Noncompositional

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 »

I’m sure you’ve said it before, and probably perfectly reasonably so. Given the nearness of Memorial Day, perhaps you’ve even said it recently. You know the difference between single days and multiple, consecutive days. But somehow, English lets us do things like it. It happens to all well-meaning people.

Next Friday is a holiday weekend in the US of A (link) First Friday of every month unless that Friday is a holiday weekend, then it is on 2nd Friday It is held at the church. (link) Friday is a pay weekend, and I have this feeling in my bones that it is going to be a wild one. (link) Moreover, Monday is a three-day weekend in the United States, and large price movements in the stock typically come immediately before or after such holidays. (link

[afterthought: After some further consideration, there is also: page 290 is a new chapter. Maybe others?]

A great example of what me some others (okay, just one other) are calling the Japanese-style relative clause in English can be found in the script for Serenity. After watching a video showing River being given given a key phrase, which causes her to pass out (after having beaten up the male population of an entire bar), Mr. Universe remarks,

Mr. Universe: And, she falls asleep. Which, she would be sleepy.

Called “Japanese-style” because there is no necessary grammatical gap in the relative clause that could correspond to the modified head (which in this case is probably just the previous sentence). There is of course a semantic and/or pragmatic (i.e., discourse/text-cohesive) relation between the two clauses.

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 »

Stateside is just a cool word. But first some background.

Spacial relations are sometimes said to involve a figure and a ground, or alternatively, a trajector and a landmark. If my bike is in front of library, then the bike is the profiled figure with respect to the ground of the library. Similarly for we are under that airplane, we are the figure with respect to the airplane, which the the ground against which we are determining our location. Given this, then prepositions like inside and under are analyzed as determining exactly what sort of spacial relation holds between the figure and the ground: containment (inside, outside), vertical position (over, under), physical contact (on), and so forth. There are of course some more complex prepositions, like astride, diagonal, and opposite (not to say that the semantics of something like over isn’t complicated as all get out). For these guys, the spacial relation is more specific that something like at or near.

Read more »

Over at Heideas, Heidi was discussing a certain interesting predicate in English, be friends with, which looks morphologically plural, but which can appear with a singular subject. More accurately, it can take one side of a symmetric relation as its external argumeny. (For symmetric situations, you can express the sides separately (I am his friend, I met him in the park), or as a collective unit (We are friends, We met in the park)).

In the comments section, Mark Liberman notes that

The process seems to be one that generalizes to other plural predicate nominals: “is colleagues with”, “is lovers with”, “is co-workers with”, etc. These seem wierd to me in a way that “is friends with” doesn’t, but they’re out there.

Regarding the first point, this is a bit of an overgeneralization. Generally the X be NP[pl] with Y construction requires the relation to be one that is social and not on a temporary basis, or not contingent upon factors external to the participants. Well, I’m not sure if that’s exactly the right generalization, but it’s meant to account for the fact that you can be friends, colleagues, partners, buds, pals, co-stars and even enemies or rivals with someone else. But you can’t be competitors or contestants with someone.

Then again, you can also be brothers, sisters, and cousins with someone, and this isn’t exactly a social relation, but it’s about as symmetric as you can get, and permanent as well. But it’s pretty clear that be friends with is the central example of this particular construction. It’s attested well back in the language, and dictionaries have an entry for it, though sometimes it is for the collocation make friends with.

I have multiple email accounts, as I assume most people nowadays do. Some of these I associate with some sort of physical location, like my work email. Although I can access it from anywhere I please, it happens that read it most often when I am in a particular location (my office). My school-provided email, on the other hand, I access from a variety of locations, and do not attach a particular locality to it (though if I had to pick, it would be either wherever my current home is, or perhaps the school campus). And I have no particular associations with my purely web-based email accounts, like gmail.

The other day I received a message on my school account asking when I would be at work. The sender wished to retrieve some items from my office, but she did not have access to the floor that I work on. I read this on my word computer from the web interface to my school account, and replied through the same. A problem confronted me as I went to indicate when I would be at work. First, the original query (paraphrasing):

There are some things that I need to look at your work office. Are you around tomorrow or the next day after around noon to let me into ACME so I can look at things?

Note the naming of my place of employment. Now, my reply:

Yes. Tomorrow I will be there until late, and the next day will be there from [...]

