Language Log

One week from tomorrow (Tuesday) night I give my Jesse and John Danz Lecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. And although the summary published on the registration page is entirely accurate, I would still conjecture that as many as half the people planning to attend will think that the scandal is people who write bad. They will assume that I will be dinging ordinary folks for writing (and speaking) ungrammatically. Little will they know what lies in store: that my target is the grammarians. It is the rule-givers and knuckle-rappers and nitpickers that I will be castigating for their ignorance of the content of the principles of English syntax.

Several people have asked me about Alexander M. Petersen et al., "Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words", Nature Scientific Reports 12/10/2012. The abstract (emphasis added):

We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two scaling regimes characterize the word frequency distributions, with only the more common words obeying the classic Zipf law. Using corpora of unprecedented size, we test the allometric scaling relation between the corpus size and the vocabulary size of growing languages to demonstrate a decreasing marginal need for new words, a feature that is likely related to the underlying correlations between words. We calculate the annual growth fluctuations of word use which has a decreasing trend as the corpus size increases, indicating a slowdown in linguistic evolution following language expansion. This “cooling pattern” forms the basis of a third statistical regularity, which unlike the Zipf and the Heaps law, is dynamical in nature.

The paper is thought-provoking, and the conclusions definitely merit further exploration. But I feel that the paper as published is guilty of false advertising. As the emphasized material in the abstract indicates, the paper claims to be about the frequency distributions of words in the vocabulary of English and other natural languages. In fact, I'm afraid, it's actually about the frequency distributions of strings in Google's 2009 OCR of printed books — and this, alas, is not the same thing at all.

It's possible that the paper's conclusions also hold for the distributions of words in English and other languages, but it's far from clear that this is true. At a minimum, the paper's quantitative results clearly will not hold for anything that a linguist, lexicographer, or psychologist would want to call "words". Whether the qualitative results hold or not remains to be seen.

A few years ago, "KateMonkey" posted this query on Flickr:

What is this language?

This was a poster of a book cover on the wall at the Dickens Museum, and all it said was "foreign language".

Really? You can't do better than that? "Foreign language"?

Charles Dickens Museum, Bloomsbury, London

James Errington sends this along via Twitter:

Jessica Mason Pieklo, "Texas GOP Considers Turning State Into Tax Dodge Over Contraception Mandate", RH Reality Check 1/30/2013 (emphasis added):

To be considered constitutional, a state tax generally cannot discriminate against interstate commerce. Broadly speaking, the Supreme Court has taken that to mean that any tax which, by its terms or operations, imposes greater burdens on out-of-state goods, activities, or enterprises than on any competing in-state goods, activities or enterprises violates the Commerce Clause and will be struck down. The basic logic of this conclusion is pretty clear—states shouldn't be able to simply preference their own industries at the expense of others if those industries touch or are part of national commerce.

AC asks:

Is this use of "preference" as a verb commonplace? It didn't sound right to my ear. We already have the verbs "prefer" and "show preference".

Joseph Berger, "Modesty in Ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn Is Enforced by Secret Squads", NYT 1/29/2013 (emphasis added):

“We give out proclamations,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Glick, its executive director. “We don’t enforce. It’s like people can decide to keep Shabbos or not. If someone wants to turn on the light on Shabbos, we cannot put him in jail for that.”

But Hasidim interviewed said squads of enforcers did exist in wildcat form.

“There are quite a few men, especially in Williamsburg, who consider themselves Gut’s polizei,” said Yosef Rapaport, a Hasidic journalist, using the words for “God’s police.”  “It’s somebody who is a busybody, and they’re quite a few of them — zealots who take it upon themselves and they just enforce. They’re considered crazy, but people don’t want to confront them.”

About the expression "in wildcat form", AMG asks:

I have never heard of this expression and when I Googled it, I only found the football term "wildcat formation" but no references that seem to indicate that this term has entered popular (e.g., non-football) culture.  Have you heard of it? Do you know what it means?  It seems odd to use such an obscure phrase in a NYTimes article.

