Language Log

In the Feb. 12 episode of SNL, things go from basilectal some-kind-of-British to complete doubletalk:

[Hat tip: Michael Hoselton]

Chuck Cook, PANDA Group Cooperation Officer of the European Bioinformatics Institute, called to my attention this Blackberry ad that he spotted on the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) in Hong Kong:

Chuck was particularly interested in finding an explanation of zi3 ging3 hai6 nei5 至勁係你 which, as he said, "I still do not understand, despite asking my wife's cousin, a native speaker of Cantonese who is fluent in Mandarin and competent in English."

Maureen Dowd's characteristically waspish review ("Blame, not shame", NYT 2/5/2011) of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir (Known and Unknown) begins like this:

So many to blame. So little space.

Donald Rumsfeld has only 815 pages — including a scintillating List of Acronyms — to explain why he was not responsible when Stuff Happened. His memoir, “Known and Unknown,” is like a living, breathing version of the man himself: very thorough, highly analytical and totally absent any credible self-criticism.

As my friends and acquaintances know, I'm a rather unreliable correspondent. I write a lot of messages, and I make a lot of phone calls, but the list of messages and calls that I ought to make always grows larger.  In fact, there seems to be a sort of positive feedback principle at work, whereby every time I discharge a communicative obligation, that very action somehow pushes several new tasks onto the stack. A similar problem afflicts my To Blog list, which reliably expands in direct proportion to my attempts to reduce it. No doubt I'm Doing It Wrong.

A few days ago, Michael Ramscar sent me a fascinating series of email messages, in which he wove together several recent LL themes:  coffee cup sizes, difficulties with multiple negation, word order typology, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. My contribution was limited to various forms of "you don't say!" and "tell me more", so I proposed, with his permission, to edit his emails together into a guest post.

But this morning, when I searched my email archive for the messages in question, I discovered a much earlier note from Michael that's almost equally interesting. So this one comes first. I'll get back before long to his theory about coffee drinks, modifier order, grammatical gender, and the cognitive processing of negation — really I will!

As we've discussed from time to time, some English proper names take a definite article ("the Times", "the Bronx") and others don't ("Language Log", "Brooklyn"). The public transport system in Boston is called "the T"; the public transport system in Philadelphia is called "SEPTA".

But sometimes, the same name for the same (in some sense) entity gets a definite article in one speech community, and not in another. Apparently people in the Los Angeles area generally use definite articles with freeway numbers ("the 101", "the 405"), although people elsewhere in the U.S. generally don't. (See Language Hat, "'The' + Freeway", 8/1/2010, for some discussion and scholarly references.)

Yesterday, JC Dill sent in the picture on the right, along with an interesting sociolinguistic commentary:

As you may know, there's a war of definite articles between San Francisco (SF Bay Area aka SFBA) and Los Angeles (SoCal).  In the SF Bay Area we talk about taking 101 to San Jose, in SoCal they talk about taking the 101 to Ventura.

So it was with some surprise that I saw the Bank of America (formerly Bank of Italy, a SF company) ad in a MUNI bus stop today.  Clearly this company has lost their SF roots.

A couple of days ago, Language Hat hosted an interesting discussion of the "X much?" construction:

I have been asked about the history of the construction "X much?" as a rhetorical response (e.g., "Bitter much? Overanalzye much? Ad hominem much?").

From Ben Zimmer, who got it from Mike Klaas, who found it on the Wonder-Tonic site ("Written, Graphical, and Interactive Sundries by Mike Lacher") of 3/31/10, here:

From today's NYT (Sam Roberts, "Unlearning to tawk like a New Yorker"):

The reader comments are interesting.

One of the most interesting papers at an interesting conference was Michael Newman, "Identifying native English speaking Pacific Asian Americans by voice".

This is funny, though unfair:

Everybody acquainted with colloquial English knows that Yes has alternations in pronunciation: it may lose its final [s] and add a centralizing offglide to become Yeah, and it may pick up an alternative final consonant, an unreleased [p] (simulating the sudden closure of the lips at the end of the utterance), to make Yep. No also gets a final unreleased [p] sometimes, hence the spelling Nope (notice that in each case there is a conventional spelling of the [p]-final pronunciation for use when direct reporting speech, e.g. in novels). But my colleague Heinz Giegerich just pointed out to me a surprising constraint on the final-[p] pronunciations: for a long time those pronunciations have been current only as single word utterances.

In particular, he noted (on receiving an email from a Chinese student who agreed to a meeting by writing "Oh, yep", and noticing that it seemed odd) that the [p]-final pronunciations don't seem to occur when preceded by the interjection oh.

My post on "Possessive with gerund: Tragic loss or good riddance?" (9/18/2010) has gotten me deeper than is probably wise into a field where I know very little. But having splashed on in, I might as well keep wading forwards a little further.  In particular, a bit of poking around on Google Scholar turned up some relevant recent work, especially Liesbet Heyvaert et al., "Pronominal Determiners in Gerundive Nominalization: A 'Case' Study", English Studies 86(1): 71-88, 2005.

Kate Gladstone writes to draw my attention to an "interesting oddity about some people's (wrong) notions of how the English language sounded in a quite recent period of history". Commenting at Barking Carnival a couple of days ago, "Nero" decried the "sad state of subject-verb agreement" and the decay of penmanship, and also advanced this interesting hypothesis about the past fifty years of phonetic history:

I read an interview in Rolling Stone with the cast of AMC’s Mad Men and one of the actors said they have to be very careful with all of their pronunciation. “There was no ‘gonna’ or ‘shoulda’ back then [in the 1960's]”