On 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 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)
It’s the last day of NaBloPoMo and it’s clear I’ve failed. I’m not really a “post daily” kind of person in a good month, and this month happens to be both “finish qualifying paper” month and “drive to Michigan for Thanksgiving and then drive back again what seems like a few days later, and is in fact less than a week later” month.
So here goes my final post of November. I was reading the Machinist column over at Salon.com¹, and came across this dialog which took place over electronic communication:
IN TOUCH: They are saying britneys pregnant and you’re the father…
JR: Its true
IN TOUCH: OK, awesome, do u think Britney will keep it? She’s already talking about it to people
JR: No clue on what she will do. She is unpredictable.
It was posted online by In Touch magazine to “prove” that their reporting re: the pregnancy status of Ms. Spears was accurate. It seems to me, however, that the “it’s true” response can in this context very felicitously be applied to the initial assertion, that is, JR could be agreeing that people are indeed saying that she’s pregnant and that he’s the father. This would have been more apparent had he followed up his remark with a phrase to clarify the scope, such as “It’s true, they are saying that.” So not that I expect high journalistic standards from a magazine like In Touch,² it does seem that there is enough room for ambiguity here to think that this might not have been the confirmation they needed to run the story…
1. Why was I reading Salon.com during “finish qualifying paper” month? you might ask, and you’d be right to.
2. Not to knock it, though — my gym has a subscription and sometimes when you’re running that third mile you don’t want to read anything more challenging than “who wore it best“. Actually that’s Us magazine, but whatever.
Read MoreApparently all they need is the modal at the New York Times. As of 9:25 pm today:
Or perhaps ‘gun-control’ is one of those nouns that’s slipped the surly bonds of its lexical category and become a verb?
UPDATE: It turns out that the missing verb was … (drumroll) … ‘take’. In this context I would have thought ‘hear’ was a better choice, as that’s what the Supreme Court tends to do w.r.t. cases, but at least it’s no longer a naked modal, searching for a verb. Take a look, if you wish: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/washington/13scotus.html
Read MoreA few years ago, Walt and my sister and I were on a roadtrip to Michigan, accompanied by the dulcet tones of John Hodgman, reading to us from the areas of his expertise (this audiobook was free for a while on itunes, and may very well still be — if it is, I advise you to get it, especially if there is a roadtrip in your future).
Those of you who have read (or heard) the book know that it contains a rather long list of hobo names. Â Recently, on Mr Hodgman’s website, he mentioned a possible HOBO SUPER HERO:
He says:
PERSONALLY, I cannot tell if this is an authentic artifact of the past, or an inauthentic one.
PLEASE LOOK. ARE THERE ANY COMIC BOOK DATING EXPERTS WHO MIGHT AID ME?
Off the top of my head, just a few of the many potential readings of this last sentence include:
- He is looking for an expert in identifying when comic books where created.
- He is looking for an expert in identifying when books were created who is also a comic.
- He is looking for an expert who goes out on dates with comic books.
- He is looking for an expert in going out on dates with books who is also a comic.
- …
I don’t have the inclination to make this list as comprehensive as the hobo name list, but I think one could easily double the length of this list, if not more.
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