tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62941417282978716882024-03-13T21:12:33.095+00:00linguistlauraLaurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.comBlogger491125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-72676056774934999222022-07-25T15:28:00.001+01:002022-07-25T15:28:06.987+01:00Getting drank<p>Beavertown Brewery currently have these billboard adverts up, with the slogan <i>Out of this world beer. Drank on Earth</i>: </p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-JVsxX1Yy1NYMSTtAe4HWNglk3coGiuFS0u68TPkDUvDpzV5kKoWnXGrflRk3vfMLrWDRMTSiOJ1N7ICaBoa7xwribhcliK9LAQWfNIlBkLu7-RPR_iA-SdKH3PNLjaGMc2msp3VRrt-64h5aTLd64S1kQLkWb4LECoGNgytutRxcj-oMsXnsrNU8/s1119/beavertown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="A billboard advertising Beavertown beer, on a street with sky and trees in the background. The text says 'Out of this world beer. Drank on earth.'" border="0" data-original-height="1113" data-original-width="1119" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-JVsxX1Yy1NYMSTtAe4HWNglk3coGiuFS0u68TPkDUvDpzV5kKoWnXGrflRk3vfMLrWDRMTSiOJ1N7ICaBoa7xwribhcliK9LAQWfNIlBkLu7-RPR_iA-SdKH3PNLjaGMc2msp3VRrt-64h5aTLd64S1kQLkWb4LECoGNgytutRxcj-oMsXnsrNU8/w400-h398/beavertown.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: @nicholasd on instagram</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>The verb <i>drink</i> is one of our irregular verbs, as it doesn't have a past tense of <i>drinked</i>, adding the regular past tense ending <i>-ed</i>, and instead changes its vowel, so you say <i>I drank beer</i> not <i>I drinked beer</i>. It also does this for the participle, which is what you use for various things including perfect aspect (<i>I have drunk beer</i>) and passive (<i>The beer was drunk by me</i>). This passive participle is also the one we use for things like relative clauses (<i>The beer that is drunk on Earth</i>). </p><p>But there is variation! Not everyone has all three of these forms in all contexts. For a lot of people, <i>drank</i> is used for all the non-present forms (<i>I drank the beer, I have drank the beer</i>), while for others, <i>drunk </i>is used (<i>I drunk the beer, I have drunk the beer</i>). For everyone, the adjective is <i>drunk</i>, though (no one says <i>I am drank</i>!), which I think is a nice indication that it's somehow separate from the verb. </p><p>In formal English, then, this slogan would say <i>Out of this world beer, drunk on Earth</i>, because it's the relative clause type: this is short for <i>which is drunk on Earth</i>. They've chosen instead to go with the form used in more informal contexts and said <i>Drank on Earth</i>. The company's image is very informal and friendly, so they presumably felt it fit more with that vibe, and it has the added benefit of not being mistaken for the adjective which might imply getting drunk, not a good look from the point of view of the advertising standards people. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-77512945631743575332022-07-18T06:00:00.003+01:002022-07-18T10:26:40.433+01:00Performing a flying fuck<p>At our students' graduations this week, a colleague told me about a (non-canonical) ballet step which, because of the particular way that it's performed, is called the Flying Fuck. </p><p>(As an aside, we had a conversation about how many of the names of dance steps are bodily, sexual or generally risqué, something that is also true of one of the types of dance that I do.)</p><p>So as you probably know, there is an expression, <i>I don't give a flying fuck</i>. It means that you don't care at all. For anyone who's using this blog to learn English (ill-advisadly, maybe), it's pretty rude so go carefully. </p><p>In this expression, <i>a flying fuck</i> is what linguists would call a Negative Polarity Item or NPI. These are words that don't sound grammatical in a sentence without a 'licensor', often a negation, hence the name. So we can say (1) but not (2), where there is no negative word in the sentence to license the NPI and it sound really weird: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>(1) I do<b>n't</b> give <b>a flying fuck</b> about his career prospects. </p><p>(2) *I give <b>a flying fuck</b> about his career prospects. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>There are actually more licensors than just negation. Lots of NPIs can be licensed by expressions like <i>exactly two</i>. We can see this with another NPI, <i>any</i>: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>(3) *<b>Some</b> people have eaten <b>any</b> salad. </p><p>(4) <b>Exactly two</b> people have eaten <b>any</b> salad. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>NPIs are tricksy and puzzling. There are several different theories to explain why they work the way they do, all of which are appealing in some way, and none of which quite satisfy completely. For example, some theories of how NPIs work predicted that <i>flying fuck</i> would not be licensed by <i>exactly</i>, as it's what is sometimes known as a 'minimiser', but it actually sounds ok to me: </p><blockquote><p>(5) Exactly two people give a flying fuck about his career prospects. </p></blockquote><p>I think this fact would be predicted under what seems to me to be the most widely-accepted (current) idea, however, which is known as 'non-veridicality' and is essentially about (4) being more specific than (3), though in more technical terms than that. </p><p>But especially interesting to me is the fact that because this is the name of a ballet step, the exact same expression can completely lose its NPI status, and doesn't need licensing at all: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>(6) They performed a perfect flying fuck.</p><p>(7) The dance opens with a flying fuck. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>I like this sort of almost-literal interpretation of the expression to repurpose it for the name, at which point it becomes just a bog-standard phrase like any other. </p><p>The literature on this is very fun to read, by the way, because it's full of phrases like <i>I don't give a flying fuck</i> so I recommend it. