Language Log

This all started when John Cowan defended the New Yorker's account of a long-past Republican debate, by proposing that Rudy Giuliani retains the syllable-timed speech rhythm of his Italian ancestors, in contrast to Mitt Romney's standard American stress-timed speech. I didn't share the intuition, and did a little experiment to show that Rudy's syllables, far from being a "constant rate … dadadadadadada", were actually more variable in duration than Mitt's were ("Slicing the syllabic bologna", 5/5/2008).

Then Jonathan Mayhew asked whether "there’s a psychological perception of syllable-timed language that is not visible in the objective data". I responded with a little experiment to illustrate the fact that syllables in (say) Spanish really are closer to being constant in duration than syllables in English are, even though this is mostly if not entirely because of the intrinsic durations of the syllable inventories in the two languages ("Another slice of prosodic sausage" 5/6/2008).

But this leaves the "stress-timed" side of the traditional distinction unexamined. So today's little Breakfast Experiment™ takes a look at the idea that speakers of languages like English arrange stressed syllables (as opposed to all syllables) equally in time.

I don't have time for a full post this morning, but here's the bare bones of one. (In fact, I develop most posts from an annotated series of hyperlinks like this is going to be, whereas bones don't develop before flesh does; so a better metaphor would be "the columns and beams of one".)

In 1958 a Virginia couple were rousted from their bed in the middle of the night by a county sheriff, arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime of miscegenation, for which they were sentenced to a year in jail. With the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, they appealed the conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, which on June 12, 1967 ruled unanimously that the Virginia law against inter-racial marriage violated the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution and overturned the convictions.

Mildred Loving passed away on May 2 at the age of 68.

From Robert Rummel-Hudson's blog Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords, under the heading "What could I possibly add to this?":

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

Like I said yesterday, the whole stress-timed-vs.-syllable-timed business is "a gigantic tangled intellectual thicket that’s easy to get into and hard to get out of". And one of the comments on my post asked a question that tempts me in further:

So then there’s a psychological perception of syllable-timed language that is not visible in the objective data?

Yes and no.

In my recent exchange with John McIntyre, I matched his jocular aside about the meat grinder of linguistic scholarship with my own little joke about the food processor of copy-editing. By chance, this morning's mail brought a note from Helen Dewitt, mentioning that her Paperpools post "Cormac McCarthy & the semi-colon" (8/17/2007) has just been reprinted at Art Nouveau, "with an illustration, no less". It's great fun to read, with or without the illustration, though it was obviously not at all fun to live.

Yesterday afternoon, I got this note from John Cowan, that indefatigable correspondent:

You linked to the piece on Romney vs. Giuliani speaking styles today,
so I checked back to see if you ever added my comment on it, but I
think I probably sent it during the period when my mail to you was being mysteriously blackholed. So here it is again.

In fact, I recall getting John's comments the first time. But they brought up a problematic point that deserves a post of its own — the vexed question of "stress-timed" vs. "syllable-timed" languages — and so I put John's note on my to-blog list, where it languished until now. I still don't have time for a proper answer, but I'll respond briefly (hah!) under the rubric of fact-checking.

A couple of weeks ago, John McIntyre took a critical look at Word Rage ("Walsh should be shot!") — from the prescriptivist point of view ("With friends like this", 4/14/2008). John is not only the Baltimore Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk, but also a past president of the American Copy Editors Society, so his opinions about usage are authoritative as well as thoughtful and interesting. As a regular reader of his weblog, I spent a few minutes pondering this passage:

Descriptivists, like the doughty linguists at Language Log, range over all written and spoken language, formal and informal, standard and nonstandard, to turn their findings into scholarship. (That’s the grand thing about an academic discipline: Once you own a grinder, you can turn anything into sausage.)

But my doughty descriptive attempts at interpretation didn't converge, as I explained in a blog post ("Scholarship and sausage-making", 4/15/2008).

Now John has explained the meat-grinder metaphor at greater length ("You're not from around here, are you?", 5/2/2008).

Stephen Smith writes:

There's a New Yorker article about a Moldovan woman working for an organization that tries to track down victims of sex trafficking and bring them home, but it includes this weird bit:

"She talks on the phone and knocks out memos and documents and e-mails in four languages and three alphabets—Russian, Romanian, Swedish, and English."

Russian is written in Cyrillic, Romanian is almost always written in Latin characters (though in Moldova, Cyrillic letters were officially used – but that was twenty years ago), and Swedish and English are always in Latin characters. Romanian and Swedish have some non-standard characters, but even if you count each language as having its own alphabet, that should make four alphabets, not three. And of course if you're going to count each language as having its own alphabet, what's the point in writing them both down? The New Yorker is usually such a fastidious publication – am I missing something here?

Stephen's question really ought to be addressed to the Columbia Journalism Review, I guess — the general problem of fact-checking at the New Yorker is not one that I'm professionally competent to investigate. But this is not the first case where we've noted carelessness and confusion about linguistic matters in New Yorker stories.

My posting on getter better (and its sisters and its cousins and its aunts, which I'll refer to as GetterBetter as a group) has elicited considerable comment, both here on Language Log and on languagehat's blog. I've responded to several of the Language Log comments with comments of my own (which might have to be reworked into full-fledged postings), but there's at least one issue that comes up in both places and is, I think, important enough to merit a posting on its own, even though the central point is one I've posted about many times before: the thin line between error and mere variation.

In response to my posting about the language of three imprisoned children in Linz, Austria, several people have commented on the report that the children finished all their sentences with the word "but" (which I took to mean German aber). Two noted that many German speakers use sentence-final conjunctions (oder 'or', but also aber) as discourse particles, and one supplied a possible parallel from colloquial Italian (with ma 'but'). Then I recalled a discussion on the newsgroup sci.lang in 2006 about sentence-final but in varieties of English and in Hawaiian Pidgin. No doubt there are parallels in other languages; the semantic development is not surprising (more on this below).

So it's likely that the children were just using a feature of colloquial German speech, which was then over-reported by an observer and treated as strange and new by journalists. Certainly we've seen many such cases here on Language Log.

Last week, I discussed some of the things that Rev. Jeremiah Wright had to say at the National Press Club about race, language, and the brain ("Wright on language and linguistics", 4/29/2008). But I didn't discuss the passage that many journalists identified as the rhetorical and emotional core of his outburst. (Click the link to hear the audio.)

This is the transcript:

In our community, we have something called playing the dozens.
If you think I'm going to let you talk about my momma,
and her religious tradition, and my daddy, and his religious tradition, and my grandpa,
you got another think coming.

Or is it?

Geoff Pullum's wonderful example of the perils of trying to avoid split infinitives: it can lead to a straightforwardedly ungrammatical result. Simplifying the original to make the point clearer, the entirely unproblematic

(1) Rockefeller has pledged $100 million to dramatically increase learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates

was incorrected to the entirely problematic

(2) Rockefeller has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates.

I intend to post later on other aspects of the phenomenon, but here I want to say a few words about the "nonintervention constraint" violated in (2): in English, nothing can intervene between a verb and its direct object (unless the direct object is long, complex, or "heavy"). I want to say these few words because I think the constraint — which I'll refer to as *V+X+DO (yes, extraordinarily clunky, but I have at the moment no better alternative) — is a beautiful piece of English syntax.