Language Log

Continuing today's snowclone theme… For snowclone collector Mark Peters, the phrasal template "X is the Y of Z" is the gift that just keeps on giving. We noted in December that Mark had launched a blog entirely devoted to the snowclone, aptly titled "The Rosa Parks of Blogs." Since then, Mark has enterprisingly spun off the blog into a regular weekly feature for JamsBio Magazine. In each installment, the Y in "X is the Y of Z" stands for the name of a prominent artist from the world of popular music.

Here's a sampling:

• The Keith Richards of the cat world
• The Barry White of the apocalypse
• The Spice Girls of the ancient world
• The Britney Spears of the planets
• The Ozzy Osbourne of the banking world
• The Courtney Love of yards
• The Chuck Berry of nationalism
• The Johnny Cash of Communism
• The Johnny Rotten of Chinatown food courts

Snowclone mavens often have trouble deciding whether some pattern is sufficiently fixed to count as a snowclone, or whether it's just an option the syntax of the language makes available. I don't think there's an easy answer.

Case in point: X REQUIRES ALL THE Y OF A Z. As in this quotation from Gail Collins in the NYT of 2 April, p. A27:

He is the longtime minority leader of the [New York] State Assembly, a job that requires all the quick-thinking and decision-making capacity of a fishing warden in the Gobi Desert.

(That is, Z requires no real Y, so X requires no significant Y, either: being a fishing warden in the Gobi Desert requires no real quick-thinking or decision-making capacity, so being minority leader of the Assembly doesn't either.)

With a little ingenuity, you can google up more examples (and others with verbs similar to require, like take or demand). But the question is: do such examples get their effect straightforwardly from the syntax of English (admittedly, with figurative language plugged in), or is there some short-circuiting from a complex figure to a conveyed meaning?

I just don't know, and I don't think there's any easy way to decide in particular instances, short of finding some way to get inside people's heads. The best we can do is flag some possible cases for investigation — while being open to the possibility that the status of the expression is different for different people. After all, even X IS THE NEW Y (now so omnipresent that I stopped collecting instances of it long ago) started as a fresh figure, a genuine invention.

A reader writes to ask about disjunctive subjects in English and how subject-verb agreement works in cases like the following:

Neither Barbara nor I ?am ?is ?are able to …
If you or I ?am ?are there, …

As it happens, I posted on the subject to ADS-L some years. I intended to post a version on Language Log, but I seem not to have gotten around to it. Until now.

According to a press release posted yesterday by Michael Eisen on the NY Giants web site, the team has released Plaxico Burress, the wide receiver who famously shot himself in the leg at a nightclub. Eisen cites the player's achievements:

Burress is perhaps best known for catching the game-winning touchdown pass in the Giants’ upset victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. He eluded Patriots cornerback Ellis Hobbs with an inside move, then ran to the outside, where he caught Eli Manning’s 13-yard throw with 35 seconds remaining in the game. Burress had two receptions in the Super Bowl, catching Manning’s first and last passes of the game.

In his four years with the Giants Burress caught 344 passes, which places him 12th on the franchise’s career list, one catch ahead of Earnest Gray and three behind Aaron Thomas. Burress had 3,681 receiving yards and caught 33 touchdown passes for the Giants.

And then he quotes the coach:

“Plaxico’s contribution to our championship season in 2007 can never be underestimated or undervalued,” said Head Coach Tom Coughlin.

In "Sign of the Times,"  I discussed a sign in a New York shop window written in Russian but ostensibly addressed to Chinese.  Now we have a bilingual sign in Russian and English:

Following up on had did (here) and have saw (here): a note on Richard Meade Bache; an I've saw sighting from the 20's (from John V. Burke); and (from Breffni O'Rourke) an observation about different verbs DO.

As promised in part 1, I'm going to survey CGEL's taxonomy of uses of would, and do a tiny corpus study to get an idea of their relative frequency.  In a later post, I'll take up the implications for the recently-fashionable "that would be me" construction. (For background, see "We've met the enemy, and that would be in the modal auxiliary, Bob" 3/18/2009, and "Why 'that would be me'? (part 1)" 4/2/2009.)

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Chapter 3, The Verb, by Rodney Huddleston, covers "The preterite forms could, might, would, should" in section 9.8, pp. 198-302. The section starts this way:

We have distinguished three uses of the preterite: past time, backshift, and modal remoteness. It is a distinctive property of the modal auxiliaries that the modal remoteness use is much more frequent and less restricted than the past time use — the complete reverse of what holds for other verbs.

