Language Log

Listening to Weekend America on my way back from a holiday party on Saturday, I heard one of the best noun phrases I think I've ever heard (uttered by WA host John Moe). Coincidentally, it's in this short segment on holiday parties and cocktails, very near the beginning in fact, so take a listen if you care to. Here's the noun phrase in context:

This time of year weekends are a time for holiday parties, and all the traditions that go along with holiday parties. You know, the sweaters that you only wear just that one time of year, the conversations that you end up in with people who you're trying to remember the names of all the way through but you kinda smile and fake your way through…

For some time now I have been in syntactic pain over what appeared to be a TV show in the UK with a completely ungrammatical title. It's a competitive ballroom dancing show on BBC TV, compered by the octogenarian Bruce Forsyth (who after what must be half a century on TV is still using his catchphrase greeting "Nice to see you, to see you, nice" every single time he confronts a camera). The name of the show is Strictly Come Dancing.

I was baffled by it. It doesn't seem to have a parse at all. You simply can't use a manner adverb like strictly to modify an invitation like "Come dancing". What on earth was going on? It was many months before I realized that almost certainly Wikipedia would reveal all for me, if I just swallowed my foolish pride and looked the show up. Wikipedia — always great on showbiz topics — did not let me down. And I could have kicked myself.

Yesterday, I took a quick poll of a few small English-language texts, to see how often future-time meanings were expressed in various tensed-verb forms ("Alternative futures", 12/11/2008). My conclusion was that by far the commonest method in written American English is to use forms of the modal auxiliary will; but that in spoken American English, other alternatives are closer to even with it. However, my sample was too small to draw any very reliable quantitative conclusions.

So this morning, I'm doing another Breakfast Experiment™ to try to get better numbers, at least for some of the alternatives in the spoken language.

Renowned broadcaster (and part-time word maven) John Humphrys gives a quick summary of the weather forecast just before the 7:30 news summary on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" program in the UK each morning; and what he said this morning was a classic of the genre: "Pretty miserable by and large." A charming example, I thought, of the tradition of extremely vague weather-forecast language in the blustery British Isles.

Just in time for the holiday season: The Linguists educational DVD! According to the announcement on the LINGUIST List, it "includes 30 minutes of DVD extras profiling endangered languages around the world and efforts to archive and revive them; and a discussion guide created by Dr. K. David Harrison and the Center for Applied Linguistics."

The catch, of course, is that this DVD was produced for educational purposes, which somehow makes the price a whopping $300. But c'mon, you know you want one.

PC and Pixel for 12/11/2008 (link sent in by Michael Erlewine) :

Yesterday, 10 November, was International Human Rights Day, and for the occasion two San Franciscans spearheaded a protest and boycott (across the U.S.) on behalf of gay rights and in opposition to California's Proposition 8 (which banned same-sex marriage).  Two points of linguistic interest: the name of the event is "A Day Without a Gay" (sometimes reported as "A Day Without Gays"), and people are encouraged to "call in gay" to work.

In yesterday's post on "what's will?", I rashly asserted that "the commonest way to express a future-time meaning is indeed to use the auxiliary verb will". This provoked immediate questions and counter-claims. So I promised to devote a Breakfast Experiment™ to quantifying the choice among alternative verb forms used to express future time in English.

In its article on Google's year-end "Zeitgeist" listings of the most searched terms, BBC News reports:

The things people around the globe have in common are a strong interest in socialising and politics, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search at Google.

"Social networks compromised four out of the top ten global fastest-rising queries while the US election held everyone's interest around the globe," she wrote on Google's official blog.

I checked back on the Google Blog and what Mayer wrote was:

Social networks comprised four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries, while the U.S. election held everyone's interest around the globe.

So the BBC editors, besides changing 10 to ten and removing the comma before while, apparently also changed comprised to compromised. A fascinating miscorrection (or incorrection, if you prefer).

Linguification is still alive and well. In a Morning Edition interview on NPR today Rob Chametzky heard Condoleezza Rice saying, "To mention Robert Mugabe in the same sentence with the President of the United States is an outrage." No it isn't.

In connection with the previous post, and in the spirit of the season, I can't resist adding this:

Yesterday's email brought this sensible question from Judith Parker, a middle-school teacher at The Philadelphia School:

In the grammar text we are perusing, the concept of modals has raised its head.  The words "The nice thing about modern grammarians is that they have reduced the number of TENSES in English to just two, PRESENT and PAST.  Notice even WILL (formerly considered to represent the future tense) is really a PRESENT TENSE MODAL expressing present time intent or will…..)"

The class and I are perplexed.  How wide-spread is this thinking?  Can you explain this, particularly the WHY this change came about, and let us know how widely accepted this concept is?  It has not crept into most grammar books that kids use.  I told them that I would ask a linguist about this since my linguistic studies are in a distant past.

Let me try to give a short answer to start with.

It's convenient to talk about past, present, and future time, and it's convenient to call the commonly-associated English verb forms past, present, and future tense: "we liked it; we like it; we'll like it." But when you look more carefully at the whole pattern of possibilities for English tensed verbs, I think that you (and your class) will see the force of the argument that English doesn't really have a future tense form, even though it has many ways to express a future-time meaning.

it's true that a common way to express a future-time meaning is indeed to use the auxiliary verb will — but from a syntactic point of view, will is used in the same way as the class of words generally called "modal auxiliaries", such as can, may, might, must, should, and would.

Furthermore, a closer look at the meanings of will suggests that it doesn't really express future time, but rather has the same sort of relationship to time-meanings that (for example) may does.

The terminology remains variable, but at least since Otto Jespersen a hundred years ago, many grammarians working on English have taken all this to mean that English has only two basic tenses, present and past. (Well, Jespersen called the past tense by the old-fashioned name "preterit" — but as I said, the terminology varies.)

Watching the new DVD release of the patriotic World War II musical This is the Army recently, when listening to champion boxer Joe Louis in a cameo delivering his one line, I found myself thinking of, of all people, Tina Fey.

Specifically, what came to mind was her movie of earlier this year, Baby Mama, whose title was one of assorted indications of late that baby mama, the black American inner-city term referring to a woman one has had children with but is not married to, has become mainstream. Further evidence was when Fox News used the term in a teaser graphic last summer in reference to Michelle Obama ("Outraged liberals: stop picking on Obama’s baby mama"). Graceless, but in its assumption that viewers were familiar with the term, indicative.

Hunt up the derivation of the term these days and even the OED has fallen for a tasty but mistaken idea that the source is Jamaican Creole ("patois"), in which there is a term "baby-mother". However, the chance that a random locution from Jamaican Creole becomes common coin across all of black America is small—a fluent speaker of Black English could go several years without uttering a single word born in Jamaican Creole. Plus, usually the Jamaican term doesn’t really mean what baby mama does, referring more generally to a pregnant woman.