Noncompositional

At least, that seems to be the majority reaction to a book by Paul Benedict called Japanese / Austro-Tai, which claims that Japanese is genetically part of the Austro-Tai family. Note that Austro-Tai is a proposed macro-family consisting of Austronesian (Formosan, Malayo-Polynesian), Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer, among others), and Tai-Kadai (Thai, among others). So the book has at least as many presuppositions in it as the infamous Japanese and other Altaic Languages by Roy Miller. And it seems to have taken quite a bashing, at least among stauch defenders of an Altaic connection, like Alexander Vovin.

I came across the book as part of a little research project to see what people out there think about the origins of the Japanese people and language. It turns out that the Altaic theory is still pretty strong among linguists and some anthropologists and geneticists, though the possibility of an Austronesian connection is still pretty strong, especially among Eastern scholars. It seems that many of them believe that the origins of the Japanese are best understood as a mixing between northern (Altaic, perhaps) and southern (Austronesian or Austroasiatic, though usually the former) features, at least culturally. Linguistically, the arguments for either a creole or a southern substratum remain, to my eyes, rather unconvincing. Though, I will admit, there are some interesting lexical correspondences between some Ryukyuan, Okinawan, and Kyushuan words for sea navigation, and some proposed Proto-Austronesian words. Okay, there’s really just one really good one, which was presented not by Benedict but by Osamu Sakiyama in a book with a great title: Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals. The word is proto-Austronesian *paRi, which is reflected in various languages with meanings related to south, southern winds, the southern cross, and sting rays (what the southern cross looks like). And, apparently in many of the Japonic languages spoken in southwestern Kyushu and beyond, there are words like pae and pai that mean south/southwestern wind. So, the medial loss of r is supposed to have happened in Japanese (though, I think that is arrived at via comparative Altaic data, so…yeah); but the vowels, I think, are supposed to have merged in various ways. Clearly some more work has to be done on this one, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, for me the little research project definitely inspired me to become more aware of the (attested) history of Japanese, so it looks like some learning of classical Japanese should be in my future.

In recent lexicographic work, I had occasion to think about the meaning of words related to tourism, including sightseeing. Now, to a fair number of people, I think, sightseeing is a noun (or verb) that appears only in the -ing form. That is, I want to sightsee or something like that would be bad. But I think for many (perhaps even a larger number of) people, sightsee is a perfectly fine O-V compound, akin to housekeep, globe-trot, hero-worship, and stage-manage, typewrite, hogtie, proofread, brainwash, vacuum clean, and top-dress. Of course, some of these are likely no longer thought of as having this particular structure (like perhaps proofread) and some are mostly obsolete or rather domain-specific (typewrite and top-dress).

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Understanding how a language changes over time is a crucial part (most people would agree) of developing a full understanding what language is (what are possible languages, how could a person’s mental model of a language be organized, and so forth). One part of language change is semantic change, whereby some word (or possibly construction) changes in its denotation or connotation. People are familiar with modern variations on word meanings, like colloquial uses of various evaluative adjectives, such as cool, tight (which has a range of different colloquial uses now than it did a couple generations ago), and sweet. Everyone knows about gay, of course. Less familiar are the history of of the meanings of computer and nice, though I assume that many students of linguistics will have heard about the latter in their historical linguistics class. Constructional examples might include the various uses of subject-aux inversion (Is linguistics interesting?, boy, is linguistics interesting!, physics is far more interesting than is linguistics, may your children study linguistics, and so forth), or in Japanese the use of a “hanging” conditional as a suggestion (where something that means If you run can mean Who not run? or You should run. Compare to English How about if you ran?).

Take the example of spill. A caricature of its change over time might be, “originally it meant kill, but now it means accidentally cause a liquid to come out of a container.” Of course this is clearly a simplification, since it glosses over large swaths of time when it had multiple meanings; and dictionaries are generally no help in getting a sense of how meanings evolved, since the job of a dictionary (like the OED) is to give clear examples of unambiguous uses, not the crucially ambiguous or “creative” (e.g., novel-metaphoric) uses that often give rise to semantic shift.

One sort of semantic change that is not often discussed in detail, but which was certainly recognized by historical linguists like Gustaf Stern, was where changing culture and technology changes, but the language doesn’t. He gives the example of a ship, the modern varieties of which look rather different from what might have been called a ship over a thousand years ago. Nonetheless some continuity was observed enough by language users that the word stuck. Similar, more modern cases include the telephone, which include not just cell phones but also wireless headsets and computer software that utilizes VoIP, and perhaps Japanese 土木学, which means civil engineering though character-by-character it is earth-wood-study. Another interesting one is the verb tape, which is used to mean copy audio/visual information onto some permanent medium: it can still be used even when there is no physical “tape” onto which the recording is done (just search for “tape * on my tivo”, and peruse the results).

It seems to me that such a “change,” involving some continuity of referent, can also be seen for other sorts of signs, like icons. One was recently pointed out in a BBC article on the demise of the floppy disk:

Interestingly, software giant Microsoft seems to be keeping the flame alight for the floppy. Its newly-released operating system Vista still pays homage to it by continuing to use a floppy disk as the icon for saving a document in Microsoft Word 2007.

