Language Log

Almost a year ago, I posted here (well, at the old LL site) about a new peer-reviewed, open access journal affiliated with the Linguistic Society of America. The journal is called Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P), and I'm coeditor, together  with Kai von Fintel. The big news today is that we have published our first article, and it's a doozy – Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding, by Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan. To give Language Log readers a picture of some of what interests formal semanticists I'll fill you in with a little background on the paper – abstruse stuff, but it has applications. Then (and I hope you'll excuse the awkwardness of me slapping my own back, but who else is gonna do it?) I'll give you an update on how S&P is doing.

Going through the latest batch of Chinglish offerings that friends sent to me last week, my eye was caught by this striking bilingual sign:

Normally, I do little more than marvel at the mistranslations and ungrammatical constructions that are characteristic of Chinglish. Seldom do I undertake deeper research into how they came about, since the causes of the bloopers and blunders are usually painfully obvious. It is only when Chinglish expressions — whether humorous or not — are hard to explain that I make a special effort to analyze them and figure out how they occurred.

But this one was different.

It gets better and better. The folks who invited me to come over and get my proteins expressed ("Just send us your gene", 5/21/2008) are now peddling videos. At least, someone using the same biospam mailing list has sent me the table of contents for the current on-line issue of the Journal of Visualized Experiments, "an online research journal employing visualization to increase reproducibility and transparency in biological sciences".

My favorite video in the current issue is Georgia Woods and Karen Zito, "Preparation of Gene Gun Bullets and Biolistic Transfection of Neurons in Slice Culture". I warn you, though, that "gene gun bullets", "biolistic transfection" and "slice culture" are all somewhat less interesting than the spam email context might make you think. (Or maybe, depending on your tastes, more interesting…)

Laura Beil, "Opponents of Evolution Adopting New Strategy", NYT 6/4/2008, includes a nice negative specimen of the phrasal template "What happens in X stays in X":

Yet even as courts steadily prohibited the outright teaching of creationism and intelligent design, creationists on the Texas board grew to a near majority. Seven of 15 members subscribe to the notion of intelligent design, and they have the blessings of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.

What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas: the state is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are loath to produce different versions of the same material. The ideas that work their way into education here will surface in classrooms throughout the country. [emphasis added]

The first page of the estimated 117,000 Google hits for {"what happens in * stays in *" -vegas} includes X = Terokkar, Aldershot, Blogshares, Negril, Uncasville, Bucksnort, Mushpoie, Cancun, Rumspringa, and Galera. The negative pattern {"what happens in * does not stay in *" -vegas} is less popular — 3,040 hits — but equally diverse: the first page of hits has X = Whistler, Uganda, Nevada, California, China, Kårsta, Bakersfield, Homo-land, and Pinebrook. There are another 5,960 hits for {"what happens in * doesn't stay in *" -vegas}, with first-page X = Lebanon, Gaza, the Capitol, Facebook, Washington, Mexico, Pascagoula, Zimbabwe, prison, and Minneapolis.

Like most people to the left of Genghis Khan, I find much of what appears on Michelle Malkin's blog rather strange, but Mojave Mike left a comment today that is really remarkable:

All the good armies of the world speak English. I’m serious. Think about it. It doesn’t surprise me that the taliban can’t maneuver worth crap, few armies can.

Is there really something about English that makes it uniquely suitable for military communication? The Israeli Army is arguably the best in the world on a per capita basis. Although English is widely known, communication in the Israeli military is in fact in Hebrew. Nazi Germany managed to run a very effective military organization using German. Napoleon got by with French. Genghis Khan used Mongolian. The conquests of Alexander the Great were carried out in Greek. Like most Whorfian claims, this one doesn't seem to do too well under close examination.

A couple of days ago, I posted some audio clips in which bits of political speechifying were reduced to their pitch and amplitude contours alone ("Political melodies", 6/5/2008). Robert Delius Royar asked me to apply the same technique to a passage from a speech that John F. Kennedy gave at Rice University on 9/12/1962. I've done as he asked; and I've also posted the code that I used, so that others can try the same thing at home.

Here's the melodized version of the first two phrases of the passage that Robert recalled, with the Obama clip for comparison:

Steve Pinker swung by Edinburgh yesterday to deliver a masterful Enlightenment Lecture to a crowd of roughly a thousand, and to sign copies of The Stuff of Thought for eager fans. As usual, both on the stage and off, Steve had a fund of funny anecdotes, surprising facts, and new ideas about language; and he pointed out to me that Language Log had not yet noted a new and quite astonishing political appeal to semantics in the news, by John McCain's campaign spinners.

