Language Log

My latest column for the Boston Globe is about some fascinating new research presented by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent NWAV 41 conference at Indiana University Bloomington. Schnoebelen's paper, co-authored with Jacob Eisenstein and David Bamman, is entitled "Gender, styles, and social networks in Twitter" (abstract, full paper, presentation).

Reader JM has been away from home since last Thursday (Nov. 1), and plans to fly back home tomorrow (Nov. 7). This morning (Nov. 6) she got an email from the U.S. Postal Service reading as follows:

From: MailHold@usps.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2012 1:38 AM
To: [redacted]
Subject: USPS – Holdmail Expiration

Your hold mail request has ended 11/07/2012
The Hold Mail Service for 11/01/2012 has ended. So we'll be resuming your regular mail delivery. Remember to pick up your held mail at the Post Office if you're not having it delivered to your address.

Richard Roeper, "Election prediction: Electoral votes will add up to Barack Obama victory", Chicago Sun-Times 11/4/2012:

Please understand, we’re not talking about my preference. This is all about the cold hard business of predicting. If you handed me a suitcase of money and sent me to a casino where they allowed wagering on elections and I had to put all of it on one candidate in this race, I wouldn’t hesitate to put that money on Obama.

Of course it’s not Romney’s fault that allies such as Hannity, Limbaugh, Trump and Giuliani seem increasingly shrill and desperate in their criticism of Obama in the last week or so. Of course Romney couldn’t do anything about a force of nature that allowed the president to be presidential while the Mittster was relegated to the sidelines, comparing the massive undertaking on the East Coast with the time when he and his chums had to clean up a high school football field after a big game. (“The field was covered with rubbish and paper goods from people who’d had a big celebration there at the game.” Rubbish?) [emphasis added]

Reader PS has written to alert us to an instructive drama unfolding at tv tropes, a wiki that is "a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction". As of about two months ago,  "titular" became a forbidden word at tv tropes. The site's software now simply deletes all (new) attempted uses of that string of letters.  PS explains:

This is not a Scunthorpe problem with "tit."  Someone on the site (presumably site co-founder Fast Eddie) decided that "titular" is a synonym for "nominal" but not "eponymous."  (I wish I had a better citation than that, but the best link I can find says that the previous discussion about using "titular" was deleted.)

In November of 2000, Ted Briscoe interviewed Gerald Gazdar about the history of "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar". In the course of that interview, Gazdar said:

That is not to say that I don't think that corpus work can't be useful, even in theoretical syntax.

,,,by which he meant to say that he thinks that corpus work can be useful, even in theoretical syntax.

If you apply your intuitions to the problem of building this sentence up out of its parts, I think you'll find that what he said actually ought to be logically the opposite of what he meant, at least in the forms of English that lack negative concord.

Ann Althouse, "There's never been a day in the last four years I've been proud to be his vice president", 11/2/2012:

The Weekly Standard (linked by Drudge) thinks it has a hilarious Biden gaffe, but they've misheard/mistranscribed it. You have to have an ear for the "working class"-style mushing of syllables, but he's saying "There's never been a day in the last four years I haven't been proud to be his vice president." The boldface is spoken: I 'n' been.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

I've listened to the audio at 0.35 speed and it's a precise "I've."…

I disagree.

It's an east-coast kind of "n" … sort of almost "i uh" like the "no" in "uh uh."

rhhardin says:

"n" is voiced and there's no voicing in Biden's 've part.

I note that I grew up in Delaware and I feel I understand the implied "n." And rh gives us his slowed down audio with repetition. I've listened, and I hear a sound after the "I" that I'm sure is the negative. There's this southern Jersey/northern Delaware/Philadelphia dropping of a sound that I can her. There's a muddled verb after the "I" that I just know. Rh says "Call in Language Log," and I will send an email. I think they will believe me. And not just for political reasons.

What xkcd is getting at with the latest comic is about syntax and semantics. I'll show you the syntax below, but as far as meaning is concerned, the point is that cell phone numbers have almost no semantics. The area code part (the first three digits) used to function as a locational marker when phones were in fixed locations in houses, but since Americans not only tend to move every three years or so but they now take phone numbers with them, and cell phone universality only really began to pick up in America five to ten years ago, it really does tend to reflect a former abode. My cool son Calvin, for example, has a number which implies that he lives in Oakland, California; he doesn't, he does his video game programming in the Pacific North West.

