Language Log

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".

Back in February I posted the abstract for my 2009 Stanford Semantics Fest paper, on alternations between direct and oblique marking of objects in English (flee the scene, flee from the scene). An expanded version of the handout is now available on my website, here.

According to The Economist, 4/2/2009, "Neuroscience and social deprivation: I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told":

THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. [emphasis added]

OK, keep that bold-faced statement in mind. Now let me offer you a bet. Suppose we have a large group of "children who have been raised in poverty", and another large group of "middle-class children", taken from the same groups described in the cited research; and we measure the capacity of their working memories, using the same testing techniques as the cited research.  We pick one of the "children raised in poverty" at random, and one of the "middle-class children" at random. Will you bet me that the rich kid will outscore the poor kid, giving odds of, oh, say, 2-to-1? (That is, you put up \$200 and I put up \$100.)

You might not like to gamble on single events — I certainly don't — so let's give you the benefit of the law of large numbers. We'll run this same bet 100 times, with 100 different random pairs of kids. Will you take the challenge now?

From the annals of (two-part) back-formed verbs and irregularization, a Sheldon cartoon:

Continuing today's snowclone theme… For snowclone collector Mark Peters, the phrasal template "X is the Y of Z" is the gift that just keeps on giving. We noted in December that Mark had launched a blog entirely devoted to the snowclone, aptly titled "The Rosa Parks of Blogs." Since then, Mark has enterprisingly spun off the blog into a regular weekly feature for JamsBio Magazine. In each installment, the Y in "X is the Y of Z" stands for the name of a prominent artist from the world of popular music.

Here's a sampling:

• The Keith Richards of the cat world
• The Barry White of the apocalypse
• The Spice Girls of the ancient world
• The Britney Spears of the planets
• The Ozzy Osbourne of the banking world
• The Courtney Love of yards
• The Chuck Berry of nationalism
• The Johnny Cash of Communism
• The Johnny Rotten of Chinatown food courts

Snowclone mavens often have trouble deciding whether some pattern is sufficiently fixed to count as a snowclone, or whether it's just an option the syntax of the language makes available. I don't think there's an easy answer.

Case in point: X REQUIRES ALL THE Y OF A Z. As in this quotation from Gail Collins in the NYT of 2 April, p. A27:

He is the longtime minority leader of the [New York] State Assembly, a job that requires all the quick-thinking and decision-making capacity of a fishing warden in the Gobi Desert.

(That is, Z requires no real Y, so X requires no significant Y, either: being a fishing warden in the Gobi Desert requires no real quick-thinking or decision-making capacity, so being minority leader of the Assembly doesn't either.)

With a little ingenuity, you can google up more examples (and others with verbs similar to require, like take or demand). But the question is: do such examples get their effect straightforwardly from the syntax of English (admittedly, with figurative language plugged in), or is there some short-circuiting from a complex figure to a conveyed meaning?

I just don't know, and I don't think there's any easy way to decide in particular instances, short of finding some way to get inside people's heads. The best we can do is flag some possible cases for investigation — while being open to the possibility that the status of the expression is different for different people. After all, even X IS THE NEW Y (now so omnipresent that I stopped collecting instances of it long ago) started as a fresh figure, a genuine invention.

A reader writes to ask about disjunctive subjects in English and how subject-verb agreement works in cases like the following:

Neither Barbara nor I ?am ?is ?are able to …
If you or I ?am ?are there, …

As it happens, I posted on the subject to ADS-L some years. I intended to post a version on Language Log, but I seem not to have gotten around to it. Until now.