In Dilbert for 1/30/2013, a rhetorical implied question:

I recently wrote on Lingua Franca about my astonishment over Piotr Cichocki and Marcin Kilarski. In their paper "On 'Eskimo Words for Snow': The Life Cycle of a Linguistic Misconception" (Historiographia Linguistica 37, 2010, Pages 341-377), they mistook my 1989 humorous opinion column "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" for a research paper, and bitterly attacked it for dogmatism, superficiality, offensiveness, and all sorts of scholarly sins. But there is an additional thing about the paper that puzzled me deeply. It concerns the word "misconception" in the title.

I have read the early sections of the paper over and over again trying to figure out what Cichocki and Kilarski think the misconception is, and I just cannot figure it out.

On reddit.com/r/linguistics, someone recently posted the following query:

At the bottom of a letter written by one John England during the US Civil War (it is not by Bishop John England) is a paragraph in a script and (seemingly) language that I don't immediately recognize:

I think this is Irish Gaelic written in the old Gaelic script, but I'm really not sure. Anyone have any guesses?

I suspect that there are some LL readers who can do better than a guess.

I learned a new word today: "hospitalist".  The fist time I saw it, in a paper on "Determinants of Hospitalist Efficiency", I mis-read it as "hospital's", then realized it wasn't that, and thought it might be a really spectacular typographical error. But in fact it's a real word, coined in 1996 by Robert Wachter and Lee Goldman, which now gets nearly 34,000 hits on Google Scholar (where hit counts seem to be more or less believable).

According to Article 2, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution,

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

According to a recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, "the term 'the Recess' in the Recess Appointments Clause refers to the intersession recess of the Senate", so that this option is not available "during intrasession 'recesses,' or breaks in the Senate’s business when it is otherwise in a continuing session". The court's argument is a linguistic one:

When interpreting a constitutional provision, we must look to the natural meaning of the text as it would have been understood at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. […] Then, as now, the word “the” was and is a definite article. See 2 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language 2041 (1755) (defining “the” as an “article noting a particular thing” (emphasis added)). Unlike “a” or “an,” that definite article suggests specificity. As a matter of cold, unadorned logic, it makes no sense to adopt the Board’s proposition that when the Framers said “the Recess,” what they really meant was “a recess.” This is not an insignificant distinction. In the end it makes all the difference.

[…]

It is universally accepted that “Session” here refers to the usually two or sometimes three sessions per Congress. Therefore, “the Recess” should be taken to mean only times when the Senate is not in one of those sessions.

The result is of some political consequence, since it invalidates decisions made by the National Labor Relations Board during 2012, on the grounds that several of its members in this period were intra-session recess appointments. (These were recess appointments because some members of the Senate, opposed to the NLRB on principle, have made it clear that they will use Senatorial privilege and/or filibuster techniques to block any in-session appointments to that board.)

Google Translate is so incredibly good — especially for typing Chinese and producing Pinyin (Romanization) with tones — that I rely on it a lot and am always afraid that, like so many software developers (e.g., Microsoft), they are going to add some unwanted bells and whistles or take away some basic features.  So today, when I turned on my Google Translate and saw a new wrinkle in the bottom left corner of the box into which you input Chinese, I was worried that it would lose the features that make it so easy for me to enter text.

MDS wrote:

I have been frustrated in trying to figure out how to use verbal phrases consisting of a verb plus a preposition/adverb in an adjectival or noun context.  I'm sure I didn't use the right linguistic phraseology there, so let me tell you what I mean.  I'm speaking of verbal phrases such as "build out," "work out," "build up," "put in," "sell off," "sell out," etc., where the auxiliary word isn't really working as either an preposition or an adverb.  It's simply part of a verbal phrase.  When used as a verb, other words may either be placed in between the words of the verbal phrase or after it.   E.g., "sell it off" vs. "sell off your stock."  I would be interested to hear what the appropriate part of speech is for the auxiliary word in these verbal phrases.

That much is easy: out, up, in, off, etc. are all prepositions, and in the cited combinations with verbs, they are simply intransitive prepositions. But MDS continues:

However, that's not my main issue.