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-72767449311999541202022-07-08T07:11:00.003+01:002022-07-08T07:14:35.519+01:00Despatches from Barcelona <p>I’m just back from Barcelona. If you haven’t been, I recommend it, it was great! Here’s a selection of linguistic observations. </p><p>I spoke mostly (Castilian) Spanish to people I interacted with while I was there, though people who live there speak Catalan. I don’t have any great insight on Catalan other than it’s a cool language. It does have this interesting spelling thing: because <ll> is a letter, but sometimes two instances of <l> occur together, they put a dot between them to separate them. So there’s a metro station called Paral.lel, for instance. This seems very helpful, if not strictly required. </p><p>In general, people did speak Spanish back to me as well, which is something that seems to vary in different places. I spoke French in Paris, but mostly people spoke back in English. Perhaps my French accent is bad enough that it just felt easier… and it definitely wasn’t that people didn’t speak English well in Barcelona. Pretty much everyone we talked to spoke it fluently. </p><p>That’s partly a result of the massive levels of tourism there. Before I went I’d read that tourism is getting to be a problem there, and I wasn’t sure how that could be. In Margate we moan about the DFLs (Down From London) clogging up our local bars and making a mess on the beach in summer, but they bring in money and allow the town to thrive. But I could see what they meant when I was there. There were so many of us, and I could see how Airbnb must be causing a real housing crisis. I saw a sticker saying ‘You tourist kills my neighbourhood’. Just to bring it back round to linguistics, I wondered if this was a generic singular (like ‘the Humboldt penguin lives in South America’), or a vocative (addressing the audience) and it was directed at me. </p><p>Lastly, a phonology one. On our last day we went to a nice ice cream place with old-fashioned decor, granizado, orxata, etc. They had a sign that said ‘More sits upstairs’. Much as I would love this to be an adorable use of the verb ‘sit’ as a noun, I suspect it’s a result of the words ‘sits’ and ‘seats’ being more or less homophonous if you have Spanish phonology. Spanish (and probably Catalan, I don’t know for sure) doesn’t have what linguists call a ‘phonemic distinction’ between the vowels in those words, which means that there isn’t an equivalent pair of words where the only difference is the vowel, like English ‘sits’ vs ‘seats’. And if your language doesn’t have a phonemic distinction, it’s really really hard to hear it and remember the difference in another language. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-14200717039098459582022-05-04T17:15:00.001+01:002022-05-04T17:15:37.100+01:00Is a great deal more than a lot? <p>I'm sure this survey made it clear what the options meant, but to me, 'a lot' and 'a great deal' mean exactly the same thing. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsdmHN2eBBOtZH0e9qz57MrJiBsCh8Vm4Y7Yg8ytNd_7XZ3kit7EkFbmmSZL4ikWA4X6dV1rhYVWTIV-oJDF525Bieu1DAC06qOfOopBYUYm88JYxZQ5JU5qnxWy9dCzcQOPED84KJTfs9O7S74FCXycaqAG2_jdm1O6Wz2CUwl_3yCji5niNZNHL7/s1125/IMG_0363.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Screenshot reading '27% of respondents said [Brexit] had affected the a great deal, and 14% a lot'" border="0" data-original-height="329" data-original-width="1125" height="117" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsdmHN2eBBOtZH0e9qz57MrJiBsCh8Vm4Y7Yg8ytNd_7XZ3kit7EkFbmmSZL4ikWA4X6dV1rhYVWTIV-oJDF525Bieu1DAC06qOfOopBYUYm88JYxZQ5JU5qnxWy9dCzcQOPED84KJTfs9O7S74FCXycaqAG2_jdm1O6Wz2CUwl_3yCji5niNZNHL7/w400-h117/IMG_0363.PNG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-32888533427043045182022-04-25T06:38:00.001+01:002022-04-25T06:38:00.152+01:00Going places in Welsh and English<p>I'm learning Welsh on Duolingo. Most people in our department are doing a language on it, in some cases for practical purposes but for many of us, for family reasons. In my case, my grandmother was Welsh and spoke it as a first language, so I feel a connection to it for that reason even though I'm not Welsh myself. My other grandparents also lived in Pembrokeshire for a long time, though they weren't Welsh, and so when we visited we'd hear it spoken, especially if we went along the coast a bit to Carmarthenshire. </p><p>I knew a fair amount about Welsh grammar before I began, because I'm a linguist so I happen to know quite a few things about quite a few languages that I don't speak, and Welsh is a language that has been studied and written about reasonably often. It's frequently studied alongside others as well as in its own right because you can compare it to other Celtic languages for within-family comparative work, or with languages from other families where it's useful as an example of a language that has VSO word order. </p><p>Backtrack! VSO? V stands for Verb, S for Subject and O for object, and these three letters are how we talk about the basic or default order of the elements of sentences in a language. English is SVO: [S The British public] [V despise] [O the current government]. This is one of the two most common orders globally, the other being SOV (e.g. Korean). VSO is less common and it can be useful, when examining linguistic theories, to illustrate how they work in languages with this order. The same VSO order is found in languages all over the world, including Berber, the Mayan languages, and Te Reo Māori. </p><p>There are lots of other interesting things about Welsh grammar, obviously, it's just that this is the one I happen to have read most about because word order is the area I've worked in most of all. And of course VSO is an abstraction and there is widespread use of auxiliary verbs (the English equivalent would be something like <i>The British public <b>is</b> despising the government</i>) which is still VSO but it's not quite so straightforward as just classifying languages and being done with it. Luckily, I suppose, or I'd be out of a job. </p><p>So all this is to say that as I begin to work out what the heck is going on with this language, I might write some posts about it. So far I'm floundering in the dark as many things are very different from English. The app starts you off with things where you can make comparisons, but I'm honestly finding some of it baffling. Of course you don't get explicit grammar instruction on Duolingo, so I've got myself a grammar book as well to help me work out the things that aren't easily deducible. </p><p>I assume they deliberately choose constructions to teach you that are similar to your language of instruction (English, in my case), to make things easier at the beginning. For me, a linguist, some of this was actually really surprising to me. For instance, all of the prepositions and articles that I've had to use so far have worked just like in English. Maybe this doesn't sound so strange but I know very well that prepositions and articles are infamously unpredictable and variable across languages. So when I'm getting sentences to translate that include a direct word-for-word equivalent of <i>going to the office </i>or whatever, I'm surprised. The main thing that has been different in this respect is the absence of an indefinite article (<i>a/an</i> in English), so here I felt back on more solid ground as I know this is a feature common to lots of languages and fully expected it. </p><p>Another, more specific, thing that seems weirdly the same is the verb(-type thing) <i>mynd</i>, which apparently means 'going'. English uses <i>go</i> for a travelling or motion event, like <i>going to the office</i>: