Language Log

I asked a former student of mine who has been working in China for many years the following questions:

What's the atmosphere like in China these days? Is it at all evident that there is a huge amount of tension between China and virtually the rest of the world over what's been happening in Tibet and Xinjiang, the arrests of dissidents in the heartland itself, and the intrusive way the government has been orchestrating the torch relay through many countries?

Here's his answer:

I have not talked to a single person among my friends and colleagues in China who has any sympathy for Tibet, Xinjiang, or the protests. Their reactions are as offended and irrational as those of the Chinese government.

In the past few days my Windows Live Messenger (an instant messaging program) contacts list has seen numerous Chinese changing their "personal message" that follows their name and is displayed to all their contacts to some version of a heart picture and China. See attached image.

In my posting on and/or, I gave an informal (but precise) account of what I take to be the semantics of expressions of the form X₁ or X₂ … or X_n, where or is understood exclusively: the disjunction is true if and only if exactly one X_i is true and the rest are false. (Compare the inclusive understanding, where the disjunction is true if and only if at least one X_i is true.) My inbox is now filling up with mail from people explaining to me that I'm wrong about the semantics of exclusive or. Well, actually, they're telling me that I'm wrong about the semantics of the binary logical connective of exclusive disjunction + (or however you want to represent this logical connective). I'm perfectly clear about the semantics of +, but that's not what I was talking about.

From Phineas Q. Phlogiston, "Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP", Speculative Grammarian, CLIII(4), March 2008:

This is only the second cartoon about computational linguistics that I know of. The first one is also rather negative, but I guess that this is only to be expected from cartoonists, who are on the whole much more likely to criticize something than to praise it.

I've defended William Safire from David Beaver. I even nominated him for an award, though when the news leaked out, it was biggest public relations disaster in the history of this venerable weblog.

But now I'm starting to come around to my colleagues' view. It's time for some serious housecleaning at Safire Industries Ltd. We need a new reality show: The Language Maven's Apprentice.

The illustration is from Taro Gomi, An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, by way of a new addition to our blogroll, The Ideophone, by Mark Dingemanse.

Back in January 2004 Mark Liberman engaged with Dr. Robert Beard, then doing business as "Dr. Language" on yourDictionary.com, on the politics of pronunciation. Dr. Beard now goes by a new nom de blog, "Dr. Goodword," on yourDictionary's successor, alphaDictionary.com. It turns out he's interested in presidential politics as well, as demonstrated by the most recent Dr. Goodword post on "superdelegates." He takes grave offense at the term and its popularization in the 2008 Democratic primary season:

The US press is pushing a new word into our collective vocabulary in an apparent attempt to tilt the US elections in the direction it prefers. Political leaders are now called superdelegates because they have more power at a political convention than rank-and-file members of the party.

Of course, this has always been the case. In fact, it should be the case since it is the leaders of the party who must ultimately decide what is best for the party and who are responsible for its health and success. So why do we need this new pejorative term this year (2008)?

This would be an intriguing argument — if, you know, the word "superdelegate" was actually new. The Recency Illusion strikes again.

I got a message the other day from Laura Petelle, an adjunct professor of philosophy at Illinois Central College, with an optimistic view of the effects of modern technology on writing skills and research abilities, the diametrically opposed to the ill-substantiated pessimism about cellphones destroying language and thought that Naomi Baron somehow peddled to a writer for The Economist. Says Laura:

I've been tutoring writing since I was in high school, and I think texting and instant messaging has made the job quite a bit easier! I used to get students who'd stare at a blank page, for whom writing was a chore, and translating their normal communication mode from talking to writing was like pulling teeth. Today, I get students (both in my college classroom and in the high school tutoring I do on the side) for whom writing IS a normal mode of communication.

My colleague Bob Ladd wondered how many people noticed the translingual pun at the top of a recent Economist article. The topic was the ascent of Ma Ying-jeou to the presidency of Taiwan— sorry, to the presidency of the the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu (Chinese Taipei). Mr. Ma is a Mandarin speaker. Now, every linguist knows that one of the large number of meanings the syllable ma can have, along with "mother", "hemp", and "scold", is (if the 3rd tone is used) "horse". (See this site for a tutorial on Chinese tones.) Chinese teachers delight in sentences with meanings like "Horse eats hemp, suffers mother's swearing" (ma₃ chi₁ ma₂ a₁i ma₁ ma₄) containing four different ma words. So The Economist's headline choice was: Ma's horse comes in. The ‘Ma’ can be read as both "Ma" (personal name) and "ma₃" ("horse") — and in fact both of these are written with the character 馬. But the allusion to Chinese lessons was not picked up anywhere in the story. I wonder how many readers will have noticed it.

