Language Log

Roy Moore's 12/13/2017 non-concession speech  started out this way:

We are indeed in a struggle to preserve our republic, our civilization, and our religion.

And he goes on in the same vein, with another rhetorical tricolon:

This particular race was watched not only by the people of this state, but by the entire nation, and many around the world.
Why? Because I believe the heart and soul of our country is at stake.

The following is a reply from Emily M. Bender, Natasha Warner and myself to Geoff Pullum’s recent posts (A letter saying they won, 12/4/2017; Courtesy and personal pronoun choice, 12/6/2017).

Respected senior linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum recently used the widely-read platform of Language Log to remark on the fact that his grammatical tolerance of singular they only goes so far (A letter saying they won, 12/4/2017). For Pullum, singular they cannot be used in reference to a personal name; example sentences such as Kim_i said they_i were going to the store are ungrammatical for him. This fact is not in dispute, nor is the fact that this is a salient grammaticality judgment for Pullum. What is in dispute, however, is the appropriateness of a series of choices that Pullum has made in reporting this grammaticality judgment. Those choices have clearly hurt people. The following is an effort to explain the hurt that these choices have caused and to give Pullum — and everyone from his defenders to those who don’t see what all the fuss is about — another opportunity to respond with contemplation and empathy as opposed to defensiveness and continued disrespect.

Here's Lulu Garcia-Navarro in discussion with Marvin Odum, Houston's chief recovery officer, about whether the Federal government will actually come through with the funds promised for disaster recovery after last summer's floods ("Houston's Recovery", Weekend Edition Sunday 12/10/2017). He describes returning from Washington without a clear idea of whether the promises will be honored:

Garcia-Navarro: You came back worried, though.
Odum: You can't help but not be worried.

A staff member at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, responsible for providing guidance for journalists on pronunciation, terminology, grammar, and usage, has asked me about "a particular usage of with, which seems to be doing the job of a conjunction." He wonders whether the construction in question is correct English or not. He supplies these attested examples (all already published by ABC news, so one thing we know is that on this matter the usage train has left the station):

1. "Same-sex marriage could be legal by the end of the day with Federal Parliament inching closer to a final vote." (found here)
2. "Peter Creigh has asked for a non-publication order on his name to be lifted, with Newcastle Local Court told he was ready to have his identity revealed." (found here)
3. "President Donald Trump introduced the plan alongside two Republican senators in the White House, with officials saying the plan was based in part on the Australian and Canadian immigration models." (found here)

A couple of days ago, I heard an interesting talk by Juliet Stanton, who proposed that variation in stress on the -at- in (English) words in -ative depends in a gradient way on the total duration of stressless material between -at- and the word's earlier main stress. Thus -at- stressing should (and does) become more frequent through a series like palliative, speculative, investigative, legislative.

It occurred to me to wonder whether there might be an effect in the other direction as well. That is, in a word like administrative (where dictionaries and my intuition agree that /ədˈmɪnᵻstrətɪv/ and /ədˈmɪnəˌstreɪdɪv/ are both possible), perhaps the phonetic duration of the intervening sequence would vary according to Stanton's principle.

I chose administrative for a test because a quick check of the LDC's published collection of conversational telephone speech turned up more than 70 instances of that word. But the OED turns out to be right that the version with stressed -at- predominates in the U.S. — 70 out of 73 instances in this set. And there were some other kinds of pronunciation variation — reductions — that make my idea hard to test in any case.

However, those reductions themselves are worth a look.

In recent months, one after another, instances of Chinese interference in Australian politics have come to light.  After a series of outstanding investigative reports in the media, finally Australia is starting to push back against Chinese encroachment:

"Laws on foreign influence just the beginning in fight against Chinese coercion", Peter Mattis, Sydney Morning Herald (12/7/17).

Most conspicuously, earlier today, the Prime Minister has spoken out, and in Mandarin, no less:

"Malcolm Turnbull declares he will 'stand up' for Australia in response to China's criticism", Caitlyn Gribbin, ABC (12/9/17).

In today's Dilbert strip, Dilbert is confused by why the company mission statement looks so different, and Alice diagnoses what's happened: the Elbonian virus that has been corrupting the company's computer systems has fixed all the grammar and punctuation errors it formerly contained.

