Noncompositional

At the risk of exposing myself as a video game geek as well as a linguistics geek: I am a fan of the Final Fantasy series of video games, which are console-style role playing games developed by the Japanese company Square Enix (formerly SquareSoft, and at some point involved with Electronic Arts). The series began on the Family Computer System (Famicom) in Japan in 1987, and released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in America in 1990. The basic premise in these games is that you are (or control) some hero (who may be reluctant) who ends up having to save the world from some magical, political, or politico-magical force. The hero is also accompanied by a group of companions who tag along for various reasons, including possibly being heroes themselves.

Without getting into the gruesome details of how the gameplay works, one important aspect is called status effects, or simply status. A status effect is some temporary or curable altering of a character’s normal condition. That is, normally a character is able to take any of the normal commands (attack with equipped weapon, cast spell, execute class-specific action [e.g., steal from opponent]), etc.), and execute them in a timely fashion with the desired effect. Characters also never randomly tire, drop dead, or get second winds, etc. on their own. However, any number of things can change this. A character may be “poisoned,” meaning that they will “die” (go out of commission) as their body is gradually weakened; or they may be “blinded,” and be unable to connect with physical attacks; or they may be “confused” and execute random commands on random targets; and so on. For each status, there is usually a particular way to cure it without waiting for it to stop on its own. To cure poisoning, one can use an antidote; for blindness, eye drops; for confusion, whack them with something.

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It’s amazing the difference between semesters [nominal extraposition]. Only two days gone by and yet the semester seems like it’s been going on for weeks and weeks [non-constituent coordination, copy-raising]. Well, I’m anticipating that either this will be a slow semester of blogging due to me faithfully concentrating on teaching and research, or a semester of much blogging due to…uh, the massive amounts of ideas I’ll be getting from all the academic activity [discontinuous coordination]. (just practicing noticing various non-canonical constructions, to get back into the swing of things)

Actually, I’m hoping that a particular ad for Aflac is still in existence at a gas station near my apartment, because it would potentially be great material for the class (actually, moreso for a slightly different class that isn’t offered this year, but I can always figure out a way to squeeze it in). But I’ll probably test it out here first. In short, it’s about metaphors for service institutions, and conceptual blending.

And, in case you hadn’t noticed, the title for this post contains the strange minimizing use of all of, as in, He’s been here for all of three days and already he thinks he owns the place.

Fear not, faithful reader(s), I still exist. However, despite the rapid onslaught of lack-of-institute, I have somehow managed to remain busy, probably due to something called “things I was supposed to be doing in July.” Maybe, just maybe, much of that will be done before classes begin at the end of August. Until then, an assignment in morphology vs. phonology: magicite (the mineral/stone/thingy that stores the essence of magic(k)al power in one or more fantasy worlds): is it magi[k]ite or magi[s]ite?

My near-daily travels down the peninsula to Stanford for the LSA institute this past month gave me an intensive course in Caltrain, the communter rail that serves San Francsico, San Jose, and the cities in between. I noticed as the train approached Millbrae station something interesting in the announcement. Millbrae is the only transfer station between Caltrain and BART (the rail service for San Francisco and the East Bay). The Caltrain operator would usually say something like

Now approaching Millbrae station. Millbrae is your transfer point for BART, SFO, and the East Bay.

This would be made when heading either south or north. I found it a little odd that BART would not necessarily be a transfer point for, say, San Francisco. After all, as far as I can tell, there aren’t any other places where a person might actually want to chose between going to a BART station or a Caltrain station - they kind of service different parts of the city, at least if you’re walking or biking. So it seems like either they wanted to save a little time, or just didn’t want to reinforce the idea that you could travel to important locations in SF via BART (in fact, several more locations than you could get to on Caltrain).

Now, something else interesting happens on BART. Actually, it doesn’t “happen,” it’s printed on their system maps. In addition to BART lines, other rail systems like Amtrack and Caltrain are shown, with thinner lines and smaller station labels. interestingly, all the Caltrain stations south of Millbrae have station labels (Palo Alto, Redwood City, and so forth), but none of the stations north of Millbrae, where BART has service, have station labels. Nice one.

