Noncompositional

Let Google Maps tell you about the libraries near UC Berkeley, and you’ll find out something quite interesting: there’s a “Library of Education Psychotherapy.” All these years and I never knew we had such a facility.

A topic of continued interest (primarily by(?) Geoff Pullum) is linguification, or the expression of a particular idea or argument in terms of language. A couple years ago I wrote about one particular type of linguification that often takes the form of

You rarely hear X and Y in the same sentence

and which expresses, basically, X and Y are really different and totally unrelated. In case X is a modifier of Y, then it means Y is anything but properly described by X (e.g., you never hear “politician” and “honest” within three words of each other).

In the June 2008 issue of Language, Frederick (Fritz) Newmeyer writes, in a footnote:

The late Jim McCawley wrote somewhere that he can always pick out theoretical linguists at academic cocktail parties. We are the ones who talk about the Fibonacci sequence, the laws of thermodynamics, and Romance clitic climbing, all in the same sentence.

This reflects what I guessed was a folk theory of discourse, one part of which is the idea that sentences have only a single topic, and that nothing is present in the scope of negation (e.g., “studying Romance clitic climbing clearly has nothing to do with the laws of thermodynamics, which is just as well considering that I know nothing about the latter”). This particular form of linguification relies on the idea that if any concepts are mentioned in the same sentence, this indicates at least that the speaker is interested in all three topics, and perhaps even that the speaker is somehow arguing for a significant relation between them. (Or perhaps just that they are concept-dropping in order to impress their colleagues).

Wow. Garkov has to be the funniest example I’ve seen in the domain of replacing the content of speech bubbles in comics. And in this case it has the added virtue of being funnier than what used to be there. In almost every case.

The combination of the subject line and first few main text lines of a bit of spam I got this morning was, in fact, slightly coherent.

Subject: Or coherent

Body: increasingly so the longer I m here and the more time I spend at

C A 9N A D/8AN P 0 4H A RM A 5CY

I prefer a colon after coherent and a comma after increasingly so

How do you describe a cow that’s rather pessimistically chowing down on grass in a meadow?

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In the news today is China’s return to the discussion table with the US on human rights. Unless you read the Washington Post headline. Ah, what a difference a little word makes.

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As I continue to move in to my new apartment, I constantly think, “I should be working on my presentation in Chicago in a few weeks.”

This leads me to wonder, what’s going on in the linguablog world in Chicago?

Today I came across a group on Facebook called You’re a Linguist? How many languages do you speak? Funny, yes, though I suppose there’s a tradition to have long, multi-utterance Facebook group names. But what had be chuckling for a while was the description of the group:

Being a linguist is not about speaking lots of languages!! It’s about coming up with theories based on data that you read about in someone else’s paper and that probably don’t account for any variation or possibly anything at all…or something…

Genius.