Language Log

Reader A.T. writes:

When I can't sleep, I go onto TED.com. I'm watching a talk by Pinker and he says syllabuses at one point (about 15:36). Not sure if you've blogged about syllabuses versus syllabi in the Language Log, but I think it'd be a pretty cool topic to discuss.

The Colbert Suffix -iness rises again, this time in the title of Charles Seife's latest book, Proofiness, subtitled The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (Viking, officially to be released next week). I read a brief review by Janet Maslin in the NYT on Thursday, and now Steven Strogatz has done a more substantial review for tomorrow's Book Review (on-line here). Strogatz (a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell) on the truthiness-proofiness connection:

The numerical cousin of truthiness is proofiness: “the art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove something that you know in your heart is true — even when it’s not.”

The comments on my recent post, "Making linguistics relevant (for sports blogs)" meandered into a discussion of linguistic example sentences that display morphosyntactic patterning devoid of semantic content. The most famous example is of course Noam Chomsky's Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, though many have argued that it's quite possible to assign meaning to the sentence, given the right context (see Wikipedia for more).

But what about sentences that use pure nonsense in place of "open-class" or "lexical" morphemes, joined together by inflectional morphemes and function words? This characterizes nonsense verse of the "Jabberwocky" variety ('Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe). One commenter recalled a classic of the genre, The ventious crapests pounted raditally, which was introduced by the cognitive scientist Colin Cherry in his 1957 book, On Human Communication: A Review, Survey, and a Criticism.

They say that any noun can be verbed, but some transformations are more surprising than others. Here's one that Bryan Van de Ven spotted earlier today on the road in Austin. (Click on the image for a larger and more complete picture.)

The sub-head ("HANG THE PERSON WHOM HIRES THEM) attests fact that whom is treated on the right just as it is on the left: All across the political spectrum, slogan-daubers use whom when "a note of dignity and austerity is desired".

The popular sports blog Deadspin isn't the first place you'd expect to find a lesson in inflectional morphology. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the recent post "Learn Linguistics the Latrell Sprewell Way," featuring this shot of a linguistics textbook:

[This is a guest posting by Larry [Laurence] Horn (of Yale), taken, with his permission, from a posting he made today on the American Dialect Society mailing list. If you comment on it, remember that these are his words, not mine.]

In the first paragraph of a letter to the editor in this weekend's NYT Magazine, a writer offers the following grammatical argument against the use of transgendered:

Jane Velez-Michell interviews Amy Bishop's friend Rob Dinsmore (this segment begins about 4:58 into the video clip embedded after the jump):

Via Talking Points Memo comes this correction from the Los Angeles Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Sarah Palin: In some editions of Sunday's Section A, an article about Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying, "How's that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?" She said, "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?"

Maybe the L.A. Times editors could have spared themselves some confusion by paying more attention to the American Dialect Society voting for Word of the Year. For 2008, I included hopey changey in my list of nominations, defining it as follows:

hopey changey: Derisive epithet incorporating Obama’s two main buzzwords (also dopey hopey changey).

In the '08 WOTY voting, hopey changey (hyphenated as hopey-changey) ended up in a special category of election-related terms, finishing a distant third behind maverick and lipstick on a pig (but ahead of hockey mom).

The linguistic point that is so interesting about the PartiallyClips cartoon strip that Mark just pointed you to is that the "suffixes" involved are not all suffixes. The endings of the words are -like, -esque, -ward, -proof, -(a)thon, -riffic, -master, -go-round, -ism, -kabob, -(o)phile, -(i)licious, and -gasm. Of these, I think I'd say (it is a theoretical judgment) that only -like, -esque, -ward, and -ism should be called suffixes.

The Sugar Bowl, where the Florida Gators shellacked the Cincinnati Bearcats 51-24, was a disappointment to me as a football game. But there was some added value linguistically. Pete Thamel's NYT article ("Sweet Finish for Tebow and Gators", 1/2/2010) quotes Tim Tebow: “I dreamed about being a Gators since I was 6 years old and it was better than I could have dreamed.”

Most American college sports teams have plural nicknames: in addition to the Gators and the Bearcats, this year's bowl games featured the Bruins, the Owls, the Hurricanes, the Badgers, the Falcons, the Vandals, the Wildcats, the Cornhuskers, and so on. And the names of professional football teams are also often plural: the NFC East, for example, comprises the Eagles, the Cowboys, the Giants, and the Redskins. But in all my experience of sports talk, I can't recall ever having seen a case where the singular form of a plural name or nickname retained plural morphology.

Following up on my commoner posting, I write to ask for some data. What I'm looking for is cases where person A uses an inflected adjective or adverb (comparative or superlative) and person B objects to it, saying that A should have used the periphrastic variant instead, or declaring that the variant A used is "not a word" or "not English". It's ok if you are person B, so long as you can cite the source of the material you objected to. It's also worth noting cases where someone says explicitly that they are unsure of which variant to choose.

Some things that need flagging: if person A is not a native speaker; if person A is a young child; if the original production is likely to have been a deliberate invention, intended as play or display, or to have been a quotation.

Now some information about what's in my files already. The items are listed in their base forms; some of these were collected in their comparative form, some in their superlative form, some in both. (Judgments on comparatives and superlatives aren't always parallel, by the way.)

James L., in a comment on Mark Liberman's "Concerning" posting:

"The second thing to say is that it's commoner in spoken registers…"

Shouldn't that be "more common"? I ask, fully expecting to be proven incorrect.

Every so often on Language Log we discuss inflectional (commoner) vs. periphrastic (more common) comparatives and superlatives, and the topic has come up again and again on ADS-L and sci.lang, often in response to someone's claim that some particular inflectional form X is just wrong.

Sometimes the claim rests on a belief in One Right Way, in this case the assumption that an adjective or adverb takes inflection or periphrasis, but not both as alternatives. If you also judge X to be not what you would say, then it must be wrong and the periphrastic variant must be right.

Even if you don't subscribe to One Right Way, you might still project your personal dislike of X onto others.

In every case I've seen where a complaint about X has been lodged, it turns out that X is attested, in fact attested in serious writing, and in many cases X is also listed in reputable dictionaries. Both things are true for commoner.

Once again, Zippy plays with English morphology. This time it's -ity day in Dingburg: