Language Log

Today's Get Fuzzy illustrates the perils of morphological decomposition:

Sticking a label on a manila file of household papers this morning I noticed that the instructions on the sheet of labels said "Insert opposite end into typewriter." It wasn't so much the ridiculous controllingness that made me smile (the labels had no header strip, so they were symmetrical, and it would make absolutely no difference if you used the sheet one way up rather than the other); it was the quaint old lexical item typewriter. I wonder what young people would think of that advice, if they ever read the instructions on anything (they don't, of course; they learn the operating systems of their new cellphones by intuition). A typewriter? When did I last even see one? It was like coming upon a word like "spats" or "snuffbox" or "inkwell" in a modern business context. I wonder if the wording will survive unnoticed on every sheet of labels manufactured by that company until the phrase has become a sort of dead metaphor or incomprehensible incantation.

"Stakeholders" is a 25-year-old piece of management-speak that has been adopted enthusiastically by some software professionals. Thus "Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success":

The term was introduced in a seminal book by R. Edward Freeman called Strategic Management (1984). The word stakeholder was used to stand in contrast to the neoclassical view of the firm as catering to stockholders. Freeman used the term stakeholder analysis to remind management that it was in the long-term interests of the company to pay attention to the interests of those who have an impact on or are impacted by the activities of the company. The present article uses the “stakeholder analysis” concept to extend the focus of user experience practitioners beyond the end user, to the organizational context of the [software] project.

This leads to a pun that (like most flashes of inspiration) is obvious in retrospect:

The people who have come to rely on features that are actually implementation errors are called ‘mistakeholders’.

Four years ago I wrote a Language Log post looking into the use of podium as a verb at the Winter Olympics in Torino — and the often extreme reactions that the usage provoked. Now with the Vancouver Olympics coming up, I return to the theme in my latest On Language column in the New York Times Magazine. It is no doubt the first (and last) article in the Times to cite both a senior editor of Ski Racing magazine and Eve & Herbert Clark's crucial study of denominal verbs.

The cover of the January-February issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette has a nice picture of Victor Mair lifting a glass with Patrick McGovern, to illustrate an article about Patrick's new book Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages, and an interview with Victor about his new book with Erling Hoh, The True History of Tea. (There are some excerpts from the two books as well.)

The reasons to be interested in the books, and to enjoy these two articles in one of the best alumni magazines around, are mostly not linguistic ones.  However, a couple of language-related points stuck with me.

Suppose you had 100 digital recorders and 800 small languages, all in a country the size of California, but in one of the remotest parts of the planet.  What would you do?  What would it take to identify and train a small army of language workers?  How could the recordings they collect be accessible to people who don't speak the language?  My answer to this question is linked below – but spend a moment thinking how you might do this before looking.  One inspiration for this work was Mark Liberman's talk The problems of scale in language documentation at the Texas Linguistics Society meeting in 2006, in a workshop on Computational Linguistics for Less-Studied Languages.  Another inspiration was observing the enthusiasm of the remaining speakers of the Usarufa language to maintain their language (see this earlier post).  About 9 months ago, I decided to ask Olympus if they would give me 100 of their latest model digital voice recorders.  They did, and the BOLD:PNG Project starts next week.  Please sign the guestbook on that site, or post a comment here, if you'd like to encourage the speakers of these languages who are getting involved in this new project.

[What follows is a guest post reporting on a very disturbing situation at King's College London involving the sacking of senior computational linguists and others in a secretly planned, tragically stupid, and farcically implemented mass-purge. The author of the post is currently employed at KCL, and for obvious reasons must remain anonymous here.

Although it is clear that KCL is suffering from severe budgetary problems, the administration has reacted to the problems inappropriately and unconscionably: the administration is sacking some of KCL's most successful, academically productive and influential scholars, showing arbitrariness and short-sightedness in its decision making, and acting with extreme callousness in the manner by which the decisions have been imposed on the victims.

