Language Log

from http://forum.zazzle.com/tools/lets_see_your_create_a_product_store?m=357327 , from a post from 5/13/2009:

As for whippet/lurcher colours, my last lurcher (apricot with kohl eyes) had 23 puppies (two litters), not one with the same coat colour or length, all fabulous handsome dogs though.

Hmm, that way of talking would spoil the resolution of the famous inductive “proof” that all horses are the same color.

Consider this passage from Kate Lahey, "DJs case will be a watershed", The Age, 8/4/2010, sent in by an alert reader:

Margaret Thornton, a law professor at the Australian National University specialises in discrimination law and policy.

She says the high profile of this {sexual harassment] case would undoubtedly encourage other women to speak out. […]

The $37 million message is also likely to resonate with employers, Thornton says.

"A huge percentage of women, if not most, have actually been subjected to some form of sexual harassment in the workplace … this is going to have an enormous ramification."

To continue the mostathon: when I said that most "licenses a default generalization," I meant to suggest that it has a kind of generic quality — you can't account for its use by assigning it a purely quantitative or numerical meaning (i.e., "more than half"). One way to make the point is to borrow Mark's method and look at examples where most would have been licensed but the writer chose instead to go with many. These are actually quite plentiful:

Among people who did seek out help for their depression, many (68.8 percent) saw or talked to a medical doctor or other health professional.

Many parents surveyed — 62 percent — say they've taken away their child's cell phone as punishment.

Once again, many employers (53 percent) are not yet sure which action they will take.

Why didn't these writers use most instead? It isn't always easy to say, but some of the examples are suggestive.

Yesterday, on our way to school, my four-year-old commented, "When you love somebody, it can't be unloved. That's 'irreversible change'." I'm not sure which I appreciate more, the sweet sentiment (don't we all wish this were 100% true?), the generalization of a concept he learned on Sid the Science Kid, or the example of unloved in this unconventional usage.

Why do I find this so compelling? On reflection, perhaps it's because instead of the adjectival un- prefix (unhappy, unclear), which is about states, what we have here seems from context to be the verbal un-, which is about reversing actions (unlock, untie). Love as an action, something that effects a change of state, not just a state.

Or maybe I'm just in a sappy mood. :-)

It was December 2009 when the intrepid syntactic explorer Andrew Dowd, hacking his way through virgin grammatical jungle, came upon this astonishing specimen:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

And now, after a further half a year out in the field, he has found another one on this website:

there were more artists breaking on their own, with no technology, than they are now, with technology

Another spectacular case of an utterance that we understand without any real trouble, despite a dawning realization, if we ever look back at it, that it couldn't possibly be claimed to have the right syntax to say what we (wrongly) thought it said.

Sex and the City 2 premiered in London last night. Sarah Jessica Parker arrived in a black strapless dress from the house of her favorite British designer, and what she told her fans provided another interesting example of what Mark Liberman noted in a recent post on fashion talk:

There's only one person I could have worn tonight and that was Alexander McQueen.

Ms Parker didn't just say she was wearing Alexander McQueen; she actually used an expression quantifying over persons (only one person) as the understood object of wear (in the sense that she modified person with the relative clause I could have worn ___), and then clarified that the person was Alexander McQueen; and still the metonymic reading survived and was understood by fans and journalists alike.

We've often discussed the stylistic choice between hypotaxis, where semantic and pragmatic relations are signaled with explicit connectives and syntactic embedding, and parataxis, which relies more heavily on context and common sense to communicate the same relationships, using phrases strung together like beads on a string.

The paratactic style is more modern, more demotic, and usually shorter. But sometimes, as in the case of this flashing highway sign, it's also harder to interpret:

I was puzzled for a few minutes by the following one-sentence summary of an editorial on the New York Times Opinion page:

Thanks to five justices on the Supreme Court, the United States is no longer the only country to impose sentences of life without parole on its teenagers.

I couldn't think how our Supreme Court justices could make some other country impose such sentences, and I really couldn't "get" the intended reading (we will no longer impose such sentences, so there will from now on be NO such countries) — it didn't even occur to me until I was really forced to it. Am I alone? This made me realize that for me, only is really strongly presuppositional: to no longer be the only X means for me that you're still an X but no longer the only one.

Busy June 20 – June 26? Could you manage to squeeze one of the most intellectually intense weeks of your life into your summer schedule? For free?

I'm talking (once again!) about the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLI 2010), of which I am program chair. It's aimed at graduate students, researchers, and advanced undergraduates, in fact anyone interested in formal approaches to language, philosophy, and computation. And I bring you, Language Log reader, some hot news that gives you the chance of attending the school and making 100-150 new friends for life for free… provided you apply by June 1.

Here's the news (and this is aimed at students). The National Science Foundation has given preliminary approval for a sizable grant to NASSLLI 2010. Together with other funds we have raised this will enable us to provide students with financial support to attend the school. We expect to be able to reimburse the registration fees of about 40 deserving students, and to pay further travel expenses for those whose need is greatest. You can find online information on how to register and how to apply for the grants – see the Support is Available from NASSLLI Itself section on the NASSLLI grants page. Basically, you need to send NASSLLI an email with a reason why NASSLLI is relevant for you, and have your academic advisor send an email too.

I'm really, really looking forward to meeting many of you in Bloomington, Indiana at the end of next month, and if you want to ask me personally about it, send me an email.

When I give lectures on why you should not listen to prescriptivists' dimwitted prattle about the wrongness of constructions that are fully grammatical and always were, people sometimes ask me what I would regard as bad grammar, as if such cases were going to be hard to find. So occasionally I note down striking cases of failure to get English syntax right (especially written English, naturally enough), and discuss them here.

A friend (don't make me say who) with a middle-rank managerial position in a large bureaucratic organization (don't make me say which) recently received a memo informing him about which of his recommendations for staff promotions and pay increases had been successful, and part of it said:

…it is strongly recommended that you meet with staff, whom have been unsuccessful, in order to provide support after their receiving the disappointing news.

That's a rather astonishing ungrammatical case of whom, used without a shred of justification as subject of a tensed verb to which it is immediately adjacent; but also a crashingly salient case of punctuating a restrictive relative incorrectly. And the email version of the memo, amazingly, was even worse.

NASSLLI 2010 is a week long summer school that offers 15 superlative graduate level courses and workshops on Language, Logic and Information from leading scholars, plus pre-session tutorials to bring you up to speed. And the price is incredibly low, just $150 for the entire week if you're a student and register by May 1.

"Second best"? We'll come to that.

According to Andreas Ulrich and Alfred Weinzierl, "German Trainers Describe Pitiful State of Afghan Police", Der Spiegel, 4/7/2010:

A functioning police force is seen as a prerequisite for a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan. German trainers, however, paint a disastrous picture of the quality of Afghan security forces. Too many police, they say, can't read or write, can't shoot straight or take bribes.

What is the connection between (a) successfully executing something tricky that not everyone could get away with, like an escape or an acrobatic maneuver or a daring sartorial fashion statement, and (b) removing by tugging, stripping, or peeling?