Language Log

Annie Wagner, in an unusual tribute to the late David Foster Wallace, asked about "a grammatical quirk the man just couldn’t quit". She quotes from a review she wrote several years ago:

Everything is the first volume in the “Great Discoveries” series, through which the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, intends to “bring new voices to the telling of stories of scientific achievement.” Which goal, as DFW’s habitual syntax would have it, is somewhat suspicious.

It has often been my duty to translate or edit Russian archeological and Sinological works in English. Two things plague such work more than anything else, and both have to do with transliteration.

You might think that it does, from the headlines "Bilingual children stutter more – study", "Stutter risk for bilingual kids", "Study: bilingual kids more likely to stutter", etc. These stories report on a recently-published study: Peter Howell, Stephen Roger Davis, and Roberta Williams, "The effects of bilingualism on stuttering during late childhood", ADC Published Online 9 September 2008.

Howell et al. studied 317 children who stuttered, all of whom started school in the UK at age four or five, first came to a speech clinic between 8 and 10, and lived in the greater London area. For 69 of the 317, "at least one language other than English was spoken in the home". Thus 21.8% of the stutterers were raised in a home where a language other than English is spoken. In comparison, among schoolchildren of comparable age in the greater London area, the London Education Authority reports that 28.4% come from such homes.

But wait a minute: the percentage of stutterers who come from non-English-speaking homes is smaller than the percentage of kids in general who come from such homes? How does this translate into "Bilingual children stutter more", or "Stutter risk for bilingual kids"?

Anyone who has ever tried to use Google Book Search for serious historical research has had to grapple with its highly frustrating limitations. I've griped about the situation on several occasions (here, here, here, here). The problem is twofold: GBS is plagued by inaccurate or misleading dating, particularly for serial publications, and it does not offer full page images even for many works that are clearly in the public domain (namely, pre-1923 US works and noncopyrightable government publications). Many of us have been patiently waiting for Google to ease up on its viewing restrictions, which would simultaneously ameliorate the dating problem: if you can skim through page images, then you can determine if the year that Google gives you in the metadata is actually correct.

Help is on the way — but not from Google, exactly. Rather, several of Google's partners in its library scanning project are stepping up to the plate. Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary passes on the news that the Hathi Trust has been established by the thirteen university libraries that make up the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. This includes the University of Michigan, which has contributed a major portion of Google's scanned material thus far. The Hathi Trust is not nearly as wary as Google in providing page images and fully searchable text for public domain materials. What this means is that if you find something on GBS that only gives you "snippet view," "limited preview," or "no preview available," you may be able to find the full page images by going to a CIC library site. The University of Michigan has already implemented this as part of its Mirlyn Library Catalog, with links to public domain material provided under the name "HathiTrust Digital Library." (Roy Tennant of Library Journal has also mocked up a prototype search service, but it still needs some work.)

Below the jump, an example of Hathi goodness in action.

Lucy Mangan ("Every little helps", The Guardian, 9/13/2008), is the troubled child of a mixed marriage:

As a family, we have few abstract points of contention. Generally, we like to keep arguments specific and concrete – who ate the last peppermint cream, who lost the door keys, who killed Grandma, that kind of thing. But let a grammatical solecism rear its ugly head and the dinner table is awash with bloodlust. My mother, as you might expect from a woman who used to break my fingers for putting our beige napkins down "the wrong way", believes that the rules of grammar are semi-divine and wholly immutable. A split infinitive, "different to" or "none are": these are the things that try her soul, at least if there aren't any inverted napkins around.

Dad, meanwhile, embraces "mistakes" as part of the natural evolution of language. Presented with an empurpled wife insisting that "to aggravate" means "to make worse", not "to annoy", he will proclaim that "effete" once meant "having given birth". Each seeks my support. Bending my head to my plate, I feel like the trembling victim of a soon-to-be-broken home.

For a peek at what makes language — and Language Log — possible, consider this. Suppose that you stand up in front of a class of kindergarten or first-grade kids, who haven't learned to read and write yet, and tell them "Today we're going to play a game. I'll tell you a story — and any time I say 'school', the first kid that raises a hand gets a dollar."

If you tell a good story, and manage the interaction right, there'll be many occasions of group glee. (A Jon-Stewart-style hammed-up doubletake, when they miss a keyword instance, should be quite effective.)

But in general, as long as you speak clearly, most of the arguments are going to be about whose hand went up first, not about whether what you said was actually school or something else.

Now, for a peek at what makes the study of intonation difficult, imagine trying the game a different way. Instead of offering a bounty for instances of a word, ask them to raise their hands for instances of a pitch contour.

Pretty much every time I post a Zippy cartoon (most recently, here), someone writes to ask about Bill Griffith's spelling of the definite article the as th', as in

I know th' human being and th' fish can coexist peacefully!

The question was asked in the comments on my posting "Are we snowcloning yet?" back in June and was answered by other commenters there. The purpose of today's posting is to record the answer, with some commentary, so that I can refer future queries here.

The short answer is that Griffith is just representing the ordinary, reduced, pronunciation of the. The spelling th' is an instance of "eye dialect" (in a narrow sense), spellings (like wimmin for women) that represent ordinary pronunciations.

At Stansted Airport near the security checkpoints I saw a closet labeled CONTINGENCY DEPLOYMENT EQUIPMENT. I reflected awhile, as I put my belt and shoes back on after a very thorough body-fondling search, on the meaning of that remarkable sequence of Latinate lexical selections, and I decided that it meant "things to use if stuff happens". But of course that doesn't really distinguish the things in that closet from the things in almost any other closet. I wonder what was in there. Things that are either too heterogeneous to classify or too secret to openly name, evidently.

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.)