I'm travelling from one place to another. Welsh also appears to do this: <i>mynd i'r swyddfa </i>is the direct equivalent, and both languages need to use it with a subject and an auxiliary verb: <i><b>I'm</b> going to the office</i> or <i><b>Dw i'n</b> mynd i'r swyddfa</i>. Here's the weird bit though: English also uses <i>go</i> for expressing the future, which is not totally bizarre but also not universal by any means, and Welsh seems to do the same. So just as in English you can say <i>I'm <b>going</b> to wait here</i>, you can say <i>Dw i'n <b>mynd</b> i aros yma</i> in Welsh, and they both express future with no motion involved. This use of <i>go</i> for expressing the future isn't unique to English and Welsh (French and Spanish have it, and <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Perspectives_on_Arabic_Linguistics_XXVI/ctjLBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=going+to+future+tense&pg=PA9&printsec=frontcover" target="_blank">Jamal Ouhalla describes it for Moroccan Arabic here</a>) but it's also not that common. Perhaps someone can tell me whether this similarity is a result of the very close contact between the languages, a shared familial feature, or simply coincidence that both languages have travelled this grammaticalisation path, just like Moroccan Arabic. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-83820691304572481272022-04-18T06:00:00.001+01:002022-04-18T06:00:00.192+01:00It wasn't then, but it was nowLinguists are liable to stop mid-conversation to write down something they or their interlocutor said, if it was linguistically interesting. Out for drinks with colleagues, the following happened. <div></div><blockquote><div>David, picking up a nearly-empty beer: Is this mine? </div><div>*David downs the last of the beer*</div><div>Me: Well, it was now! </div></blockquote><div></div><div><div>And at this point we stopped to reflect on the fact that you really can't say that, unless you're a linguist mucking about with language for funnies. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Now</i> is a flexible sort of thing. It doesn't only mean this precise moment (which can be measured in infinitesimally smaller moments anyway). It can be the present time give or take a few minutes, or a few hours: </div><blockquote>I'm busy right now; I'll call you back when I'm finished. </blockquote><div>Or the present time give or take a few days: </div><blockquote>The delivery is due around now, I think. </blockquote><div>It can be the present time, probably extending into the future, since some past causal event or just compared to before: </div><blockquote>We have to submit form 3A now to claim expenses, not form 3B (since the new manager updated the policy). </blockquote><blockquote><p>We generally have better living conditions now (compared to in the last century), though there are still too many people living in poverty. </p></blockquote><div>My <i>now</i> was, I think, a present situation resulting from a causal event, where since David had downed the pint, it was now (and forever, I suppose), his. If the beer wasn't his before, <i>It is now</i>. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>But as I said my line, I mentally switched it from <i>It is now. </i>Because the beer no longer existed, I changed the tense from present (<i>is</i>) to past (<i>was</i>). I left the temporal adverbial <i>now</i> untouched, however, thereby creating a weird mismatch between past time (the tense of the verb expressing the existence of the beer) and present time (the adverbial expressing the time that the state of affairs described pertains to). </div><div><br /></div><div>This is why we have things like present perfect and past perfect, that you might have studied at school: <i>I have drunk the beer</i> is present (state of affairs) and perfect (action completed in the past), so although the beer is already drunk, I'm describing the present situation. <i>I had drunk the beer</i> is about a completed action and a past state of affairs – the situation that I'm describing, in which the beer had already been drunk, was at some past time. </div><div><br /></div><div>I was, in effect, trying to make <i>now</i> cover both the present time (our current situation) and a past time (when the beer existed). <i>Now </i>can easily include some time in the past, like all of the past time since the new manager changed the policy in the example above, but crucially it has to be conceptualised as not being in a distinct past time. It has to be a single <i>now</i> period compared to a <i>before</i> period (or <i>then</i>, or whatever). So it has to be present tense for a current state of affairs. </div><div><br /></div><div>And lastly, the reason my line was a dorky linguist joke rather than an incomprehensible failure of tenses is that the phrase <i>It is now!</i> has become a set phrase or 'chunk' of language. I wasn't consciously referencing the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_think_it%27s_all_over" target="_blank">commentary of the 1966 football world cup final</a>, but this is an extremely well-known use of the phrase and I think it has got into people's vocabulary, including mine, as an idiomatic expression. It highlights the inevitability of the current situation, the sense of having pinched a victory, and the impossibility of having the outcome reversed. </div>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-86862287885747904112022-04-11T06:00:00.001+01:002022-04-11T06:00:00.166+01:00At last, someone has written about Wordle! <p>I've held off on blogging about Wordle, because everyone else did it, and because I didn't have anything particular to say. People tend to assume that if you're a linguist, you like word games, but I don't think that's any more true for us than for normal people. Some of us do, others don't. I happen to love crosswords (because there is a quiz or a puzzle element) and dislike Scrabble (because I'm not good at anagrams). I do, as it happens, love Wordle. I love logic puzzles like sudoku, and this is basically just a logic puzzle with an added constraint. </p><p>There is, or used to be, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)" target="_blank">a board game called Mastermind</a> which was a pure logic version of Wordle. (If you don't know what Wordle is, by the way, I don't know where you've been. It's what we all spent the early part of 2022 doing.) There, the thing you had to guess was the sequence of coloured pegs. There were only a few colours, and only a sequence of four, so much fewer than the 26 letters and five slots that Wordle involves. And you needed like ten goes to get it, rather than the six that you get with Wordle. The rules were the same: you got told if you'd got one right and in the right place, or right but in the wrong place, or wrong. You weren't told <b>which</b> one, though, which did make it harder in that respect (otherwise