Language Log

If you haven't picked up a copy of Michael Adams' new book, Slang: The People's Poetry, well, what are you waiting for? For starters, it's a lively and engaging look at English slang and its multitudinous forms. At the same time, it's a thoughtful interrogation of what "slang" actually is, and how we might determine its boundaries. One way that Michael expands traditional notions of slang is in his treatment of affixation, or what he amusingly calls "unorthodox lexifabricology." I talked to Michael about slangy affixation in the second part of my two-part interview with him for the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt follows below.

Rick Detorie's One Big Happy for 10/27/2008:

We find it amusing when an apparently logical generalization about word formation goes badly wrong, as Joe's idiosyncratic inference does in this strip.

Two things from recent days: first, I posted on my blog about, among other things, the innovated verb bigger 'make bigger, enlarge', noting that zero-verbing of adjectives is not very frequent in English; and then, yesterday's New York Times Magazine was an issue about "The Green Mind", which reminded me of the now-ubiquitous use of green (roughly, 'environmentally responsible') as a verb meaning 'make green(er) [in this sense]': another zero-verbed adjective.

I was then reminded of a discussion a while back on the American Dialect Society mailing list on the innovated verb extinct 'make extinct, drive to extinction'.

Now it's time to clarify some of the details of what I'll call the I-T-PST construction (as in "It's time that I left"), introduced by Geoff Pullum here. In fact, there are three relevant constructions, differing in which inflectional form they have in the subordinate clause:

I-T-PST: It's time (that) he had some success.
I-T-PRS: It's time (that) he has some success.
I-T-BSE: It's time (that) he have some success.

(The labeling here anticipates some results of the discussion to follow.)

People differ as which of these constructions they have and, when they have several, whether the constructions differ semantically or pragmatically, and whether there are contexts in which one construction is preferred to another. There are probably subtle differences between the that and zero variants and between the contracted and uncontracted variants, and there's certainly more to be said about the modifier about, as in the title of this posting (there's also it's high time …). But here I'm going to talk about less subtle matters.

Stanford offices that provide services of one kind or another e-mail every so often to tell faculty what they can offer us. So a little while back I got a message from the Stanford Ombuds Office, and recognized the usage as one I'd seen before but didn't find entirely natural. Well, the world (or at least part of it) has shifted, and it turns out that the standard dictionaries haven't caught up.

A new advertising campaign by the cellphone company Boost Mobile is a real head-scratcher, in large part due to its creative (possibly too creative) experimentations in English morphology. Morphological innovation has driven some other recent ad campaigns, notably the creation of "Snacklish" by the good people at Snickers (discussed by Arnold Zwicky here, linking back to earlier morpholiciousness from Snickers here). Both the Snickers and Boost Mobile campaigns revolve around self-conscious neologisms, but the similarity ends there. Whereas Snickers introduces lexical blends fusing a variety of words and word-parts, Boost Mobile exploits one particular morphological frame: un____ed.

From the annals of (two-part) back-formed verbs and irregularization, a Sheldon cartoon:

Following up on had did (here) and have saw (here): a note on Richard Meade Bache; an I've saw sighting from the 20's (from John V. Burke); and (from Breffni O'Rourke) an observation about different verbs DO.

A little while back, it was had did, and other uses of did, rather than done, as the PSP (past participle) of the verb DO. Non-standard PSP did is a (partial) regularization of the system of verb forms in English; all regular verbs, and a great many irregular ones as well, have identical PST (past) and PSP: jump ~ jumped ~ jumped, buy ~ bought ~ bought. PSP did improves the fully irregular pattern do ~ did ~ done to the somewhat more regular do ~ did ~ did. As I pointed out in the earlier posting, the most common non-standard partial regularization for DO is using done for the PST: do ~ done ~ done (similarly, see ~ seen ~ seen).

