Language Log

My Wall Street Journal column this week looks at the history of the word rider, inspired by Frances McDormand's cryptic use of the phrase "inclusion rider" at the end of her acceptance speech at the Oscars on Sunday, after she won the Best Actress award for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (Link to WSJ column here — if paywalled, follow my Twitter link here.) But just before she got to "inclusion rider," McDormand offered another linguistically intriguing nugget. Here's how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported it:

On Sunday, she asked all of the women nominees in Hollywood's Dolby Theatre to stand and reminded them to tell their stories.
Laughing, she said in the Pittsburgh vernacular, "Look around ladies and gentlemen, because we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed." 

You can hear the relevant bit at the end of this clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JEI0sjJs8c

Morphological negative concord? Or just a slip of the fingers?

[link] The Labour Court report does not detail what was contained in the graphic, but stated it “was inappropriate and inoffensive”.
[link] Al Franken, who was also scheduled to appear on the show, has canceled, calling Maher's words “inappropriate and inoffensive.”
[link] The IPSA worker said they found this “deeply inappropriate and inoffensive” but the MP's staff “laughed and agreed” with the term.
[link] Objectors said it was demeaning to women and the privacy of childbirth and was inappropriate and inoffensive.
[link] Access to the Internet is regulated centrally via a third party provider, to ensure that inappropriate and inoffensive sites cannot be accessed.

The tweets above have extra salience for me, because I used begs the question in the traditional way ('assumes the answer to the question in dispute') in my most recent post on LAWnLinguistics. I did so with some trepidation—not because I was worried that someone would think I was using the phrase wrong, but because I was worried that someone would think I was using it in the 'raise the question' sense and wonder what the question was that I thought was being begged.

One of the linguistically interesting aspects of Jason Kelce's victory-parade speech was his pronoun usage:

And you know who the biggest underdog is?
It's y'all, Philadelphia!
For fifty two years, y'all have been waitin' for this.

Although this is a perfectly idiomatic use of y'all, one thing about it is unexpected — Jason Kelce is from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, which is not in the y'all zone from a geographical point of view.

Over the past dozen years, there's been a scattering of LLOG posts about various forms of a periphrastic future construction in English:

"I'ma", 7/3/2005
"I'monna", 7/3/2005
"'On' time", 8/4/20015
"Finna and tryna", 8/5/2005
"I'm a?", 9/19/2009
"I'ma stay with the youngsters", 5/14/2010
"Gonna, gone, onna, a — on?", 8/10/2012

But there's a quasi-inflectional aspect to this development that I don't think I've noticed before — and I haven't seen it discussed in the literature on this topic either, though I may well have missed the coverage. Specifically, some of the forms are apparently only available in the first person.

Speakers of Northeastern / Dongbei topolect and Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin) speaking very common equivalent expressions and holding up cards with the written forms of what they are saying:

On Sunday 9/10/2017, Steve Bannon was interviewed on 60 Minutes. Looking at the interview from the perspective of a phonetician, I was struck by pervasive evidence of a little-studied sound change in progress. Word-internal intervocalic coronal consonants — /t/, /d/, /n/ — in weak positions (i.e. not followed by a stressed vowel) are deleted, and the surrounding vowels are merged. This process is increasingly common in American English, and is frequently exemplified in Steve Bannon's speech, at least in this sample.

Wired.com has some perfect linguaphile clickbait: “Watch People With Accents Confuse the Hell Out of AI Assistants.”  By “accents” they mean, non-American ones (e.g., Irish English). The AI Assistants were Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home. I’m curious about how well the voice recognition systems in these devices work with varieties of spoken English, so I clicked. Sucker! Can’t tell anything from the video except that it’s fun to say “Add Worcestershire sauce to my shopping list” to a machine.  This definitely beats asking Siri “What is the meaning of life?”

Mainly I was impressed by how poorly I understood the speakers.  I have a bad time understanding other people’s accents  but that’s only one data point.  How well do people understand speech that is in the same language as their own but spoken with a different accent?

I just asked @DarrellIssa abt the Comey news and he flicked me off — literally gave me the middle finger — and kept walking. Said nothing

— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) May 16, 2017

Sent in with the comment "Who the hell says 'flicked off' instead of 'flipped off'??"

John Herrman, "The Online Marketplace That’s a Portal to the Future of Capitalism", New York Times Magazine, 5/3/2017:

Among the items I sent to my friend, on our modest budget: a laser pointer; 100-count “super strong” small magnets; a functioning violin; a spare part for the window mechanism on an Audi A6; a deep-V-neck sweater; and of course, the self-stirring mug. Shipping was often free, or only a dollar. The items were extraordinarily well reviewed, often by thousands of customers. The deals seemed, if not exactly too good to be true, at least economically unfeasible — which, close enough.

Michael Glazer, who sent in the link, commented:

Because, why not?

In Finnish, that is. Garrett Wollman ("Some linguistic observations from my trip to Finland", Occasionally Coherent 4/14/2017) notes that Finnish morphology differentiates between "surface" and "interior" relationships of position and motion:

Against this background, he describes his recent experience at the World Figure Skating Championships in Helsinki.

From Susan Rice's interview today with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, an interesting example of emphatic multiple negation:

Below is an email from Eoin Ryan (with added audio):

Last week on Language Log you posted about a "tentative would" as used by Mike Pence, which reminded me of a use of "would" which I find interesting and may be similar, but I think it is different. Also, last week I had no clear examples to hand, which was a reason not to jump into the comments of the previous post.

Martin McGuinness died this morning. As a central and complex figure in both the Northern Irish Troubles, Peace Process and devolved Stormont parliament, his death is receiving blanket media coverage. A radio host named Ryan Tubridy has a show every weekday morning at 9 on RTE 1 (one of the national radio channels) and he too could not but talk about McGuinness, and this is how he led off:

As you can imagine, it is wall-to-wall
uh talk of
uh the passing of Martin McGuinness, which
is news that I would have woken up to this morning and uh as soon as I checked
the uh newspapers and the headlines and so forth it was the uh
it was the opening story.