Language Log

From the character Morton (played by Robert Wagner) in the 2005 movie The Fallen Ones:

(1) We have a lot of earth to move and maintain structural integrity.

The sentence has have used in two different ways in the conjuncts: with a NP object in the first conjunct, with a VP complement in the second (where it's apparently the obligative have of We have to maintain structural integrity). This is formally similar to the GoToGo construction of

(2) She's going to San Francisco and talk on firewalls.

(which has go used in two different ways in the conjuncts: as a motion verb, with a directional complement, in the first conjunct, but as a prospective quasi-modal, with a VP complement,  in the second conjunct). Because of this parallel, I'll call the configuration in (1) HaveToHave. 

My friend Max Vasilatos, with whom I exchange mail every day (it's a long story), recently started sending me postcards in a series featuring signs in which a word has been replaced by FUCK or FUCKING — for instance,

YOU NEED SPACE
WE NEED TENANT
LET'S FUCK

(with TALK replaced by FUCK). And my favorite so far:

FUCKING IN REAR

(with PARKING replaced by FUCKING).

Nothing especially notable about the cards. Except that Max has been sending these as postcards, not put inside an envelope, and the USPO seems to have no problem with this display of taboo vocabulary. (Max does put cards of naked pornstars in envelopes.)

I haven't inquired about this with the USPO — no point in calling attention to it — and it might just be a local thing (Max is in San Francisco, I'm in Palo Alto, and this is a pretty tolerant part of the world). But for some time now I've been noticing bumper stickers (locally) with FUCK and SHIT on them (FUCK BUSH, rather than the Spoonerized BUCK FUSH, for example), so apparently you can display taboo vocabulary in public (in certain places) without getting in trouble with the law.

At least twice here on Language Log, we've looked at combinations of negation and exclusion that might be seen as overnegation (exclusion being a covert negative).

According to Tim Arango, "I Got the News Instantaneously, Oh Boy", 9/14/2008, some so-far anonymous computational linguist caused United Airlines to lose more than a billion dollars of its market capitalization, over the course of about 12 minutes last Monday.

A nice blend from Get Fuzzy:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Well, part of it, anyhow… Michael Y. Chen wrote:

I went to Beijing and studied Chinese in July, and while I was over there I came across an interesting phenomenon.

In English, we talk about shapes that correspond to letters, like an S-curve or a T junction. While asking for directions, I found that there's a similar thing for shapes that correspond to Chinese characters. For example, 十字路口 (shi2zi4lu4kou3), a "十 intersection", refers to a four-way intersection (or just any intersection). The phrase is based entirely on the shape of the character, and not the meaning (十 means ten in Chinese). There's also a 丁字路口 (ding1zi4lu4kou3), a "丁 intersection", which would correspond to our T intersections.

It isn't unusual for a political controversy to turn on the interpretation of what someone on one side said. Indeed, I discussed a couple of cases of this type the other day. What is peculiar about the most recent incident in the Presidential election is that the side whose exegesis is superior appears to have won a Pyrrhic victory.

Mark Liberman's post on a recent xkcd strip unleashed a flurry of comments about jokes that follow the template, "X-er? I hardly know 'er!" (The strip used "supercollider" in the template, an apparent homage to "Futurama.") Commenters were also reminded of a somewhat similar bit of musty British humo(u)r:

A: My wife's gone to the West Indies!
B: Jamaica?
A: No, she went of her own accord!

The success of the joke, such as it is, requires being able to interpret [dʒə ˈmeɪkə] as a clipped form of "Did you make her?" As I discuss in the post "Pinker's almer mater," Led Zeppelin alluded to this joke by titling a reggae-influenced song, "D'yer Mak'er" (recorded in 1972, released the following year). This non-rhotic pronunciation spelling is utterly lost on most (rhotic) American fans, who would likely be puzzled by the original joke anyway.

Well, Spore is out, and a certain 12-year-old of my acquaintance is well into the tribal stage already. But there's an important evolutionary transition, identified in David Malki's latest Wondermark strip, that Will Wright hasn't allowed for:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Over on the American Dialect Society mailing list, we've returned to the topic of illeism, the use of third-person expressions to refer to oneself (treated on Language Log last year), in particular, illeism in speech to or from young children, as in:

[mother to child] Mommy has to go now.

[from child named Kim] Can Kim have ice cream?

As Larry Horn noted, such illeism seems to be a way of coping with the difficulty that young language-learners have with first- and second-person pronouns, which famously are "shifters", with reference that shifts from context to context. Ordinary proper names (like Kim) and kin-terms used as proper names (like Mommy) have a reference that doesn't depend on context the way the reference of first- and second-person pronouns does. Horn recollected:

I recall a Sesame Street episode when our own children were at the appropriate tender age that attempted to "teach", or at least play on, such issues involving the proper use of "I"/"you", "my"/"your", etc.

Carrying the Sesame Street theme in a different direction, I added that Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reported to me some time ago that toddlers' use of their names for self-reference comes up repeatedly on parenting discussion sites, usually in the context of blaming Elmo for it. Elmo refers to himself as "Elmo", and parents reason that their kids picked up their illeism from Elmo. Where else could it have come from?

There's a suppressed premise in that reasoning, and when it's exposed we can see that this way of looking at things is pretty much backwards. And that it ties in with other widespread beliefs about what happens in child language acquisition.

In my post "Uptalk anxiety", 9/7/2008, I tried to comfort an American parent who was worried about a daughter's use of rising pitch accents on statements. As part of the recommended cognitive therapy, I observed that there are regional varieties of English, known as "Urban North British", in which rising pitch accents on statements are more common than not.

But Bob Ladd, who ought to know, commented that "It's important not to confuse the rises in Belfast, Glasgow, etc. with uptalk. They're phonetically and functionally very different."

I responded that "There's no question at all that they're *functionally* different. In terms of sound, though, I think that the issue is less clear." I asked Bob whether he thinks that the pitch contours are systematically different, and in particular whether he could "tell the difference, on short phrases whose F0 and amplitude contour was used to modulate a non-speech oscillator, in the mode of the example e.g. here?"

Bob answered: "If you make some examples, we can do the experiment, but the short answer is that I think I could as long as there is a "tail", i.e. unstressed syllables after the nucleus (last main stress) – in the sound example I posted, there are two postnuclear syllables, -mond and mine. The main phonetic difference between classic North American / Antipodean uptalk and the "Urban North British" statement rises is that the latter rise at the nuclear syllable and then level out or trail off, whereas in uptalk the pitch just keeps on rising."

We're not ready to do the experiment yet, but I can offer some evidence-based suggestions about how it's likely to turn out.

For our first lolcat on New Language Log, here's a phonological one (passed on by Lise Menn):

That is, insert cat between cushun and cushun. (This one is along the lines of a linguistic lolcat suggested by Laurel MacKenzie in an earlier Language Log posting on lolcats.)

[Andrew Carnie writes to tell me that there's a LOLPhonology group on Facebook. Very entertaining. There are 82 photos there at the moment, including this one.]

Mark Liberman's recent posting on the Cobot elicited some comments about talking in slogans. And now along comes Zippy, in catch-phrase dialogue with Griffy:

And from a while back, Dingburgers conversing in George W. Bush quotes: