The City’s efforts to address the problem. (same) The City removed the former coin and parking-pass operated meters in the busy tourist district and installed four new meters for the entire block. (link)

In all or most cases, you could just replace “The City” with “San Francisco” and get a perfectly fine sentence. You could also just put it in lowercase and get a similarly fine sentence. But it would be surprising if you never got anything strange from this policy. For one thing, it’s not just typographic, it indicates a particular linguistic choice, namely using the city to refer to San Francisco in particular. And it no doubt functions as a geographic and sociolinguistic index (”I’m from the SF Bay Area and I love San Francisco!” or something like that). This means that there are nontrivial consequences for using “The City” within direct quotation: Read more »

The passive construction (at least in English, Spanish, Japanese, and probably many other languages) promotes what is normally a direct object to the subject position, demoting the subject to an oblique position that may be omitted (not to be confused with some rhetorically similar moves). However, the poor subject, if it is semantically an intentional actor, is certainly still part of the sentential semantics. This can be demonstrated by adding a purpose clause:

Many believe their leader was killed simply to demonstrate the power of the opposition.

Now, consider the following paragraph, from a recent special from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, on 9 hidden gems.

Read more »