Language Log

Collaborative post by John Kingston and Chris Potts

Newspaper stories about the financial markets often contain quantitative information that is intepretable only by experts. The headline screams "Dow Up 200!", but what does that mean? In some contexts (say, apartment rentals), 200 is a lot. In others (e.g., houses prices), it is hardly anything at all. Similiarly, what is a 3% change like? Sometimes we're asked to shrug off 3% differences as irrelevant (think of polling data). For the markets, though, most of us have the sense that 3% is a big deal.

The headlines do contain some information that all of us have intuitions about: the verbs and other predicates that describe the change. We know that rise says that the change was upwards, and we can intuitively juxtapose it with soar, which suggests really dramatic upward change. Conversely, fall and plummet describe motion in the downward direction, with the second implying much worse news than the first.

So much for our linguistic intuitions. Do they square with the way newspaper headline writers use these predicates in describing financial markets? This is much less clear. As part of our Data Rich Humanities project, sponsored by UMass Amherst CHFA, we have been exploring this question using the collection of 23,327 NY Times financial headlines described in this earlier post.

Etymology is not destiny, as we keep pointing out here. Thinking that it is is subscribing to the Etymological Fallacy (see here, among many other places). But even synchronically, you can't always trust what you see: derived lexical items are often specialized semantically (as are noun-noun compounds and also combinations of non-predicating adjective plus noun). This is especially true of technical terms; as I am fond of saying: labels are not definitions.

Which brings us to financial derivatives. Derivative here is derived from derive, right? So we can tell what it means in this expression from its morphological composition, right? Well, no. But people want that to be true.

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.

Andrew Gelman wrote to ask "Do you have any idea why blogs are often considered to be 'places' (rather than 'things')?", with a link to a post at his weblog that explains

Henry Farrell referred here to his blog as a "place." Which seemed funny to me because I think of a blog as a "thing." Henry replied:

That's the way that I [Henry] think about blogs (or at least group blogs and blogs with comments) – places where people meet up, chat, form communities, drift away from each other etc.

My analogy was blog-as-newspaper, the self-publishing idea, and I'm not used to thinking of a newspaper, or even a listserv, as a place. I think there is an aspect of the analogy that I'm still missing.

For the last couple of days, I've been in Chicago at an NSF-sponsored workshop on "animacy and information status annotation", organized by Annie Zaenen, Cathy O'Connor and Gregory Ward.

A traditional and characteristic example of the role of animacy in English syntax is the way it affects the choice between the two ways of expressing genitive relations, X's Y vs. the Y of X.  In general, the apostrophe-s structure is said to be preferred for animate Xs, while inanimates tend to go with the of-phrase. I'm a believer in Yogi Berra'a dictum that you can observe a lot just by watching, especially if you count things. So during the wrap-up session this afternoon, I thought I'd try using some simple web searches to probe this animacy-genitive relationship.

A recent xkcd cartoon looked back to the time when Pluto was demoted from being called a planet to being called a dwarf planet (where dwarf planets don't count as planets):

We posted extensively here on various aspects of the story. Today I'm going to return to the status of the expression dwarf planet.

Arnold Zwicky recently wrote about the word once in an important post on what he calls "temporary potential ambiguity" (a very useful concept indeed). His target was the strange practice among prescriptivists of deprecating what he calls the "subordinator" use of once, by which he means the use where it is immediately followed by a clause complement, as in Once you've finished the report, bring it to me immediately. The prescriptivists object to that, but don't seem to mind the others at all. I want to refine Arnold's analysis a bit — in a way that only strengthens his general point. He says there are three main uses of once. I put the number at five well-established different uses. And interestingly, if I'm right about them, this word has been completely misanalyzed by all grammarians so far.

The simple version of the traditional position is that once is an adverb, and in the objectionable use it's a subordinating conjunction. I claim all of this is wrong. Neither the traditional grammarians nor the usage purists have managed to get anything right about this multi-talented word.

At least twice here on Language Log, we've looked at combinations of negation and exclusion that might be seen as overnegation (exclusion being a covert negative).

Ray Nagin has some company. Late last week, as Mayor Nagin was warning of a potential mandatory evacuation of New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Gustav, he said: "I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that." (Audio and discussion here.) Tonight on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann interviewed Gary Miller, National Disaster Relief Operations Director for the American Red Cross, about the current situation with Gustav. Miller said:

And by people adheeding [əd'hidɪŋ] the warning and paying attention to the officials and leaving town and getting to safe areas, this makes all the difference in the world.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city in preparation for Hurricane Gustav. He had warned that such a move might be necessary on Thursday night, at a press conference with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. A clip of Nagin speaking at the press conference was played in a segment on NPR's "Morning Edition" on Friday. I've isolated some of the audio here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is, this is serious business, and
we would not be calling for a mandatory evacuation
unless we thought there was a serious threat
and I think most people will adheed [æd'hid] to that.

Though he clearly said [æd'hid], NPR transcribed it rather differently in its online article:

"This is serious business. We would not be calling for a mandatory evacuation unless we thought there was a serious threat," Nagin said. "And I think most people will pay heed to that."

I am greatly enjoying Steven E. Landsburg's book More Sex Is Safer Sex (Free Press 2007, paperback 2008). Landsburg is a brilliant popularizer of his academic subject, economics. He writes the way popular material should be written, I think. I wish I could do it that well. His sentences are exactly the right length. Mine are too long (this one isn't, of course, or at least it wouldn't have been, except that I went and added this bit… oh, damn…). However, just because someone is a brilliant writer, that doesn't immunize them against unintentional grammar slips. We all make those. And although we on Language Log often defend users of the language against stupid claims of ungrammaticality by prescriptive usage authorities who don't know their facts, we don't deny the existence of flatly ungrammatical sentences that occur anomalously in excellent prose. Take a look at this clearly ungrammatical sentence on page 33 of the paperback of Landsburg's book:

The question is how to say in precise terms why it is ungrammatical. Keep in mind that this alternative would have been perfectly grammatical:

Along with "I like the crotch on the idea…" on composer Nico Muhly's blog (commented on here) comes a use of the verb gay marry, in

I did an interview with a guy in Seattle – totally random, I had never met him before – who had such a smart, interesting read on the piece [Muhly's most recent album, Mothertongue], I wanted to gay marry him right there on the phone.

The moderately common gay marry is undoubtedly a back-formation from gay marriage (with its non-predicating modification), the result being a compound verb of a pattern (Adj + V) that's not at all productive in English. Meanwhile, some people have asked me why anyone would use gay marry at all; why not just use marry?

I understood that it was a

(1) [big penis] [book] 'book [about big penises]'

but it was only when it arrived that I realized it was also a

(2) [big] [penis book] 'big [book about penises]'

It's big, in both size (12.2 x 11.8 x 1.5 inches) and weight (7.1 pounds). (There's some scholarly joke to be made here about iconicity.)

The ambiguity of big penis book is a familiar one in English linguistics; little girls' school is a much more decorous textbook example. And the parsing of it in (1) illustrates some nice little facts about English morphology/syntax.