Language Log

Reports that the textbook The World: Social Studies asserts that: "Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus." have triggered considerable controversy. Some maintain that this is a gross inaccuracy reflecting the intrusion of anti-Semitism, to which others respond that it is correct and so unexceptionable. The former are correct: the description of Jesus as a Palestinian is both inaccurate and offensive.

In a comment on my post about relative word frequencies in the vice-presidential debate, Roo suggested that there's "a difference in mindset/strategy between conservative and liberal politicians", where conservatives tend to use "America" while liberals use "United States". While this was true in that debate, I'm not sure whether it's true in general. As a start towards addressing the question, I took a quick look at the frequency of words based on the morpheme America (e.g. America, American, Americans) in the repository of inaugural addresses at the American Presidency Project.

The results show an overall rising trend, but no clear conservative/liberal division (at least none that's clear to me):

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Michael Erard, who wrote the book about speech errors ("Um"), discusses the latest slip of the tongue to make political news. We've previously commented on John McCain's substitution of Iraq for Iran, Barack Obama's substitution of president for vice-president, David Kurtz's substitution of Republican for Democratic, and Jo Ann Davidson's substitution of Sarah Pawlenty for Sarah Palin.

In a recent post on "Affective demonstratives", I quoted the curious codicil to the OED's entry on that:

"Also that one, used disparagingly of a woman."

and I wondered whether this disparaging demonstrative really always has a female referent. And sure enough, this evening's presidential debate provided a counterexample.

Eager as always to score high-school snark points, Maureen Dowd wrote today about Sarah Palin ("Sarah's Pompom Palaver", 10/5/2008):

Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there.”

"Defies diagramming"? Sorry, that sentence may not embody the most cogent foreign-policy argument ever made, and it's so awkward that it might have come from a non-native speaker —  but it seems syntactically straightforward to me.

This is a follow-up to Mark's post earlier today on affective demonstratives, though I am going to move us even further than he did from Palin and towards the lexical/constructional pragmatics. The overall picture is this: this NOUN reliably signals that the speaker is in a heightened emotional state (or at least intends to convey that impression), whereas those NOUN sends quite a different signal. Our data are from upwards of 50,000 speakers.

We can fairly be accused of spending too much time recently on the subject of how Sarah Palin talks, though in this respect, Language Log is simply reflecting the level of popular interest represented by the millions watching her clips on YouTube. This post also pivots (to use a couple of her special words) off of her way of talking — so if you're tired of the subject, you might want to move on, or even avail yourself of our famous double-your-money-back-in-case-of-less-than-full-satisfaction guarantee.

In a comment on a recent LL post, John Curran wrote "I noticed last night that Governor Palin's verbal style seemed to employ more deictic terms". (Here deictic refers to the demonstrative "pointing words" this, that, these, and those.) John's observation is mostly but not entirely true, as this table of word-counts from the debate transcript suggests:

In an op-ed in Saturday's New York Times, Steve Pinker tries to explain or extenuate some of Sarah Palin's linguistic derelictions, real and alleged. Among other things, he says that Palin shouldn't be taxed for saying "nucular," which is

 …not a sign of ignorance. This reversal of vowel-like consonants (nuk-l’-yer —> nuk-y’-ler) is common in the world’s languages, and is no more illiterate than pronouncing “iron” the way most Americans do, as “eye-yern” instead of “eye-ren.”

I agree with Pinker's overall conclusion that Palin shouldn't be on the hook for this one, but I think both of the claims here are wrong. It's not a phonetic process, and if it isn't exactly a sign of ignorance, it's the legacy of it. 

One of the things that marks Sarah Palin as a linguistic outsider is her use of also. In part, this is just a matter of frequency. In her contribution to last night's vice-presidential debate, she used the word also 48 times in about 7600 words, accounting for  about 0.63% of her words.  Her opponent, Joe Biden, used also only 3 times in about 7200 words. Relative to the rates seen in large and representative corpora, Gov. Palin used also about 5 to 10 times more often than expected, while Sen. Biden used also about 2 to 3 times less often than expected

OK, I'm going to give it a shot — I'm going to make a comment about language use by some politicians while giving Language Log readers what they come here for: "discussion of language by real live linguists".

After the vice-presidential debate last night, I was pleased not to have heard Gov. Sarah Palin repeat Sen. John McCain's claim in the first presidential debate that Sen. Barack Obama has "the most liberal voting record" in the Senate. Speaking as a "real live linguist", this kind of claim is to my mind a little more insidious than your typical lie or stretching of the truth in a political campaign. Here's why I think so.

That's the bag-of-words summary of last night's vice-presidential debate.

This is a follow-up on a couple of my more recent LL posts on language and politics, and on the discussion that has been generated by one of them in particular.

First, Main Street. Several commenters wrote that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not being "unnecessarily redundant" (as I put it) by referring to "Main Street and everyday Americans", asserting that "Main Street" refers exclusively to the commercial/business part of a (small) town/city in America, not to any residential areas nor to the "everyday Americans" who live there. (Interestingly, some of the comments seem to be duplicating themselves over on Mark's post from earlier this morning.)

In response to Eric Bakovic's recent Language Log post asserting that he doesn't live on Main Street, Victor Mair sent this recent New Yorker cartoon: