Language Log

Today's the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, and I've commemorated the event in a Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus by considering lyrics from four of his most famous songs. As you might have guessed, the four songs are "Oh Boy," "That'll Be the Day," "Rave On," and "Not Fade Away." You can check out the column here. As a postscript, one of those four song titles has an extra syntactic wrinkle that's worth mulling over.

In the lecture room where I will be giving a talk later today at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the audiovisual equipment is controlled by a small touch-screen unit. Right now, the part of the display that controls the ceiling-mounted projector looks like this:

That is almost exactly what it looks like. Now, you tell me: would that mean that the projector is on, or that it is off? Is the blue button the operative one, showing the name of the current state? Or is it the white button beside it that we should pay attention to? (I should make it clear that the PAUSE across below them is not a button: only the ON and the OFF buttons change color when touched.) And then once we have decided whether we should see this as saying "ON" or as saying "OFF", do you think it means that the pausing function is on, which would mean that the projector is off? Or that the pausing function is off, which would mean that the projector is on?

Opinions were strikingly divided about Obama's inaugural speech, and not necessarily along ideological lines. George Will called it lyrical and Pat Buchanan called it "the work of a mature and serious man"; but in National Review, Yuval Levin said that within a few weeks not a line of it would be remembered, and Rich Lowry spoke of "overwrought clichés and poor writing." At the New Republic, John Judis called it a "disappointing muddle" that "got no style points," while John McWhorter, moonlighting from his Language Log day job, called the speech "worthy of marble" and pointed in particular to Black English influences on Obama's cadences, though he didn't develop the point in detail. And Stanley Fish pronounced the speech a paradigm of paratactic prose, which in its nature "lends itself to leisurely and loving study," and having duly allowed himself to "linger over each alliteration [and] parse each emphasis," predicted that it would be studied in a thousand classrooms: "canonization has already arrived."

Those are the criteria people always bring to this sort of address: Was it memorable? Marmorealizable? Did he stick the landing? It's understandable, a way of flattering ourselves that ritual oratory still matters. But I have the feeling Obama and his writers knew better.

Of course it was a very memorable event, on a historic, make that epochal, occasion. And the speech is sure to be memorialized — in fact Penguin Books is already on it.

But if the speech was well turned, it wasn't memorable. What's more, it didn't need to be memorable. It couldn't have been memorable. And my guess is that nobody tried too hard to make it memorable. As I put the point in a "Fresh Air" piece that aired today [full text here ]:

Obama’s speech made all the required moves: it was grave but not doleful; resolute but not belligerent, eloquent but not grandiloquent. Its acknowledgments were eclectic: Biblical allusions, a nod to Tom Paine, a shout-out to Jerome Kern.

But it wasn’t especially memorable. If we still lived in an age when people compiled collections of great speeches for pupils to memorize and declaim on national holidays, the editor would more likely go with the moving speech that Obama made in Grant Park on the night of the election.

But that isn't necessarily a weakness of the speech.

I'm at the Linguistic Society of America meetings (in San Francisco) and spent part of the morning sitting in on the LSA's Executive Committee meeting. The part I attended was mostly about a fairly long document detailing the programs of the society and their objectives. In the midst of this came a digression on linguistic (adjective) vs. linguistics (noun) as a modifier of a noun.

The specific question was: should the text refer to the linguistic community or the linguistics community?

In the end, a vote was taken, and the S version (nominal) won handily over the version without the S (adjectival).

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.

I was busy throwing out works by Jerry Fodor today (one really has to, every year or two, or one's whole office would eventually become clogged and unusable) when I noticed that the title of his December 2005 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the (published in Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association 80:2 [November 2006], 11-24) is a violation of the Coordinate Structure Constraint:

You might think it would embarrass a famous defender of the idea that we have innate knowledge of universal grammar if he unreflectingly wrote and published a sentence that violated an important constraint of universal grammar. But it won't.

