Language Log

A SpinSpotter tool — a plugin for the Firefox browser — has been announced in a credulous article by Jon Fine in Business Week. It will (its inventors claim) scan the text of web pages that you view, and identify passages of untrustworthy spinspeak. Our experts at Language Log's research laboratory have run it through our secret multi-million-dollar bullshit detector, and we got a strong positive. Having written several times before on Language Log about people who publish claims about language, and mention the passive voice, when they are completely unable to tell an active clause from a passive clause, I was delighted to see one more instance. Look at this description, from Jon Fine's description of SpinSpotter, detailing the "tenets" (i.e., diagnostics) that enable SpinSpotter to spot spin:

The tenets are: reporter's voice (adjectives used by a journalist that go beyond the supporting evidence in the article); passive voice (example: a story says "bombs land" without stating which party is responsible for them); a biased source (a quoted source's partisanship is not clearly identified); disregarded context (a political rally's attendance is reported to be "massive," but would it have been so huge had the surviving members of the Beatles not played?); and lack of balance (a news story on a controversial topic gives much more credence to one side's claims).

Bombs land is of course an active clause. Passive clauses always have a participial form of the verb, in almost all cases (setting aside "concealed passives" like "This needs looking at") a past participle. The past particple of land has the form landed. So quite independently of the absurdity of an algorithm running on raw text being able to spot things as subtle as strength of supporting evidence or balance on controversial topics, the inventors of this crucially linguistic tool (or the people who wrote their press release) don't know even the most elementary things about English grammar. Caveat downloader.

I am greatly enjoying Steven E. Landsburg's book More Sex Is Safer Sex (Free Press 2007, paperback 2008). Landsburg is a brilliant popularizer of his academic subject, economics. He writes the way popular material should be written, I think. I wish I could do it that well. His sentences are exactly the right length. Mine are too long (this one isn't, of course, or at least it wouldn't have been, except that I went and added this bit… oh, damn…). However, just because someone is a brilliant writer, that doesn't immunize them against unintentional grammar slips. We all make those. And although we on Language Log often defend users of the language against stupid claims of ungrammaticality by prescriptive usage authorities who don't know their facts, we don't deny the existence of flatly ungrammatical sentences that occur anomalously in excellent prose. Take a look at this clearly ungrammatical sentence on page 33 of the paperback of Landsburg's book:

The question is how to say in precise terms why it is ungrammatical. Keep in mind that this alternative would have been perfectly grammatical:

I understood that it was a

(1) [big penis] [book] 'book [about big penises]'

but it was only when it arrived that I realized it was also a

(2) [big] [penis book] 'big [book about penises]'

It's big, in both size (12.2 x 11.8 x 1.5 inches) and weight (7.1 pounds). (There's some scholarly joke to be made here about iconicity.)

The ambiguity of big penis book is a familiar one in English linguistics; little girls' school is a much more decorous textbook example. And the parsing of it in (1) illustrates some nice little facts about English morphology/syntax.

A few days ago I got a card from my friend Steven Levine with a clipping on it from a TLA Video catalog (offering videos of gay interest, including gay porn videos):

We love it when really good porns are made into even better sequels!

Steven asked: "porns"?

Yes, porn used as a count noun, meaning 'porn film'. An instance of a specific type of mass-to-count (M>C) conversion, also seen in spam and e-mail, and in a couple of other examples recently discussed on the American Dialect Society mailing list.

I wonder how many of Language Log's tens of thousands of American readers will have done a quick double-take on seeing the sentence that Bill Poser just quoted: "Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education". A chambers? Not a chamber? Or a bunch of chambers? Isn't chambers the regularly formed plural of chamber, meaning "room"? And isn't the indefinite article a(n) incompatible with plural nouns? Well, as I write this, the buzz and chatter in the comments below Bill's post does not include anyone asking this question, but I wouldn't be surprised if some found the phrase a chambers odd-looking. Especially since I believe it is almost entirely limited to British English (perhaps someone will correct me on this). A chambers is really just a law practice. A group of lawyers working together would take a suite of rooms in some suitable district of London proximate to the major law courts, e.g. the Temple area or the Grays Inn Road, and that suite of rooms would be referred to as their chambers; and from there, "chambers" seems to have morphed into a singular count noun denoting a law practice. That's how I understand the history to have run, anyway. (Perhaps someone will correct me on this too. But more likely the prattle in the comments area below will digress into talk of chamber pots, and from there to flower pots, and from there to the Chelsea Flower Show, and from there to the Chelsea football club, and so on… Comment warp seems uncontrollable, like the Dark Energy that cosmologists report is forcing the universe to fly apart.)

Caught on-screen in an episode (set in Namibia, a re-run from some years ago) of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, a travel-and-food television show:

This program contains indigenous nudity. Parental discretion is advised.