I had some serious issues when I got to there in my message. For whatever reason, I didn’t want to rename the place where I work, wanting instead to use a deictic. Well, as I typed the message, I was sitting in my office, so it should have been “here” (especially since the relevant event, i.e., letting her in, would also be taking place with both of us “here”). But this was troubling, because I was typing from my school account, which I do not associate with work (though it has no strong associations with other locations, it is definitely negatively associated with work, pushed out my explicitly work-related account). So I viewed this communication as taking place in some space outside of my office, and the building containing it. So I went with “there”, instead, essentially taking my interlocutor’s viewpoint (or at least her perceived viewpoint; this is complicated by the fact that she may not have been aware of my work address).

Somehow I don’t think this issue would have come up if this were a telephone conversation, even if (for instance) I had received a call on my (non-existent) work-provided cell phone. The use of deictics would have been a function of my actual location. As it was, though, somehow the medium of communication influenced me enough to make me unsure of what word to use. Hmm, perhaps a folk theory of accessibility to email accounts (”you can only access xyz@abc.com when you are ‘located’ at abc”).

Since Grant’s useful comment on skeuomorphs, I’ve started keeping my eye out for them. I’m not entirely sure how to characterize the difference between the linguistic and non-linguistic versions of this. Additionally, there is apparently a thing called path dependence, which is common in talk of economics and history/sociology in general, whereby decisions made at some point in time turn out to be non-optimal or non-suitable for some point much later in time, though by that point there’s no way to switch paths. Or, as some people seem to sloganize the concept, “history matters.” This seems like a nice, general concept, perhaps illustrated by my recent difficulties in getting the sysadmins at work to let me use a dvorak keyboard interface (actually, they’ve been very nice about it, but once they had to do maintenance on my machine, and it was a real pain when they didn’t know the key layout; so it’s all on hold for now).

Path dependence may or may not subsume skeuomorphy, though this latter concept seems to be more in the realm of aesthetics, rather than somehow being “stuck” on some path. That is, designers of (say) audio software make the GUI look like a regular stereo interface, knobs and screws and all, to make the experience easier for the user, and also to make the experience more “authentic” (becuase clearly computer software is always a replication of what we used to do without them). It’s all about familiarity. On the other hand, the typical examples of path dependence, like usage of VHS and QWERTY, or the various standards for railway guages, are not about aesthetics, I suppose, and more about the fact that changing is just not very easy. It’s a variation on the “keep things familiar” tune, though in a different domain.

On the other hand, this terminological distinction may simply be…uh, an accident of history, so to speak. In any case, we can always borrow real science terms and talk about “inertia.” Inertia of design features, inertia of symbols, inertia of the familiar.

In any case, a couple of examples I came across yesterday. First, in a (non-new) standup routine Ellen Degeneres commented on the common gesture that people use to get someone to to roll down a car window, namely, miming a circular hand crank. There are two parts to this. First, that gesture is simply carried over from when that was the only way to roll (roll?) down a car window. Second, the new way to lower a window doesn’t involve a very unique or visually salient gesture: you hold down a button. Assuming that it isn’t interpreted as simply pointing downward, there is still the question of disambiguating all of the things that could be accomplished by holding down a button. And even if the only likely thing in context is “roll down your window!”, there’s still factor number one, i.e., there’s already a gesture for that, so this must mean something different.

The second example came when I was watching Star Trek Voyager (one of the very rare good episodes), and the holographic doctor said that he would be ready as soon as he finished “scrubbing,” which appeared to be moving and rubbing one’s hands underneath a dull orange light (which I assume also emits cleansing sound waves, as supposedly the general self-cleaning method in Star Trek is the “sonic shower”). Now, the rubbing was still there, so perhaps scrub is not so much of an anachronism. But if it were simply moving one’s hands underneath the cleaner, it probably would be. I’d guess that the choice of that word was quite conscious, in order to show the viewer how certain mundane things change over the centuries. The significance might have been lost if the doctor had just said “I’ll be there after I finish disinfecting/cleaning/sanitizing my hands”. (Uh, and let’s ignore the fact that this shouldn’t really be necessary, given he’s a hologram: he could just disappear and then come back, presumably all cleaned up)