Google, please! On the one hand,

Young Coconuts are perishable and have virtually no shelf life at all. (link)

Unlike our regular growler selections, cask ale has no shelf life and is highly perishable. (link)

There is basically no shelf life on expensive caviar, two or three days so plan to plan accordingly. (link)

On the other hand,

If you want a safer product that will last much longer in the fridge, add a bit of acid blend or citric before its cooked. Pomona is a citrus based product that has no shelf life like regular and no/low sugar types. (link)

REAL black powder has no shelf life if stored well. Substitutes like pyro and trip 7 im convinced loose effectiveness if several years old. (link)

Flashlight Batteries – 10 years (the flashlight can be recharged forever and has no shelf life) (link)

As far as distilled spirits go, like your Bacardi Limon (YUM!), or your whiskey, an unopened bottle has no shelf life. (link)

Excellent. I think the “lasts forever” meaning is more common, but for whatever reason it’s not what came to my mind first when I saw the headline. I guess it sort of means, “it has nothing which you would call a shelf life, i.e., lasts forever,” as opposed to “it has a shelf-life value value at or near zero.”

I was trying to think of other expressions like this. What first came to mind was what I (once upon a time ) thought “priceless” and “no/little love lost” meant. (apparently originally the latter was in fact ambiguous, but I don’t know if anyone still uses the “they’re still good buds” meaning anymore).

The last several questions afterward had to do with how a linguist’s perspective on communication might differ from that of a psychologists (or a sociologist, etc; no one actually mentioned other fields, though Tannen mentioned psychology). That lead to wondering what the heck linguistics was anyway. After briefly explaining that, Tannen offered something that Robin Lakoff had once said (light paraphrasing on my part):

I know what I do is linguistics, because I’m a linguist, and I do it.

And like you, I have significant difficulties with women. Most of my friends are and always have been men. (link

I really want to know how most people (whose brains haven’t been fried on syntax and semantics) react to this sort of sentence.

Question 2: could you describe the situation as Sal accidentally took a loaf of bread?

I think not. Without anything in the sentence to contrast the real state-of-affairs with Sal’s mistaken view of the world, “accidentally” doesn’t work. Everything in the sentence is consistent with what Sal meant to do.

The first thing this means is that accidentally is one of those adverbs that creates a non-monotonic context. That is, normally Sal took Tom’s loaf of bread entails Sal took a loaf of bread because a loaf includes Tom’s loaf. But when you add accidentally, the entailment stops working (assuming my intuitions about Question 2 are correct).

Now, why did I ask the original question? It seemed that in many “accidentally”-sentences, there are alternatives: Jack’s ass vs Sal’s in Erik’s comment. If there were two loaves of bread, then there would be an alternative: Sal took Tom’s loaf instead of his own. But in the situation I concocted, there was really only one loaf: just different ways it could relate to different people. Sal didn’t take one loaf rather than another; he took a loaf thinking it had property X when it really had property Y. And that’s enough, I suppose, to license the description “accidentally.”

So then there’s another question. Let’s say Sal walks through Tom’s property, and let’s say that (for some reason irrelevant to us) that is illegal. But Sal doesn’t know that. Did he accidentally walk through Tom’s property? Where Sal thinks Tom’s property has attribute X (legal-to-walk-through) when it has attribute Y (illegal-to-walk-through).

Question: can anyone (Sal, Tom, or some other individual) characterize what happened as: Sal accidentally took home Tom’s loaf of bread.

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…

I later became rather embarrassed that I hadn’t remembered the old fake usage guideline that, in fact, nauseous is only to be used for the stimulus, and nauseated only for the experiencer. So in effect I not only didn’t have that guideline in my grammar, I felt sure (momentarily) that the standard was the exact opposite!

Now, first off, if you look in any dictionary or usage guide you’ll see that experiencer-nauseous is widely accepted and basically unexceptional. At the same time, nauseated is said to be rather rare (whether the frequencies take into account the sense of nauseous is unclear; the lexeme is overall more frequent on Google, though interestingly not in the BYU TIME corpus).

But further, I asked myself if I even make the distinction between nauseous and nauseated, ever. Certainly I don’t think I use stimulus-nauseous. Do I use nauseated? I have no idea. I don’t think so, but I couldn’t guarantee it. There must be some reason I thought the nauseous smell use was non-standard, and I don’t think it’s because I had done some sort of strange prescriptive rule-reversal.

(Then there’s the unambiguously stimulus-selecting nauseating, and I’m pretty sure I use that.)

So, in conclusion…valence alternations and semantic change: it’s weird! (or am I weird from it?)

(for fun, search Google or whatever for “nauseated smell”)