Language Log

Geoff Pullum posted a little while ago on it's time (that) + a PST clause ("It's time (that) we left"), which he noted as an English construction that was new to him. [Correction 4/19/09: Geoff was actually commenting on the similar construction with a PRS clause.] One commenter, Stephen Jones, labeled this as an instance of the Recency Illusion, on the grounds that such expressions had been around for some time. But Geoff wasn't claiming that the construction was new in the language, only that it was (as far as he could tell) new to him; he replied:

My phrase "brand new fact about English syntax that I had no inkling of when I woke up this morning" meant "brand new in my experience". The post is explicitly about the personal experience of discovering things one didn't know before, not about the very difficult business of dating the start of an incipient change.

I read him as also suggesting (though not actually saying) that it hadn't been previously recognized by scholars (if it had, it would probably have come to his notice; but of course even distinguished scholars of English grammar miss things on occasion).

I often have to point out that English grammar is not a settled body of dull doctrine, it's a live field of scientific investigation in which new facts are emerging all the time. So how long is it since I last learned something entirely new about the grammar of English? Oh, about… two minutes. In a press report about Al Franken's win in the Minnesota recount, I read that Franken said, "It's time that Minnesota, like every other state, has two senators." [See below for Ben Zimmer's observation that the AP report in which I read this was in fact departing, outside of the direct quotation marks, from what Franken actually said! It turns out not to matter for my purposes. The discovery in what follows is not about Franken.] That present tense on has struck me as odd. I would say It's time Minnesota had two senators. The idiom demands the preterite (simple past) tense in my variety of English. So I picked the random word sequence it's time everyone and Googled it, and I found that It's time everyone flies is a corporate motto of Cebu Airlines in the Philippines. And then, although instances of the preterite vastly outnumber cases of the present among the Google hits, I soon found it's time everyone understands and it's time everyone takes a moment on the ESPN site… It's already clear to me that people are starting to say It's time X does Y instead of It's time X did Y. That's not a major discovery; it's not especially important or interesting as far as I can yet see, because it doesn't relate to some descriptive thorny point or theoretical crux; but it's a brand new fact about English syntax that I had no inkling of when I woke up this morning.

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.

Nearly two decades ago I wrote a paper on terminological difficulties surrounding the classification of Sinitic languages entitled "What Is a Chinese 'Dialect/Topolect'?  Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms," Sino-Platonic Papers, 29 (September, 1991), 1-31.  (Available online at http://www.sino-platonic.org/)  In that paper, I did not go deeply into the question of the utility of mutual intelligibility for determining the difference between a language and a dialect, mainly because it is a red hot can of worms, but also because people say such nonsensical things as that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."  Now, in preparation for updating my 1991 paper, I would like to revisit the matter of mutual intelligibility to see whether it can somehow be salvaged for purposes of taxonomic classification.

I was just reading a year-old article in the NYT reporting on Molly Ivins's death, and in discussing her friendship with Ann Richards, they said, "The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds."

I was surprised that Katherine Q. Seelye could say that, and that the copy-editors didn't mind. I hadn't ever noticed this phenomenon before, but others must have. So while "a reverence for power" is fine, for me "an irreverence for power" is ungrammatical, though cute, and certainly understandable, and maybe it was intentionally tongue in cheek — after all, they had just been discussing the slogan "Molly Ivins can't say that, can she?", which her editors had put on billboards to defend her and which became the title of one of her books.

Similarly, I can say "a passion for politics", but I can't say "a dispassion for politics".

Well, I should check Google. … Hmm, supportive, to some extent, but not conclusive.

Yesterday, I took a quick poll of a few small English-language texts, to see how often future-time meanings were expressed in various tensed-verb forms ("Alternative futures", 12/11/2008). My conclusion was that by far the commonest method in written American English is to use forms of the modal auxiliary will; but that in spoken American English, other alternatives are closer to even with it. However, my sample was too small to draw any very reliable quantitative conclusions.

So this morning, I'm doing another Breakfast Experiment™ to try to get better numbers, at least for some of the alternatives in the spoken language.

In yesterday's post on "what's will?", I rashly asserted that "the commonest way to express a future-time meaning is indeed to use the auxiliary verb will". This provoked immediate questions and counter-claims. So I promised to devote a Breakfast Experiment™ to quantifying the choice among alternative verb forms used to express future time in English.

Watching the new DVD release of the patriotic World War II musical This is the Army recently, when listening to champion boxer Joe Louis in a cameo delivering his one line, I found myself thinking of, of all people, Tina Fey.

Specifically, what came to mind was her movie of earlier this year, Baby Mama, whose title was one of assorted indications of late that baby mama, the black American inner-city term referring to a woman one has had children with but is not married to, has become mainstream. Further evidence was when Fox News used the term in a teaser graphic last summer in reference to Michelle Obama ("Outraged liberals: stop picking on Obama’s baby mama"). Graceless, but in its assumption that viewers were familiar with the term, indicative.

Hunt up the derivation of the term these days and even the OED has fallen for a tasty but mistaken idea that the source is Jamaican Creole ("patois"), in which there is a term "baby-mother". However, the chance that a random locution from Jamaican Creole becomes common coin across all of black America is small—a fluent speaker of Black English could go several years without uttering a single word born in Jamaican Creole. Plus, usually the Jamaican term doesn’t really mean what baby mama does, referring more generally to a pregnant woman.

I have some things to say about markedness, variation, and the role of habits in creating meaning. And I was planning to say them this morning, taking as a starting point the US/UK difference in verb agreement with collective nouns like government and committee that Geoff Pullum cited in his recent post "More on verb agreement as a judgment call":

It is a curious fact that American English strongly favors the use of the singular with subject nouns like committee (likewise nouns denoting companies, teams, departments, governments, etc.), while British English clearly prefers the plural.

But then I made the mistake of checking into the facts. This was not because I doubted Geoff — on the contrary, my impression of the situation agreed with his — but because I wanted to provide not only some examples but also some numbers, in my usual humorless hyper-empirical style.

I've been musing recently about minutiae of English punctuation: apostrophes, periods, commas, and all the rest of it. There is considerable variation in usage on many points, and astonishingly passionate opinion about some of these points, even when they are mind-numbingly inconsequential.

Case in point: the use of periods in abbreviations composed of initial letters: I.B.M. or IBM? U.C.L.A. or UCLA? F.B.I. or FBI? Style guides vary, from those that are fond of periods (because the periods clearly mark the words as abbreviations and indicate where material has been suppressed) to those that are shy of them (because the result looks cleaner and takes up less space). Something can be said in favor of each scheme, and there is no issue of substance here. But some people have strong preferences.

The Wikipedia entry on abbreviation surveys a variety of schemes, noting that

The New York Times is unique in having a consistent style by always abbreviating with periods: P.C. [personal computer], I.B.M., P.R. [public relations]. This is in contrast with the trend of British publications to completely make do without periods for convenience.

Now a few words about the NYT's practices, and about the value of consistency.

Following some of the news yesterday, on the radio and in print, I was struck by a quote from U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that was repeated several times:

Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company is objectionable to most Americans — me included.

(The quote can be found several places, such as near the end of this WSJ blog post.)