Archive for Language change
April 26, 2018 @ 1:37 am· Filed by Neal Goldfarb under Changing times, Language and society, Language and the law, Language attitudes, Language change, Politics of language, Prescriptivist non-poppycock, Prescriptivist poppycock, Usage advice
In the recent decision enjoining the suspension of DACA (but giving the government a 90-day mulligan), the court referred to the people who are affected by DACA’s suspension as “undocumented aliens” rather than “illegal aliens,” and it dropped a footnote explaining why it made that choice:
Some courts, including the Supreme Court, have referred to aliens who are unlawfully present in the United States as “illegal” instead of “undocumented.” See, e.g., Texas v. United States, (explaining that this “is the term used by the Supreme Court in its latest pronouncement pertaining to this area of the law”); but see Mohawk Indust., Inc. v. Carpenter (using the term “undocumented immigrants”). Because both terms appear in the record materials here, and because, as at least one court has noted, “there is a certain segment of the population that finds the phrase ‘illegal alien’ offensive,” Texas v. United States, the Court will use the term “undocumented.” [pdf (citation details omitted)]
Although the court didn't similarly decide to use immigrant instead of alien, that may well be due more to the fact that alien is a frequently used term in the context of immigration law than to any view about the term's possible offensiveness.
The first case mentioned in the footnote, Texas v. United States, is the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that had enjoined the DAPA program (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, which was related to but separate from DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). That decision used the term illegal aliens rather than undocumented aliens, but like Tuesday’s DACA decision, it explained its choice of terminology.
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April 3, 2018 @ 3:49 pm· Filed by Neal Goldfarb under Dictionaries, Language and gender, Language and society, Language change, Lexicon and lexicography, Words words words
On Twitter, Katherine Connor Martin (Head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press) writes:
In the latest @oed update, dozens of entries relating to sexual and gender identity were revised, the first phase of a project to revisit this rapidly changing segment of the English lexicon.
She links to the lengthy Release Notes, of which the following is just the introduction:
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March 17, 2018 @ 9:51 pm· Filed by Barbara Partee under Dialects, Language change, Questions, Syntax
My friend James Cathey sent me an eyebrow-raiser this morning: “Here is a sentence that stopped me in my tracks: "Robinson, who has a warm voice and is easy to laugh, has a way of setting the record straight …" (TIME: March 12, 2018, p. 50)"
Jim says he could never say "is easy to laugh" in any context that he can think of, and asks “What is going on here?”
I could never say that either, but then I was also surprised at some of the meanings Russian reflexives (and Polish, etc) can have — not only reflexive, reciprocal, and 'unaccusative' (the door opened, etc), but also transitives with missing object and a 'habitual' meaning — I heard it used standardly for 'that dog bites'.
So “easy to laugh” feels to me not totally impossible, and maybe related to the connection between 'These plates break easily' from a transitive and 'He laughs easily' from an intransitive. In the literature I've seen plenty of discussion of the 'break easily' cases and don't remember seeing any of the 'laugh easily' cases.
Maybe also relevant that “laughable” is one of the relatively few -able words formed from an intransitive? But the sense of “laughable” is very different, seems related to a transitive ‘laugh at’ sense, whereas this one is clearly based on intransitive ‘laugh’.
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March 12, 2018 @ 6:35 pm· Filed by Neal Goldfarb under Changing times, Fieldwork, Language and society, Language and technology, Language change
…in Alta, Utah, where I'm conducting field research into how many words skiers have for snow, evidence of the polysemousness of Twitter:
Do you want to know what her Twitter is? [Apparently meaning 'her Twitter handle']
I have a Twitter. [By the same guy, apparently meaning 'a Twitter account']
Extra added bonus: I'm writing this on my iPad, and the autocorrect suggestion for polysemousness was polysemous nests, which for some reason I kinda like.
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March 10, 2018 @ 1:04 pm· Filed by Neal Goldfarb under Language change, Peeving, Prescriptivist non-poppycock, Prescriptivist poppycock, Taboo vocabulary, Usage, Usage advice, Variation
At Arrant Pedantry, Jonathon Owen continues the conversation about begs the question (Skunked Terms and Scorched Earth). Citing my previous post Begging the question of whether to use "begging the question", Jonathon describes me as writing that "the term should be avoided, either because it’s likely to be misunderstood or because it will incur the wrath of sticklers." I wouldn't put it that way; I did quote Mark Liberman's statement to that effect, and I did note that I had, in an instance I was discussing, decided to follow that advice, but I don't think I went so far as to offer advice to others.
