Language Log

A couple of days ago, I tried to answer a journalist's questions about nonplussed ("Nonplussed about nonplussed", 8/6/2008). I wasn't entirely satisfied with one of my answers, and so I've tried again today.

In my recent posting on uses of non-dual (outside the domain of the philosophical/religious position of nonduality or nondualism), I (informally) characterized the meaning of the expression as follows:

a non-dual X is simply something (of the appropriate category) that is not a dual X

This characterization incorporates an important observation about expressions of the form non-dual X, like non-dual citizen: they exhibit a "bracketing paradox", in that these expressions have one syntactic bracketing,

[non- + dual] + [X]

but a different composition for the purposes of semantics,

[non-] + [dual + X] 'something that is not a dual X' (e.g. 'someone who is not a dual citizen')

(and not 'a X that is not dual', e.g. 'a citizen who is not dual'). If you were hoping that semantic interpretation could build directly on morphological and syntactic structure, then cases like these are problematic.

The first extended transformational-generative grammatical study of any aspect of a language written by anyone other than Noam Chomsky was the study of nominalizations by Robert B. Lees in his MIT dissertation, published as a monograph in 1960. In it, Lees attempted, among other things, to offer a detailed treatment of noun-noun compounds. Other early studies in generative grammar followed. Part of what they were attempting to do was to give a syntax for nominal compounds that would explain what patterns of meaning were available in noun-noun compounds: tree house means "house in a tree" (a location relation), while lion king means "king who is a lion" (a predication relation), and tax collector means "collector of taxes" (a verb-object relation), and so on. I never thought such research was on the right track. It seemed to me that the semantics of such noun-noun combos was so protean that nothing could ever come of it. And I was reminded on this the other day when I saw this headline in a British newspaper:

Detective attacks jailed canoe wife who lied to sons

What, I hope you are asking yourself, is a canoe wife?

The comments on my posting "Commercial categories" struck me as useful, and also fascinating. They illustrated my observation that though technical, semi-technical, and everyday uses of expressions can be distinguished, these uses aren't fixed in stone, but can vary from person to person and time to time; and that both what's included in a category and also the label that's used for that category can vary in the same way.

Now comes a technical usage that was new to me, in a NYT Science Times article on Tuesday, "Anything But Clear", by Kenneth Chang, on glass. Two small points (none of them new): a technical usage that's an extension of everyday usage; and a mass-to-count conversion, taking a noun denoting a substance X to a noun denoting a type of X.

A comment by Frank on my "Correcting misinformation" posting:

Whether or not peanuts are nuts or not, the statement "May contain nuts" on the package cannot be rendered untrue. It could just as easily read "May contain chicken feathers" and still be true. They didn't say it did, just that it "may".

The background… Lloyd & Mitchinson had claimed in The Book of General Ignorance:

Peanuts… are not nuts. So the legendary health warning on a packet of peanuts ("may contain nuts") is, strictly speaking, untrue.

and I noted:

Obviously, peanuts must count as nuts for legal purposes (hence the health warning), so botany is not the only source of technical definitions.

Now Frank has taken us away from the question of what nut means to the question of what may means (or, rather, conveys).

An e-mail ad from 10percent.com (purveyors of goods to the gay community) appeared on my screen a few days ago. Well, the top part, offering 20% off on PERSONAL PLEASURES, appeared there. 

So: an ad for a photo book? A DVD? A music CD? Gay fiction? An advice book on gay sex? All of these were possible, and more (but not everything; 10 Per Cent doesn't offer escort services or massage, for instance). But it turned out to be an ad for a category of products roughly characterizable as '(gay) sex accessories'.

My credit-card company has developed a new scheme for trying to trick me with speech-acts. It's likely that you've heard roughly this pitch before, especially if you are lucky enough to work at home sometimes and trusting enough to answer the phone before ring #3.

Overheard yesterday afternoon, from a woman on the street talking on a cellphone and looking down the street:

Oh, there you are! I'll talk to you when you get here.

Two different senses of talk here. The woman was already talking to her friend, in the sense of talk defined by the OED as 'exercise the faculty of speech', and was meanwhile preparing to talk to her, in the sense 'convey or exchange ideas, thoughts, information, etc. by means of speech'. No actual paradox, but it did catch my ear.

A couple of days ago, I took Roy Peter Clark to task for claiming that phrases like "a million dollars" show that the indefinite article a can be used with a plural head ("Slippery glamour", 7/4/2008). I observed that the structure is clearly [[a million] dollars], not [a [million dollars]]; that expressions like "a million" are just numbers, fitting into the normal syntactic slot where numbers go; and that million in this case is morphosyntactically singular.

In the comments, Russell Lee-Goldman pointed out that

There are, however, a few cases where it really looks like "a" is acting funky:

– He was there for a good seven years.
– An additional three people are required.
– A mere four nations recognize that standard.
– She collected an amazing and heretofore unprecedented forty million dollars.

With respect to the choice between singular and plural in phrases like "ostriches when frightened bury their head(s) in the sand", Richard A. Posner wrote:

I don't think there's actually a rule, in English at any rate, or at least a simple either-or rule, to govern the choice between the singular and the plural. The choice depends on the mental picture that it evokes. That in turn depends on whether the subject of the sentence, though plural, is viewed aggregatively or distributively. The "virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads" sounds fine, but so does "In prosperous days They swarm, but in adverse withdraw their head." The difference is that the virgins are acting collectively, in unison; the swarmers are not–nor are the ostriches when they bury their heads. Each ostrich does that separately, individually. So the reader thinks of an individual ostrich, and he (or she) has one head. But the virgins are thought of as moving their heads in unison–a bunch of heads moving at once.

This is an interesting analysis, but as a description of general usage, I don't believe that it's accurate.

The Microsoft Manual of Style tells us not to use once as a subordinator because it could lead to ambiguity. Specifically, from the 1995 edition:

once
To avoid ambiguity, do not use as a synonym for after.

Correct
After you save the document, you can quit the program.

Incorrect
Once you save the document, you can quit the program.

(That's the entire entry.) Ambiguity? Stop a moment and try to concoct an English sentence where subordinator once could be taken to be something else. It can be done — see below — but it's not easy, and I doubt that examples like the ones below were what the MMoS folks had in mind.

Instead, I think they were concerned about the fact that once has three primary uses and that readers (especially readers who are not native speakers of English) might not understand which one was intended until partway into the sentence: TEMPORARY POTENTIAL AMBIGUITY (TPA). (I'll take up the concern for non-native speakers in a later posting.)

Here at Language Log, we don't just sit around unravelling the mysteries of by-topicalization, stress-timing, resumptive pronouns, and the like. We have our playful sides: cartoons, "lost in translation" examples, Cupertinos, fun with taboo avoidance. Here's today's little amuse-bouche (or, if you prefer, amuse-gueule), which came to me originally on a card from a friend: a photo of a sign on a platform at the Penrith (English Lake District) railway station. The card was a grainy print-out, but here's a much better image:

An invitation from Mark Dingmanse:

I just posted a piece on Many Eyes, a nice text visualization tool which I have fed some Siwu texts.

Now this is an open access tool with an interesting philosophy: "Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis."

I would like to test this philosophy in a peculiar way: by seeing if readers can come up with some kind of account of the functions of the Siwu word 'ne' *only by looking at the patterns* here.

Would you like to join all my eye and Betty Martin in some pattern hunting?

For more discussion, see Mark's post at The Ideophone, "Visual corpus linguistics with Many Eyes", 6/14/2008.