It's a warning that there were to be (female) breasts and (male) penises on display, though surely only fleetingly or out of the main focus of the camera, combined with the reassurance that the people whose bodies are (however negligently) on display are indigenous peoples — "primitives" and not "full people" like you and me, the viewers (or like Janet Jackson). That's the social point, which has been commented on on the net by a fair number of people, and about which there's a gigantic literature having to do with the attitudes and stances of people in dominant, urban, colonializing, modern, Western, literate, largely white, and/or "civilized" cultures towards the Other, the Exotic.

Then there's a linguistic point, about the nominal expression indigenous nudity, which is clearly an adjective modifier plus a noun head, but isn't understood as predicating some property (indigenousness, in this case) of some entity (nudity, in this case), but is understood as relating two entities (nudity and indigenous peoples, in this case). That is, the expression is Adj + N, but it functions semantically (and to some extent syntactically) like N + N, like a noun-noun compound.

Some of the political blogs (Marc Ambinder here, for example) are talking about counterfactuals today. A counterfactual conditional adjunct is a conditional adjunct (usually taking the form of a subordinate clause with the word if before it) that makes reference not to this world but to another world, a non-existent one. The phrase if Edwards were honest is unambiguously counterfactual, because were with first or third singular is a special possibility, the irrealis form of the verb, reserved solely for clauses making counterfactual reference. But the phrase if Edwards was honest doesn't necessarily have that meaning.

Language Log reader Jukka Kohonen has written to me about the Recency Illusion, the (often inaccurate) belief that a usage you have recently noticed is in fact a recent development in the language. Kohonen wondered whether anyone had studied its causes (and effects) systematically, and he had a specific instance in mind. I had to admit to a profound ignorance on the subject, and to considerable worries about how the topic could be studied systematically.

In my recent posting on uses of non-dual (outside the domain of the philosophical/religious position of nonduality or nondualism), I (informally) characterized the meaning of the expression as follows:

a non-dual X is simply something (of the appropriate category) that is not a dual X

This characterization incorporates an important observation about expressions of the form non-dual X, like non-dual citizen: they exhibit a "bracketing paradox", in that these expressions have one syntactic bracketing,

[non- + dual] + [X]

but a different composition for the purposes of semantics,

[non-] + [dual + X] 'something that is not a dual X' (e.g. 'someone who is not a dual citizen')

(and not 'a X that is not dual', e.g. 'a citizen who is not dual'). If you were hoping that semantic interpretation could build directly on morphological and syntactic structure, then cases like these are problematic.

With respect to a piece of political spam from John McCain that included the sentence "You will also have an exclusive opportunity to … ask questions to one of my top advisors", Graham commented

Is "ask questions TO somebody" good American English? It reads very oddly to this Brit.

Well, "ask questions to somebody" sounds odd to me as well. And this morning's Breakfast Experiment™ will confirm that oddity quantitatively, as well as suggesting some further research into the population genetics of prepositions.

Here are two snippets from news items about the actor Shia LaBeouf, who was recently involved in a car accident:

Shia LaBeouf has been released from hospital in Los Angeles, five days after he crushed his hand in a car crash. (Contact Music, Aug. 2)

The "Transformers" star didn't just injure, but crushed his hand in the crash last Sunday that flipped his truck, reports The Associated Press. (Metro NY, Aug. 4)

I'm not happy with either of these sentences. My internal verb-ometer tells me that crush just doesn't work that way.

The first extended transformational-generative grammatical study of any aspect of a language written by anyone other than Noam Chomsky was the study of nominalizations by Robert B. Lees in his MIT dissertation, published as a monograph in 1960. In it, Lees attempted, among other things, to offer a detailed treatment of noun-noun compounds. Other early studies in generative grammar followed. Part of what they were attempting to do was to give a syntax for nominal compounds that would explain what patterns of meaning were available in noun-noun compounds: tree house means "house in a tree" (a location relation), while lion king means "king who is a lion" (a predication relation), and tax collector means "collector of taxes" (a verb-object relation), and so on. I never thought such research was on the right track. It seemed to me that the semantics of such noun-noun combos was so protean that nothing could ever come of it. And I was reminded on this the other day when I saw this headline in a British newspaper:

Detective attacks jailed canoe wife who lied to sons

What, I hope you are asking yourself, is a canoe wife?

My posting on glass as a technical term, with both mass and count uses, elicited an off-topic thread on myriad, which I'll reproduce below, after some (more) discussion of the Language Log comments policy.

The thread began with this query from kip on 8/1 at 9:58 a.m. (times are U.S. Eastern Time):

Does anyone else have a mass/collective distinction problem with the word "myriad"? I see uses like "the movie has myriad problems" and in my head I change it to "the movie has a myriad of problems" because that's what sounds right to me. Maybe I'm alone in that though…

So what's the problem with this comment?