Language Log

Yesterday I went to the Beijing Public Security Bureau (Gōng'ān jú 公安局) to renew my visa.  While waiting in the main hall for my number to be called, I had ample time to walk around and familiarize myself with the operations there.  One thing in particular piqued my curiosity.  Namely, I saw four gray, metal cabinets full of hundreds of passports (three for Chinese, one for foreigners) waiting to be picked up.

I watched a clerk filing passports into the slots on the mechanized, revolving shelves inside the cabinets.  Wondering how the passports were arranged so that they could be readily retrieved when called for, I asked the supervisor how the passports were ordered on the shelves.  Her reply left me both startled and pleased.

The latest sad story of trammeled speech in the UK comes from Northamptonshire, where there is a furniture company called The Sofa King. For years their advertisements and their vans have borne a legend stating that their prices are "Sofa King Low". But not any more: having escaped when they were reported to the police in 2004 (the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn't act), they have now met their come-uppance: their slogan has been branded offensive by the Advertising Standards Authority. I hope you can see why.

The annual begging posting for that admirable resource, the Linguist List. Some details, including the portmanteau metafortress, on my blog, here.

We've had some discussion lately about the sports subjunctive/baseball conditional/bare paratactic conditional. I'm going to stay out of any naming controversies, but I do want to pick up on the fact that this construction typically involves using a present tense verb form to describe a future event. Like this:

We've also been discussing Keith Chen's controversial proposal that the grammatical marking of future tense leads to unwise spending and eating habits—allegedly, these behaviors are curtailed when the same form is used for both present and future time, since people are encouraged to perceive a stronger continuity between their present and future interests. (Commentary on the subject has been offered by Geoff Pullum, Mark Liberman and myself.)

It only seems right, then, to point out to proponents of Chen's hypothesis that perhaps they should consider that the construction in question offers some excellent potential for persuasive applications. You want to cut the deficit, you know how to address your colleagues in Congress. You want your patients to stop smoking, you avoid the future tense. You want to cut back on your credit card debt, you walk around talking like this all day.

Kazutaka Kurihara & Koji Tsukada, "SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback", arXiv:1202.6106v1 [cs.HC], 2/28/2012:

In this paper we report on a system, "SpeechJammer", which can be used to disturb people's speech. In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stop speaking. Furthermore, this effect does not involve anyone but the speaker. We utilize this phenomenon and implemented two prototype versions by combining a direction-sensitive microphone and a direction-sensitive speaker, enabling the speech of a specific person to be disturbed. We discuss practical application scenarios of the system, such as facilitating and controlling discussions. Finally, we argue what system parameters should be examined in detail in future formal studies based on the lessons learned from our preliminary study.

A very nice demystification of those horrible Latin abbreviations ibid., idem, loc. cit., op. cit., etc., by smart copy editor Carol Saller on Lingua Franca today. There's an utterly ridiculous pun in the accompanying photo, and also some useful advice, which I hope all future academic authors take. (Whenever I see op. cit in a footnote my blood pressure goes up.) Check it out if you ever write academic material in any subject, especially in the humanities.