Language Log

In response to Eric Bakovic's recent Language Log post asserting that he doesn't live on Main Street, Victor Mair sent this recent New Yorker cartoon:

This is a follow-up to my syntax quiz from Sunday. Kai von Fintel was the first to correctly note that it was a trick question: swallow hard is probably intransitive in the relevant McCain quote, and so this is (probably) neither an instance of a parasitic gap nor of "across-the-board movement, coupled with right node raising out of a coordinate structure". There were various good attempts by others to show that it is actually an example of one or the other, though, of course under the assumption that swallow hard is, or at least could be, transitive (one reader even urged me not to concede defeat — even though I hadn't, I had only admitted to planting a trick question). Thanks to those commenters who accepted that the 'intransitive camp' had a point but that they'd like to give the quiz a go on the terms that I laid out.

Ever wonder what Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" would look like overlaid with electronic text markup? Well, wonder no more!

(Source text here.)

Sarah Palin's accent has elicited a great deal of curiosity, and now Slate has posted a well-researched analysis by the OED's Jesse Sheidlower. Here's the first paragraph:

Since Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican candidate for vice president, many people have made comments about her unusual speech, comparing it to accents heard in the movie Fargo, in the states of Wisconsin and Idaho, and in Canada. Some have even attributed her manner of speaking to her supposed stupidity. But Palin actually has an Alaskan accent, one from the Matnuska and Susitna Valley region, where Palin's hometown, Wasilla, is located.

A more impressionistic take, with commentary by Rosina Lippi-Green (author of English with an Accent) appeared yesterday on Politico.

"Canada PM faces plagiarism claim", says the BBC. And indeed some copying certainly occurred — in addition to comparing the texts, the story juxtaposes and then overlays video of a speech made by Australian PM John Howard on March 18, 2003, with video of a speech made by Canadian politician (and now PM) Stephen Harper. Here's a bit of the overlaid audio:

But as the story makes clear, the copying was actually done by Harper's then speechwriter, one Owen Lippert:

A Canadian Conservative Party speech-writer has resigned after Prime Minister Stephen Harper was accused of plagiarism in a speech he made in 2003.

Owen Lippert admitted he had been "overzealous in copying segments" of a speech in support of the invasion of Iraq by then Australian PM John Howard.

Mr Lippert said neither his superiors nor Mr Harper, who was opposition leader at the time, had been aware.

Irregular Webcomic has its own view of the U.S. presidential debates:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

More drama here than we've seen in the actual debates.

A few days ago, in discussing Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin ("The phonetics of flop sweat", 9/26/2008), I quoted the reaction "Those aren't talking points; they're babbling points". But in Couric's 9/29 interview with Governor Palin and Senator McCain together, things went differently, in a way that deserves notice.

Andrew Gelman wrote to ask "Do you have any idea why blogs are often considered to be 'places' (rather than 'things')?", with a link to a post at his weblog that explains

Henry Farrell referred here to his blog as a "place." Which seemed funny to me because I think of a blog as a "thing." Henry replied:

That's the way that I [Henry] think about blogs (or at least group blogs and blogs with comments) – places where people meet up, chat, form communities, drift away from each other etc.

My analogy was blog-as-newspaper, the self-publishing idea, and I'm not used to thinking of a newspaper, or even a listserv, as a place. I think there is an aspect of the analogy that I'm still missing.

NASA is reporting that the Mars lander has observed snow falling, though it vaporizes before it reaches the ground. NASA is silent about how many words the Martians have for snow.

In response to a recent Language Log post that mentioned Belgium as the New Jersey of Europe ("Willimantic", 9/27/2008), Cosma Shalizi wrote to draw my attention to the Belgian joke embedded in Robert Pinsky's poem "Impossible to Tell".

My posting on Clark Hoyt's column on the NYT's practices in referring to people by name has elicited interesting commentary, some of which I'll talk about here.

There were two sets of Times practices Hoyt discussed: the use of "courtesy titles" (that is, Title + LN [last name], in Mrs. Clinton or Senator Clinton, rather than LN alone — or, of course FN [first name] alone) in non-first mentions of someone; and the use of middle names, as in Barack Hussein Obama.

Zippy is pursued by electronic communications and seeks unavailability:

Speaking of the soon-to-be-approved bailout plan: I've frankly gotten pretty tired of the constant references to "Main Street" (generally if not exclusively as opposed to "Wall Street") in discussions of the bailout. It's not that I don't understand the metonym (and why it might have once sounded like the perfect phrase to oppose "Wall Street" with), I just don't find it very effective — that, or the relative novelty of it (for me) wore off very, very quickly and now it just sounds cliché and, quite frankly, devoid of content.