Language Log

In commenting on a recent LL post, Daddy G. asked

Does the term "code-switching" apply ONLY to those instances when the practice is consciously employed for effect? Or is the term more generally applied to the switching itself, regardless of whether or not there is conscious control involved?

With respect to the use of the term, the answer is simple. From the beginning  — the classical reference is John Gumperz, "Linguistic and Social Interaction in Two Communities", American Anthropologist, 66(S3): 137-153, 1964 — the term "code switching" has been used to refer to what speakers do, not whether they do it consciously.

One of the things that marks Sarah Palin as a linguistic outsider is her use of also. In part, this is just a matter of frequency. In her contribution to last night's vice-presidential debate, she used the word also 48 times in about 7600 words, accounting for  about 0.63% of her words.  Her opponent, Joe Biden, used also only 3 times in about 7200 words. Relative to the rates seen in large and representative corpora, Gov. Palin used also about 5 to 10 times more often than expected, while Sen. Biden used also about 2 to 3 times less often than expected

OK, I'm going to give it a shot — I'm going to make a comment about language use by some politicians while giving Language Log readers what they come here for: "discussion of language by real live linguists".

After the vice-presidential debate last night, I was pleased not to have heard Gov. Sarah Palin repeat Sen. John McCain's claim in the first presidential debate that Sen. Barack Obama has "the most liberal voting record" in the Senate. Speaking as a "real live linguist", this kind of claim is to my mind a little more insidious than your typical lie or stretching of the truth in a political campaign. Here's why I think so.

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reports that a if you play the CD entitled (on the cover) "Disco F*cks House" on iTunes, the program inquires, "Do you wish to import 'Disco Fucks House'?" Several things are going on here.

The first thing you need to know is that the CD is German. The second thing you need to know is that the CD is a disco/house mix by the Fabulous Glitterboys (a German group, despite the name). A third thing you might be interested to hear is that the Glitterboys also have a weekly radio show called "Disco F*cks House".

The points of interest are: the use of taboo avoidance characters, and the interpretation of "Disco Fucks House".

In the 13 September NewScientist's "Feedback" column: a note beginning "There should be a law against it, we grumble", with a report that back in June Reuters distributed a story on the Japanese company Genepax, which claims to have produced a car that runs on "nothing but water". The magazine noted that the claim has been debunked a number of times over the past few years, but keeps re-surfacing. A possible remedy:

We thought for a moment we had a way of stemming the tide of water stories. Surely those clever people who write word-processor programs that put annoying green wiggles under our sentences with notes like "the grammatical passive voice has been used" [nice deployment of the passive!] could add a feature that crosses sentences out in red with the note "this does not happen in the real world". Shouldn't that feature be made mandatory in news organisations?

But then we remembered that when Microsoft tells us off about our grammar we invariably click on "Ignore rule" and proceeed blithely on. Back to the drawing board…

While I was busy doing various other things (like wasting my time on this post), I missed an e-mail from fellow Language Logger Ben Zimmer kindly tipping me off to the fact that The Linguists (which I've blogged about here, here, and here) was screened last night in Washington, DC, as part of National Geographic's All Roads Film Project. Sorry, readers in DC, for not being more on the ball — but I hope that those of you who read the Post will have seen the piece in yesterday's edition entitled "Babble On, Say Researchers In 'Linguists' Documentary" (coincidentally also noted by a commenter on one of my recent posts).

That's the bag-of-words summary of last night's vice-presidential debate.

This is a follow-up on a couple of my more recent LL posts on language and politics, and on the discussion that has been generated by one of them in particular.

First, Main Street. Several commenters wrote that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not being "unnecessarily redundant" (as I put it) by referring to "Main Street and everyday Americans", asserting that "Main Street" refers exclusively to the commercial/business part of a (small) town/city in America, not to any residential areas nor to the "everyday Americans" who live there. (Interestingly, some of the comments seem to be duplicating themselves over on Mark's post from earlier this morning.)

While filing some examples of summative constructions, I came across the discussion of summative modifiers in Joseph Williams's Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (I have the 3rd ed., of 2008), which made me wonder whether we had said good things about Williams's books on style here on Language Log. The answer is yes, but just barely, so it's time for a note. And for a late notice that Williams (long-time professor of English at the University of Chicago) died in February.

In response to Eric Bakovic's recent Language Log post asserting that he doesn't live on Main Street, Victor Mair sent this recent New Yorker cartoon:

This is a follow-up to my syntax quiz from Sunday. Kai von Fintel was the first to correctly note that it was a trick question: swallow hard is probably intransitive in the relevant McCain quote, and so this is (probably) neither an instance of a parasitic gap nor of "across-the-board movement, coupled with right node raising out of a coordinate structure". There were various good attempts by others to show that it is actually an example of one or the other, though, of course under the assumption that swallow hard is, or at least could be, transitive (one reader even urged me not to concede defeat — even though I hadn't, I had only admitted to planting a trick question). Thanks to those commenters who accepted that the 'intransitive camp' had a point but that they'd like to give the quiz a go on the terms that I laid out.

Ever wonder what Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" would look like overlaid with electronic text markup? Well, wonder no more!

(Source text here.)

Sarah Palin's accent has elicited a great deal of curiosity, and now Slate has posted a well-researched analysis by the OED's Jesse Sheidlower. Here's the first paragraph:

Since Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican candidate for vice president, many people have made comments about her unusual speech, comparing it to accents heard in the movie Fargo, in the states of Wisconsin and Idaho, and in Canada. Some have even attributed her manner of speaking to her supposed stupidity. But Palin actually has an Alaskan accent, one from the Matnuska and Susitna Valley region, where Palin's hometown, Wasilla, is located.

A more impressionistic take, with commentary by Rosina Lippi-Green (author of English with an Accent) appeared yesterday on Politico.