Noncompositional

If you’re a linguist and you haven’t checked out the squibs/essays for the Jorge Hankamer WebFest, I recommend you do so immediately.

One of the squibs is by Language Logger Geoff Pullum, entitled Hankamer Was! It is devoted to exploring the possiblity that verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in English can be used in cases where what is elided does not have a correspondent in the linguistic context. The original claim, from a paper by Jorge Hankamer and Ivan Sag, is that there is no such possibility. In their made-up context, you have two stage performers, one who appears to be about to chop off his own hand. The other performer cannot say, without any prior linguistic context, *Don’t worry, he never has before, where the meaning is supposed to be “he never has chopped off his own hand” or something like that.

Pullum goes through all the putative examples of verb phrase ellipsis that have been argued to be possible even without a linguistic antecent. He finds only about a dozen, and argues that they are all fixed expressions, and further, involve non-declarative clause types: Don’t!, May I?, and so on. He then issues a challenge: send in your examples of ellipsis without a linguistic antecedent. He’s willing to bet that none will be. (ahem). Let this post be such an entry.

One day last week, while walking home from work with my girlfriend, an interaction like this happened. I’m N, my girlfriend is G.

N and G are walking down the street, and pass a woman walking the other way wearing a half sweater. N points it out.

N: What do you think of those?

G: Those half sweaters? They seem seem silly to me.

N: Yeah. I know someone who has one…

G: I used to want one for a long time, but I didn’t.

At this point I was somewhat in shock that this seems to be a case of VPE with no linguistic antecedent. Unlcear how to get the miraculous thing to happen again, I just said (something like):

N: Uh huh?

G: …

But nothing like the VPE-containing utterance was forthcoming, so like a normal person I reoriented to the content, not the form, of what was being said.

At the outset let me say that I basically agree with Hankamer and Sag (and Pullum) that VPE requires a linguistic antecedent.* There is at least one way to interpret G’s utterance that does not involve VPE: namely that she abandoned the utterance before completing it, and it would have ended with a full verb phrase like I didn’t end up buying one. There was quite a pause between her putative VPE and my “uh huh” — I was waiting to see if anything would happen (”completing” or repairing the sentence, the sky falling, etc.), but nothing did. Note that the abandonment (if that’s what it was) would almost assuredly have been “internally” motivated: G was not eating or drinking anything, or having difficulty breathing, nor did anything absolutely astounding pop into the air in front of us.

I will also note that there is almost a linguistically-provided semantic antecedent in want. That is, wanting something means wanting to have or get something. Some people interpret this as an indication that in the syntactic structure there is an unpronounced HAVE element; others take a more semantically-oriented approach (say, metonymy) or lexical approach (it’s just another sense of want). This is close, but clearly what G didn’t do was buy a sweater, not have one (*I used to want one for a while, but I didn’t (ever) have one).

I unfortunately cannot meet the requirement Pullum set out, namely that two independent observers be there at the time. I can however be rather sure of all the preceding context, at least in that so far as I recall there was no mention of buying anything since we met up at the train station to walk home, and perhaps even that entire day.

In any case, this is my humble submission to the inventory of VPE without a linguistic antecent.

*I “basically” agree because there’s always a bit of me that wonders if the restriction is actually something like “VPE must have an antecedent that is salient in XYZ way” where XYZ always happens when something is introduced by linguistic means, and nearly never by anything else. But I admit I have no way of making this non-circular.

Stephen Dolan had a simple question: what is the center of Wikipedia? That is, if you look at a graph of all the articles in Wikipedia with all the links between them, and see which is (on average) closest to all the other articles. In doing this he came up with a great tool that finds the shortest distance between any two Wikipedia articles (that existed at the time he downloaded them). Lets see what the results are for Spinach to Cataphora: Spinach — Asia — Arabic language — Pronoun — Cataphora

Because links in Wikipedia are one-way, it’ll be different going the other way: Cataphora — Linguistics — Brain — French cuisine — Spinach

And interestingly, the results are rather different for anaphora. It’s sort of interesting if you’ve picked two lower level articles to see what sort of strange connection happens as you go “up” the hierarchy (which in my experience is usually what happens; I haven’t seen a lot of traversal among more leafy levels to get from one specialty article to another) — like the connection from brain to French cuisine: go figure! Now I don’t know what happens when there are multiple, equally short paths - my hunch is that alphabetical order is involved, but I haven’t looked into it.

My personal best is eight links: from kinship to Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination.

As far as I can tell, the term desktop computer originated as a way to designate a computational device that could fit on a desk, as opposed to the larger variety that, my elders tell me, took up entire warehouses and required something like an entire army Santa’s elves to operate. Now, though, the more common distinction is with laptop computer.

Now, a laptop is also called a notebook computer, and while I’m not sure exactly what the differences in usage are, there are some cases where you would use one term and not the other. For one, there is a variety of computer called the subnotebook — not the sublaptop. If I had to guess, I’d say that laptop is on a par with notebook computer, but that just plain notebook requires a (little, to be sure) context to be used normally.

Okay, great. So we have {desk/lap}top and then notebook. Then Intel comes along and starts calling the ultraportable, intenet-oriented laptops like the Asus Eee netbooks, presumably to both indicate the functionality and minimal (ahem) differences with full-fledged notebooks. So, what do you call a non-portable, on-the-top-of-the-desk computer with processing capability approximating that of a netbook? Perhaps it will have a word like, say, desk in it? No: they’re nettops. I guess the salience of notebook/desktop is enough to trump the laptop/desktop distinction, and so -top has, at least here, come to mean “desktop.”

Let’s talk the maxim of quantity. It’s one part of Grice’s cooperative principle that has most certainly withstood the test of time. (Don’t know who Grice is or why he came up with the maxim of quantity? As usual, check out the free encyclopedia as a starting point). The maxim is:

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The first part is really the crucial (the second part could probably be subsumed by some other of the maxims). One often-studied consequence of this maxim is what is called scalar implicature. Say you ask me how many cats I have, and I say “I have three cats.” If I have less than three, I’m lying; but if I have more than three, then I’m not strictly untruthful, but I’m certainly being uncooperative (if I hear “you must have three cats to qualify for VIP membership” I assume that having four or five is sufficient as well). That is, in many cases expressions of quantity are taken to be exact specifications.

The principle extends beyond numbers, though, to a sort of nebulous idea of “specificity” - that is, one should be as specific as required (but not too much). If one is less specific than people usually tend to be, something special is usually implicated. If I say “I drive a vehicle to work every day,” you might be inclined to think it’s not a car; If I say “I work in a man-made structure downtown,” something similar might happen. Now I will present a story that, I think, illustrates that people actually do this.

Someone I know had some car trouble the other day, and he called AAA for help. He said where he was and described to the dispatcher what he was wearing. They sent a tow truck out, but after driving around the area for a while and seemingly not seeing him, he flagged down the driver. The driver apologized — for not being able to help random people who flag them down! After my friend explained that he was in fact the person who called in, the truck driver said:

Oh, they told me to look for someone wearing a green jacket, not someone wearing an A’s jacket

That is, if the dispatcher knew he was wearing an A’s jacket they would have said so, it being a good identifying characteristic. He apparently took “green jacket” to mean “green jacket that’s not an A’s jacket.”

In the March 19th issue of the Economist, there is an article “Kamikaze Politics” about political scandals in Japan, which has the following two sentences.

At midweek a new deputy governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, looked likely, at least for a while, to fill the vacuum—an unnecessary one, since candidates acceptable to both sides have been there for the choosing all along, notably Haruhiko Kuroda, head of the Asian Development Bank. By not putting him forward, Mr Fukuda showed himself unable and unwilling even to pick up the phone to the opposition.

Pick up the phone to? What’s that?

A cursory examination of google search results indicates that this seems to be a UK and Australian thing to say. If it happens in America, I’ve certainly never heard it. It’s a nice example of a multiword expression. What’s interesting is that it’s a communication verb that incorporates the means of communication (like phone, fax, email, and write) but which, perhaps due to syntax of the words in the expression, requires the person called to be expressed with the preposition to (like talk, speak, and write).

(yes, write goes in both places: I write (letters) to my aunt every week, but I write my uncle every month)

This is the result of a train of thought that went like this. The other day I was in the linguistics department and looked at a sign that’s been at the base of a set of stairs for a few years now. It said something like, “Step up your fitness level: take the stairs.” I wondered, for some unknown reason, how this would be expressed in Japanese. Of course I really have no idea (though I’m sure that such a sign is possible, or even probable in Japan…though on the other hand, there are many places where Japanese people use staircases where Americans would use or at least expect an escalator or elevator; well, at least in places where “accessability” is important).

Not really knowing a word for fitness other than kenkoo ‘health,’ I just figured that probably, on signage like this, English was more the way to go: fittonesu reberu. Then there’s the question of raise. There are a few words like ageru which correspond to raise in some contexts. But again, why do that when you can go English: appu!

And then yes, we had reberu appu, or level up. That got me to wondering: how many uses of level up (including the pseudo-exclamative “level up” as well as the verb “(to) level up” in both transitive and intransitive senses) are original to the American gaming community, and how many (if any) are the result of Japanese influence - or are all Japanese uses taken from elsewhere?