That'll be the day. Right now, computational linguists with an unlimited budget (and unlimited help from Elbonian programmers) would be unable to develop a trustworthy program that could proactively fix grammar and punctuation errors in written English prose. We simply don't know enough. The "grammar checking" programs built into word processors like Microsoft Word are dire, even risible, catching only a limited list of shibboleths and being wrong about many of them. Flagging split infinitives, passives, and random colloquialisms as if they were all errors is not much help to you, especially when many sequences are flagged falsely. Following all of Word's suggestions for changes would creat gibberish. Free-standing tools like Grammarly are similarly hopeless. They merely read and note possible "errors", leaving you to make corrections. They couldn't possibly be modified into programs that would proactively correct your prose. Take the editing error in this passage, which Rodney Huddleston recently noticed in a quality newspaper, The Australian:

There has been no glimmer of light from the Palestinian Authority since the Oslo Accords were signed, just the usual intransigence that even the wider Arab world may be tiring of. Yet the West, the EU, nor the UN, have never made the PA pay a price for its intransigence.

There's been a lot of media attention paid to some slurring of speech in Donald Trump's recent announcement about moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, especially this passage:

Most of the focus has been on his pronunciation of "the United States" in the peroration (though there were some issues with sibilants elsewhere in the speech):

My most recent post started out as a very minor note of approval about the continuing spread of singular they in journalism. Then the person who sent me the quote realized that Phillip Garcia, named in the cited newspaper story, had a preference for being referred to with the pronoun they, which nullified the point. So I modified the post to acknowledge that. I added a side remark that this caused a difficulty for me: although I find singular they fully grammatical and entirely natural with many types of antecedent, that's not true for singular personal name antecedents. I didn't reject the notion of following Garcia's preference; I said "I'll do my best, but it will be a real struggle."

Ironically, on re-reading the paragraph I saw it was more of a struggle than I thought: within minutes of learning about Garcia's preference I had unintentionally disrespected it by using "he". So I went back and corrected myself, overtly, the way people do in speech ("Phillip Garcia's profile reveals that he is — sorry, that they are…"). It was not snarky; it was an honest admission that I had found it hard to make an instant change to my syntactic habits. But it prompted an angry and disappointed reader signing in as Cass to comment* that my post was "immensely transphobic", and failing an immediate apology, "Language Log needs to take him off this blog."

This is Language Log, so let's be careful with our word choices. What has transphobia got to do with this? My young friend Magnus, born about 18 years ago as the daughter of a good friend of mine but now militantly trans-identified and male, expects to be called "he". I respect his wishes, of course. The use of they under consideration here has (normally) nothing to do with being trans. It's the requested usage of those who (whether trans or not) hate the binary sex distinction that Magnus has rebelled against in his own way; they wish to be referred to in a way that does not assign them to a sex category at all. I have young friends of that persuasion too, and I do my best to avoid the gendered third person singular pronouns when talking about them. I respect their choice.

Yet for simply touching in passing on a slight problem for the they-preference, I am suddenly the conservative hate figure of the week, targeted for dismissal and subjected to streams of hostility in an intemperate guest post by Kirby Conrod and a welter of comments underneath it. This hostility is, to put it mildly, unmotivated and misdirected.

A political cartoon reacting to the discussion of who wrote one of Donald Trump's tweets:

Forwarded by Alex Baumans, an email advertisement from Legend Footwear in London — "RESTOCK YOUR SHOEDROBE FOR WINTER!"

https://twitter.com/BryceElder/status/938104780546871296

This one isn't in the Eggcorn Database, and doesn't seem to be mentioned in the forum either. [But googling the phrase is not recommended…]

This is a guest post by Kirby Conrod.

[Note from Mark Liberman: Kirby Conrod seriously misinterprets (and/or misrepresents) the post they attack, and makes false assertions about its author's opinions and practices. Eric Bakovic should have recognized this, and it was wrong for him to have posted the piece rather than trying to remedy the misunderstandings privately. See "Courtesy and personal pronoun choice", 12/6/2017, and "Linguists and change", 12/15/2017, for an attempt to balance the scales.]

I'm sorry to see that the venerable Geoff Pullum is so desperately behind the times. I don't mean to be snarky, I genuinely am sad about it. It's not just a matter of being un-hip to the cool new language change in progress (singular "they" is making inroads syntactically in the types of antecedents speakers will use it with), but rather a methodological and disciplinary unhipness that really makes me feel bad.

First, let me address the rudeness: if a senior colleague of mine pulled this kind of self-conscious "he is–sorry, they are" on me in a professional setting, I'd file a complaint. If they did it in a casual setting, I'd have a nasty word for them. That's the kind of snide, intentional misgendering that I am not okay with. In writing, Pullum clearly has the ability to force a use of "they" even if he finds it distasteful. To do otherwise is profoundly disrespectful and borderline hostile, even as a supposedly self-effacing joke about his own grammar. It would've been easy to make the point of his difficulty in writing that sentence without using the wrong pronoun for anyone–and Pullum should seriously self-interrogate on why he thinks "he" would have been the alternative, anyways.

With that out of the way, I'll go into the linguistics first, then the methods.