Language Log

Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett have done another end-of-the-year buzzword catalog for the NYT Week in Review. There's a sampling on the front page: aporkalypse, Chimerica, octomom, car tone, ununbium. And then Grant's main list, from athey to wise Latina woman, on p. 3.

Matt Bauer sent in a specimen of preposition doubling from a recent Chicago news story ("Man stabbed in head with screwdriver in Joliet", WGN/Chicago Tribune, 12/20/2009):

A Joliet man was stabbed in the head with a screwdriver by the husband of a woman with whom he was speaking with at a local bar, police said.

The Philadelphia Eagles have been winning recently, and this led [Inquirer columnist] John Gonzales to pose a generic question yesterday on the philly.com sports blog You Talkin' to Me?:

The Eagles are on a nice little run right now. Someone asked [Eagles head coach Andy] Reid about that the other day, about why his teams seem to come on strong late in the season. (Maybe that's something we just imagine; conventional wisdom and all that.) He just sort of brushed it off without giving an answer. Surprising, I know.

You guys are smart(ish). Why do Reid's teams appear to play better at the end of the year? And who wins today's game?

There's a nice example of a blended cliché in a post by Patrick Appel on Andrew Sullivan's blog:

From the notorious Global Language Monitor:

(Click on the image for a larger screenshot.)

Back in 2005, when George Lakoff's ideas about "framing" in political discourse were a hot media topic, the common journalistic mistake was to see the issue in terms of words rather than concepts.  Now the whole issue seems to have fallen out of fashion — at least, an interesting study, published about a month ago in Psychological Science and featured in the Random Samples section of Science Magazine, hasn't (as far as i can tell) generated a single MSM news story or even blog post.

James Cameron's sci-fi blockbuster Avatar is opening this weekend with much fanfare. As has been widely reported, Cameron enlisted a linguist, Paul Frommer of USC's Marshall School of Business, to create the Na’vi language, spoken by the inhabitants of the alien world Pandora. We first heard about the development of Na’vi nearly three years ago, when Cameron was hyping the as-yet-unnamed language of Pandora as one that would "out-Klingon Klingon." (See my post, "Advances in cinematic xenolinguistics," Jan. 29, 2007.) When I decided to write about Na’vi and other alien tongues of the silver screen for the New York Times Magazine On Language column, I finally got to learn the real story of the language's construction from Paul Frommer himself ("Skxawng!," NYT, Dec. 6, 2009).

Paul generously shared a great deal of material describing Na’vi's phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, hardly any of which found a place in my On Language column. But since there is already tremendous interest in the language, and some less-than-accurate information about it is currently floating around online, I asked Paul if he could write up a formal description of Na’vi as a Language Log guest post. He wasn't able to reveal everything about the language, but what he has sketched out should whet the appetite of even the most diehard xenolinguistics buffs.

John Bainbridge's 1961 book The super-Americans: a picture of life in the United States, as Brought into Focus, Bigger than Life, in the Land of the Millionaires — Texas was originally published as a series of articles in the New Yorker. The first installment (March 11, 1961: p. 47) began with this sentence:

It is currently fashionable among the more advanced spirits in this country to look upon Texas with an air of amused condescension.

And a few pages later, Bainbridge underlined the advancement of his own spirit as follows:

At a recent cocktail party in Dallas, a visiting journalist was introduced to a handsome, impeccably groomed young matron with golden hair, velvety eyes the color of wood violets, and a becomingly superbious air. She seemed a sublime specimen of the Super-American until, as so often happens, she elected to open her mouth. "Mistah," she said, "Ah'm sick and tahed of readin' those trashy stories you-all keep writin' ahbowt Texas. They ah just so unfaih they make mah blood boil."

In Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur for 12/14/2009, Danae resists grammar instruction:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Following up on my recent "annals of spam" posting, Ernie Limperis has written me about a different sort of scam, involving a site that

seems to be using a sophisticated robot to generate "personal" web pages, filling standard templates with text lifted from Wiki and other sources, photos from Google and videos from Youtube.  The pages contain Adsense links and links to stuff for sale on Amazon.com (of course if you buy using those links some money will kick back to [the sponsoring site].

It seems you can't swing a dead cat in a bookstore these days without hitting a recent book on language endangerment and language death. One of the newer entries is Claude Hagège's On the Death and Life of Languages (Yale University Press, 2009). Schott's Vocab (at the NYT) recently invited people to ask Hagège questions about language endangerment and death; and some of them (plus answers, of course) were published yesterday. Check 'em out.

This morning I got e-mail from someone (whose name I didn't recognize) telling me that my site (Arnold Zwicky's Blog) was included in a list of recommended linguablogs and providing a link to the location of the list. The correspondent described this location as their site, but in fact it's a commercial site, and the correspondent's name seems to be nowhere on it. (Nor could I find any information on the web about who the correspondent was.)

A "dangling modifier" can follow the intended understood subject in a sentence and yet still dangle. That is (let me rephrase, since the traditional "dangling" metaphor isn't very helpful): a subjectless non-finite clause in a phrase functioning as an adjunct may be hard to associate with a suitable target of predication even though the intended one is a subject noun phrase occurring earlier in the same sentence. Here is an example, from a short piece about comedian Russell Brand and singer Katy Perry that appeared in the UK newspaper Metro:

Russell Brand says Katy Perry's God-fearing parents loved his 'old school Englishness' after showering them with chocolates.

In my judgment (your mileage may differ), the clause showering them with chocolates occasions a brief moment of involuntary surprise and puzzlement. One does a very brief double-take and then searches back for the right noun phrase to be understood as the one who does the showering.

The judgment is subtle. Some will say that they don't see any unacceptability at all, and that's fine for them; but I'm not interested in the reactions of those who managed to see instantly what the right interpretation was. I'm interested in the structural properties that trigger the slight flicker of syntactic disquiet for those that experience it.