Language Log

Yesterday, I quoted someone writing on the nanowrimo forum ("Also, check the back seat", 11/7/2009), who offered an apparently irrefutable argument in favor of "No Initial Coordinators" (NIC), the zombie rule that forbids us to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and or but:

[Usage standards and grammar] are related but not identical. Grammar deals with categories such as parts of speech, and the logical rules of syntax for constructing sentences. Grammatically, conjunctions link words, phrases, or clauses. So from a grammatical standpoint, a sentence beginning with a conjunction is a fragment, and hence ungrammatical.

You have to see this cute article by Giles Turnbull. It's about the deep-seatedness of children's need to have names for all the things they deal with — and the lack of any necessity for there to be pre-existing names in the language they happen to have learned.

From Doghouse Diaries:

Reader FW asked for some advice about a nanowrimo discussion of "Ands and buts", which started Nov. 3 with this question:

So this is one that always get [sic] me.

Grammatically speaking, or however it is known, can you use Ands and Buts at the beginning of sentences? And can you use it at the start of dialogue as well?

A participant using the name pointytilly links to Paul Brians' list of "non-errors" in defense of the view that sentence-initial and and but are "grammatically correct". And indeed they are, according to essentially everyone with any plausible claim to expertise, prescriptivists and descriptivists alike.

It is an exhausting business trying to keep up with the extraordinarily dumb content of the continuing flow of truly awful grammar texts as the amateurs crank them out. I am so grateful to Brett Reynolds for having shouldered some of the burden by putting reviews of recent ghastlies on his blog English, Jack. He has discussed the over-loose definition of "phrase" in the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics; he has critiqued Eric Henderson's Writing by Choice; he has excoriated Ron Cowan's The Teacher's Grammar of English in at least four posts, this one, this one, this one, and this one; he has done battle with the "Grammatically Speaking" column from TESOL's Essential Teacher magazine; and there are other posts accessible from these. He is fighting the good fight. Thank you, Brett. When I say that grammar books are being written by the incompetent and published by the blind or uncaring, I do not exaggerate. Just take a little time to read Brett Reynolds on this topic.

Let me return to the issue of wildly incompetent grammar text writing and the question (which I posed here) of whether and how you can find three adjective phrases in the following list of word sequences:

1. thank you said Jim
2. Janet ran home
3. the poor injured duck
4. a shivering and frightened
5. give me that
6. with a heavy bag

If you would like the answer, read on.

In today's newspapers and magazines:

"Newborns cry in their native language".
"Babies cry with an accent within the first week of life".
"Babies cry wiith the same 'prosody' or melody used in their native language by the second day of life".
"Newborn babies mimic the intonation of their native tongue when they cry".
"French babies cry in French, German babies cry in German and, no doubt, the wail of an English infant betrays the distinct tones of a soon-to-be English speaker".

The science behind these statements is in a paper released yesterday: Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke, "Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language", Current Biology, in press. Does it support these journalistic generalizations? Before reading the paper, I give ten-to-one odds against, on the general principle that journalistic statements involving generic plurals are almost never true. Mesdames et messieurs, faites vos jeux. Let's spin the wheel.

Mark Liberman's post, "On beyond personal datives?", has generated quite a bit of discussion in the comments section, much of it related to Larry Horn's paper, "'I love me some him': The landscape of non-argument datives", in Bonami & Hofherr (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 7, 2008. Larry has sent along a response to the commenters, which is reproduced here as a guest post.

Yesterday's South Park episode features an elaborate drama of grass-roots lexicography.  The wikipedia entry gives some details:

From the Names Desk at Language Log Plaza, a bulletin from the October 31 New Scientist, p. 6:

ALIEN worlds deserve more romantic names. So says Wladimir Lyra at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, who has proposed mythological monikers for the known exoplanets.

The profusion of planets discovered around other stars in the past 15 years are known only by drab and hard to decipher strings of numbers and letters – at least officially. Instead, Lyra suggests that the 400 exoplanets found so far should be named after characters from Greek and Roman mythology, in the same way the planets in our own solar system were. For example, MOA-2007-BLG-400-Lb becomes "Achilles" (arxiv.org/abs/0910.3989).

Alas, Lyra's suggestions are unlikely to become official. The International Astronomical Union, which approves names for objects in our own solar system, considers it impractical to name exoplanets, given how many of them are likely to be discovered.

On beyond the dwarf planet Pluto and off to other worlds!

Today's Irregular Webcomic:

According to CGEL, that should be "Noun: the Gerund-participling".

[Hat tip: Paul Bickart]

Yesterday, Daniel Mahaffey wrote to ask about his friend's "unusual indirect object sentences". Thus after backing into a dog in a crowded kitchen, she said "I nearly stepped on me a dog".

I received this email message this morning:

Dear Student Systems User

There are currently problems with the main database server, affecting NESI, EUCLID, WISARD, STUDMI, etc.

IS are investigating, but we have no timescale for a resolution. Sorry for any inconvenience

Regards
Student, Admissions & Curricula Systems

You might like to reflect awhile on the linguistic lessons you can learn from this. Then read on…