Language Log

You're the prime minister of Australia. (Well, you're not, actually, but this is my little rhetorical way of plunging you imaginatively in medias res. I want you to imagine that you're the prime minister of Australia.) Your foreign minister is a former prime minister that you ousted from the leadership in 2010, and now a bitter rival who looks like he's plotting to get back the leadership. You haven't been exactly assiduous in publicly rebutting criticisms of him emanating from your wing of the party, because frankly you wouldn't piss on him if he caught fire. He suddenly decides, while on a trip overseas representing the country, that he's had enough of the insults and attacks, and it's time to make his play. So he resigns his ministerial post and announces his resignation to a press conference at 1:30 a.m. in Washington DC so as to catch the 6 p.m. news in Australia.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it: to say something prime-ministerial about his accomplishments in office without giving one iota of extra support to his candidacy now that he's quite clearly going to come back to Oz and challenge you for your job. What do you say? You don't want to say that he achieved anything, yet you have to uphold the foreign policy record of your government. Is it time for the passive construction?

"Restoring American Exceptionalism" has recently become an important Republican slogan. It's a featured theme for Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Glenn Beck.  Mitt Romney and Ron Paul at least bow in its direction, as do Rick Perry and Sarah Palin. Last month, there were hundreds of "Restoring American Exceptionalism" events during National School Choice Week (Jan. 22-28, 2012), under the leadership of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, founded by David H. Koch.

The odd thing about this is that "American Exceptionalism" was originally a Communist doctrine motivating a moderate and reformist approach to revolutionary organizing, developed and fiercely argued in the 1920s and 1930s; and the term was revived, with a similar meaning but a different motivation and emphasis, by liberal political scientists and historians in the 1950s.

Keith Chen's recent proposal that the grammar of tense marking in a language has a causal effect on future-oriented financial and health behaviors is too intriguing to resist talking about. In fact, it reminds me of the words of a prominent linguist who once announced during his talk: "The explanation in question is almost certain to be false. However, if it were true, it would be incredibly interesting, so we have no choice but to explore it."

I'm not sure that this is the best argument for, say, how research funding should be allocated. At least, I've never had the guts to put that in a grant proposal. But if Language Log isn't the place to explore almost-certainly-false-but-incredibly-interesting-if-true ideas, then I don't know what is.

On my personal blog, an inventory of postings (mostly from Language Log) on IAG (It's All Grammar) — here — with the proposed technical term garmmra.

I happened to have the TV going in the background during the press conference where the new Greek bail-out was announced, and it struck me that at an event about Greek sovereign debt, held in Brussels,  Klaus Regling (German), Christine Lagarde (French),  Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourgeois) and Olli Rehn (Finnish) were all speaking English. Nor did I notice any native speakers of English among the reporters who asked questions (in English) afterwards. This is is now completely normal, of course.

But sometimes completely normal things seem temporarily strange, and I had this experience while listening to Olli Rehn's remarks, when it occurred to me that international affairs have become a wonderful opportunity to study non-native pronunciation of English.

[This is a guest post by Keith Chen.]

Mark and Geoffrey were kind enough not only to write thoughtful columns on a recent working paper of mine here and here, but to invite me to write a guest post explaining the work. In the spirit of a non-linguist who’s pleased to be discovering this blog, I wanted to use Mark and Geoffrey’s insightful posts as a springboard to explain my work.

At about 6:38 a.m. today Jak Beula, chairman of a community trust, was talking on BBC Radio 4's "Today" program about Smethwick, a town in the Midlands of England, where there were famous incidents of racism in the 1960s, leading to an important visit by Malcolm X nine days before his assassination in New York. Beula wanted to explain about a disgracefully racist election leaflet that was going around at the time, aimed at discrediting the Labour Party. He knew that because he was on the BBC he was under a constraint (which Language Log does not impose on itself): he must not utter the word nigger. So he struggled to walk round what he had to say without ever uttering that word. And the result was a total disaster of mis-speech.

"Santorum Spokesperson Refers To Obama's 'Radical Islamic Policies'", TPM 2/20/2012:

Rick Santorum spokesperson Alice Stewart slipped up on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports Monday afternoon when talking about President Obama's environmental policies. Instead, she called them Obama's "radical Islamic policies."

Santorum communications director Hogan Gidley told TPM that Stewart "misspoke." Andrea Mitchell said that Stewart called her to say she slipped up. "She had repeatedly said during that same interview ‘radical environmental policies’ and she said she slipped when she apparently said [it]."

A charming eggcorn on a Yahoo! answers page — one that involves writing what is really a single word as a sequence two separate words:

My friends have been being really judge mental lately, i need advice?

Kay so my best friends i have known and been friends with for about 2 years now, are being really judge mental around me lately. . .

Just a quick pointer to this fun post by Toma Tasovac, which discusses the removal of a term from WordNet, the best known and most widely used lexical database for English. Apparently DuPont, the huge chemical company, expressed displeasure about the entry for Teflon (oops, I mean Teflon^TM), which did not indicate its status as a registered trademark.

Christiane Fellbaum's mail to the WN-USERS mailing list indicates that, although DuPont had not yet actually requested removing the term, the WordNet folks "settled" by offering to do so as "the simplest solution". Tasovac suggests to DuPont that they follow up this clear success by following his generously contributed outline for setting up a Division for Lexicography, Trademark Enforcement and World Domination. He concludes, "I have three more killer tips for how to rule the world by means of lexicographic black magic, but they are patented and trademarked. I am willing to discuss business propositions with DuPont representatives in strictest confidence."

Senator Rick Santorum has taken over the lead in national polling for the Republican presidential nomination; and so there is increasing interest in his ideas for new national policies, for example as he explains them in this October 2011 interview with Shane Vander Hart.  As a linguist and a true conservative, I'm especially intrigued by a section that starts at around 25:50, where Senator Santorum promises to protect us against government interference in education by mandating an federal accreditation program to ensure ideological balance among teachers.

Here at AAAS 2012 in Vancouver, this morning's 8:00 a.m. Section-Z symposium is "Gesture, Language, and Performance: Aspects of Embodiment", organized by Philip Rubin. The abstract:

Communication, language, performance, and cognition are all shaped in varying ways by our embodiment (our physicality, including brain and body) and our embeddedness (our place in the world: physical, social, and cultural). The real-time production of spoken and signed language involves the dynamic control of speech articulators, limbs, face, and body, and the coordination of movement and gesture, by and between individuals. Increases in computing power and the recent emergence of ubiquitous and flexible sensing and measurement technologies, from inexpensive digital video and other devices to higher end tools, are beginning to make it possible to capture these complex activities more easily and in greater detail than ever before. We are on the cusp of a revolution in sign, gesture, and interactive communication studies. New computational and statistical tools and visualization techniques are also helping us to quantify and characterize these behaviors and, in certain instances, use them to control and synthesize speech, gesture, and musical performance. This symposium brings together experts spanning linguistics, computer science, engineering, and psychology to describe new developments in related areas of inquiry. These include coordination and synchrony during spoken and signed language, gestural control of musical performance, physiologically and acoustically realistic articulatory speech synthesis, and cognitive and linguistic development.

According to the UK Daily Mirror's report on Whitney Houston's funeral:

The funeral service included a eulogy by Kevin Costner, who starred with Whitney in her hit film The Bodyguard, and a performance by Alicia Keys, who sung with tears in her eyes.

What the linguist notices here is that the system of around 200 irregular verbs in English is so complex and hard to memorize that native-speaking professional journalists and editors are unable to pick the right preterite form for extremely common verbs. Alicia Keys, of course, sang with tears in her eyes.