I noticed an ad in the métro claiming that some… product (I don’t recall what it was) was in fact “faster!” (than other competing products, I assume). What interested me was the fact that the phrase in French, “plus vite” (literally more fast), could be iconically abbreviated by swapping in the + sign for the word “plus”. Commenting on this fact sparked a long discussion about the words for mathematical operations in French and English. We think of ‘addition’ as a symmetrical function, but adding (as in, say, milk to cereal) does not appear to be symmetrical. Is this a semantic or pragmatic feature of ‘add’? Those who know me will not be surprised that I typically would vote for pragmatic, but it’s rather difficult to see how to work that out in this case. More as I think about it.
Read MoreOn Mount Desert Island in Maine, people refer to roads with the definite article. So what the street sign says is “Crooked Road” might be mentioned in a sentence as “He lives on the Crooked Road.” This is likely to be how many roads originally got their names, so Birmingham Road in Coventry used to be the primary road to take to get to Birmingham, etc. At some point the reference became the “official” (under whichever authority) name for the road, and this status could remain even if a different road became the preferred thoroughfare (cf., e.g., Kripke on Dartmouth). But does the use of the definite article just reflect a quirky regionalism in the statement of the name? Or is it indicative of a different conception on the part of the locals w.r.t. names and descriptions? I only wish I could get a grant and stay here longer to do more research. Perhaps I could combine this with my planned game-theoretic analysis of the soft-shell/hard-shell demarcation equilibrium…
Read MoreI think I just realized another reason why I don’t like Facebook — it doesn’t work so well with my pragmatics module. I can’t tell what my speech acts actually mean there, and I don’t know how failure to “friend” everyone I know, or lack of response to “notes” or “wall” or whatever that shit is comes across. I suppose there must be some academic papers I could read on the topic, although I imagine they would have Derrida or someone equally obscurantist in the bibliography. There’s just too much structure there, too many holders for content with not enough content. Maybe I’m worried about this more these days since I’m going to be moving to another country and I’m counting on the internet to keep me in touch with friends. Also I might just be too old.
Read MoreMy dashboard tells me that up to now, I’ve written 99 posts (in this incarnation of SS), and the pressure of a round number bore down mightily, intimating that I had to come up with something good at this milestone. That, and other other down-bearing elements of my life, like papers, teaching, grading, etc. But recently, after finishing up a paper (on time!) I realized that I had to just jump back in with both feet if I’m ever going to use this site again. So here goes, with a comment on metafilter as a starting point, and because I’ve been thinking a lot about discourse anaphora recently:
His father, Nick Begich, won an election posthumously, only they didn’t know for sure that it was posthumous because his plane just disappeared. It still hasn’t turned up. It’s why locators are now required in all US planes.
Notice that there are three instances of “it” in the above. The first one, I think it’s clear, refers to the election winning event. But notice the second and third instances of “it” — the second refers to the lost airplane, which is to say it is the “it” that picks out a singular object in the world. But the third “it” refers to the event of the airplane being lost. I think this is fascinating because not only does it refer to a larger entity than what the previous “it” picks out, but it also refers to a proposition that isn’t the closest one, as it bypasses “it still hasn’t turned up,” which is closer, and instead is linked with the event of the airplane disappearing. If you’re confused, I made a little chart:
Resolving this kind of anaphora is something that humans do flawlessly, without thinking, all the time, but I bet it would be rather difficult to automate using a non-human.
Read MoreI’m at the point in the semester where I’m knee deep in teaching syntax, which is good as it’s something I don’t often think about but feel that I should know better than I do. It does, however, have the additional effect of making me notice how my idiolect contains all sorts of examples of constructions that many people judge ungrammatical (most grievously, according to Walt, the dreaded resumptive pronoun).
So yesterday, I was with my sister at NYU’s lovely Bobst Library (now less scary with plexiglass barriers — photo of the amazing internal atrium here). Walt called, and wanted to meet up with us later at Old Town, but didn’t recall exactly where it was. So in the course of explaining to him how to get there, I said:
You know that street that the Union Square Petco is on the corner of Broadway and?
So apparently I can extract out of a coordinate construction. Now all I have to is come up with a naturally occurring subjacency violation (cause that’s the one that loads of papers about have been written) and I can just declare my own dialect.
Read MoreJust yesterday I was teaching the first class of an introductory linguistics course, and I asked students how many languages they thought were currently spoken in the world. Guesses ranged from one to ten thousand, which was pretty good for a first class. When the last version of Ethnologue came out, it claimed there were 6,912 languages in the world. As of two days ago, there are only 6,911: the last traditional speaker of Eyak, a native language of Alaska, died at 89 years of age.
Read MoreOver at languagelog, Geoffrey Pullum takes a student to task for writing on a test that some phrases in an example sentence “were not deemed noun phrases.” He feels that students shouldn’t be “deeming” anything, as they’re the students and he’s the professor, and that further pomposity was added by the passive voice. When I read his post, I realized that if I had been grading that paper, I would have interpreted the student’s locution entirely differently: it’s possible that the student used the passive voice to invoke unnamed experts who have already done the deeming elsewhere, and the student was merely reporting on that fact. I’m sure it would have struck me that the student was weighing in a bit too heavily to make his point, however it’s not entirely clear to me that it was the student who intended to do the deeming in this case.
Either way, it couldn’t have been a very high-level course, as the task was to identify noun phrases in a sentence, so I think all the deeming on that subject has been done.
Read MoreI’m giving a talk tomorrow (info/abstract below the fold) which required me to find an image of Boris Badenov (don’t ask — it’s to illustrate an example slide). I went to his wikipedia entry, and found, to my delight, that someone has taken the time to create a long list of disguises that Boris has used, along with the episode in which that disguise appeared. Some of my favorites:
- Mayor Avaricious J. Wardheeler (Bumbling Brothers Circus)
- Salesman of Dancer, Prancer, Blitzen, & Fink advertising agency (Moosylvania Saved)
- Hailfellow J. Backslap, Official Washington Greeter (Missouri Mish Mash)
In a meeting today of Linguistics 101 teachers at Rutgers we were discussing plagiarism. A colleague made a hilarious suggestion: give students a homework question about topic x, then go to the wikipedia article on topic x and alter it to be incorrect. Laugh at the results. I expanded on the theme, positing that one could insert a random word, say, donut, into the entry on topic x and expect to see donut on at least one submitted homework. I might actually try this.
Read MoreIn a lecture the other day, I had a slide on “neologisms” to illustrate the concept of productivity. This was in Linguistics 101, a course populated by undergraduates from a wide variety of majors, and I thought I’d use “weblog” as an example of a neologism. So I pointed to “weblog” on the slide and asked what the word meant. Silence. This is a tough class to crack as it’s in the evening and they’re tuckered out and digesting, so I often have to resort to calling on individual students. No worry, I thought, as it’s an easy question for someone to answer, and it’s just their general disinclination to speak in class that’s causing the blank stares. I choose a name from the list. The student in question looks up at me with the same blank stare. “Umm, do you mean ‘blog’?” she asks, and then provides the definition.
It is actually the case that ‘weblog’ has ceased to function as a denoting term amongst this age group, having been supplanted by the catchier ‘blog’, thereby obscuring the etymology.
I felt just a tiny bit old after that class.
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