And the rest of the number, the other seven digits? Space enough there for some real personal information, but it is not used. It functions merely as arbitrary material to distinguish one cell phone's location point in the information universe from all the others.

Stoeger et al., "An Asian Elephant Imitates Human Speech", Current Biology (2012):

Vocal imitation has convergently evolved in many species, allowing learning and cultural transmission of complex, conspecific sounds, as in birdsong. Scattered instances also exist of vocal imitation across species, including mockingbirds imitating other species or parrots and mynahs producing human speech. Here, we document a male Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) that imitates human speech, matching Korean formants and fundamental frequency in such detail that Korean native speakers can readily understand and transcribe the imitations. To create these very accurate imitations of speech formant frequencies, this elephant (named Koshik) places his trunk inside his mouth, modulating the shape of the vocal tract during controlled phonation. This represents a wholly novel method of vocal production and formant control in this or any other species. One hypothesized role for vocal imitation is to facilitate vocal recognition by heightening the similarity between related or socially affiliated individuals. The social circumstances under which Koshik’s speech imitations developed suggest that one function of vocal learning might be to cement social bonds and, in unusual cases, social bonds across species.

From the Inland Printer, January 1927:

[ht Daniel Mellis]

On my commute home from Language Log Plaza West yesterday, I heard this brief piece on NPR about Lydia Callis, NYC Mayor Bloomberg's American Sign Language interpreter. (See also here, here, here, here, here — screw it, just search for "Lydia Callis".) A couple choice quotes from some of these stories:

From the NPR piece I heard: Callis was animated – both in her facial expressions and hand movements – the antithesis of the stoic mayor.

From this Bloomberg News piece: "She's awesome," Lynn Correa, 30, who has watched YouTube videos made about Callis, said today at a bus stop in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. "She's much more expressive than [Mayor Bloomberg] is."

Don't get me wrong: I think it's great that Callis, and sign language interpreting generally, are getting some postive attention. But looking at the videos, I don't see anything other than a (very good) ASL interpreter — in other words, Callis is not doing anything extra special here, she's just doing her job, which is to translate what people are saying into ASL. I understand that there's the contrast with the otherwise somber Bloomberg, and that what is being translated is news about Hurricane Sandy, and that for many folks this may be one of the first times they've seen sign language interpretation up close — but I can't help pointing out here that the hand movements and facial expressions are defining features of ASL (and of other signed languages). The perception that we non-signers have that these hand movements and facial expressions are particularly "animated" and "expressive" is precisely due to our lack of experience with them as linguistic features.

The varsity commentariat seems, for the most part, to have given up on the "Obama is a narcissist because pronouns" meme — we haven't heard this recently from George Will or Peggy Noonan or Charles Krauthammer or Stanley Fish. But it's alive and well among second- and third-string pundits, for example surfacing in Howard Portnoy's analysis of the third presidential debate, "L’état c’est Obama", Hot Air 10/23/2012:

There may be no “I” in team, but there is most definitely an “I” in president and nation. And in Obama’s eyes, if no one else’s, the two are one and the same.

It is the latest flexing of his best-worked muscle, the egotissimus anteriori. It is telling. if unsurprising after four years of non-stop speeches filled with self-reverence. […]

CNN acknowledges that Mitt Romney did what he came to do, and that was to appear knowledgeable and presidential. And he did it without repeatedly using first-person pronouns.

Ed Manley, "Detecting Languages in London's Twittersphere", UrbanMovements 10/22/2012:

Over the last couple of weeks, and as a bit of a distraction from finishing off my PhD, I've been working with James Cheshire looking at the use of different languages within my aforementioned dataset of London tweets.

I've been handling the data generation side, and the method really is quite simple.  Just like some similar work carried out by Eric Fischer, I've employed the Chromium Compact Language Detector – a open-source Python library adapted from the Google Chrome algorithm to detect a website's language – in detecting the predominant language contained within around 3.3 million geolocated tweets, captured in London over the course of this summer. […]

One issue with this approach that I did note was the surprising popularity of Tagalog, a language of the Philippines, which initially was identified as the 7th most tweeted language.  On further investigation, I found that many of these classifications included just uses of English terms such as 'hahahahaha', 'ahhhhhhh' and 'lololololol'.  I don't know much about Tagalog but it sounds like a fun language.  Nevertheless, Tagalog was excluded from our analysis.

From today's SMBC: