Language Log

Thanks to Graeme Forbes for alerting me to this! He has given me permission to post his note to his pro-compositionality friends. [For readers for whom compositionality is a new concept: it's a central tenet of formal semantics, usually credited to Gottlob Frege (but not without some controversy): The meaning of the whole is a function of the meaning of the parts and of the way they are syntactically combined. See, for instance: this introductory handout or the entry on Compositionality in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]

From Graeme Forbes:

You may have already seen this, but in case not, here's an excerpt from an article in the current New Yorker, "Easy, Tiger", by David Sedaris (July 11/18 2011, p.40). It's an entertaining piece about how he "mastered" Mandarin, Japanese and German with the aid of tourist-courses on his iPod, including one from a company called Pimsleur. The "Easy, Tiger" alludes to a phrase in the section on romance in the Mandarin course. Or was it the German course? Surely not!

Jane Perlez and Eric Schmitt, "Pakistan's spies tied to slaying of a journalist", NYT 7/4/2011:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Obama administration officials believe that Pakistan’s powerful spy agency ordered the killing of a Pakistani journalist who had written scathing reports about the infiltration of militants in the country’s military, according to American officials. […]

The disclosure of the intelligence was made in answer to questions about the possibility of its existence, and was reluctantly confirmed by the two officials. “There is a lot of high-level concern about the murder; no one is too busy not to look at this,” said one.

I did the stupidest thing in Bulgaria. I bought a new wallet. Never do that on a foreign trip. See if you can figure out why before you read on. (And yes, of course there's a linguistic angle.)

Luke Yeomans (pictured) had a king cobra sanctuary in Nottingham, England, and planned to open it to the public this weekend, but instead one of his cobras killed him on Wednesday with a single bite, a hefty injection of neurotoxic and cardiotoxic venom that gave him a heart attack. Sadly, the linguistic signs that he would be killed this way were already present in the record, quite clear in something he had said. I wish someone could have warned him.

The Daily Telegraph quotes Yeomans as saying this about why the snakes offered no threat to him:

These king cobras know I provide them with food and fresh water so they're not going to go out of their way to do harm to me when I do no harm to them whatsoever. People say I’m mad but it’s better than saying that you’re bad and everything I do is good. My life is about the conservation of the king cobra.

Jim Reeves' classic country song "Distant Drums" (written by Cindy Walker) expresses a marriage proposal by a young man who wants his true love to marry him right now, before the drums and bugles that he already imagines he hears in the distance arrive and he is conscripted and forced to go off to war. The main part of the young man's argument is expressed in the chorus thus:

So Mary marry me, let's not wait
Let's share all the time we can before it's too late
Love me now, for now is all the time there may be
If you love me Mary, Mary marry me.

I have a question about the underlined part, addressed primarily to professional semanticists. Some of our posts get a bit nerdy on Language Log, and this is one. Skip it if you hate to see a capital A written upside down.

On CNN recently, this exchange:

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Ari Velshi: You're more like an average guy.

Tim Pawlenty: I welcome that. I'm not, you know, going to light my hair on fire and shoot sparks out my ears, or whatever.

In my last post puzzling over even ("What does 'even' even mean?", 2/8/2011), I suggested that there's a new even idiom, exemplified in phrases like "How does that even work?" or "What does that even mean?", in which even has become simply an intensifier rather than a scalar focus particle. If this is true, it would be a rebirth of even's pre-16th-century use as (in the OED's gloss) "an intensive or emphatic particle" that can be "prefixed to a subject, object, or predicate, or to the expression of a qualifying circumstance, to emphasize its identity". However, the 94 helpful comments on that post left me wondering whether this is really happening.

So here's another even example that brought me up short — Michael Hinkelman, "Feds unveil 50-count indictment against 'Uncle Joe,' 12 others", Philadelpha Daily News 5/24/2011:

But Joseph C. Santaguida, Ligambi's attorney, said the reputed mob boss, who pleaded not guilty to all charges and has a bail hearing Thursday, claimed that the feds' case was "weak."

Asked if Ligambi, dressed in a white polo shirt and jeans, was the mob boss portrayed by prosecutors, the defense attorney said: "I don't know if [prosecutors] can even prove that. I don't think it's that strong a case."

The first sentence of this news report is perfectly fine, but it presents a linguistic puzzle:

The leader of the International Monetary Fund and a possible candidate for president of France was arrested Sunday in connection with the violent sexual assault of a hotel maid after being yanked from an airplane moments before it was to depart for Paris, police said.

The puzzle is how such a conjunction can denote a single person, as it clearly does in this sentence. It could even more easily denote two, but then we’d see “were arrested”, not “was arrested”.

First a descriptive query: do all languages allow such a conjunction of a definite and an indefinite singular noun phrase in subject position, interpreted as referring to a single person? And does English allow it quite generally, or is this a special newspaper style?

A couple of days ago ("On not allowing Bin Laden to back-burner", 5/3/2011), I noted that English (like other languages)  often turns a noun denoting a place into a verb meaning "cause something to come to be in/on/at that place".  I also noted that other causative change-of-state verbs generally have intransitive/inchoative uses as well (The sun melted the snow versus The snow melted), but denominal locative verbs typically don't.

Thus we have transitive causatives like She floored the accelerator and We tabled the motion, but not the corresponding intransitive/inchoative versions *The accelerator floored and *The motion tabled.

Ben Smith and Glenn Thrush, Osama bin Laden's death brings celebration, unity – and questions", Politico 5/2/11 (emphasis added):

Two years ago, Obama tasked CIA Director Leon Panetta to prioritize the hunt for the 9/11 mastermind, a response to the perception that the Bush administration had allowed the hunt for bin Laden to back-burner.

The bold-face usage struck me as unexpected.

Tom Scocca, in Slate magazine, is full of scorn for the language of the New York Times. It is not always easy to discern his meaning (he uses a metaphor of lard in pie crusts, which I didn't quite follow), but he seems to think the Times is desperately concerned to "preserve its sacred function (or the appearance of its sacred function) of neutrally and modestly recording events, not judging them" — it struggles so hard to be neutral that it becomes vapid. He is incensed that the phrase "showed just how broadly" in the print edition was replaced in a later online edition by "raised new questions about how broadly", in this passage about the reported deaths of Gaddafi's son and grandsons in Tripoli:

And while the deaths could not be independently verified, the campaign against Libya’s most densely populated areas raised new questions about how broadly NATO is interpreting its United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

Scocca's bitterly scornful remark about the language involved is this:

There: in the disembodied implied passive, questions were raised. About the interpretation of the mandate. And just like that, we have bounced gently away from the bomb crater to a discussion about the understanding of a policy.

The disembodied implied passive? What is this, exactly?

What is the link between (a) denigrating, (b) ceasing to hold in one's hand, (c) making written notes, and (d) euthanasia?

Ben Yagoda shows in this article in Slate (not for the first time) that he is one English professor cum journalistic writer who really is smart as well as witty when writing about language. In this article he actually does some empirical research on the extent to which the prescriptivist conservatives are holding their ground — he makes an attempt at quantitative assessment of the extent to which recently shifting word meanings have caught on (the words whose meanings he studies include decimate, disinterested, eke, fortuitous, fulsome, momentarily, nonplussed, presently, toothsome, and verbal).