Noncompositional

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.

Consider what are likely values for X in the phrasal template (nascent snowclone?) I X and I vote. Such a declaration is commonly seen on bumper stickers and sometimes in the windows of people’s places of residence. In my experience (at least the experience that I think I can recall), it’s most commonly I own a gun and I vote and I’m in the NRA and I vote. But that could just be because a house near where I used to live had such a sign up in his or her window. I briefly considered that this was more of a right-wing thing to say. But if you search on google you’ll find slogans like I’m Indian, I game and I vote, I have a dog and I vote, and I’m undead and I vote, none of which really leads one to believe that the voter in question leans one way or the other politically. Well, maybe the last one…

Let it be known that other(s) have noted and commented on this pattern, including this criticism. Others seem to be aware of the template and modify it consciously.

In any case, it seems that the non-humorous ones tend at least to be proclaiming that the person holds some fringe (I’m Pagan and I vote) or at least controversial (I’m Pro-Choice and I vote) stance. What’s interesting is what you can tell about a person from the bumper sticker beyond the two stated facts.

Okay, so I really have only one case in mind, and that’s the following bumper sticker I saw recently in Berkeley. I don’t recall the sort of car it was on, but the sticker was green, and it read

I eat tofu and I vote.

Given the connection in the West (or at least California) between tofu and vegetarianism/veganism, and (thereby?) with environmentalism, and in general progressive attitudes, I read this as a statement of progressive, or possibly just tree-hugger values. But for what class of people could you draw such a connection? And here’s where the issue of the significance of tofu-eating comes in. There are people for whom tofu eating is nothing special, myself included, but nonetheless there is at least for some people (again, myself included) a recognition of the indexicality of tofu, especially (or exclusively) among people for whom tofu is something quite special. And it is this latter group’s recognition of the specialness of tofu that lets one understand the significance of the bumper sticker. Of course it’s not so simple as all that - it’s not necessarily just about individuals who happen to eat tofu, but the historical context in which they eat it. The grown child of an immigrant from a tofu-eating nation might feel just as home with tofu as the grown child of people raised in a tofu-is-new culture. Nonetheless, the social significance of eating tofu, or at least the recognition of a historical significance, might somehow persist in the later generation, such that the driver of that car might have dietary habits observably no different from (say) mine, though it would be entirely misleading (in intent, though not in literal meaning) to put that bumper sticker on my own car.

On the other hand, if a bumper sticker were to read I eat rice and I vote we would have a rather different situation.

At the beginning of the Double Jeopardy! round of today’s Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek noted to one contestant, “Robin, I see red on you and red in front of you: let’s try to get rid of one of those this round.”

Robin had a negative score, and was wearing a red shirt. Thank goodness for specific indefinites.

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I don’t often shop at Sears - in fact, as far as I can remember I’ve walked into one less than five times in my life. But recently I was looking for an item that I thought might be sold at Sears (turned out, it’s not, at least not at the one I went to), and we now live not far from one, so I went over to do some shopping. While up in the tools and hardware section, I heard a really interesting message over the PA system. Paraphrasing:

Attention, Sears sales associates. Make sure your areas are well organized. Walk through the aisles and make sure your inventory is tidy and that everything is visible. Remember, we pride ourselves on good service, and always put the customer first!

I’d never heard anything like this before. For the first half of the announcement, I was thinking, “why am I hearing this?” Then it became clear - this public announcement, on the surface aimed at employees (I have no idea if what was in the message was actually supposed to be immediately relevant to sales associates), was designed to be overheard by customers.

It’s an interesting question how (or if) one can tell that a message that was not explicitly addressed to them is meant to be overheard by them. It seems as though the biggest cues are semantic and pragmatic, but it seems like there could be some more grammatically constructions that do the job. I’m thinking of utterances like Well, I would have gone to the show but _someone_ wanted to stay home and unpack all evening. It seems as though conversation analysts would have covered this topic in their work, but after a quick search the closest thing I could find was the idea that conversations in play-by-play sports commentary are dialogues meant to be heard by a non-participating audience. Then there’s the more recent idea that some instances of self-directed or soliloquial utterances are in fact meant to be overheard by nearby potential addressees. But I don’t know of any real generalizations that have been made about saying things with the intention that someone other than the addressee receives a message.

Over at Language Log, Geoff Pullum has posted on the ongoing story of Gillian Gibons, a schoolteacher teaching in Khartoum, Sudan. She has been charged with blasphemy for naming (actually, for accepting the class’ suggestion for naming) a teddy bear “Muhammad,” apparently after one of the most popular boys in the class.

I don’t want to get into the details of this particular case, but I do want to comment on something in Geoff’s final paragraph, which begins:

Here on the Linguistic Crimes desk we try to highlight the lighter side of language offenses: the zany character of victimless criminality that amount to no more than uttering strings of letters of syllables, the mad asterisking of words too awful to print, the giggleworthy character of loony attempts to suppress free speech.

Now I am sure Geoff has thought about the philosophy of language, and in particular the philosophy of what language “means,” far more than I could have if I had started when I was born and not stopped until last night, but there is something interesting in this particular statement. That is, on the one hand, we have the fact that “uttering of strings of letters and syllables” cannot reasonably constitute victim-ful criminality (being inherently meaningless, one presumes). On the other hand, we have the importance of the freedom of speech, which one presumes is an important thing to do because sometimes speech is meaningful or somehow experienced as meaningful.

But like I said, I’m no philosopher.

A recent PC post on envelope-pushing names in China reminded me of the situation on names in Japan, where there is a government-sanctioned list of Chinese characters (kanji) that can be used in personal names. This doesn’t limit the possible sounds that can go into a name (beyond the phonology of the language), as you can just use hiragana (or katakana?) to indicate the appropriate pronunciation.

The approved list of kanji, the Jinmeiyoo Kanji (’Chinese characters for use in personal names’), consists of 983 kanji that do not appear in the standard 2000-odd standard kanji used in everyday writing, giving parents about 3000 characters to chose from. Excluded from the list are many characters that indicate culturally taboo or offensive concepts, like prostitution, cancer, and various emotional states (resentment, e.g.). Once, there were parents who attempt to give their child a name like ‘demon’ or something similar, and this name was rejected as a form of abuse of parental powers, due to the expected social difficulties that the child would be expected to experience (but, I haven’t heard anything about Japanese parents tying to put symbols in names, like in the Chinese story).

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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.

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 »