Language Log

In the comments on "The order of ancestors" (12/24/2009), there was some discussion about the possible role of gender bias in determining the preference for orders like "mothers and fathers" over "fathers and mothers".  This discussion faced a basic empirical problem: there were more plausibly-relevant principles (a long list of apparent semantic and phonological preferences) than there were facts to explain.

In this post, I'll review in more depth the evidence about the preferred orders of English binomial expressions for gendered categories of humans. This review will leave us in the same logical impasse.  Then I'll tell you about the clever solution found by Saundra Wright, Jennifer Hay and Tessa Bent in their paper "Ladies first? Phonology, frequency, and the naming conspiracy", Linguistics 43(3): 531–561, 2005.

Andrew Dowd sends me a genuine, attested case of the kind of sentence that I have elsewhere called plausible angloid gibberish. It is a particular kind of mangled comparative that somehow seems English when it isn't. It has absolutely no right to be called grammatical, and nothing can explain why it is that we (falsely) believe that it has a meaning that could be accounted for in the regular way — it doesn't and it couldn't. No syntacticians that I know of can say why it sort of slips by, in comprehension and sometimes (as here) even in production. The sentence came from http://www.backspace.com/notes/2004/06/, citing AdAge, and it reads thus:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

Complete and utter syntactic nonsense. And yet when you read it you see what they meant long before you realize that they couldn't have meant it.

Before I had even met American Heritage Dictionary supervising editor Steve Kleinedler, I knew about his tattoo. A 2005 New York Times article about the young Turks of American lexicography revealed that Steve "has a phonetic vowel chart tattooed across his back." Recently Steve upgraded his ink with an even more elaborate IPA chart. Since my brother Carl has supplemented his science blog The Loom with the Science Tattoo Emporium, I asked Steve to send along a shot of his new improved body art to add to the collection. Read all about it here.

(Also in the Emporium, there's an Aztec speech glyph, some Paiute IPA, and a glottal stop. Feel free to email Carl with photos of your own linguistic tattoos.)

Paul Krugman in an op-ed piece ("Tidings Of Comfort") in today's NYT:

In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules are no longer operative. No, Virginia, at this point there is no sanity clause.

Since our Christmas-themed posts are a bit thin so far this year, here are a few topical blasts from Language Log's past:

2008: "Seven fishes"; "Happy Christmas";
2007: "One Christmas too long"; "Christmas and 'politically correct(ed)ness'", "'Tis the season", "The unkindness of strangers", "Victims and etymology", "Lexical repulsion", "Insert flap 'A' and throw away";
2006: "Merry … umm … Christmas, Will!", "Like, a Christmas gift card", "Happy tensing and coal in sex";
2005: "Christmas trees and holiday trees";
2004: "Talking animals: miracle or curse?", "A boxing day election — or not?"
2003 "'Twas the night before Christmas", "Same-sex Mrs. Santa: 'The semantics are confusing'"

Back in August, I posted a report about how the Hangeul alphabet had moved beyond the Korean Peninsula.  Now, nearly half a year later, it may be worth taking a look at how things are progressing in this novel attempt to introduce the Hangeul alphabet to members of a 60,000 member Indonesian tribe called the Cia-Cia.

Ben Zimmer called my attention to an article by Jon Herskovitz and Christine Kim entitled "Indonesian tribe turns to Korean to save language" that was made available by the AlertNet of the Thomson Reuters Foundation on December 23 and has appeared elsewhere as well.

Chris is puzzled by these Google counts, for famous quotations with and without quotation marks flanking the search string:

Gone With The Wind
about 797,000 for "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"
about 163,000 for Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!

Taxi Driver
about 17,500,000 for "You talkin' to me?"
about 7,450,000 for You talkin' to me?

As he explains: " I discovered something weird. In some cases, the more restrictive, double-quoted query returned more hits that the unquoted query. A lot more. "

Reader MH wrote to ask "I was wondering if the following phenomenon is backed up by any data, and if so, if it's unique to English", with respect to a bit of Twitter social science, wherein happymrlocust asked

Tell me twitter, when you refer to your grandparents together, who comes first, the grandmother or the grandfather?

and learned that:

Possibly this is an english language thing, but most replies have been "grandma first". Which is very curious.

This is not exactly the email message that I'm looking for in connection with a hotel reservation I've recently made:

… and anticipations of media to come (courtesy of the Pinheads):

To follow up on our recent discussion of the effects of Alzheimer's disease on the writing of Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie ("Literary Alzheimer's"; "Authorial Alzheimer's again"), I promised to post about the broader linguistic background, starting with a discussion of the normal effects of aging. With respect to lexical issues, there's a useful, if complicated, summary graph in a recent review paper coming out of the Language in the Aging Brain project (Mira Goral et al., "Change in lexical retrieval skills in adulthood", The Mental Lexicon 2: 215–240, 2007):

(Note that these are schematic plots from their statistical model, not the average values being modeled, much less the trajectory of any individual. The data comes from a "longitudinal data from 238 adults, ranging in age from 30 to 94, who were tested … over a period of 20 years".)

Here in the Edinburgh office of Language Log we are snowed in this morning. Thick, thick snow. (Though our language has only one word for it, we find that is quite enough.) There have been repeated falls overnight. This is unusual weather for Edinburgh. Part of the major London-to-Edinburgh highway, the A1, is being closed. Travel advisories of the don't-even-think-about-it type are being broadcast on the radio. And yet below the windows of our New Town apartment, cars and trucks and taxis belonging to those unable to understand broadcast warnings are sliding around and getting stuck on the snow-coated cobblestones of our street. People are digging spasmodically and hopelessly with rusty shovels they found in their basements to try and free these cars from their wintry doom. I saw one neighbour come out with an ice axe to try and free a truck that was unable to get up the hill. It was in vain. Linguists are helping too. We have teams out across the city doing comprehension tests: asking the drivers of stuck cars, "Which part of ‘unless absolutely necessary’ did you find hard to understand?"

Vaguely parallel to preposition doubling, there's a phenomenon involving extra instances of that.  A typical pattern is …VERB that ADVERB that SENTENCE, e.g. this comment by Robert Gibbs about Mary Robinson:

There are statements that obviously that she has made that the president doesn't agree with, and that's probably true for a number of the people that the president is recognizing for their lifetime contributions.