Language Log

Back in 2005, Mark Liberman and I (here and here and here) both took a look at certain issues relating to placement of clause adjuncts, and we touched on William Strunk's prejudice against sentence-initial however as an adjunct, as set forth in The Elements of Style. I suggested in "Fossilized prejudices about however" that Strunk had some basis for his prejudices, since novels of the time really did seem to prefer however in second position. This was a modest defense of Strunk, whose horrid little book I regard as almost entirely mistaken in the grammatical advice it purveys. Michael Stillwell has now discovered that my defense evidence was flagrantly mistaken.

Politicians who have to assert some proposition P often take advantage of the opportunity to flap their mouths a bit more by asserting not just that P but also that they have consistently maintained that P in the past. It functions as a kind of gratuitous self-affirmation regarding consistency over time, and a pre-emptive defense to any possible charge of flip-flopping. The habit has spawned what appears to me to be an entirely new construction. The spokesman for UK prime minister Gordon Brown said yesterday (in a defensive response to something the governor of the Bank of England had said about Britain being unable to afford another round of debt-fueled stimulus to the economy): "We have been clear that we will do whatever it takes to see us through the global downturn." It seems to me that this is almost entirely a feature of minister-speak, and to a lesser extent corporate-speak ("Certainly Microsoft is a well-respected and successful company and we have been clear that we are fully prepared to do a deal with them", said a Yahoo! release recently). Lots of people think (ever since Orwell's "Politics and the English language") they are highly sensitive to new developments of government and business jargon. Yet I don't believe that "We have been clear that P" has been discussed in language forums before (I could be wrong). Despite all the grumbling about newfangled clichés (often not so newfangled), when a new syntactic construction limited to organizational jargon comes along, apparently people don't spot it.

People seem to imagine the prepositions, like other so-called "function words", belong to a fixed and fairly small list that is handed down to us unchanging over the centuries: at, by, for, from, in, into, of, off, on, to, under, with, within, without, a few others, and that's it for our lifetime. But it's not like that. Not only is the list of prepositions longer than people think (probably over 200 items in all), it is growing. New prepositions pop up from time to time, some borrowed from other languages and others derived from various sources within English. Brett Reynolds and Rodney Huddleston have discovered a new one. Brett heard somebody say (about a water contamination in Walkerton, Ontario): "How is the water, post Walkerton?" And he suspected this meant post had to be a preposition, so he mailed Huddleston about it. Huddleston had already collected an example of the same kind: Post the wash-out from the credit crunch, most assets globally were overpriced (The Weekend Australian, 26-27 April 2008, page 39). And then just today he got a piece of mail including the sentence Post the entitlement offer, the only remaining bank facility is with ABN AMRO Bank. That's three. Get used to it, folks: we have a new preposition amongst us. Post is already in most dictionaries as a prefix. Expect the dictionaries to add "prep" to the entry in… oh, about fifty years or so would be my guess (dictionaries don't exactly work like greased lightning when it comes down to new usages like this: the new words they add every year or two are mostly new nouns).

Searching for something else, I happened across this quotation about language, attributed to the German (and later American) philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973):

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say having double meaning.

I stared at these remarks with some astonishment. Have you heard of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest managed by the Department of English at San José State University? The one where people try to construct an opening sentence for the worst conceivable novel? The quotation above is like the winner of a bad writing contest where the task is to construct an opening sentence for the worst conceivable book about language and meaning.

Linguists sometimes have run-ins with copy editors over points of usage: the linguists use variants that they know to be standard, but the editors edit them out in obedience to some fancied "rule of grammar". Frustration ensues.

On to John McWhorter (in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (2008)) on "singular they", a topic we've returned to many times on Language Log. The short version is that in certain (not all) contexts, singular they is entirely standard and has been so for a very long time. Yet many people believe, passionately, that it is always wrong, because it offends "logic".

That's apparently the commonest 5-word sequence in English, barely beating out "property of their respective owners". At least, those are the commonest five-word sequences on the web.