What I didn't say in that posting — because I've mentioned it several times in the past — is that the regularization to PSP did is in fact in the usual direction of verb regularization, which gives non-standard I have took / went / rode / wrote etc. John Cowan has now reminded me of this, and also reminds me that H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, refers to this regularization as a feature of "The Common Speech" — widespread, non-regional, non-standard American English. It now seems that the geographical and social distribution is more complex than that, that PSP did has some association with Southern varieties and with AAVE (as several correspondents have suggested to me). And that I have saw is out there too.

Looking into these things brought me to Richard Meade Bache's Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech (which I've seen on-line in the 2nd edition (1869)), with its note on I have saw.

From a recent circuit court opinion on a case with defendants Ike Brown and the Noxubee County [Mississippi] Democratic Executive Committee:

… Mable Jamison, an independent notary, testified that Brown phoned her in an effort to dissuade her from collecting absentee ballots from voters that “his people,” such as Windham, intended to collect: “[h]e pretty much said that his people had did the initial leg work and I shouldn’t be picking up his ballots.”

(Hat tip to Victor Steinbok. An earlier version of this posting was posted on ADS-L.)

Two aspects to Jamison's had did: had plus PSP (past participle), possibly conveying simple past rather than past perfect; and did (rather than done) as PSP of the verb DO. The first of these is a well-known feature of AAVE, but the second hasn't been so much discussed, though it wasn't entirely new to me. The most common (non-standard) leveling of PSP and PST (past) forms for DO is in favor of done ("I done it yesterday") — OED2 lists it as colloquial, dialectal, and U.S. — but here the leveling is in the other direction, in favor of did, and it's not in the OED.

Two little notes about Obama’s name and morphology:

1). In an article in the NYT yesterday I came across the verb form ‘Obama-tizing’ (hyphen in the original), and realized that because his name ends with a vowel, you can’t just add –ize. But why the choice of ‘t’ as epenthetic consonant? It doesn’t sound totally natural to me, but I don’t know any other consonant that would sound better. Is it just because there are various Latinate groups of words with a ‘t’ in some of their forms like ‘sane – sanity – sanitize’? I found the neologism overcommatize on this fun page from Rice University, so maybe –tize is the accepted allomorph of –ize for vowel-final words?

2).  What happens you decline the name “Barack Obama” in Russian?
My ears perked up when they put “Barack Obama” in the instrumental case (as object of ‘with’) on the radio in Moscow yesterday: Barakom Obamoj – and I realized that morphologically, Barak becomes a first-declension noun – native Russian nouns that end in a hard consonant are all first-declension masculine –, while Obama, ending as it does in –a, becomes a second-declension noun, and the great majority of those are feminine. And I wasn’t sure whether that was “peculiar” or not – I noticed it, but would a Russian? The situation with prototypical Russian names is that for men both names are first-declension consonant-final masculine (Mikhail Gorbachev), and for women both are second-declension –a final feminine (Raisa Gorbacheva).

I know that Language Log has already (e.g. here) mentioned the widespread would of, though I haven’t seen a whole lot about the gradual expansion of that of into uses like hadn’t of where there never would have been a  have (oh! I tried to be funny and write ‘would of been’ but Word automatically turned it into 'would have been' – but at least its little pop-up offered the option of restoring it and even to “stop automatically correcting ‘would of been’” – that’s very open-minded of them!), suggesting that 'of' is becoming a general marker for counterfactual modality, but I just have to report a really beautiful example I heard on my favorite public radio station, WFCR of Amherst, on Feb. 16 during their recent fund drive, out of the mouth of a very literate member of their development staff, K***, –- I’ve even met her and been interviewed by her, and I won’t name her simply because she might be embarrassed and I wouldn’t want to cause that. You know how the announcers have to just keep talking all the time to try to fill the time interestingly enough in between repeating the phone number to call – I’m impressed that they stay as coherent as they do. Anyway, the other announcer, a regular classical music host, had just said something interesting about some composer, and K*** replied, “I didn’t know that, and certainly wouldn’t of have without listening to WFCR.”

MSNBC headline: "Songbirds migrate faster than thought".

In case some alert editor modifies it:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)