Language Log

Craig Russell, one of the commenters on my post "What sounds like a clearing of the throat", asked a question that deserves an answer:

Even though the consonantal *sound* in the middle is singular, is it really a sin (or even a mistake) to use the word "consonant" to refer to certain letters of the alphabet?

Craig went on to suggest that by implying people should use the term "consonant" for a sound type rather than a letter type I was just being a prescriptive pedant of the type I normally condemn.

Well, the short answer to his question is yes, it's a real mistake. But I'll give a longer one.

The following poster is circulating among students from Shanghai, both inside and outside of China:

For a complete translation, go to the next page.

Not surprisingly, my post on /men tuh list/ yesterday was not well received. I tossed it out, stirred the pot, and it bubbled up. Many readers, some angry, have written me to tell me how utterly wrong my syllabification was. I fully agree.  But that wasn’t what I wanted to communicate. I don’t really care how Mentalist syllabifies the name of that TV program. My point, obviously made too obscurely, or too subtly, or too ineptly, had nothing to do with the phonological property of a word. It had to do with children learning how to read. Language Log readers set me straight, but also they were unanimous in saying that the phonologically correct division of mentalist produces two words totally unrelated to the meaning of that word, men and list. I could be very wrong (not unusual for me), but when children find these two unrelated words in mentalist as they try to split the word into phonologically accurate syllables, the result seems counterproductive to the process of learning to read. As heretical as this may sound, I suspect that sometimes a correct analysis of something can actually hinder rather than help children learn new tasks.

I'm reading (I don't know why) an article in The New Yorker about golf course renovation in the Outer Hebrides, and I come to this (April 20, 2009, p.38):

On South Uist, linksland is called machair, a Gaelic word. It's pronounced "mocker," more or less, but with the two central consonants represented by what sounds like a clearing of the throat.

That's one consonant in the middle there, of course — evidently a voiceless velar fricative. And I dream, Language Loggers, of a day when anyone who completed high school will be able to write "It's pronounced [ˈmaxər]," and all New Yorker readers will understand. A day when analytical knowledge about human languages is not still mired in the state it was in long before the American Civil War. Is learning the largely quite intuitive symbols of the International Phonetic Association's universal alphabet, and thus gaining an ability to represent pronunciations accurately for all the languages of the earth, so far beyond the intellectual reach of a teenager who already knows the Roman alphabet? Do we have to live forever with "what sounds like a clearing of the throat" and similar impressionistic descriptions? (It's a hopelessly wrong impression, incidentally: clearing the throat is a bronchial and laryngeal matter, not a light frication produced between the back of the tongue and the soft palate.)

About a month ago, Brad DeLong took Ross Douthat to task for his unpleasant description of a failed undergraduate hook-up ("Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes on the Pill", 3/16/2009). DeLong made his case mainly by quoting Douthat's own words, from p. 184 of his 2005 book Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. The quoted passage was picked up and reproduced in more than a dozen other blog posts, for example in Wonkette ("Misogynist Neck-Beard Ross Douthat Shares his Sexy Stories", 3/18/2009).

It's hard to disagree with the rather negative tone of the comments on Mr. Douthat's attitude towards the young woman "who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon", and who "bored and somewhat disgusted" him by "drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks" and "pushing her tongue into my mouth". Perhaps the most temperate of these remarks was "it's clear he is no gentleman".

But I'm here to defend Douthat from the many commenters who also accused him of being an incompetent writer — e.g. Froborr at slacktivist.com who suggested that "once again we note the curious association between being a horrible person and being a bad writer".

Even jezebel.com is getting into the S&W 50th anniversary act (Sadie, "Stylistas", 4/16/2009):

The Elements of Style, Strunk and White's timeless usage and composition handbook, is 50 today. Please place a preposition after the relative pronoun in its honor.

I applaud this attempt to re-purpose words that have otherwise lost their meaning in popular culture, but frankly, the results are a stylistic disappointment.

It's always dangerous to speculate that some phenomenon hasn't been described in the literature, as I did with the I-T-PST recently. Someone will come along with a bibliographic reference, usually to something you've read.