it would have been incredibly easy). I loved this game and I'm not sure why I never had my own copy (maybe no one else liked playing it with me, or maybe I never mentioned that I liked it?) but I played it when I was at other people's houses. </p><p>So yes, I do love Wordle, because of the logic puzzle aspect. The word part of it does add something interesting for me, though. I like the constraint it puts on the possible answers. It's not the case, as in Mastermind, that every combination is equally possible. Some just aren't, or are much less likely, and that's due to the rules of either languages in general, or English in particular. So an example of a language-in-general thing is that there are going to be some vowels in the word, and some consonants. An example of an English-in-particular thing is that the last letter is probably an 'e' or a consonant, because we don't have so many words that end in 'a', 'i', 'o' or 'u' (though we do have some, so it's not absolutely ruled out). Another English-in-particular thing is that if you know you've got an 'h' in there somewhere, it's possibly the first letter but if it's not, you've likely also got a 't' for 'th' or a 'g' for 'gh' in there. Not always; <i>ahead</i> would have stumped me in that case. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbDzqkFZmZcMUYuZlyq7smJa2a1OZBif8tefOZG9XGlhSRf9xi-w-iBpJi8ZsoFg4JcmlzY-svtm_oE3hCa0UeoB3fjr6Xy8mJ8VdbnNIbJLzZaoaDFwb89vpel8vCg2q_6gDkgaqD3xadpBR0KqKeiFQ6JNsBiibDvc-vZg0SaOldgN4VmsHb9sIV/s1929/IMG_0106.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Screenshot of my Wordle stats showing a normal distribution with most words taking me four guesses to get." border="0" data-original-height="1929" data-original-width="1125" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbDzqkFZmZcMUYuZlyq7smJa2a1OZBif8tefOZG9XGlhSRf9xi-w-iBpJi8ZsoFg4JcmlzY-svtm_oE3hCa0UeoB3fjr6Xy8mJ8VdbnNIbJLzZaoaDFwb89vpel8vCg2q_6gDkgaqD3xadpBR0KqKeiFQ6JNsBiibDvc-vZg0SaOldgN4VmsHb9sIV/w187-h320/IMG_0106.PNG" width="187" /></a></div><p>I've been paying attention to how I solve them, and I usually get the answer on the fourth go. I imagine this is true for most people, as we'd expect a 'normal distribution' with very few right on the first or second go (that's a lucky guess) and few taking six (that's some bad luck or a word that has many very similar to it). </p><p></p><p>I'm not sharing any new insights on how to solve them – I just do the same as you all do and rule out the most common letters first until I can see what it's likely to be. But what interests me is how quickly you get to the point where it can only realistically be one word. This is normally where I am by guess four. </p>Here are a couple of recent ones, where the answers were <i>epoxy</i> and <i>lowly</i>. Just coincidence that they both end in a 'y', I think. I vary my starting words but always try to include some common letters. Sometimes I just use things I see nearby like the dogs' names. In both these cases, by the time I'd had three guesses I didn't have many right, but I had ruled out nearly all the possibilities, and there was only one possible word that I could think of in each case that could fit what I knew. <div><div><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimSh_IeiAtxq6sM3MZvt1YBLO82JwPM-1MMkdFLrZ2CuufD0zOmJcqC94xux9nYz2VqlE_mzGsgfXgJ8RCjkV0p-eD2lk-FuUq3JOzz7AHh-fMuTi2uowuSV6SrGrgduZDa0qYi8HlyfGGLO5CRsoY2GbRU4fiH-6q9FzBm1YJzqm-0DNhM5eE6LEH/s1909/IMG_0107.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1909" data-original-width="1125" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimSh_IeiAtxq6sM3MZvt1YBLO82JwPM-1MMkdFLrZ2CuufD0zOmJcqC94xux9nYz2VqlE_mzGsgfXgJ8RCjkV0p-eD2lk-FuUq3JOzz7AHh-fMuTi2uowuSV6SrGrgduZDa0qYi8HlyfGGLO5CRsoY2GbRU4fiH-6q9FzBm1YJzqm-0DNhM5eE6LEH/s320/IMG_0107.PNG" width="189" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi24H_lQB0X0js1npEZmrEnArB0Dnx9c_oHdQjTQhls1bbNnh9asKIfKKe5BdupygmZT9g7QaHSMThT0FQYbHedfb2jZvn89rWPFFrhpxCMPze98OgFNUVkHO5Q_xvJFg7ZEXXVV6kwk8faLPF--pmjLkBNeUAnLHjZzxe7EoLMSM9vp0sEVJgxOrg1/s1897/IMG_0127.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Screenshot of Wordle with the word 'lowly', correct on the fourth go with few correct letters on the previous three. The previous image shows the same but for 'epoxy', but I can't edit the alt text for some reason." border="0" data-original-height="1897" data-original-width="1125" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi24H_lQB0X0js1npEZmrEnArB0Dnx9c_oHdQjTQhls1bbNnh9asKIfKKe5BdupygmZT9g7QaHSMThT0FQYbHedfb2jZvn89rWPFFrhpxCMPze98OgFNUVkHO5Q_xvJFg7ZEXXVV6kwk8faLPF--pmjLkBNeUAnLHjZzxe7EoLMSM9vp0sEVJgxOrg1/w190-h320/IMG_0127.PNG" width="190" /></a></div><br /></div>This is the most satisfying way of playing the game, I think. If you end up with only one letter to get and several possibilities, it becomes chance and annoying, and if you get it right with some lucky guesses you don't feel like you earnt it, whereas this way you feel happy that you worked it out. <p></p></div></div><div>I also saw <a href="https://twitter.com/lesley_jeffries/status/1508700323061379074?s=20&t=Zc7juzgIb1RqjRukGjv_ZQ" target="_blank">Lesley Jeffries talking about doing it in other languages</a>, and noting that her guess distribution was much more spread, presumably because her vocabulary is not a large in those languages and so she is likely to need more goes to get it right than the average speaker of that language would (and she noted that she is relying on phonotactics, which is those rules of the language that I mentioned earlier). </div>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-11355145481319518222022-04-04T06:00:00.001+01:002022-04-04T06:00:00.166+01:00Foreshadowing via conjunction<p>There is a film called Willy's Wonderland, starring Nicolas Cage, and it is bizarre and wonderful. You should watch it. Cage has to spend the night in a disused family amusement animatronic kids' party type place, working as a cleaner in order to pay off the bill for fixing his car. The man who makes this deal with him says something along the lines of, </p><blockquote><p>'You walk out of that building in the morning and I'll have your car waiting for you.'</p></blockquote><p>I've written before about conjunctions ('and') working as a conditional, in my post about the instruction(?) <i><a href="https://linguistlaura.blogspot.com/2019/02/dont-touch-actors-and-they-wont-touch.html" target="_blank">Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you</a></i>. There, I noted that you could interpret the whole sentence as a statement of fact, that you shouldn't touch the actors and, independently, they also will not touch you, but that in fact we interpret it as a conditional: if you don't touch the actors, they won't touch you. </p><p>In the line from this film, the same is true. Either the man was saying to Nicolas Cage that he'd be able to leave in the morning and when he did so his car would be ready, or, very much foreshadowing what was to come, that there is a possibility that he might not walk out in the morning but that if he did, his car would be waiting. </p><p>I felt like the intonation gives us a clue as to which it is, but I lack the technical skills to show you how it goes on this blog. It's something like this, though: in the conditional interpretation, we get rising intonation to the end of the first clause and then falling on the second one, whereas on the statement of facts interpretation, they're both falling, and similar to each other. </p><p>(Yes, this could also be a threat, as noted in that other post as well. Context would have made that really weird – who offers to fix your car as a threat?)