Language Log

Yesterday, LizardBreath at Unfogged made an excellent point in response to my recent post about Sarah Palin's (in)coherence ("I Think There's A Problem With the Methodology Here", 11/19/2008):

If even the clearest speakers' speech often looks incoherent when transcribed, then this argument establishes that no one can ever be validly criticized as an unusually incoherent speaker. And that can't possibly be right — some people do sound clear and logical when they talk, and other people sound error-ridden and confused.

There was rather an unfortunate fracas in the sherry lounge at Language Log Plaza yesterday. Liberman was still throwing his weight around with evidence that attacks on Palin's language are mostly ill-informed linguistic snobbery, when Pullum, who is much better informed than most snobs, pulled the rug out from under his feet.

Now, at last, we can get discussion of political language from an expert whose credentials are not open to question. Here is presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota (quoted at the Huffington Post, by his mouthpiece Andy Borowitz):

Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement….

Now, it's true that this apposite little witticism reinforces a stereotype (i.e. Obama speaks fluently compared to certain other salient politicos). And it's also true that no evidence at all is offered for the generalization. But it's important to keep in mind that the expert providing the quote, Davis Logsdon, is a distinguished university professor. And Professor Logsdon's primary distinction… is that he doesn't exist.

Since The Economist has come in for a bit of scolding here recently, it's only fair to cite an example that illustrates why it's usually one of the most intelligent and well-informed periodicals around, linguistically as well as in other ways. (The link is to the blog "Democracy in America" at Economist.com, but still…)

Some quotes from Victor Mair are featured in the NYT today ("The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn't Care to Listen To", 11/18/2008), with respect to the 3,800-year-old mummies found in the Tarim Basin.

Mr. Mair has disputed any suggestion that the mummies were from East Asia. He believes that East Asian migrants did not appear in the Tarim Basin until much later than the Loulan Beauty and her people.

The oldest mummies, he says, were probably Tocharians, herders who traveled eastward across the Central Asian steppes and whose language belonged to the Indo-European family. A second wave of migrants came from what is now Iran.

A postcard from my friend Chris Ambidge, an ad for the comedy movie Stiff Luv (2008), picturing six cast members, all dressed as women:

Something tells me, Arnold, that not all these women actually are.

(To judge from the cast list at the movie's website, I'd guess that NONE of the women actually are.)

Ok, Chris's note is a joke. The sentence isn't grammatical (though it's entirely comprehensible). But what's wrong with it?

Joel Berson wrote to the American Dialect Society mailing list on 12 November:

In the NYTimes Thursday, Nov. 6, Alessandra Stanley wrote (in "Cheers, Tears and a Sense of the Historic Moment"), "There was many a confessional detour, from Dan Rather reminiscing … to the former White House adviser David Gergin describing …".

This seems awkward, when "there were many confessional detours" is available (and uses the same number of keystrokes).

Many a N is "notionally plural" — it refers to more than one N — but grammatically singular:

Many a linguist has/*have wondered about how to analyze this construction.

So the singular was in Stanley's sentence is just the form you'd expect. But Berson found it awkward, and others agreed with him. Ben Zimmer suggested that the problem was the proximity of the verb to many, in which case you might get "agreement with the nearest": 

There were many a confessional detour…

This still doesn't satisfy me, because the unproblematic many confessional detours is available as an alternative.

As Ben noted, there's a problem here only because the sentence is existential, with there as the grammatical subject (in subject position, preceding the verb) and a referential NP in the predicate (following the verb). In standard English, this predicative NP determines the number of the verb (with some wrinkles for there's). And if this predicative NP has the form many a N, the plural quantifier many ends up as the nearest potential determinant of agreement on the verb (while when many a N is in subject position, the singular N is not only the head of the NP but also the nearest potential determinant of agreement on the verb).

It's been a while since we looked at agreement with the nearest, so maybe a re-play of another case involving existentials is in order.

Mark struggles to maintain some sort of balance to counter the amateur linguistics we see in the press concerning the language used by political figures, even to the extent of trying to defend Sarah Palin's often incoherent public pronouncements. But I think she'll continue to outflank him. Here's a recent quote, from the Larry King show (on display in the Doonesbury site's "Say What?" feature over the last few days):

If there is anything that I can do in terms of assisting there and allowing the credence, the credibility that that great vocation, that cornerstone of our democracy called the press, if I can help build up that credibility in the press and allow the electorate to know that they can believe everything that is reported through the airwaves and through print, I want to be able to help.

We may expect to get an apology for an offense committed against us but we sometimes don’t get one. Henry Alford’s opinion piece in the NYT offers one solution: apologize to the person who should have done the apologizing. It goes something like this:

(someone bumps into him)

Alford: Oh, I'm sorry you bumped into me.

Bumper: That's okay.

Alford calls this “reverse etiquette.” In an effort to elicit the expected politeness routine when somebody bumps into him, he tries to prime the pump by apologizing to the bumper. He admits, however, that this strategy doesn’t seem to work. But he tries again, more explicitly upping the ante with something like this:

Alford: I didn’t really mean for you to bump me with your bag.

Bumper: Don’t mention it.

A report from Languge Log's Rocky Mountain desk, where folks out here now fight over words rather than cattle rustling.

The Planning and Zoning Board of the Missoula Montana city government is having one of those ding-dong, small-town lexical battles, this time over what constitutes a parapet. Montana Lil’s has purchased the defunct 4 B’s Restaurant at a busy (by Montana standards) intersection and wants to turn it into a casino (yes, we have lots of these out here and we probably don’t need any more, but that’s how it goes out here in the new Rocky Mountain west).

The new owners want to erect a big video sign on the old restaurant’s roof, which has four equal sized, triangular sections that come to a point at the center. Current signage rules allow for parapet signs but they prohibit any signs on roof tops. No problem, say the new owners. Their new sign will be placed on a parapet that they’ll construct as a small, box-like structure on top of the building’s existing pointed roof. Unfortunately for them, their proposed construction is way too far from the edge of the outer wall of the building, where parapets normally are located. City officials say this doesn’t fit anyone’s definition of a parapet. They have a point.

WAG is a very unusual initialism that has evolved in the last decade or so in the language of British newspapers. It is a back-formation from an acronym. Its origin lies in the the initials of the phrase Wives And Girlfriends, the phrase used to refer to the often newsmaking entourage of female companions surrounding (in particular) British soccer-playing celebrities. But once the acronym was established, and said females (often glamorous models or wannabes much sought after by celebrity photographers) could be referred to collectively as the team's WAGs, a singular noun was created as a kind of back-formation, and today an individual woman in a relationship with a soccer player can be referred to as a WAG.

Zippy and a stranger on the street puzzle about the fictional, the actual, and the real, somewhere in New Jersey, or at least the idea of New Jersey:

Zits returns to a familiar theme, the presumed chattiness of women, especially young women.

Folk sociolinguistics lives on, sturdily.

Dick Cavett recently called Sarah Palin "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla" and "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High". He worries that "ambitious politicos" will learn "that frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits". Peter Suderman, more specific if less witty, complains ("Sarah Palin speaks!",11/12/2208 ) that "I do not know what this means":

… massive leverage by everyone from consumers who bought houses for nothing down to hedge funds that were betting $30 for every $1 they had in cash a world economy that is so much more intertwined than people realized which is exemplified by British police departments that are financially strapped today because they put their savings in online Icelandic banks to get a little better yield that have gone bust globally intertwined financial instruments that are so complex that most of the C.E.O.'s dealing with them did not and do not understand how they work especially on the downside a financial crisis that started in America with our toxic mortgages …