Language Log

In a recent post ("Creole birdsong?", 5/9/2008), I mentioned Derek Bickerton's "language bioprogram hypothesis". Derek responded with a long comment. Since I responded to his comment with another post ("A multi-generational bioprogram? Derek Bickerton objects", 5/10/2008), I invited him to respond in kind. The guest post below is the result.

My posting on getter better (and its sisters and its cousins and its aunts, which I'll refer to as GetterBetter as a group) has elicited considerable comment, both here on Language Log and on languagehat's blog. I've responded to several of the Language Log comments with comments of my own (which might have to be reworked into full-fledged postings), but there's at least one issue that comes up in both places and is, I think, important enough to merit a posting on its own, even though the central point is one I've posted about many times before: the thin line between error and mere variation.

Just in case you haven't already seen it, you should go check out WALS Online:

The data and the texts from The World Atlas of Language Structures, published as a book with CD-ROM in 2005 by Oxford University Press, are now freely available online.

WALS Online is a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library . It is a separate publication, edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, 2008).

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Zimmer told me that he was leaving Oxford University Press, where he was Editor for American Dictionaries, to become Executive Producer of the Visual Thesaurus online site. I was happy for Ben's career advancement, but I had another reaction that had nothing to do with him. When I talk with undergraduates about the jobs that studies in linguistics might prepare them for, "executive producer" has never been one of them. Before now.

Last year I wrote about citation plagiarism and why there is no such thing. I just discovered a comment on this by Miriam Burstein at The Little Professor which requires some discussion.

I've had a few opportunities to overhear (or over-read) some strange example sentences while I've been spending more time here in the west wing basement of Language Log Plaza. Here are a couple of them for our readers to mull over before I comment on them (and invite your comments on them) sometime later this week.

1. I'll never forget how he must have felt. (overheard)
2. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted? (over-read)

From Phineas Q. Phlogiston, "Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP", Speculative Grammarian, CLIII(4), March 2008:

This is only the second cartoon about computational linguistics that I know of. The first one is also rather negative, but I guess that this is only to be expected from cartoonists, who are on the whole much more likely to criticize something than to praise it.

The illustration is from Taro Gomi, An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, by way of a new addition to our blogroll, The Ideophone, by Mark Dingemanse.

Overheard on Locust Walk: "What you need to do is call him up and be like, 'why are you doing this to me?'"

Something about this struck me — maybe it's because I'm old enough that I still think of be like as a description of behavior associated with speaking, rather than a simple synonym for say. But I should have know better — {"call him up and be like"} gets 7,590 web hits on Google, which is a lot for a six-word sequence.

A few weeks ago, Seth Roberts visited Penn to give a talk about self-experimentation, and I took advantage of the opportunity to invite him to dinner with 15 or 20 students in Ware College House, where I'm Faculty Master. There was a lively discussion, mostly about Seth's "Shangri-La Diet" ideas.

Seth turned the tables before dinner by interviewing me about blogging. He took notes on his laptop, and sent me a draft the next day, and I promised to look at it and get back to him with corrections — and then I forgot about it until he reminded me yesterday. As it turned out, it didn't really need any changes, but I adjusted a few words here and there, and he's published it on his blog: "Interview with Mark Liberman about Blogging", 4/16/2008.

Having commented in an idle moment on what and/or means and why we have it, I started to receive email from people solemnly informing me that they were native speakers but in their variety of English or had only the exclusive meaning, where the disjuncts can't both be true. In other words, these are people who think that in their variety of English, if I say If Gordon Brown or the Pope is in the USA today I'll eat a copy of Strunk and White, I do not have to eat a copy of that disgusting little book The Elements of Style: I luck out on the grounds that (as it happens) both of them are in the USA today.

I hate to sound dogmatic, but my correspondents are actually wrong about their own native language.

One form of American Exceptionalism — resistance to texting — is definitely gone:

Shortly before the Great Language Log Server Meltdown, there was a reader-inspired post on the conversational sequence "yeah no" (4/3/2008), which in turn inspired a lot of interesting reader reaction ("'Yeah no' mailbag", 4/3/2008; "Yet another 'yeah no' note", 4/4/2008).

And just as I was distracted by the old server's death on 4/6/2008 (R.I.P.), other readers sent in a number of fascinating examples of "yeah, no" in TV shows, movies, advertisements, and books.

So a week or ten days late, here they are.