So it is in this case. Russell Lee-Goldman wrote this morning with this quote from Fillmore (1988:51):

Many grammatical constructions can be shown to have this same context-characterizing preperty. As a simple example, the syntactic idiom which has the introducers IT'S TIME, IT'S ABOUT TIME, and IT'S HIGH TIME, generally requires that the following indicative clause be past tense in form.

(The reference is to Charles Fillmore's "The mechanisms of "Construction Grammar"", Berkeley Linguistics Society 14.35-55.)

Lee-Goldman remarks that this is probably one of the many cases where Fillmore and his associates mention a phenomenon in passing, without picking up on it later. I should have thought of Chuck Fillmore.

[Added 19 April: Fillmore's mention was of I-T-PST, but Geoff's original report was about I-T-PRS, and I still don't have a reference in the scholarly literature for that one.]

Now it's time to clarify some of the details of what I'll call the I-T-PST construction (as in "It's time that I left"), introduced by Geoff Pullum here. In fact, there are three relevant constructions, differing in which inflectional form they have in the subordinate clause:

I-T-PST: It's time (that) he had some success.
I-T-PRS: It's time (that) he has some success.
I-T-BSE: It's time (that) he have some success.

(The labeling here anticipates some results of the discussion to follow.)

People differ as which of these constructions they have and, when they have several, whether the constructions differ semantically or pragmatically, and whether there are contexts in which one construction is preferred to another. There are probably subtle differences between the that and zero variants and between the contracted and uncontracted variants, and there's certainly more to be said about the modifier about, as in the title of this posting (there's also it's high time …). But here I'm going to talk about less subtle matters.

A new cop show called Mentalist has been one of the big hits of this season’s television fare. It features Simon Baker as a former fortune teller turned honest by renouncing his former fraudulent practice and now working with an unlikely bunch of California Bureau of Investigation officers to catch the bad guys. What caught my eye, however, was the title of the show, which is broken into what the writers believe to be the syllables of Mentalist:

/’men – tuh—list/    noun

Okay, the second syllable is actually /t / plus schwa, but I don’t have a keyboard with a schwa, so you understand what I mean by the /-uh/.

Geoff Pullum posted a little while ago on it's time (that) + a PST clause ("It's time (that) we left"), which he noted as an English construction that was new to him. [Correction 4/19/09: Geoff was actually commenting on the similar construction with a PRS clause.] One commenter, Stephen Jones, labeled this as an instance of the Recency Illusion, on the grounds that such expressions had been around for some time. But Geoff wasn't claiming that the construction was new in the language, only that it was (as far as he could tell) new to him; he replied:

My phrase "brand new fact about English syntax that I had no inkling of when I woke up this morning" meant "brand new in my experience". The post is explicitly about the personal experience of discovering things one didn't know before, not about the very difficult business of dating the start of an incipient change.

I read him as also suggesting (though not actually saying) that it hadn't been previously recognized by scholars (if it had, it would probably have come to his notice; but of course even distinguished scholars of English grammar miss things on occasion).

(Mark Liberman and I posted on this topic at nearly the same time. Consider this to be an amplification of Mark's posting.)

Yesterday was Strunk & White day — the actual 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements Of Style — which National Public Radio celebrated twice. Morning Edition had "Strunk And White's Venerable Writing Guide Is 50", in which Renee Montagne interviewed Barbara Wallraff, and then in the afternoon Talk of the Nation had "A Half-Century Of 'Stupid Grammar Advice'", in which our very own Geoff Pullum fielded questions from host Neal Conan and from listeners who called or e-mailed in. You can listen to both programs here. And read some related material, like this remarkable item:

This telegram [of August 20, 1959] from California Book Co. (supplier to the Berkeley college bookstore) is an indicator of the book's early success. Placing an order for more copies, it ends with the words "Whole campus gone wild."

Plus photographs of Strunk and White.

Geoff Pullum was on the NPR radio program Talk of the Nation yesterday, in a segment entitled "A Half-Century of Stupid Grammar Advice".

For those who want more, lists of past LL posts mentioning Strunk can be found here and here.

Another Zits cartoon on this topic: