Language Log

A few weeks ago, the same teen language consultant who warned me that abbreviating words in texting (e.g. "u" = "you", "4" = "for") is something that only old people do anymore, pointed out that my habit of ending statement-style texts with a period communicates an affect that I probably don't intend.

I was skeptical, but this morning's PhD Comics confirms the generalization (although it's about email, which obviously skews the sample to an older demographic)…

On the Muskegon Opinion page at m live in Michigan, Paula Holmes-Greeley posed a Question of the Day: After this election, what will pull our country together. Among the clowns who answered the call for comments (people saying that we should start an impeachment movement, or that all the Republicans should jump into the sea), Harry Masters posted this comment:

What will pull the country together?

The question should be "What/Whom has so divided our country?"

My question is different: What or who is responsible for teaching Americans grammar so badly that when commenting online, i.e. communicating publicly rather than conversing, they will change who to whom just as a shot in the dark, to cover themselves against the vague fear that who might be incorrect? What or who is the source of the nervous cluelessness that leads to this sort of panic-attack accusative?

Also, the sky turns out to have been blue much of the time, and early returns are strongly suggesting that water is often wet. John Sides, "2012 Was the Moneyball Election", The Monkey Cage 11/7/2012:

Barack Obama’s victory tonight is also a victory for the Moneyball approach to politics.  It shows us that we can use systematic data—economic data, polling data—to separate momentum from no-mentum, to dispense with the gaseous emanations of pundits’ “guts,” and ultimately to forecast the winner.

Ben Yagoda spotted a nice case of overnegation on NPR's "Morning Edition" earlier today, when Renee Montagne interviewed political science professor Michael McDonald about early voting. After explaining that Obama was leading in early voting in Nevada, McDonald said, "I don't want to discourage people from not voting today."

My latest column for the Boston Globe is about some fascinating new research presented by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent NWAV 41 conference at Indiana University Bloomington. Schnoebelen's paper, co-authored with Jacob Eisenstein and David Bamman, is entitled "Gender, styles, and social networks in Twitter" (abstract, full paper, presentation).

Reader JM has been away from home since last Thursday (Nov. 1), and plans to fly back home tomorrow (Nov. 7). This morning (Nov. 6) she got an email from the U.S. Postal Service reading as follows:

From: MailHold@usps.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2012 1:38 AM
To: [redacted]
Subject: USPS – Holdmail Expiration

Your hold mail request has ended 11/07/2012
The Hold Mail Service for 11/01/2012 has ended. So we'll be resuming your regular mail delivery. Remember to pick up your held mail at the Post Office if you're not having it delivered to your address.

Richard Roeper, "Election prediction: Electoral votes will add up to Barack Obama victory", Chicago Sun-Times 11/4/2012:

Please understand, we’re not talking about my preference. This is all about the cold hard business of predicting. If you handed me a suitcase of money and sent me to a casino where they allowed wagering on elections and I had to put all of it on one candidate in this race, I wouldn’t hesitate to put that money on Obama.

Of course it’s not Romney’s fault that allies such as Hannity, Limbaugh, Trump and Giuliani seem increasingly shrill and desperate in their criticism of Obama in the last week or so. Of course Romney couldn’t do anything about a force of nature that allowed the president to be presidential while the Mittster was relegated to the sidelines, comparing the massive undertaking on the East Coast with the time when he and his chums had to clean up a high school football field after a big game. (“The field was covered with rubbish and paper goods from people who’d had a big celebration there at the game.” Rubbish?) [emphasis added]

Reader PS has written to alert us to an instructive drama unfolding at tv tropes, a wiki that is "a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction". As of about two months ago,  "titular" became a forbidden word at tv tropes. The site's software now simply deletes all (new) attempted uses of that string of letters.  PS explains:

This is not a Scunthorpe problem with "tit."  Someone on the site (presumably site co-founder Fast Eddie) decided that "titular" is a synonym for "nominal" but not "eponymous."  (I wish I had a better citation than that, but the best link I can find says that the previous discussion about using "titular" was deleted.)

In November of 2000, Ted Briscoe interviewed Gerald Gazdar about the history of "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar". In the course of that interview, Gazdar said:

That is not to say that I don't think that corpus work can't be useful, even in theoretical syntax.

,,,by which he meant to say that he thinks that corpus work can be useful, even in theoretical syntax.

If you apply your intuitions to the problem of building this sentence up out of its parts, I think you'll find that what he said actually ought to be logically the opposite of what he meant, at least in the forms of English that lack negative concord.

Ann Althouse, "There's never been a day in the last four years I've been proud to be his vice president", 11/2/2012:

The Weekly Standard (linked by Drudge) thinks it has a hilarious Biden gaffe, but they've misheard/mistranscribed it. You have to have an ear for the "working class"-style mushing of syllables, but he's saying "There's never been a day in the last four years I haven't been proud to be his vice president." The boldface is spoken: I 'n' been.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

I've listened to the audio at 0.35 speed and it's a precise "I've."…

I disagree.

It's an east-coast kind of "n" … sort of almost "i uh" like the "no" in "uh uh."

rhhardin says:

"n" is voiced and there's no voicing in Biden's 've part.

I note that I grew up in Delaware and I feel I understand the implied "n." And rh gives us his slowed down audio with repetition. I've listened, and I hear a sound after the "I" that I'm sure is the negative. There's this southern Jersey/northern Delaware/Philadelphia dropping of a sound that I can her. There's a muddled verb after the "I" that I just know. Rh says "Call in Language Log," and I will send an email. I think they will believe me. And not just for political reasons.

What xkcd is getting at with the latest comic is about syntax and semantics. I'll show you the syntax below, but as far as meaning is concerned, the point is that cell phone numbers have almost no semantics. The area code part (the first three digits) used to function as a locational marker when phones were in fixed locations in houses, but since Americans not only tend to move every three years or so but they now take phone numbers with them, and cell phone universality only really began to pick up in America five to ten years ago, it really does tend to reflect a former abode. My cool son Calvin, for example, has a number which implies that he lives in Oakland, California; he doesn't, he does his video game programming in the Pacific North West.

And the rest of the number, the other seven digits? Space enough there for some real personal information, but it is not used. It functions merely as arbitrary material to distinguish one cell phone's location point in the information universe from all the others.

Stoeger et al., "An Asian Elephant Imitates Human Speech", Current Biology (2012):

Vocal imitation has convergently evolved in many species, allowing learning and cultural transmission of complex, conspecific sounds, as in birdsong. Scattered instances also exist of vocal imitation across species, including mockingbirds imitating other species or parrots and mynahs producing human speech. Here, we document a male Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) that imitates human speech, matching Korean formants and fundamental frequency in such detail that Korean native speakers can readily understand and transcribe the imitations. To create these very accurate imitations of speech formant frequencies, this elephant (named Koshik) places his trunk inside his mouth, modulating the shape of the vocal tract during controlled phonation. This represents a wholly novel method of vocal production and formant control in this or any other species. One hypothesized role for vocal imitation is to facilitate vocal recognition by heightening the similarity between related or socially affiliated individuals. The social circumstances under which Koshik’s speech imitations developed suggest that one function of vocal learning might be to cement social bonds and, in unusual cases, social bonds across species.

From the Inland Printer, January 1927:

[ht Daniel Mellis]