</p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-2698603540212264072022-03-28T07:00:00.001+01:002022-03-28T07:00:00.164+01:00How many times is too many for words?<p>How many times do you need to use a word in one piece of writing or speech before it's too many? </p><p>In the novel 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a word meaning 'rose-coloured' or 'rosy' is used several times. <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61963/61963-h/61963-h.htm" target="_blank">The version on Project Gutenberg</a> translates it in one of those two ways, and there are 27 instances (24 of <i>rosy</i>, 3 of <i>rose-colored</i>). In my copy it was translated as <i>roseate</i>, an uncommon word, and that was certainly enough times for me to first notice it, then become distracted by it, and eventually become annoyed by it to the point where it's the main thing I remember about the book. I'm sure in the original it's fine and probably has a stylistic purpose but it was way too high frequency for it not to stand out for me. Because it was highly salient, it's stuck in my memory extremely effectively. </p><p>In one of the podcasts I listen to, <i>The Knitmore Girls</i>, one of the hosts used the word <i>cocoon</i> for the second time within an hour-long episode and caught herself, saying she was using that word a lot in that episode. Just two uses isn't that many, certainly not as many as 27 instances of <i>roseate</i> in a short novel, but it was salient enough to stick out for her and so more than once was too many. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-22190262539425548652022-03-21T06:00:00.001+00:002022-03-21T06:00:00.164+00:00Disappearing, and being disappeared<p>The verb <i>disappear</i> is normally what we call 'intransitive', which means that it has one participant: the person who disappears. Like this: </p><blockquote><p>The leftovers disappeared. </p></blockquote><p>If anything follows the word <i>disappear</i>, it's either some extra optional information, or it's a continuation of the discourse and the 'disappear' phrase is done: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>The leftovers disappeared overnight. </p><p>The leftovers disappeared, which I'm very annoyed about because I was going to have them for lunch today. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>If we want to talk about more than one participant, like if we have both the thing that disappears and also someone who causes the disappearing to happen, we have to add in another word, <i>make</i>: </p><blockquote><p>The kitchen staff made the leftovers disappear. </p></blockquote><p>English being the flexible language that it is, you can find examples of 'transitive' <i>disappear</i>, which is when we just put the two participants of the action right there with the verb: </p><blockquote><p>VICE has disappeared the post from its website (from <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disappear#:~:text=Definition%20of%20disappear&text=1%20%3A%20to%20pass%20from%20view,seem%20to%20have%20disappeared%20again." target="_blank">M-W</a>)</p></blockquote><p>But English also being the kind of language that doesn't like redundancy (this is all languages tbh), because we already have a way of doing this with <i>make</i>, the 'cause to disappear' meaning takes on a more specialist meaning than the other one, so that they are distinct in their function as well as their form. Content warning now for examples relating to war and dictatorships. Here's some more examples from Merriam-Webster: </p><blockquote><p>Her son was disappeared during Argentina's so-called Dirty War.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Under his repressive regime, tens of thousands of Chileans were 'disappeared', tortured and killed. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>It [Nineteen Eighty-Four] imagines a secretive regime that surveils its people and polices even their thoughts, disappearing anyone who rebels against the order. </p></blockquote><p>It has taken on this specialised meaning of the imprisonment or killing of political dissidents. </p><p>Perhaps, if you're paying close attention, you might notice that only the last one actually has two participants mentioned: the 'secretive regime' and 'anyone who rebels'. The others only mention the person who disappeared. But here we have an exception that proves the rule, because these are passive sentences (<i>He was disappeared</i> vs <i>The government disappeared him</i>). You can only make a passive sentence with a transitive verb, because to do so you need to promote the object (the thing the verb happens to) to be the subject of the sentence: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>I (subject) ate the leftovers (object).</p><p>The leftovers were eaten. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>You can't do it with a sentence with only one participant to begin with, because then there's no object to promote. Or, if you prefer, you can, but by doing so you're adding in another understood participant: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>Not passive, one participant: The boat sank (perhaps with no particular cause). </p><p>Passive: The boat was sunk (by someone in particular, though we aren't told who). </p></blockquote><p>While it is true to say that the political dissidents disappeared, it is more informative to say that they <i>were disappeared</i>, because it informs us of the involvement of a third party who deliberately caused this 'disappearance'. </p><p></p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-34987049077708029892022-03-15T10:19:00.000+00:002022-03-15T10:19:25.454+00:00Best pub for precisely 8.5km is decent<p>There's a sort of trope that Japanese has no swear words, and instead you insult someone simply by using the wrong level of politeness. As with all these things, it's based on a grain of truth (there are linguistically-encoded formality registers) but it's also really xenophobic and demeaning to essentialise cultures in this way, as it perpetuates racial or national stereotypes of Asians/Japanese people. Plus, you miss out on the actual interesting facts about Japanese honorific speech if you skim the surface like this (you'll have to go somewhere else for those, though, as I am not a Japanese expert). The truth is often more interesting than the factoid and I encourage you to learn more if you didn't know about this! </p><p>So probably I didn't even need to bring that trope up apart from I like to share information about languages, but some things I saw lately reminded me that English (and any other language, probably) is also perfectly capable of being highly insulting without using actual insults, and we do it with pragmatics. </p><p>First, a tweet from @mralanjohnsmith, his second appearance on this blog in recent times, included this photo and observation: </p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">"Decent staff 🙂" feels like shade at the staff of another café. <a href="https://t.co/4vnzUsTzUr">pic.twitter.com/4vnzUsTzUr</a></p>— Alan ‘join a union’ Smith (@mralanjohnsmith) <a href="https://twitter.com/mralanjohnsmith/status/1470358592905793540?