Talking

« previous post | next post »

Overheard yesterday afternoon, from a woman on the street talking on a cellphone and looking down the street:

Oh, there you are! I'll talk to you when you get here.

Two different senses of talk here. The woman was already talking to her friend, in the sense of talk defined by the OED as 'exercise the faculty of speech', and was meanwhile preparing to talk to her, in the sense 'convey or exchange ideas, thoughts, information, etc. by means of speech'. No actual paradox, but it did catch my ear.

 



15 Comments

  1. Skullturf Q. Beavispants said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 12:36 pm

    "Before I begin my speech, I'd like to say a few words."

  2. Ryan Rosso said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 12:38 pm

    That is certainly an interesting concept. There could also be an added emphasis of communication in person, rather than on the phone. The concept of distance could play a role here- although communication by speech is occurring and she can even see her friend, there is a distinction between the 'talking' happening in the moment and the 'talking' that will occur as soon as they meet in person.

  3. John said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 12:41 pm

    At a train station in the UK waiting for a train for a long time and the announcement included
    "the train will be composed of eight carriages" and I was struck by the use of the future tense. The train already existed with its carriages and was trundling along the track towards the station, but for the announcer there was some entity which would exist once present at the station.

  4. Alan Gunn said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 2:19 pm

    One of my favorite sentences, in a discussion of whether the word "guy" can refer to a woman: "Even guys use "guys" to refer to women." I think the usage point is no longer in doubt, if it ever was, but still it's a nice example of a word meaning two different things in the same sentence.

  5. S Onosson said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 2:24 pm

    Did the woman in question hang up her phone afterwards? I have made very similar statements myself, in similar circumstances, and my intended meaning was always something like: "I'll continue talking to you when you get here."

  6. Josh Millard said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 2:40 pm

    Did the woman in question hang up her phone afterwards?

    The same notion occurred to me, almost as an objection at first, but I'm not sure that it really contradicts what Arnold is noting at all when I think about it. And I don't think that it's necessary in that sense even to get off the phone immediately — I've certainly told someone that I "can't talk" to pre-empt lengthy conversation while still making a little time for chatter or logistics, or said that "we'll talk later" to set aside a specific topic from a conversation without ending the conversation itself.

    The sort of conceptual scoping of "talk" is interesting. It seems like there's a lot of temporality bound up in how people talk about talking in general — an impassioned "can't we talk about this" in the middle of an argument (a breakup, perhaps?) could be about talk-vs-shout ("let's be reasonable!") or talk-at-greater-length ("don't go, let's talk!") or a bit of both.

  7. dr pepper said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 2:46 pm

    I suspect that in the future, even if we never have phones as implants, we will still have buttonless phones controlled by small muscle twitches that will be as semiconscious as walking. And phone communication will come to seem like just another vocal range mode, like whispering or shouting. So two people wlking towards each other would start out using their phones and as they get closer, switch seemlessly to speaking directly. I expect that "talk to you when i get there" will be part of a whole set of similar expressions.

  8. Kensy Cooperrider said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 4:08 pm

    Another kind of "talk" is the grave kind implied by that ominous conversational preface: "We need to talk." Grave-talk may also be implied when there is an article, as in "So, did you guys have the talk?"

  9. Ellen K. said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 6:47 pm

    Okay… this is off topic… but that's two threads where I've seen reference to "guy" as gender neutral. As someone said in the other thread, I've never before seen the word guy, singular, as other than referring to a male. It's only in the plural (and when addressing addressing those one is referring to) that the word can refer to females or a mixed group.

  10. Paul Donnelly said,

    July 7, 2008 @ 9:31 pm

    In what way is "talk" being used in two senses? Saying that they will talk when she gets there has no bearing on whether they are currently talking, does it? She could have optionally said "continue to talk", but I don't see that it changes the meaning of the sentence.

  11. Tarlach said,

    July 8, 2008 @ 5:05 am

    What is so interesting about homonyms?

  12. Josh Millard said,

    July 8, 2008 @ 11:29 am

    They're…very interesting?

    Tarlach, you're not required to care about any of this, but the conventional response to not caring is to stop reading, not to comment in multiple threads to point out that you don't care about what you're reading. If Language Log just isn't for you, that's fine, but if that's the case it'd be a kindness if you'd stop mucking up the conversations you don't care about by telling us about it.

  13. kyle gorman said,

    July 8, 2008 @ 10:26 pm

    there is the well-known (among philadelphian sociolinguists at least) phenomenon of "talkin' to" with a definition "have a sexual relationship with". i've heard numerous, unambiguous tokens from both AAVE speakers and speakers of philadelphia basilect in the north.

    overheard:

    "i thought you was talkin' to her too and i know you aint bin the kinda guy to be talkin' to a shorty be talkin' to another [expletive]"

  14. Tarlach said,

    July 9, 2008 @ 2:05 am

    It's not that I don't care, in fact I DO care about linguistics, and my point is that pointing out homonyms doesn't rise up to the level of linguistics. I've used the analogy before about the difference between an accountant and an economist. Pointing out that someone has more debt than income is something an accountant would care about, not an economist. Pointing out that "talk" has more than one meaning is something a grammarian would care about, not a linguist. This is my point. You may disagree with it, but you can't discount what i'm saying as merely not caring or dislikeing Language Log.

  15. Josh Millard said,

    July 9, 2008 @ 11:28 am

    Well, but you're attempting to propose some standard of what is and is not worth thinking or blogging about. The idea that homonyms aren't interesting is a long haul from self-evident: the authors find it interesting and folks commenting seem to as well. If you personally get no joy from thinking about and digging into these things, you may be spending time at the wrong site.

    I'm not telling you to like it here, or that you're wrong not to — to each his own — but yes: I will happily discount what you're saying as purposeless grousing if what you're saying amounts to "this is dumb and you shouldn't talk about it". LLog is, like any blog, opt-in; you're not required to comment, ever, at all. If the only reason you comment is to complain about how you don't like the basic content of the site, you're wasting your time and everyone else's. There are other language blogs out there.

RSS feed for comments on this post