Though you may not be able to find a manufacturer that produces computers with floppy drives built in by default, everyone will still understand that the floppy disk symbol means save. But in fact this is not new just with the end of the medium itself. That icon has long been used to mean save, even if it was to a hard disk: I hardly expect clicking on a button with the floppy disk icon to default to the floppy drive. Especially since such a drive does not exist on the machine I’m using now. (hmm, that makes me wonder if the verb drive is not also a similar case)

Though “valley girl” talk is a well-known dialect feature of (some parts of) California, I find it’s not extremely common around where I live, nor does it seem to be for the rest of the East Bay, even among my (current and past) friends who’ve grown up in northern California. But once in a while, I’ll hear it around campus and in coffee shops, and I’m absolutely fascinated by it, because it seems to be legitimately spreading. (It could be that I just don’t hang out with the appropriately vocalically-vulnerable people.)

Of course, you don’t have to be from the valley, or even be a girl (or a woman), to show the characteristic tendencies. I highly recommend the sound files on Penny Eckert’s site, which shows, I believe, mostly schoolchildren from the southern part of the San Francisco peninsula. I personally exhibit (almost) none of the uniquely Californian vowel shift. (The only possibility is a palatalized /n/ before /i/, which might be the result of /i/-heightening (though not in the environments noted on Eckert’s site.) And this may be a good thing, since according to some, when I try to imitate the changes, I sound like I’m “from the Castro.” Whatever that might mean…

(And yes, I’ve certainly heard men (who I guessed were not from anywhere in San Francisco) in the 18-35 range with some of the vowel changes. It totally boggles my head to hear it, though.)

And relatedly, I know a couple of young kids (both under 6), one of whom seems to consistently have /E/ for /I/ (pronouncing the name Nick as /nEk/). The other one, who is older, seems to most people to have the standard English that you get out here in California, but the other day I noticed her announcing the age of one of her friends as /sEks/ - that is, 6. It may be to early to see if this actually a result of the /I/-to-/E/ change noted on Eckert’s site, but it would be pretty interesting if it were.

(for some more samples and text on Californian speech, there’s the Do You Speak American coverage of California, which is passing good.)

I begin with a story.

Once in China there lived a man who loved to raise monkeys. He loved his monkeys so much that his family left him and he was left with his pets. Thankfully for him, he could speak with these monkeys, and so knew exactly what they wanted; and he always provided. But one day, he realized that his funds had been depleted so much that he could no longer afford to feed them their favorite food (nuts) as much as they wanted. So he told them one morning, “from now on, I will only give each of you three nuts each morning, and four each evening.” The monkeys were not pleased, and pleaded with him to reconsider. After thinking a while, he presented a new plan: “all right, I will give you four each morning, but then only three in the evening.” The monkeys were very pleased with this plan, and did not complain further.

And so today in Chinese, the phrase 朝三暮四 (zhao1 san1 mu4 si4, ‘morning three dusk four’) indicates someone who constantly changes their opinion, or who is unreliable or irresponsible.

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A post by Geoff Pullum at LL a few days ago pointed readers to an article in the Boston Globe by Jan Freeman which itself was about a (negative) review of The Da Vinci Code in Newsweek by David Ansen (available here). In particular, Freeman and Pullum make fun of Ansen’s chosen headline, “Thou shalt not like it.”

The phrase thou shalt not blah is, I assume, mostly known via the popular rendering of the Ten Commandmants, and so it might seem to some an odd choice for a review headline. After all, reviews are about saying either what one personally thought, what one thinks others will think, or both. They are not about telling people what they must think (unless one is cynical). Regarding this, Pullum writes:

Thou shalt is of course a prohibition. They wanted to express a prediction about your reaction, not forbid a positive one. Surely they knew the difference.

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While researching some historic uses of SAI in English, I came upon an interesting passage from A Sixth Booke to the Coutesse of Pembrokes Arcadia from 1624.

Shamefac’t Cherrie, blush no more, Nor esteeme your beauties store To be lessened, cause you see Her lips excell much worth may bee In your Vermillion, though no eye Can discerne a paritie.

And I thought: huh? Surely that couldn’t be an abbreviated version of because…or could it? And so I, as now (temporarily) anyone can do, looked up “cause” in the OED. I found this:

1. (with of) = BECAUSE of, on account of. 1513 BRADSHAW St. Werburge (1848) 184 Churches..were gyuen To god and saynt Werburge cause of deuocion.

A use without the “of” comes in 1556. Of course, the OED notes that this usage is “now only dial., or vulgar.” So pepper your formal documents with cause. Just be prepared to back it up with a little historical precedent.

(And no, there’s no SAI in the passage above. It continues, “You worthy were to set at odds, / As did the Apple, all the Godds:”)

I just discovered a paper published last year in Linguistic Inquiry, that perhaps should be of interest to people thinking about constructional approaches to language, and more indirectly, how constructions should relate to diachrony.

den Dikken, Marcel. 2005. Comparative Correlatives Comparatively, LI 36(4): 497-532