In Athens for the EACL (European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics). Weather lovely, wish you were here. Athens more beautiful than I had expected. And for me, a grammarian married to a philosopher and interested in logic and mathematics, being in Greece is utterly awe-inspiring. The Greeks invented alphabets (writing systems that separate the consonants from the vowels) and the Western tradition of grammars (which basically start with Dionysius Thrax; yes, Panini in India was much earlier, but that is not where today's grammatical tradition comes from, because no one in Europe knew about it until late in the 18th century). They founded modern Western philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and logic. Barbara and I walked across a patch of ground called the Ancient Agora and realized that this was where Socrates taught. It is unbelievable. And then you climb up to the Acropolis and see the Parthenon and you realize it's unbelievably more unbelievable than you ever believed.

So, did I identify anything linguistic enough to justify putting this postcard on Language Log? Not really. But Barbara and I did have a giggle each day as we flipped the Do Not Disturb card on our door handle to signal that our hotel room was ready for cleaning. The hotel had not appreciated the vital nature of the little particle up, and they had printed on the card the words Make My Room. Somehow, since Clint Eastwood's Sudden Impact (filmed in Santa Cruz), that seemed very funny ("Go ahead!"). I have no idea why make up the bed and make the bed are basically equivalent but make up the room and make the room are not. Not everything about English syntax and semantics is regular and logically explicable. Some of it is as messy and lawless and unpredictable as Athens traffic or Dirty Harry's policing methods.

English is a fine language in most respects, but its morphosyntactic resources for talking about sampled properties of groups are remarkably poor.  (Not that other languages are any better, as far as I know.)  In particular, English speakers have no simple alternative to the use of generic statements about whole groups or typical members, when discussing cases where between-group differences are significant, but small relative to within-group variation — Xs are P-er than Ys, or Xs prefer A to B, or an X prefers A while a Y prefers B.

The result is especially unfortunate when it involves invidious comparisons in socially sensitive areas, but the problem comes up whenever anyone discusses properties of groups.  This morning, Stephen Jones brought a particularly striking example to my attention: an article in today's Independent, "Oodles of noodles: Britain prefers Chinese to curry".

There's a recently-fashionable construction, in which "would be" is used where plain "is" might have been expected. For example, in the imaginary Q&A below, I might respond with B₂ rather than B₁

A: I'm looking for Mark Liberman.
B₁: That's me.
B₂: That would be me.

A couple of weeks ago, our comments section featured a lively discussion of this phenomenon. (As far as I know, there isn't any common-used term for it, so pending a better idea, I'll call it the TWBM construction, for "That Would Be Me"). Opinions differed, as they often do in discussions of matters linguistic, about where to draw the boundaries of the phenomenon, as well as about its meaning, origins, circumstances of use, and so on. In particular, Bloix suggested that "The point of the 'would be' construction is that it implies doubt on the part of the speaker", while I expressed skepticism about the relevance of doubt to the meaning of this construction.

The following sign is posted in a New York City shop window:

Geoff Pullum gave us a really neat lesson on Finnish short vowels a few months ago, pointing out things that nobody but native speakers have ever known — that Finns produce a subtle duration of short /Ih/ vowels that the rest of us don’t even hear. But hey, The Finnish vowel duration distinction doesn’t come close to what’s going on in a remote part of Tanzania.

A really, really short /Ih/ has been discovered by phonetic scientists who study vowel duration. Phoneticians in East Africa recently have stumbled upon the shortest vowel ever known to humankind. They discovered that the duration of the /Ih/ vowel, already known for its very short length in languages like English (to say nothing about it’s tremendous importance in Finnish), is produced in .11 hundredths of a second by a small band of speakers of Kwatnaksa, who live on an otherwise unoccupied island in the Indian Ocean.

Facing a steep drop in revenue, Language Log plans to cut the pay of all employees by 10 percent and will place some writers on unpaid furloughs. There will also be additional budget adjustments, according to executive offices on the penthouse floor.

The reduced pay for non-union employees, including top executives, will become effective April 1. Several writers have been offered early retirement but at the time of this writing, management has not received responses from any of them. Anonymous sources say that the writers instead demand that the executives return all huge bonuses that they received at the end of the past fiscal year.