At a Town Hall meeting on May 28, McCain expressed confidence in the "Surge" policy on Iraq troop levels (which started in February 2007): "I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it's succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels." The actual facts are that the present troop levels in Iraq are around 155,000, while the January 2007 numbers were 128,569. That is a 26,000 increase from pre-Surge levels. McCain made a flatly untrue statement. So what did his staff do? McCain's foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann dismissed it as mere linguistic nitpicking on the part of the journalists: "It's the essence of semantics," he claimed. "If you're going to start fact-checking verb tenses, we're going to make sure we start monitoring verb tenses a lot more closely than we have in this campaign." He apparently meant that troop levels will come down to below 2006 levels in the future, and that is what his boss should be understood to have meant. This is unbelievable mendacity, even by the standard of presidential campaign politics.

Alex Baumans sent in this quote from a press release about a Chinese Exhibition on solar energy:

3rd 2008 Asia Solar PV Exhibition attracted many companies come from more than 20 countries and regions, such as Germany, France, Switzerland, the United States, Hungary, with their ears, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea,China Taiwan,and so on. [emphasis added]

My fellow phonologist Geoff Nathan recently contributed a post to phonoloblog on the pronunciation of "Myanmar" by news readers. Another fellow phonologist, Darin Flynn, added a comment with a link to this post on TidBITS ("Your source for indispensable Apple and Macintosh news, reviews, tips, and commentary since 1990"), pointing out that Mac OS X's Dictionary program (featuring the New Oxford American Dictionary) lists the pronunciation of "Myanmar" as "Burma":

Incidentally: all images in this post are from my own copy of Dictionary, version 1.02 (© 2005), running on Mac OS X "Tiger" (version 10.4.11). The TidBITS sources are from a newer version of Mac OS X ("Leopard", version 10.5.2), which appears to include a newer version of Dictionary (but possibly with the same New Oxford American content).

… if you can't read the word California?

And how can you (despite the above) read the word California anyway, when you're expecting to see instances of it?

I'm reporting here on a real case, that of my late partner Jacques Transue, who exhibited just this configuration of (in)abilities. Such extremely selective ability constitutes a paradox of neurology (neurolinguistic division), of the sort that Oliver Sacks delights in. The key idea is some sort of cognitive split between what we know, or are able to do, EXPLICITLY, and what's there IMPLICITLY.

The links below will allow you to listen to a brief clip from each of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama. But there's a trick — it's not actually their voices. Instead, I've tracked the pitch and amplitude of a short passage from the speech that each of them gave on Tuesday night, and then "played" that melody on a simple synthetic instrument (just five harmonically-related sinusoids with 1/F amplitudes, not that it matters). It seems to me that you can tell who's who pretty easily — but my opinion doesn't matter, because I've heard the originals. So listen and see what you think:

A friend of mine recently noticed a sign in a washroom saying

and wondered for a few moments just how many people had ever wrenched one of the sturdy hot-air hand-drying machines off the wall and hurled it into a toilet bowl in a fit of rage — before realizing that "hand dryers" was merely an unaccountably weird lexical replacement for "paper towels". Is "towel" a dirty word now? What on earth gets into some people when they are told to write a sign that addresses the public?

Flash! From the Toronto Star on 2 June: "Language test spells trouble for newcomers", in which Lesley Ciarula Taylor (the Star's immigration reporter) tells us that all immigrants to Canada would soon be required to take a specific "rigorous language test", the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam, widely used in Britain and Australia and already used in Canada for foreign students seeking to go to Canadian universities.

This much is accurate. But the story leads off with an especially tricky grammar question:

Think you speak English? Try this test.

Find the grammatical (or syntactic) error in this sentence: The standard of living has increased.

Stumped? Soon, that will count against you if you're hoping to immigrate to Canada. The rigorous language test that will be a requirement is vital to be fair to the influx of newcomers or vastly discriminatory and fatally flawed, depending on whom you talk to.

The correct answer is: The standard of living has risen.

And that, as it turns out, is just wrong. I wasted considerable time trying to find this sample question on the IELTS site, until I realized that there weren't any grammar questions at all on the exam. Then, illumination from Brett Reynolds (Professor of English for Academic Purposes at Humber College) on his English, Jack blog the same day, under the heading

Language tests for immigrants & Honesty tests for newspapers

Yes, more reportorial mischief.