Language Log

After several days, I'm still thinking about the very funny Dilbert strip of September 1, at http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2011-09-01/, which made me laugh out loud. Alice is asked by her boss to simplify the wording on a slide so that it can be explained to the company's executives. She does not suffer fools gladly and her immediate suggestion for the simplified wording is: "MONEY BE GOOD. THIS MAKE MORE. OOGAH!". What I'm thinking about is the nature of the stereotype Alice has concerning the sort of language that would be understandable to people like company executives who are (in Alice's jaundiced opinion) virtually brainless.

Every English dictionary in the world categorizes numerous as an adjective. And quite rightly: it mostly is. But a recent development has seen it pick up a second life as a determinative: a word like all, many, most, none, several, some, that, and this. Crucially, (i) at least some determinatives can form a noun phrase all on their own, as in All were approved, and (ii) at least some determinatives can make up a full noun phrase when accompanied by a partitive of phrase (but no head noun), as in some of my best friends. Adjectives cannot perform either of these feats: *Good were approved and *Happy of my friends liked it are wildly ungrammatical. Articles can't either: the articles a(n) and the are special determinatives that have neither of the properties (we don't find *The was very thoughtful or *An of my friends did it). But in recent writing, numerous is turning up (albeit rarely) with both properties, and thus taking on the syntax of a word like several.

Kira Simon-Kennedy wrote to me from Beijing that she is chaperoning 30 French high school students on their first trip to China to learn Mandarin.

Yesterday afternoon, the French students were trying to decipher the following banner at a bus stop:  "没有共产党, 没有新中国."  Most of the students have already taken a couple years of lessons, so they could be classed as having reached intermediate level.  They got as far in their interpretation of the sign on the banner as "There is no collective __, there is no new China."  Not bad for intermediate level learners, but the banner remained a mystery to them, if only at the lexical level because they didn't know what 共产党 meant.  However, when Kira told the students that 共产党 meant Communist Party, they were all the more puzzled.  "Are they allowed to say that ('there is no Communist Party')?" one student asked.  "Isn't that really dangerous to deny the existence of the Party in public?"

The students thought that someone had the nerve to buy a public ad to tell the world:  "There is no Communist Party, there is no New China" — superficially that's what the sign on the banner seemed to be saying.  The close grammatical parallelism of the two clauses only made such an interpretation seem all the more certain.

Wikipedia's article on the Cornish language (the Brythonic Celtic language once spoken in the county of Cornwall, England) quotes this sentence (twice, in fact) from Henry Jenner, author of Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904):

There has never been a time when there has been no person in Cornwall without a knowledge of the Cornish language.

Oh, what a mess we do create when first we practice to negate! Let's just think that sentence through, counting up the negations carefully.

According to the BBC News for US & Canada website today, "The Pentagon is set to announce that the ban on gay people openly serving in [the] US military is to end"; and my colleague Heinz Giegerich did a double-take. He notes with puzzlement that he understood it despite the fact that the adverb is clearly in the wrong place. It's not open service that is banned by the military; it's open gayness. How can we possibly understand an adverb positioned as a premodifier of the verb serve when it ought to be positioned before the adjective gay?

Are we losing it? [*] It's been almost three weeks since the latest and greatest episode in the News Corporation phone-hacking scandal began dominating the world's news, and no one at Language Log has yet found a linguistic angle. I mean, Geoff Pullum connected a World Series victory with Strunk & White; I found a way to put Paris Hilton together with birdsong syntax; surely we can relate Rupert Murdoch to hypotaxis, or Rebekah Brooks to FOXP2?

Well, not so far. But this morning, I've got at least the peripheral glimmer of a connection.

Last night, with some diffidence, for the first time since Barbara's death, I made an attempt at cooking the excellent mushroom risotto that she used to do. I knew how to do it in broad outline. But through a careless fumble when adding more olive oil to the pan at the sauteeing stage, I put way too much olive oil in — like about half a cup too much. Barbara (mistress of delicious low-fat cooking) would have thrown the whole mess in the bin. I made a different decision. I decided to reconceptualize. This was not going to be Barbara's mushroom risotto at all; this was an olive oil risotto with mushrooms. Qua mushroom risotto it would not have ranked highly, but qua olive oil risotto it wasn't too bad.

AN EXTRAORDINARY SERIES of news revelations about "hacking" scandal in the Murdoch-owned tabloid press continues to amaze the UK public. There are bombshells exploding here in Britain every eight hours or so: an ex-editor and former government aide arrested; a whole newspaper permanently closed down on 48 hours' notice; news that CEO Rebekah Brooks' resignation had been refused by Rupert Murdoch, followed by news that she had indeed resigned, and then by her interrogation at a police station, and finally by her arrest; the resignation (because they had received favors from the newspaper and done favors for it) of the head of London's Metropolitan Police and a former assistant commissioner . . . I have never seen anything like this in the turbulent history of Britain's feisty press. But none of it has been mentioned here on Language Log, because linguistic issues are simply not coming up. The issue is crime, not grammar. In fact, I noticed in one recent case that you could see grammar being quite decisively not the issue. People keep accusing the English passive construction of evils like concealment of agency and evasion of responsibility (and you can see the trope coming up in the context of this story in this post by Adrian Short), but it is a bum rap; the passive is ultimately irrelevant. Take a look at the truly staggering piece of misdirection concerning agency to which Erik Wemple and subsequently James Fallows have drawn our attention. They note that the Fox News program "Fox and Friends" recently raised the topic of "hacking" and then brought on an expert in corporate public relations, Bob Dilenschneider, to talk about how people shouldn't be "piling on" The News of the World or its parent company News International because there's hacking all over the place and we need to focus on that . . .

A web page about songs referring to God, pointed out to me by James Kabala, makes a critical remark about the grammar or style of one of the song titles:

11. New Order – 'Touched by the Hand of God'
Though it's guilty of one of the most heinous journalistic crimes – that of 'passive voice' (it should technically be "Touched by God's Hand," although it wouldn't be nearly as catchy) – this song is one of New Order's finest.

I have been collecting boneheaded usage advice on passives for a long time, but I am truly staggered at this one. The writer thinks touched by the hand of God is a passive clause, and is correct about that, but also thinks that "technically" it should be changed to touched by God's hand, which is not!

A candidate for the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding, in the form of a BBC News teaser:

A penguin chick that was hand-reared by zoo keepers in Devon who used a puppet to impersonate an adult dies.

This use of "very not appreciative" caught my eye on Sunday:

“I’m very not appreciative of the way she came in here,” Ted Shpak, the national legislative director for Rolling Thunder, told the Washington Post.

This construction is not in my own dialect; it reminds me of the recent broader uses of "so". ("I'm so not ready for this", which I had perhaps mistakenly been mentally lumping together with "That's so Dick Cheney" or "That's so 1960's".)

I'm not sure what's changing, "very" or "not" or both. I suspect that "not" may be moving into uses previously reserved for "un-".

The first sentence of this news report is perfectly fine, but it presents a linguistic puzzle:

The leader of the International Monetary Fund and a possible candidate for president of France was arrested Sunday in connection with the violent sexual assault of a hotel maid after being yanked from an airplane moments before it was to depart for Paris, police said.

The puzzle is how such a conjunction can denote a single person, as it clearly does in this sentence. It could even more easily denote two, but then we’d see “were arrested”, not “was arrested”.

First a descriptive query: do all languages allow such a conjunction of a definite and an indefinite singular noun phrase in subject position, interpreted as referring to a single person? And does English allow it quite generally, or is this a special newspaper style?

A couple of days ago ("On not allowing Bin Laden to back-burner", 5/3/2011), I noted that English (like other languages)  often turns a noun denoting a place into a verb meaning "cause something to come to be in/on/at that place".  I also noted that other causative change-of-state verbs generally have intransitive/inchoative uses as well (The sun melted the snow versus The snow melted), but denominal locative verbs typically don't.

Thus we have transitive causatives like She floored the accelerator and We tabled the motion, but not the corresponding intransitive/inchoative versions *The accelerator floored and *The motion tabled.