On a recent trip to Barnes and Noble (I have a gift card) I happened upon a book in one of the bargain sections called (IIRC) Where’s that word from? I looked inside the front jacket and saw what I expected, namely things like “did you know [word x] actually came from the Old [English/Norse/etc] word [blah] that means [amusing thing]? Find out all about this and many other words in this collection of…” I figured that it would be a series of one- or two-page-long descriptions of maybe a hundred words, with some light commentary and anecdotes, or whatever. So I turned to a random page in the middle, and was slightly surprised to find that a more appropriate description of the book would have been English Etymological Dictionary, because that’s what it was: a list of words with a short definition (the sort helpful only to an already-literate user of English) and a line about the proximal source language (Middle French, Latin, etc.) and word. Then I looked at the front matter, and found a description of the history of the English language, not surprisingly. Only the author talked about “Indo-Germanic (or Indo-European).” Then I turned to the publication information: yep, 1974. And probably the really original publication date was rather earlier. Sweet repackaging, guys.

At the moment I’m trying to recover the exact publication information, including the editor and original title, but for some reason I can’t find it out. Might be another trip to B&N for me.

I was surprised and very happy about the sudden interest on LL in “yeah no” (initial post and the aftermath)since I’ve also been paying attention to the little guy in some recent research (following up, in a sense, from two earlier posts of mine here and here. I won’t reveal too much now (have to keep you in suspense!) but there’s one use of it which is really cool, and which is illustrated by LL’s own Geoff Nunberg on NPR.

Get yourself an archived recording of Talk of the Nation on June 2nd, 2004. It’s a discussion between Neal Conan and Geoff Nunberg on his then-new book Going Nucular. At about 10m30s into the session, they’re taking calls, and you’ll hear this:

JIM: Well, three categories here. I’ll do them real quickly. First I guess I’ll call it the category of the cachet of erudition. ((dozens of seconds omitted; some talk of the word robust included near the beginning))

CONAN: Any thoughts on those, Geoffrey?

Mr. NUNBERG: Yeah. No. I think ‘robust,’ for example, is an instance of one of those vogue words that for one reason or another is just picked up and people like the sound of it. You’re right. I don’t know if it’s erudition but there’s a kind of pleasure in saying a word like that and everybody plugs into it.

This sort of thing happens not infrequently on NPR (and other radio talk shows, I presume). It might even be getting to the point where “yeah no” (and sometimes just “no”) is almost just a question-uptake marker more than anything else. Listen for it. Other good places to listen for it: asymmetric social contexts, especially where one person constantly feels the need to maintain a non-disagreement or positive-alignment stance with other people there, either just in order to be nice (think job interviews) or to prevent themselves from being misunderstood (think any academic context).

It’s too bad that neither Burridge and Florey, nor Moore’s thesis from what I saw, take up the task of comparing “yeah-no” and “no-yeah” to the use and distribution of yeah and no individually. Maybe I’m just too much of a lexical semanticist. But, if they had, they might have found what I did in going through a bunch of LDC mixer corpora (as well as some more natural conversations): namely, that in most but not all cases there’s not a whole lot special about the combination in and of itself. It doesn’t seem to fulfil any core function that either “yeah” or “no” aren’t observed to do on their own (assuming you assign some combination of propositional and discursive meaning to each yeah and no when they do appear on their own, and also when they appear in combination). There may be cases where it is appropriate or even ideal to use both, as many of Mark’s readers pointed out (like in responses to negative or leading questions), but the resulting “meaning” is not really anything beyond what you might expect by putting the two together. I think that’s the case with most of the examples in the two LL posts. However, Australia could be a completely different story. In particular, if you have access to the Burridge and Florey article, check out the “athletic” use, which to my ears is actually rather strange.

Finally, it may interest my more sociologically- or CA-minded readers (all none of them?) that this sequence of words was analyzed by Schegloff in a 1992 paper, “Repair After Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation”, Am. J of Soc. He also looked at just “no” in “Getting Serious: Joke->Serious ‘No’” (2001, J of Prag.), but this “no” can also be combined with “yeah” resulting in a very similar effect. This is the use that I don’t think any of the LL-responders has mentioned, where you say something joking as a sort of ice-breaker, and then “(yeah) no I just wanted to ask you about….” This is as opposed to Mark’s (right-on, by the way) characterization of the “no” as indicating “divergence from (perhaps shared) presuppositions or expectations” — note the similarity to “intersubjectivity” in Schegloff’s title.