Language Log

In a post a few days ago ("Why you shouldn't use spellcheckers", 4/7/2009), Bill Poser argued that "if English had a decent writing system there would be no use for [spellchecking] software". I'm no defender of our current writing system — it makes life much harder than it should be for writers and readers alike, especially in the early stages of learning. But I think that Bill is overselling the potential benefits of reform.

Today's Cathy:

When I write a clause that begins with a clause-containing adjunct, I generally put a comma after the adjunct. The comma in that first sentence illustrates my practice. Some writers studiously avoid such a comma (sometimes my style is known as "heavy" punctuation and the other style as "light"). I also like the so-called "Oxford comma": I write Oregon and Washington, but I don't write California, Oregon and Washington. I use an extra comma and write California, Oregon, and Washington.

I couldn't wish for a better illustration of why I like my own policies than the following sentence, which I saw in The Economist last week (April 4, p. 11). It goes the other way on both of my policies, and it's disastrously misunderstandable in my opinion:

Traders and fund managers got huge rewards for speculating with other people's money, but when they failed the parent company, the client and ultimately the taxpayer had to pay the bill.

Oh dear. One of my favorite columnists, Nicholas Kristof, wrote this in his column today on animal rights:

Professor Singer wrote a landmark article in 1973 for The New York Review of Books and later expanded it into a 1975 book, “Animal Liberation.” That book helped yank academic philosophy back from a dreary foray into linguistics and pushed it to confront such fascinating questions of applied ethics as: What are our moral obligations to pigs?

No comment. Just a sad sigh. (I'm all for the animal rights topic, just "too" and not "instead".) I have no idea why he feels that way (or who he got it from.)

Billy Bob Thornton gave a bizarre interview today on CBC Radio that could serve as a case study for Paul Grice's conversational maxims and how to violate them. Billy Bob was there with his band the Boxmasters, but he was upset that the host Jian Ghomeshi mentioned his acting career in the introduction to the segment. He proceeded to take a passive-aggressive approach to answering Ghomeshi's questions, finding the most uncooperative possible responses.

Right off the bat, when asked by Ghomeshi about the formation of the band, Billy Bob flouts the Maxim of Quality ("be truthful") and the Maxim of Quantity ("be informative") by claiming that he doesn't know what Ghomeshi is talking about. Later Ghomeshi asks him about musical influences, and he gives a long, rambling recollection of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, thus flouting the Maxim of Relevance ("be relevant") and the Maxim of Manner ("be clear"). It's truly a tour-de-force performance, sure to be appreciated by students of pragmatics everywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJWS6qyy7bw

The English language press in China is swooning (here, here, and here) over the young (age 19) Panchen Lama's address in English to the Second World Buddhist Forum on March 27, 2009. The Forum opened in the east China city of Wuxi in Jiangsu Province and closed five days later after the participants were flown to Taipei on four direct charter flights.

You can hear the Panchen Lama's speech for yourself here.

Here's what I think you should do regarding your desire to immigrate to Scotland so you can study linguistics and English language at the University of Edinbu… oops. I nearly put a foot wrong there. According to a brochure I just received from my daytime employer:

Staff should not give immigration advice to students. To do so represents a high risk and is a criminal offence.

A criminal offence? A conversation in which I supply you with some advice about UK immigration matters could end up with me facing criminal charges? Even for me, well versed in the many ways the UK government is permitted to restrict freedom of speech (look for the phrase "who cannot be named for legal reasons" in UK newspapers, for another example), it is hard to get fully attuned to the necessity to button one's lip. Sorry. No advice from me.

The LINGUIST List's annual fund drive is under way; the drive is about halfway to its goal of $60,000 (the money goes to support the student staff). From the list's site.

The LINGUIST List is dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world. LINGUIST maintains a web-site with over 2000 pages and runs a mailing list with over 25,000 subscribers worldwide. LINGUIST also hosts searchable archives of over 100 other linguistic mailing lists and runs research projects which develop tools for the field, e.g., a peer-reviewed database of language and language-family information, and recommendations of best practice for digitizing endangered languages data.

LINGUIST provides a space for discussion, job listings, information on conferences, and much more. It also runs an Ask A Linguist service, where people can get answers to questions about language and linguistics.

The list is an incredible resource for linguistics, deserving of your support. Small donations are welcome, by the way.

(Information for donors is on the site, along with special features like a "linguist of  the day" writing about how they got into the field. So far this year these are: Brian Joseph, Sarah Thomason, Richard Hudson, Marianne Mithun, and Andrew Carnie. Sally is the fourth Language Logger to be honored this way in the four years LINGUIST has provided this feature.)

In my role as self-appointed David Brooks watcher, I wearily contemplated his latest masterpiece of misunderstanding, and wondered whether the linguistic angles justified a post. Imagine my relief when I discovered this lovely dissection in cartoon form at chaospet (click on the image for a larger version):

The following picture was taken by my student, Ori Tavor, in the summer of 2007 in a little Tibetan village near Daqin, Sichuan.

An incident yesterday at Brigham Young University, the leading academic outpost of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, provides yet another example of the pitfalls of using spelling correctors. In yesterday's Daily Universe, the student newspaper, a photograph of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the second highest body in the Mormon church, was mistakenly captioned "Quorum of the Twelve Apostates". The error is attributed to a spell checker that did not recognize the word "apostle" and suggested "apostate" as a substitute, a suggestion mistakenly accepted by the editor.

Of course, if English had a decent writing system there would be no use for such software and one less source for errors.

Yesterday, those listening to NPR's Morning Edition heard a report by Robert Krulwich ("Shakespeare had roses all wrong") discussing the effects of grammatical gender on word-association norms, as investigated by Lera Boroditsky.

Yesterday, Norm Geras spotted a lovely dangling modifier for the Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct's collection. The source was an article by Tim Adams ("The town that made Margaret", The Guardian, 4/5/2009), which featured this second sentence:

Now 83, and long gone from power, Britons remain fiercely divided over the reign of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher is the one who's "now 83" and "long gone from power", but the handiest peg to hang these modifiers on is the subject, "Britons". Geoff Pullum has argued ("Stunningly inept modifier manners", 3/10/2005) that such sentences don't "violate the syntactic correctness conditions for English", they're just "bad grammatical manners, the syntactic analog of … eating the butter from the butter dish".