Language Log

From the cartoon Ham and Wonder (by "lapsed linguist" Joe), an adventure in garden pathing, with a bit of explanation:

I haven't had a chance to do any analysis of last night SOTU address, but Nate Silver has some interesting observations about the matrix of word-count comparisons to other such addresses over recent decades.

[Update: and more here from Jamie Pennebaker.]

[Update 2: discussion of computational models of standing ovations by Dan Katz, including a link to a NetLogo applet.]

[Update 3: for a discussion of the actual content, see James Fallows in the Atlantic.]

The theory of Speech Acts gives us a couple of dozen descriptive categories for the things people do with words and phrases. The theory of Dialog Acts gives us a couple of dozen descriptive categories focusing specifically on the things people do to a conversation with words and phrases. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and its various competitors give us a couple of dozen descriptive categories for the ways people use relations between words and phrases in framing an argument or telling a story. There are several other descriptive systems for discourse structures, such as the one used by the Penn Discourse Treebank.

Discourse analysis using such categories, though often insightful, is rarely funny. But you can make people laugh by caricaturing a text or conversation through self-referential descriptions of discourse functions and relations, abstracted away from specific content.  I can think of two specific examples of this, though I'm sure that I've seen others over the years.

Carl Voss wrote to me about this sentence in a recent humor piece by Woody Allen in The New Yorker called "Udder Madness (I had already noticed the same sentence when reading the piece):

That's why when included in last week's A-list was a writer-director in cinema with a long list of credits although I was unfamiliar with the titles I anticipated a particularly scintillating Labor Day.

It is a remarkable piece of sentence construction. Here's what's going on.

What do support poles, staff positions, battery terminals, army encampments, blog articles, earring stems, trading stations, and snail mail have in common with billboard advertising, accounts recording, making bail, and assigning diplomats?

Today's Non Sequitur:

That's the title of Victor Mair's talk tomorrow [Wednesday 1/27] afternoon, 5:00-6:30, in the Rainey Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  So if you're in the Philadelphia area, and you're a fan of Victor's LL posts, or of his work with the Xinjiang mummies, or of his many books, or you're just interested in Bronze Age Asia, come to 3260 South Street at 5:00 for a treat.

Several readers have written to suggest LL coverage of the latest viral site, "Sleep Talkin' Man". So if you're one of the half-dozen netizens who haven't yet browsed this compendium of oneirophonic entertainment, by all means do so now.

I haven't written about this because I don't have much to say, except that it's interesting how interested people are in such things. In some Elysian bistro, André Breton and Philippe Soupault are doubtless kicking themselves for being born too early to publish in the t-shirt and coffee-mug market:

In the January 25 New York Times, two items that caught my eye:

First, a front-page piece on the Tohono O'odham Nation of southern Arizona: "In Drug War, Tribe Feels Invaded by Both Sides" (by Erik Eckholm). The tribe is pressed by drug smugglers and by federal agents, a combination that has made their lives difficult indeed.

Linguists will recognize the group as the people formerly known as the Papago (a name given them by unfriendly outsiders), whose (Uto-Aztecan) language is familiar to linguists through the work of the late Ken Hale and his student Ofelia Zepeda. Reading about the trials of the Tohono O'oodham is like hearing distressing news about an old friend.

The business about musical modality and emotion reminds me of an amazing unpublished experimental result.  At least, it's amazing if it's true; and I think it probably is.

Over the weekend, one of the guests on the NPR show "Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen" was the Malaysian singer-songwriter Zee Avi, who has managed to convert YouTube buzz into an indie recording contract and a well-received debut album. Most of her lyrics are in English, but one of her songs, which she performed on the show, code-mixes Malay and English. As she explains, the song "Kantoi" (meaning "Busted") is in "a hybrid of Malay and English called Manglish." I talked about Manglish a few years ago in the post, "Malaysia cracks down on 'salad language,'" where I discussed measures taken by the Malaysian government to ban Malay-English mixtures. I wonder how government officials feel now that Manglish is getting international exposure, thanks to a diminutive, ukulele-strumming songstress.

Over on ADS-L, Larry Horn read his NYT carefully:

One additional highlight of the Virginia Heffernan guido/guidette piece in today's N. Y. Times Magazine section is a nice example of a plural pronoun with singular sex-known but indefinite antecedent, a phenomenon we've discussed in the past. Here's Sammi Sweetheart, describing the role she plays in the MTV Reality show, "Jersey Shore", as quoted by Heffernan

"A Guidette takes really good care of themselves, has pretty hair, cakes on makeup, has tan skin, wears the hottest heels."

Just a pointer to a bit of whimsical language play described by Erin McKean in the Boston Globe's "The Word" column: composites of the form X Y Z, created by overlapping a composite X Y with a composite Y Z. So: sweet tooth fairy, from sweet tooth plus tooth fairy. Examples that make "a certain cockeyed sense" (parlor game warden) or those "merging wildly divergent things" (magnetic personality disorder) are especially entertaining.

Post comments to Erin's column.