Yesterday in the New York Times, Stanley Fish got his peeve on with some representatives of my former employer, AT&T ("Return of the Old Grouch", 12/28/2008). Although the real problem seems to have been the difficulty of arranging for voice mail to be turned on, he focused on a linguistic irritant:

… finally, after pressing a number of zeros, I was rewarded with the voice of a live person who said, “With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”

Verb phrase ellipsis in English normally requires an overt linguistic antecedent of approximately the right morphological form. That is, I can't normally begin my conversation with "He did!", but this is perfectly normal after "Sam said he would win, and …". There are exceptions, of course (Geoff Pullum's Hankamer Was! is lively and informative on this topic). Obama's campaign slogans "Yes, we can" and "Together, we can" were prominent exceptions. Lacking antecedents themselves, they invited inferred antecedents or allowed Obama to fill in occasion-appropriate ones. The first time I noticed headline writers playing with the slogan was November 5, 2008:

Using Google News, I gathered a bunch more, based on can, can't, and do.

Listening to Weekend America on my way back from a holiday party on Saturday, I heard one of the best noun phrases I think I've ever heard (uttered by WA host John Moe). Coincidentally, it's in this short segment on holiday parties and cocktails, very near the beginning in fact, so take a listen if you care to. Here's the noun phrase in context:

This time of year weekends are a time for holiday parties, and all the traditions that go along with holiday parties. You know, the sweaters that you only wear just that one time of year, the conversations that you end up in with people who you're trying to remember the names of all the way through but you kinda smile and fake your way through…

In connection with the previous post, and in the spirit of the season, I can't resist adding this:

Yesterday's email brought this sensible question from Judith Parker, a middle-school teacher at The Philadelphia School:

In the grammar text we are perusing, the concept of modals has raised its head.  The words "The nice thing about modern grammarians is that they have reduced the number of TENSES in English to just two, PRESENT and PAST.  Notice even WILL (formerly considered to represent the future tense) is really a PRESENT TENSE MODAL expressing present time intent or will…..)"

The class and I are perplexed.  How wide-spread is this thinking?  Can you explain this, particularly the WHY this change came about, and let us know how widely accepted this concept is?  It has not crept into most grammar books that kids use.  I told them that I would ask a linguist about this since my linguistic studies are in a distant past.

Let me try to give a short answer to start with.

It's convenient to talk about past, present, and future time, and it's convenient to call the commonly-associated English verb forms past, present, and future tense: "we liked it; we like it; we'll like it." But when you look more carefully at the whole pattern of possibilities for English tensed verbs, I think that you (and your class) will see the force of the argument that English doesn't really have a future tense form, even though it has many ways to express a future-time meaning.

it's true that a common way to express a future-time meaning is indeed to use the auxiliary verb will — but from a syntactic point of view, will is used in the same way as the class of words generally called "modal auxiliaries", such as can, may, might, must, should, and would.

Furthermore, a closer look at the meanings of will suggests that it doesn't really express future time, but rather has the same sort of relationship to time-meanings that (for example) may does.

The terminology remains variable, but at least since Otto Jespersen a hundred years ago, many grammarians working on English have taken all this to mean that English has only two basic tenses, present and past. (Well, Jespersen called the past tense by the old-fashioned name "preterit" — but as I said, the terminology varies.)

Anyone following the national news in the US yesterday — and perhaps many of you following international news elsewhere — has undoubtedly heard about the tragic crash of an F/A-18D fighter jet in San Diego yesterday morning. (The pilot managed to eject safely, but the plane crashed into a house, killing "[a] mother, her young child and the child's grandmother".) The fighter was on a training mission over the Pacific Ocean, and according to reports had already lost an engine over the ocean. Nevertheless, the pilot was apparently instructed to fly the jet to the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, which requires flying over residential and business areas just south of UC San Diego (where my basement office in Language Log Plaza is located). This is where the plane crashed.

Another case of agreement being a judgment call: which of the following (note the agreement forms of the underlined verbs) is correct?

We can't leave the garden unwatered during what is usually the hottest sixty days of the year.

We can't leave the garden unwatered during what are usually the hottest sixty days of the year.