Language Log

We can fairly be accused of spending too much time recently on the subject of how Sarah Palin talks, though in this respect, Language Log is simply reflecting the level of popular interest represented by the millions watching her clips on YouTube. This post also pivots (to use a couple of her special words) off of her way of talking — so if you're tired of the subject, you might want to move on, or even avail yourself of our famous double-your-money-back-in-case-of-less-than-full-satisfaction guarantee.

In a comment on a recent LL post, John Curran wrote "I noticed last night that Governor Palin's verbal style seemed to employ more deictic terms". (Here deictic refers to the demonstrative "pointing words" this, that, these, and those.) John's observation is mostly but not entirely true, as this table of word-counts from the debate transcript suggests:

In an op-ed in Saturday's New York Times, Steve Pinker tries to explain or extenuate some of Sarah Palin's linguistic derelictions, real and alleged. Among other things, he says that Palin shouldn't be taxed for saying "nucular," which is

 …not a sign of ignorance. This reversal of vowel-like consonants (nuk-l’-yer —> nuk-y’-ler) is common in the world’s languages, and is no more illiterate than pronouncing “iron” the way most Americans do, as “eye-yern” instead of “eye-ren.”

I agree with Pinker's overall conclusion that Palin shouldn't be on the hook for this one, but I think both of the claims here are wrong. It's not a phonetic process, and if it isn't exactly a sign of ignorance, it's the legacy of it. 

Dr. Edward S. Klima died on September 25 at the age of 77 from complications of brain surgery. Dr. Klima was founder and professor emeritus of the Department of Linguistics at UC San Diego (my home department), adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and associate director of the Salk's Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Dr. Klima's wife and longtime collaborator is the equally eminent Dr. Ursula Bellugi. Perhaps their best-known work is their book The Signs of Language (Harvard University Press, 1979), which was named the Most Outstanding Book in the Behavioral Sciences by the Association of American Publishers. This book was instrumental not only in establishing the importance of sign language research in linguistics and cognitive science more broadly, but also in affirming the finding — not widely appreciated at the time — that sign languages are natural human languages in the same way that spoken languages are. Drs. Klima and Bellugi were jointly awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association in 1993.

UCSD has a news release here, and the New York Times obituary is here.

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky notes

Semifreddo's sweet baguette, which has a big circle on it. The center of the circle says "NO TRANS FATS", and the circle itself says "NEVER HAD" at the top and "NEVER WILL" at the bottom.

No trans fats is a NP conveying something like 'There are no trans fats in this [referring to the food the label is attached to, that is, to Semifreddo's sweet baguettes in general]' or 'This has no trans fats in it'. The other two expressions are subjectless, with a referent supplied from context (once again, Semifreddo's sweet baguette). The point of special interest here is at the other end of these two expressions: had and will with nothing following.

Never will is unproblematic in this context: this is just Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), with the missing VP complement of the auxiliary will interpreted as 'have any trans fats' (the no–any alternation is a side point of interest). But never had presents a little puzzle.

In commenting on a recent LL post, Daddy G. asked

Does the term "code-switching" apply ONLY to those instances when the practice is consciously employed for effect? Or is the term more generally applied to the switching itself, regardless of whether or not there is conscious control involved?

With respect to the use of the term, the answer is simple. From the beginning  — the classical reference is John Gumperz, "Linguistic and Social Interaction in Two Communities", American Anthropologist, 66(S3): 137-153, 1964 — the term "code switching" has been used to refer to what speakers do, not whether they do it consciously.

One of the things that marks Sarah Palin as a linguistic outsider is her use of also. In part, this is just a matter of frequency. In her contribution to last night's vice-presidential debate, she used the word also 48 times in about 7600 words, accounting for  about 0.63% of her words.  Her opponent, Joe Biden, used also only 3 times in about 7200 words. Relative to the rates seen in large and representative corpora, Gov. Palin used also about 5 to 10 times more often than expected, while Sen. Biden used also about 2 to 3 times less often than expected

OK, I'm going to give it a shot — I'm going to make a comment about language use by some politicians while giving Language Log readers what they come here for: "discussion of language by real live linguists".

After the vice-presidential debate last night, I was pleased not to have heard Gov. Sarah Palin repeat Sen. John McCain's claim in the first presidential debate that Sen. Barack Obama has "the most liberal voting record" in the Senate. Speaking as a "real live linguist", this kind of claim is to my mind a little more insidious than your typical lie or stretching of the truth in a political campaign. Here's why I think so.

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reports that a if you play the CD entitled (on the cover) "Disco F*cks House" on iTunes, the program inquires, "Do you wish to import 'Disco Fucks House'?" Several things are going on here.

The first thing you need to know is that the CD is German. The second thing you need to know is that the CD is a disco/house mix by the Fabulous Glitterboys (a German group, despite the name). A third thing you might be interested to hear is that the Glitterboys also have a weekly radio show called "Disco F*cks House".

The points of interest are: the use of taboo avoidance characters, and the interpretation of "Disco Fucks House".

In the 13 September NewScientist's "Feedback" column: a note beginning "There should be a law against it, we grumble", with a report that back in June Reuters distributed a story on the Japanese company Genepax, which claims to have produced a car that runs on "nothing but water". The magazine noted that the claim has been debunked a number of times over the past few years, but keeps re-surfacing. A possible remedy:

We thought for a moment we had a way of stemming the tide of water stories. Surely those clever people who write word-processor programs that put annoying green wiggles under our sentences with notes like "the grammatical passive voice has been used" [nice deployment of the passive!] could add a feature that crosses sentences out in red with the note "this does not happen in the real world". Shouldn't that feature be made mandatory in news organisations?

But then we remembered that when Microsoft tells us off about our grammar we invariably click on "Ignore rule" and proceeed blithely on. Back to the drawing board…

While I was busy doing various other things (like wasting my time on this post), I missed an e-mail from fellow Language Logger Ben Zimmer kindly tipping me off to the fact that The Linguists (which I've blogged about here, here, and here) was screened last night in Washington, DC, as part of National Geographic's All Roads Film Project. Sorry, readers in DC, for not being more on the ball — but I hope that those of you who read the Post will have seen the piece in yesterday's edition entitled "Babble On, Say Researchers In 'Linguists' Documentary" (coincidentally also noted by a commenter on one of my recent posts).

That's the bag-of-words summary of last night's vice-presidential debate.

This is a follow-up on a couple of my more recent LL posts on language and politics, and on the discussion that has been generated by one of them in particular.

First, Main Street. Several commenters wrote that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not being "unnecessarily redundant" (as I put it) by referring to "Main Street and everyday Americans", asserting that "Main Street" refers exclusively to the commercial/business part of a (small) town/city in America, not to any residential areas nor to the "everyday Americans" who live there. (Interestingly, some of the comments seem to be duplicating themselves over on Mark's post from earlier this morning.)

While filing some examples of summative constructions, I came across the discussion of summative modifiers in Joseph Williams's Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (I have the 3rd ed., of 2008), which made me wonder whether we had said good things about Williams's books on style here on Language Log. The answer is yes, but just barely, so it's time for a note. And for a late notice that Williams (long-time professor of English at the University of Chicago) died in February.