Language Log

On my own blog, a (lightly annotated) inventory of linguablogs and other web resources on linguistics (very far from exhaustive), here. Much of it based on LLog's blogroll.

The first sentence of this news report is perfectly fine, but it presents a linguistic puzzle:

The leader of the International Monetary Fund and a possible candidate for president of France was arrested Sunday in connection with the violent sexual assault of a hotel maid after being yanked from an airplane moments before it was to depart for Paris, police said.

The puzzle is how such a conjunction can denote a single person, as it clearly does in this sentence. It could even more easily denote two, but then we’d see “were arrested”, not “was arrested”.

First a descriptive query: do all languages allow such a conjunction of a definite and an indefinite singular noun phrase in subject position, interpreted as referring to a single person? And does English allow it quite generally, or is this a special newspaper style?

Iowa is home to the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, which is located at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Over the years, many aspiring Chinese writers who later became outstanding poets and authors have enjoyed residencies there, and many of China's and Taiwan's most distinguished authors have come to the Writers' Workshop for shorter stays, to attend conferences, and to give lectures.

Here is a 1993 account of "Chinese Writers in Iowa" by Peter Xinping Zhou that gives a good idea of the importance of the Writers' Workshop for the Sinophone literary realm.  This essay mentions only a fraction of the Chinese writers who had come to the Workshop by 1993, and, needless to say, the number who have passed through the Workshop since 1993 is even greater.  As Peter Xinping Zhou begins his essay, it is no exaggeration to say that "To many people in China, the name of the University of Iowa is just as familiar as that of Harvard or Oxford."

According to Stan Carey at Sentence First:

λ♥[love] is written and sung by Christine Collins, a writer and self-described time traveller [Doctor Who fan] from the U.S. She describes it as “a convenient, terminology-dropping, non-gender-specific love song for all your linguist-seducing needs”.

According to Dave McMillion, "Republican W.Va. gubernatorial candidate gets in hot water over 'joke'", Herald Mail 5/12/2011:

Former Berkeley County delegate and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Faircloth said Thursday that a joke he told referring to President Obama as "Sambo" and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a "bimbo" was simply an attempt to "bring a little humor" to the campaign. […]

"There's nothing racist or feminist about me," Faircloth said in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon.

It's been a while since I've posted on Chinglish. In truth, I have an enormous backlog of precious items, some stretching back for years, but I just haven't been able to get to them because I've been trying to concentrate on more substantial topics lately. Today's example, however, is so amazing that I feel inspired to address it immediately.

Consider the photograph on the right, showing a notice on the door of a hotel room's shower stall.

What in the world is going on here? One big Chinese character and all those Roman letters beneath it:

拉

Latin
America

Dahlia Lithwick, "It's Good for You", Slate 5/10/2011:

The appeal doesn't all come down to judicial politics, either, although everyone is already atwitter about the fact that the random, computer-selected, three-judge panel was comprised of three judges appointed by Democratic presidents: Diana Gribbon Motz, nominated by Bill Clinton in 1994, and Andre M. Davis and Wynn, both nominated by Obama in 2009.
[…]
It's not clear to me that a panel comprised of two African-Americans and a woman, sitting in Richmond no less, will be all that receptive to arguments about the wonders of nullification.

In the comments section, "Angela Stockton" takes Ms. Lithwick to task:

Dahlia, the panel was not COMPRISED of three judges–it was COMPOSED of three judges. "Compose" and "comprise" do not mean the same thing. Parts compose a whole, while a whole comprises its parts. "Comprise" comes from the same root as "comprehensive," which means all-inclusive.

Today's Zits:

Matthew Edney, who describes himself as "a British-born academic who now, 27 years after first arrival, is linguistically located somewhere in the general confusion of the mid-Atlantic", sent me an interesting query about the history of English spelling. Since I know almost nothing about this subject, I'm forwarding the question to LL readers, who are likely among them to have the answers, or at least some useful observations.

Following up on my posts about locative denominal verbs, yesterday's SMBC:

Cosma Shalizi, "Lyric poetry in Pluto's Republic", 5/8/2011, considers DeWall et al. on pop-culture pronouns in the light of genre and style differences:

The empirical basis for inferring narcissism from using first person singular pronouns appears to be Robert Raskin and Robert Shaw, "Narcissism and the Use of Personal Pronouns", Journal of Personality 56 (1988): 393–404. This shows that, over twenty years ago, there was a modest positive correlation (+0.26) between scores on a quiz intended to measure narcissism, and how often 48 UC Santa Cruz undergrads used first-person singular pronouns in extemporized five minute monologues. Top 100 songs are not spontaneous monologues by undergrads looking for a painless way to get $5 and/or check off a Psych. 1 requirement, and DeWall et al. offer no evidence that this correlation generalizes to any other context. In particular they offer no reason to think that differences over time, as language and culture changes, should be explained in the same way as these differences across people, at a single time and in a single school.

The most recent Templar, Arizona starts with this panel:

The latest plagiarism scandal involves the now former German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who resigned due to allegations that he had plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation. The scandal itself is of no particular interest, but it has inspired some really pretty and informative visualization. The "barcode" shows the fraction of pages on which plagiarism from a single source was found (black), the fraction of pages on which plagiarism from multiple sources was found (red), and the fraction of pages on which no plagiarism was detected (white). The blue pages are things like the table of contents and appendices which were not included in the analysis. There is also a display of the individual marked-up pages here.