Last week, in commenting on Geoff Pullum's "Familiar six-word phrase or saying" post, I observed that

For five-word phrases, a version of the question "What five-word phrase occurs most often on Google?" can definitively be answered by reference to the Web 1T 5-gram corpus, created by researchers at Google, which contains English n-gram counts from about one trillion words of web text.

Several readers asked me what the answer actually is.  The answer turned out to be not entirely trivial to get, and it may not be as interesting as you'd expect. Or maybe it's more interesting, I don't know. Anyhow, I live to serve, if not always at internet speeds, and the details are below.

Here is one of the saddest facts about language and culture that I have noticed in quite a while: the search pattern "before turning * gun on himself" gets tens or even hundreds of thousands of hits on Google.

The following is a guest post by Jason Merchant.

The Supreme Court is scheduled today (25 Feb 2009) to hear arguments (Flores-Figueroa v. U.S., No. 08-108) to decide whether Ignacio Flores-Figueroa should have his conviction for aggravated identity theft reversed. The debate centers on the interpretation of a statute, 18 U.S.C. sec. 1028A(a)(1), which states that:

"Whoever … knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person shall … be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 2 years."

Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona has now reached Edinburgh, and made a wonderful movie for a Valentine's Day date yesterday. (A wonderful film, too; the whole script is interesting and intelligent as well as funny and appealing, and Penelope Cruz's electric, chew-up-the-scenery portrayal of a deranged artist is incredible — near Oscar level.) But what a strange syntactic move Woody made in naming the picture. The three names are just concatenated: Vicky is one of the girls, Cristina is the other, and Barcelona is the city where most of the the action is located. There's absolutely no grammatical warrant for that at all. For example, although you can interpret Celery, apples, walnuts, grapes as an asyndetic coordination (a conjunction without an overt and), the commas are obligatory in written English: *Celery apples walnuts grapes is not grammatical at all. And similarly, it would be possible to interpret Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona as a coordination with three coordinates; but the string Vicky Cristina Barcelona doesn't have that privilege. It's got the written-English syntax of a single personal name. (Dougal Stanton, here in Edinburgh, noticed
today that the people running the Cameo on Home Street were confused enough to abbreviate it to "Vicky C. Barcelona" on their large signs — exactly as if it were somebody's name.) Woody is thinking right outside of the syntactic box. (Which is OK, of course, for an artist. This is an observation about innovative syntax, not a correction or a criticism.)

Languagehat has posted about an oddity in the New Yorker:

My wife was reading John McPhee's New Yorker article about fact checking … when she asked me what I thought about this sentence: "One technician who slipped up and used the 'R' word [radiation] was called to an office and chewed." "Chewed?" I said. "Not 'chewed out'?" She confirmed the reading. I said it must be a typo.

So maybe (ironically) "a flagrant typo in an article about fact checking", or maybe some creativity on McPhee's part, a vivid metaphor bringing the chew of chew out back to life.

It turns out that you can find other occurrences of chew conveying something very close to chew out 'reprimand' (an idiom the OED describes as colloquial and chiefly U.S.). And other pairs of plain V in alternation with V plus a "particle" (Prt); the phenomenon is related to, but distinct from, the direct/oblique alternations I posted on yesterday.

March approaches, and just before the Ides of March (on the 13th and 14th, specifically) comes the Stanford Semantics Festival. This is the 10th; a program, with abstracts, will soon be up on the Stanford Linguistics site.  As usual, I'm giving a paper (I'm not actually a semanticist, but I play one annually at SemFest), this year on verbs taking either direct or oblique objects — with extensive references to postings on Language Log and ADS-L. The paper is a follow-up to my paper from last year's SemFest, on "diathesis alternations".

The abstract is below. (Remember that this is just an abstract, not the whole paper. It's much compressed and also lacks most of the references.)

MSNBC headline: "Songbirds migrate faster than thought".

In case some alert editor modifies it:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

A headline in today's Metro (a UK free newspaper) looks like this:

I was taken aback: it looked decidedly ungrammatical for quite a few seconds. And another reader, from Glasgow, has already mailed me to say the same thing. What is wrong with the headline? Or can it be parsed as grammatical?