For those out of the field, I would note that I and other Language Loggers are intimately acquainted with the work of those under fire at KCL. It is among the most important work in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics, presenting ideas that many of us cite regularly and have absorbed into our own work, and which nobody in the field can ignore. – David Beaver]

Philosophers have been aghast at recent developments at King's College, London
where three senior philosophers, Prof Shalom Lappin, Dr Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Prof Charles Travis, have been targetted for redundancy as part of a restructuring plan for the KCL School of Arts and Humanities. The reason for targetting Lappin and Meyer-Viol has been explained to be that KCL is `disinvesting' from Computational Linguistics. One of the many puzzling aspects of this supposed explanation for targetting Lappin and Meyer-Viol is that there is no computational linguistics unit in Philosophy to disinvest from. (For detailed coverage see the Leiter Report here, here, and here, and these letters protesting the actions taken in the humanities.)

I write this from gate 27 at SFO, on my way back to Philadelphia from a meeting that was interesting and productive, but didn't have a lot of direct linguistic relevance.  I did manage to fit in breakfast with Geoff Nunberg and lunch with Paul Kay, and  Paul pointed me to Andrea Baronchelli et al.,  "Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns", PNAS 1/25/2010, which I'll post about after I've had a chance to read it — in combination with Paul's own recent paper, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, & Naveen Khetarpal, "Color naming and the shape of color space", Language 85(4) 2009, which has been at the top of my to-blog list for a week or so.

In the few minutes before my plane boards, I've got time to register one linguistic observation of possible interest:  earlier this morning, as I was checking out of the place I've been staying, something happened that made me wonder whether American "huh" might be heading in the direction of Canadian "eh".

A few days ago, TPM linked to an political ad in the New Orleans Coroner's race, which gives a good example of a particular NO accent (known as "Yat") about which A.J. Liebling wrote in The Earl of Lousiana:

There is a New Orleans city accent . . . associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans.

'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' —'definitely'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.

So reports CNews in Canada here.

But I think what they meant was that Professor Budra (who is talking about the disastrous state of the spelling and grammar skills of students in Canada's universities today) said (or rather, emailed) 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' —'definately'. The in-house automatic spelling checks, I conjecture, flagged definately as an error (which it is: undergraduates take note), and they incorrectly corrected it to the correct spelling, which here was incorrect!

David Marsh, in the regular language column at The Guardian, writes about the increasing frequency of -gate derivatives in recent journalism, and cites Language Log:

All these gates are examples of a snowclone, a type of cliched phrase defined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum as "a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants". Examples of a typical snowclone are: grey is the new black, comedy is the new rock'n'roll, Barnsley is the new Naples, and so on.

Xgate as a snowclone? Not quite. I see the conceptual similarity, but the very words he quotes show that I originally defined the concept (in this post) as a phrase or sentence template. The Xgate frame is a lexical word-formation analog of it, an extension of the concept from syntax into derivational morphology.

Edward Wyatt ("Creators of ‘Lost’ Say the GPS Unit Is Plugged In", NYT 1/28/2010) quotes Damon Lindelof, an executive producer of Lost, exploring the use of they as an indefinite singular pronoun in free variation with he:

“There’s an inherent process when you’re ending something to sort of be thinking about the beginning,” Mr. Lindelof said. “One of the things that I think we are trying to do — all of us, the actors and the writers as well, in the sixth season — is to show the audience the before,” as well as the after.

Therefore episodes in the final season will continue to provide plenty of back story. That way viewers “have some sense of, ‘Oh, this is what he used to be and who they are now,’ ” Mr. Lindelof added. “So you really get a sense of how far that person’s come.”

Jens Fiederer writes with a link to this blog posting, about North Korean ideologies as described in B.R. Myers's How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why it Matters. The blogger adds:

I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick.  Excerpt:

North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way that the Inuit do for snow.