Well, it’s past the halfway point for Linguistics Summer Camp–that seems to be what people are calling it, though for me it’s a bit different, as I’m commuting from my home four times a week. All the classes are great - but some are much funnier than others. One of the funniest moments came the other day in Gregory Ward and Betty Birner’s class on word order variation. At one point, the latter wanted the class to recall the various types of information-structural status that referents could have, according to a 1992 article by Ellen Prince. She said something like, “Now, I’m sure you all remember Ellen Prince’s ‘92 breakdown.” There was a moment of silence before a wave of laughter. Following which Gregory Ward reassured us all that “she’s much happier now.”

Other fun moments in various classes:

On natural types: “Aristotle’s nice, but that was 2400 years ago” and “The water’s coming along, saying ‘I’m just a natural sort of guy’.”

On accounting for constituents in a sentence: “I guess I don’t have to account for the pad thai.” “Well, it came from a recipe!” “Yes, an old family recipe. Not MY family, though. We called it pasta.”

(Yes, that was a reference to a recently-released movie that I happened to have seen recently)

This post is part of a probably vain attempt to increase my wakefulness so I can continue to do coursework. I’ve mentioned before strangenesses related to the word say. I noticed another earlier today (or perhaps it was yesterday). Consider these:

I practice acceptance, which is to say: I occasionally acknowledge the obvious. SF Chron

MS. PERINO: What I can tell you is how the President reacted today, which is to say that he does feel terrible for them, he thinks they’re going through a lot right now, they’ve been through a lot. Press Gaggle

There’s a very widely-believed explanation going around that what Hamlet meant by “nunnery” was a “house of ill repute,” which is to say, a brothel. That’s All I’ve Got to Say

Random House/Dictionary.com has an entry for this particular turn of phrase:

that is to say, that is what is meant; in other words: I believe his account of the story, that is to say, I have no reason to doubt it.

This is apparently a rather old construction, with an OED attestation in c1175, and with nearly the same sort of meaning throughout. In informal search of which is to say shows that the relative clause version has been around at least since the 1600s. Also dating from Early Middle English is the shortened version, that is.

Efter schrifte, hit falleth to speken of Penitence, thet is, dedbote

It’s not until much later (the OED gives 1865, so probably a bit earlier) that that is allows itself to be tagged onto the end of the material it goes with (the material it’s glommed onto, that is).

Earlier today I happened upon a question on MetaFilter on skeuomorphs. The submitter gives several examples of what I conceive of as typical skeuomorphs, both linguistic and not. The linguistic ones are spot-on, as is the noticing of changes from icons to symbols. Actually, one case, the use of the shopping cart for online shopping sites, is interesting, as the era of online shopping has always, as far as I recall, involved the trading of items that would not normally go in shopping carts. This despite the fact that, as far as my experience goes, a shopping cart is not the general sign for shopping containers, or for places where you buy items.

There are then dozens of responses, most of which are probably skeuomorphs, though all of which are interesting. One contrast of note is the continued use of the 3.5” floppy disk as an icon (described earlier, and technically nearly a symbol in the semiotic sense, previously an icon in the same sense) for “save,” as opposed an opening-file-folder icon used to indicate “open.” This latter is more a metaphor: we still use file folders to hold various related documents in the non-electronic world, and the folder perhaps remains a reasonable analogy to directory hierarchies, though we don’t really put folders inside folders in the paper world.

In continuing the tradition of very short posts, here’s an update: I’m currently near Georgetown University for the Roundtable on little words. It’s (to me, anyway) a novel take on what conference themes can be about, and so far we’ve had a lot of interesting presentations.

And in non-linguistics, I’m getting my second-ever taste of snow in an urban setting. Actually, it was really only snowing on the day that I arrived, but it was a novelty nonetheless. Also interesting is watching the local news shows; something about theme seems different from what I’m used to, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. But I probably won’t have enough time to figure it out before I have to get back to the west coast.