Language Log brings little surprises into my life — this week, the report by Geoff Pullum that there are people who believe that the English conjunction or is always understood exclusively (so that and/or and or both might be useful expressions to have around, to convey an inclusive reading).  Geoff countered with an argument that the meaning of or is in fact just inclusive disjunction, though the conjunction can be used to convey exclusivity via conversational implicature.  

The usage literature largely agrees with this position, and so and/or is widely (but not universally) reviled, as unnecessary. But there's more to the story.

In a couple of recent posts (here and here), I discussed cases where someone substitutes one person's name for another, on the basis of a relational analogy or associative similarity: sister for daughter, child for pet, ex-spouse for current spouse, and so on. A particularly interesting extension is the phenomenon of chains of incorrect names, often arranged in chronological or other stereotyped order. Some examples from readers' email:

My grandmother would often call me by a string of names: my mother’s name, then my aunt’s name (my grandmother’s other daughter) and then my name.
… my mother ran through the string of family thus: Mary Ann, Robert, Paul, John, Kitty, Pat. Mother did not make much pause between names, just stopped (usually) when she got to the one she wanted. Pat got added last, so she came in after whatever the current cat was. Mother always used Kitty for the cat.
… his mother was famous for doing the string-of-names thing when she wanted to call out to any of her 6 children, and Emmon as the youngest was usually on the receiving end of the longest string, “Stanley-David-Austin-Sven-Betty-Emmon!”
My name is often fourth or fifth in the chain of names I’m called, coming after my father and sister (almost always), my uncles (usually), and various other relatives (sometimes).
I am Italian and my grandmother used to have to go through the whole list of her six daughters’ names before saying mine. It occurred all the time she was addressing a close relative and it annoyed her enormously. Her daughters are now also doing it – it seems the older one gets, the more likely it happens. I can think of quite a few other people who do it, and they all seem to be women. And I would say it mainly occurs with relatives’ names.

I wondered whether there is any existing term — scientific or informal — for this chaining of family-members' names. It seems that the answer is "no", and so I've tentatively staked a terminological claim with the term "name chain". (If you felt the need for a term with more gravitas, you could try "onomastic catenation". But why would you, in a world where physicists spend billions on equipment to distinguish among the categories of quark known as up and down, charm and strange, top and bottom, and biologists pursue the sonic hedgehog gene?)

In the Metro, a free newspaper that I often pick up in Edinburgh, there is an entertainment gossip page called Guilty Pleasures, which of course I never look at. Perhaps the most poisonous of the regular features is a couple of square inches, buried amongst the candid paparazzi shots of heiresses' breasts and film stars' bellies, under the title News from the Molehill, which I certainly never look at. It has a very particular and routinized syntactic form.

The piece always begins with a wh-phrase, usually of the form which + Adjective + Noun, the noun being something like actor, celebrity, TV personality, or singer. That wh-phrase is then used as the hook on which to hang a bizarre gossip item. Further references to the unknown individual with definite noun phrases are used to supply enough clues to get you guessing as to who it might be referring to. I quote one such item below in its entirety. (They are known in journalism as "blind items", Grant Barrett tells me.) I offer it for your scrutiny not so that you can start guessing who is being talked about, but because the piece, which unusually conceals the sex as well as the identity of the unknown gossip target, uses a striking series of singular they forms. In my judgment it goes outside the bounds of ordinary Standard English: the piece is basically ungrammatical for me.

Which paranoid celebrity has become so obsessed with their portrayal in the media they are going to extreme lengths to control their perception? The increasingly reclusive singer now personally rummages through their own bins in case they've thrown out anything that would give an insight into their private life…

Something that we don't always think about is that names don't come by themselves but are part of a system with a certain structure. This is brought out by instances in which the names and the system of which they are a part come to be separated.

Carrier people used to have names that were wholly or partly meaningful in the Carrier language, but these died out very quickly once a resident priest arrived in 1865. The church gave people French saints' names on baptism, and these names immediately replaced the original Carrier names. Children ceased to receive a Carrier name.

A few days ago Geoff Pullum reviewed an Economist article that relied heavily on the recent work of Naomi Baron. The article cited her as saying that cell phones, pagers, laptops, and wireless devices are the weapons of mass language destruction that we see everywhere around us. But those of us who read newspapers these days know better. The real cause of linguistic chaos is right under our noses. It's the New York Times crossword puzzles, that's what it is! In terms of language correctness, almost anything goes there.