As it happens, I'm meeting Jonathon for lunch (and for the first time) later today. I'm in Utah, where the law-and-corpus-linguistics conference put on by the Brigham Young law school was held yesterday, near where Jonathon lives. So I will have it out with him over the aspersion he has cast on my descriptivist honor.
Despite my peeve about Jonathon's post, it's worth reading. He discusses the practice of declaring a word or phrase "skunked". As far as I know, that is a practice engaged in mainly by Bryan Garner, who offers this description of the phenomenon of skunking: “When a word undergoes a marked change from one use to another . . . it’s likely to be the subject of dispute. . . . A word is most hotly disputed in the middle part of this process: any use of it is likely to distract some readers. . . . The word has become 'skunked.'”
Jonathan writes, "Many people find this a useful idea, but it has always rubbed me the wrong way." He explains:
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February 28, 2018 @ 6:54 pm· Filed by Neal Goldfarb under Language attitudes, Language change, Peeving, Prescriptivist non-poppycock, Usage, Usage advice, Variation

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.
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January 21, 2018 @ 11:36 am· Filed by Mark Liberman under Language change, WTF
In a series of posts over the last few years, I've documented gradual declines in the frequency of the English definite determiner "the" in a wide variety of text sources: State of the Union addresses, Medline abstracts, the Corpus of Historical American English, Google Books (from both American and British sources), and so on. Both in conversational speech and in informal writing, we see the kind of correlation with sex and age that we expect for a language change in progress; and there are surprisingly systematic geographical differences. (See the links below for details.)
For reasons discussed in a couple of recent posts ("Proportion of dialogue in novels", 12/29/2017; "Ross Macdonald: lexical diversity over the lifespan", 1/13/2018), Yves Schabes and I have been analyzing variation over time in the writing of some prolific 20th-century authors, so this morning I thought I'd take the opportunity to look at longitudinal changes in "the" usage in the two authors whose books I've processed so far, Agatha Christie and Ross Macdonald.
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December 21, 2016 @ 5:42 pm· Filed by David Beaver under Announcements, Awesomeness, Language change, Psychology of language

Four sure-to-be-amazing talks on language are coming to central Texas on January 8 and all are invited!
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November 26, 2016 @ 8:02 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Creoles and pidgins, Language change, Language contact
On Monday (11/26/16), Erika Sandman will be defending her doctoral dissertation on "A Grammar of Wutun" in the Faculty of Arts, Department of World Cultures, at the University of Helsinki. I have a special interest in this type of "mixed" (for want of a better word) language that is situated at the interface between the Tibetic and Sinitic groups. My fascination with the hybrid Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages of northwestern China derives from a number of factors, including the decades of fieldwork and historical research I have devoted to the region, the fact that the 14th Dalai Lama was born here, and the intriguing thought that — if Sinitic and Tibetic are indeed related in some fashion, as many people believe — the Gansu-Qinghai sprachbund constitutes a laboratory both for the study of Tibetic and Sinitic languages individually, but also for observing their interactions with each other and with the Turkic and Mongolic languages that have also prevailed here at different times and are still present today.
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November 25, 2016 @ 10:55 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Dialects, Language change, Language extinction, Topolects, Variation
Reports of the death of languages and the extinction of languages are alarmingly routine, but before a language dies out entirely, when it is endangered, its dialects die off one by one.
"Last native speaker of Scots dialect dies" (10/6/12)
Dialect Death: The case of Brule Spanish (1997)
The list of publications documenting the dead and dying dialects could go on for many pages: I lament each and every one of them.
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April 9, 2016 @ 3:03 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language change, Semantics, Syntax
The following photographs come from an article on citizen protests in Lanzhou and Beijing openly demanding governmental transparency on public officials' personal assets (I am no longer able to access the article online).
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April 4, 2016 @ 5:48 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language change, Writing systems
In a comment to "Character amnesia and kanji attachment " (2/24/16), I wrote:
For the last 40 years and more, I have informally tracked kanji usage in Japanese books, newspapers, journals, magazines, signs, notices, labels, directions, messages, reports, business cards (meishi), packaging, etc., etc. and the conclusion I reach is that the proportion of kanji used now is much less than it was four-five decades ago. Conversely, the proportion of katakana, hiragana, rōmaji, and English has increased dramatically.
Has anyone done studies of this phenomenon in a more formal, rigorous way? And I would suggest extending the investigation back a hundred years or more.
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March 17, 2016 @ 9:00 pm· Filed by Mark Liberman under Language change, Variation
From Peter Weinberger:
My group at work was discussing a proposed outing:
I said "I'm up for that".
Our intern said "I'm down with that".
Do you know if this is purely generational, or is there some sort of geographic component?
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