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2021</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>(Photo shows a cafe's outdoor A-board with things like 'awesome food', 'delicious cakes', 'the best brew', and 'decent staff'.)<p></p><p>Secondly, this one: </p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">There’s a pub in the village with a sign saying it has ‘the best pint of Guinness for 8.5km’ which is so incredibly specific it has to be a sick burn on some other pub</p>— Pro Pattys Day Account (@steveohrourke) <a href="https://twitter.com/steveohrourke/status/1500086441438814209?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 5, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p></p>
<p>Both of these seem to be maligning another establishment but not by directly saying anything bad. They in fact both just say good things about themselves. However, they do it in such a way that we fill in the blanks and infer a whole lot more. </p><p>The 'decent staff' cafe has a lot of very enthusiastic words like 'awesome', 'the best'. So among these, 'decent' sounds like fairly low praise, meaning only tolerably good. I had a quick look on Urban Dictionary to see if the kids these days are using it in a more positive sense, and while there are a couple of entries with that sense, most have the 5/10 meaning. It seems strange, then, to put this on your advertising. The cafe could be saying that, if it's honest, its staff are only pretty good, but given that the staff wrote the sign, we might interpret it as more likely that they're comparing themselves to other places. Those other places may have good coffee, but this place has 'the best!' Those other places may have good food, but the food here is 'awesome!'. And by extension, if this place only has 'decent' staff, the other places must have less than decent staff, and the next level down from decent is, well, not good. </p><p>The other sign, rather than saying too little, gives us too much information. If you said you serve the best pint for miles around, we interpret this to mean you think you're pretty good, but haven't literally done a taste test and got votes and so on. The non-specific nature of the claim means that it's not verifiable, because it's not meant to be. The pub next door might have something to say about it, but a pub five miles away can safely consider itself out of range of the claim. But as it says 'for 8.5km', which is a specific measurement, it just can't be interpreted as 'a large area' or 'a long way' in the way that a round figure like 'ten miles' could, so we wonder what is precisely 8.5km away. Is it, as the person suggests, that there is some other pub within that range that they're saying is less good? Perhaps the village is 8.5km in size, so it's a way of saying it's the best in the village? or is it, as I think I'd be inclined to think, that 8.5km away is a better pint? </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-3366118640486986252022-02-28T06:00:00.002+00:002022-03-07T09:46:27.317+00:00It end ups being a word<p>[Please note that this is a schedule post and I am currently observing my union (UCU)'s industrial action over pensions, pay, workloads, and equality.]</p><p>English has a group of verbs that you might know as 'phrasal verbs'. It's things like <i>cheer up</i>, <i>find out</i>, <i>turn off</i>. They include what looks like a preposition (<i>up, out, off</i>) so can be hard to distinguish from normal verbs with a preposition following them. To add to the complication, verbs that are not really phrasal but might have a preposition after them come in two types: they have to have a particular preposition, or they can have any old one optionally. Here's a classic Linguistics 101 example to clarify: </p><p><i>Look</i> can occur with no preposition at all: </p><blockquote><p>I'm not sure where it is, I'll look. </p></blockquote><p>Or it can be followed by one of several prepositions: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>I'm not sure where it is, I'll look <b>at</b> a map. </p><p>I'm not sure where it is, I'll look <b>up</b> the address. </p><p>I'm not sure where it is, I'll look <b>in</b> the atlas. </p><p>I'm not sure where it is, I'll look <b>to</b> the stars as my guide. </p><p>I'm not sure where it is, I'll look <b>with</b> my soul. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>OK, I'll stop there before it gets silly. But one of these is different from the others. Compare these two sentences: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>*I'm not sure where it is, I'll look a map at. </p><p>I'm not sure where it is, I'll look the address up. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>In the second one, we can put the preposition at the end, whereas we can't do that in the first one. That's because <i>look up</i> is (in this case) a phrasal verb, and <i>up</i> isn't really a preposition. It's sometimes known as a verbal particle and it's doing something other than signifying direction. Compare it to the same phrase when it's not a phrasal verb. As we just saw, phrasal verbs like this one can move the 'preposition' to the end: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>I looked <b>up</b> the address.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>I looked the address <b>up</b>. </p></blockquote><p>They can't have any other preposition than the one they go with, though: </p><blockquote><p>*I looked <b>down</b> the address. </p></blockquote><p>But if <i>look up</i> is not a phrasal verb, but instead just a normal verb that happens to be followed by a preposition, the opposite is true. You can't move the preposition to the end, but you can change it for another one. (I've added in a bit of context here to make the meaning clear.) </p><blockquote><p>I looked <b>up</b> the street and saw my friend arriving. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>*I looked the street <b>up</b> and saw my friend arriving. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>I looked <b>down</b> the street and saw my friend arriving. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>Anyway, this is all stuff that's in grammar books, so on to the observational content that you know and love. Someone I follow on twitter used the phrasal verb <i>end up</i>, but treated it as a single unit, putting the verbal ending on the particle, like this: </p><p>...because it <b>end ups</b> reproducing the same situation they want to avoid. </p><p>Normally, you'd expect to see <i>ends up</i>, not <i>end ups</i>. But this does make sense if you consider a phrasal verb to be a single unit. <i>End up </i>is a bit different from <i>look up</i> in that we can't move <i>up</i> anywhere else. It really always does have to be <i>end up</i>, with nothing in between them, and no other preposition than <i>up</i>. The parts don't really mean the same on their own (<i>end </i>could be used in the same way, but it's not). So it's really functioning as a single word in any meaningful sense, and therefore it makes sense to stick the word ending (the 'inflection') on the end of the whole unit, as this person did. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-69095015769073271222022-02-21T04:00:00.003+00:002022-02-23T10:16:17.126+00:00If/had I needed to express a counterfactual<p>[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.]</p><p>In a recent tweet, which I won't quote because the subject was too serious and grim for this light and fluffy discussion of linguistics, I saw the construction <i>had/if</i>. Like this: </p><blockquote><p>This is who I'd have spoken to <b>had/if </b>I needed help. </p></blockquote><p>It's like when you use and/or, to be clear that it's inclusive. If I write <i>You'll enjoy this if you like fantasy and/or thrillers</i>, then you'll like it if you like just one of those things or both of them. In other words, fantasy and thrillers, or fantasy, or thrillers. It just makes explicit the 'inclusive disjunction' (one or both are ok). </p><p>But with <i>had/if</i>, there's no equivalent thing to make explicit. We can indeed use either of them in this sentence: <i>This is who I'd have spoken to if I needed help</i> and <i>This is who I'd have spoken to had I needed help</i>. But although <i>had</i> is a bit more formal, the meaning is the same, unlike with <i>and/or</i>. They both give a conditional interpretation. This made me wonder about the difference between them and after some struggle with finding out what the 'had' construnction was called (honestly it's hard to google linguistic things sometimes), I found Iatridou and Embick's 1994 article 'Conditional inversion'. </p><p>It's called conditional inversion because it's used in conditionals, and the verb <i>had</i> is inverted with the subject: <i>I had needed help</i> vs <i>Had I needed help</i>. We use inversion a lot, including in questions (<i>Had I needed help? Who can say.</i>). </p><p>So, <i>if</i> and inversion both indicate a conditional: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>If Sabine had eaten the calamari, she might be better by now.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Had Sabine eaten the calamari, she might be better by now. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>(Examples are all taken from Iatridou and Embick 1994, but with the name 'John' changed to 'Sabine' because John is in way too many linguistics example sentences.) </p><p>Here's one difference between them, though. <i>If</i> can be used in situations where the thing might be true, and we just don't know the facts: </p><p></p><blockquote>If Sabine has eaten the calamari, there'll be none left for us. </blockquote><p>Inversion, meanwhile, can only be used in what are called counterfactuals, where we know the thing isn't the case, and you're talking about if it had been (but it isn't). In the equivalent example to the one just above, where it may or may not be true, it doesn't sound at all natural: </p><blockquote>*Has Sabine eaten the calamari, there'll be none left for us. </blockquote><p>(Remember the convention that an asterisk means that a sentence is not grammatical for speakers of the language under discussion.) </p><p>And while <i>if</i> can be used with contracted negation (<i>n't</i>), inversion can't: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>If he hadn't seen the car coming, he would have been killed. </p><p>*Hadn't he seen the car coming, he would have been killed.</p><p>Had he not seen the car coming, he would have been killed.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>So there are some differences. But in the sentence I saw, where we began this, either would have been fine, because it was a counterfactual (she didn't need help), so inversion is ok, and <i>if</i> works in all conditionals so that would have been ok. So there's no reason to include both for covering more bases. It looks like one of those times when it feels like they mean something more than just using one of them, so you include both for the feeling of completeness. </p><p></p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-15947901480860047842022-02-14T06:00:00.002+00:002022-02-14T06:00:00.164+00:00An ilk of that ilk<p>[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.]</p><p>You should always learn something at a pub quiz, and I did recently: I learnt what <i>ilk</i> means, as in <i>of that ilk</i>. The question asked us about a phrase that is used generically to mean 'of that type' and specifically in Scottish English and Scots to mean 'of the same name or place'. I had no idea and was coming up with all sorts of nonsense like <i>autochthonous</i>. But <i>of that ilk</i> it was, and once we knew, it was so obvious! An example from the OED of it being used in this way is <i>Wemyss of that ilk</i>, meaning <i>Wemyss of Wemyss</i>. </p><p>Reading the OED entry is really interesting because it was used to mean family or class, and you can see how that's related to the meaning above. But its origin is in a pronoun, it seems, which has come down to Modern English as <i>each</i> or <i>which</i> (Scots is descended from the same predecessor as Modern English is) and that meant <i>same </i>or <i>alike</i>. You could use it like that for a while, as in the OED's example from 1648, <i>During this ilk time...</i>. </p><p>It still seems to be pretty widely used in informal contexts today, as a quick twitter search turns up plenty of examples. You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that there's also the occasional sighting of the eggcorn version <i>of that elk</i>. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-36555738095507192122022-02-07T04:00:00.001+00:002022-02-07T04:00:00.162+00:00Catching criminals and watching them in the act<p>CW: mention of public indecency behaviour in the tweet linked and below, before we get to the linguistics. </p><p>This reply to a tweet of Derren Brown's delighted me. The response is to a screenshot of a takeaway driver review in which the person says they 'caught the delivery guy playing with himself in his car for ten minutes': </p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Ten minutes seems a long time to "catch" someone doing something. I feel like that strays into "watch".</p>— Alan ‘join a union’ Smith (@mralanjohnsmith) <a href="https://twitter.com/mralanjohnsmith/status/1472361974935793667?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 19, 2021</a></blockquote><p>As Alan says above, you can't really catch someone doing something for ten minutes. Why not? </p><p>This is what linguists call 'lexical aspect', and it's basically part of the meaning of the verb, but it also interacts with the tense and other features of the way you use it. It's why if you say <i>I'll go for a walk in an hour</i> you mean that an hour from now, you will go for a walk, whereas <i>I finished my homework in an hour</i> means that it took you one hour to do your homework, and <i>I'll do my homework in an hour</i> is ambiguous: you'll do it in one hour's time, or it will take you one hour to finish it. Notice that <i>I'll go for a walk in an hour</i> doesn't have this ambiguity because it's just not the type of verb that you can say how long it takes to complete. You can, however, say <i>I'll go for a walk <b>for</b> an hour</i>, and then you're expressing the duration of your walk. </p><p>There are a few different systems of classifying verbs in this way, but let's go with the classic one: Vendler's system from 1957. On this classification, <i>catch</i> is what he termed an 'achievement': an instantaneous action, a point in time. While you might have a long build-up to the catching, like a year-long investigation and stake-out, the act of catching itself is an instant in time. <i>Watch</i>, on the other hand, is an 'activity', which is an ongoing process without a pre-defined end point. If it doesn't have a pre-defined end point, then you can specify how long it went on, as in this case (ten minutes). </p><p>You can manipulate these classes, and for instance say that <i>It took ten years to catch the criminal</i>, and then although we're using a frame that specifies the length of the process, that length of time is actually the delay before the achievement takes place: ten years of meticulous planning and investigating, or perhaps alternatively bumbling incompetence. This is why, after the ten years is up, you might say <i>We finally caught the criminal on Tuesday, after ten long years!</i>. Compare this with an 'accomplishment' like <i>write a novel</i>: you can say <i>It took ten years to write my novel</i>, but you can't say <i>I finally wrote my novel on Tuesday, after ten long years!</i>. You'd have to say instead that you <i>finished </i>it on Tuesday, because <i>write a novel</i> includes the process leading up to the completion as well as the completion itself, unlike <i>catch</i>, which is just the completion and not the process. </p> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-90135128223477230532022-01-31T04:00:00.002+00:002022-01-31T09:47:29.138+00:00The pronunciation of plantain<p> Please enjoy this nice linguistic observation made by someone on twitter: </p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">The pronunciation of “plantain”<br /><br />When a word has the suffix “-tain” it’s pronounced ‘tayn’ when it’s a verb, and ‘tin’ when it’s a noun <br /><br />Verb: contain, maintain, entertain, ascertain, pertain<br />Noun: captain, fountain, curtain, mountain… plantain <a href="https://t.co/jXv6BEGSsN">https://t.co/jXv6BEGSsN</a></p>— Sean Daley (@daleyvibes) <a href="https://twitter.com/daleyvibes/status/1471959913547112454?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 17, 2021</a></blockquote><p>We'll deal with the minor quibble first: –<i>tain</i> is not a suffix in most of these words. For it to be a suffix, it would need to be at least somewhat productively affixable, and really it's just in these words as a remnant. In the verbs it's what we might call a 'bound base', as it comes from Latin <i>tenere</i> 'hold', so <i>contain</i> is 'hold with', <i>maintain</i> is 'hold in the hand', <i>entertain</i> is 'hold together', and so on. In the nouns it's more just an accidental similarity in that <i>mountain</i>, <i>fountain</i> etc come from French words <i>montaigne</i>, <i>fontaine</i>, etc. <i>Plantain</i> comes from Spanish <i>plátano</i>. </p><p>So, not a suffix per se, but nevertheless, the observation seems to hold. The author of the tweet even provides the exception that proves the rule: <i>bloodstain</i> isn't pronounced like 'tin', but it's also not got the morpheme –<i>tain</i> (as it's part of <i>stain</i>). </p><p>It fits with other noun/verb pronunciations, such as the stress difference on <i>record </i>depending on whether it's a noun (<i>play a REcord</i>) or a verb (<i>reCORD the show</i>). I listen to a lot of knitting podcasts and I've noticed this with <i>repeat</i>, which I would always say with final stress, which I put down to the fact that it's normally a verb. But it can be a noun, in knitting, as your pattern may have a certain number of <i>repeats</i>. While I would still give this final stress, quite a few of the podcasters (all American English, though I'm not sure if that's relevant) will say REpeat with initial stress when it's a noun. </p><p>Our –<i>tain</i> tweeter is making a point about the pronunciation of the final example, <i>plantain</i>, which white people typically say with the 'tayn' version while Caribbean or West African people pronounce it 'tin', so it also functions as a helpful mnemonic in that sense and I for one learnt something here and haven't said it 'tayn' since. </p> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-5310304580210809582022-01-05T08:00:00.003+00:002022-01-05T14:20:18.810+00:00Behind the scenes: Diversifying reading lists<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Decolonising universities has become something of a buzzword, guaranteed to turn Telegraph readers into frothing puddles of outrage. Every other week they publish an article about subjects getting ‘cancelled’ (also known as modules being updated) or lecturers being ordered to use Twitter instead of historical archives (also known as using an expanded range of sources). Well, buckle up, because that’s what my newest publication is about. Strictly speaking, it’s not decolonisation <em>per se</em>. That’s a deeper, longer, more transformative process that in my opinion might not even be possible without deconstructing universities as we know them. But the article <em>is</em> about diversifying the content of what we teach, and teaching it in a different, more inclusive, more culturally aware way, with the goal of creating a learning environment that is less hostile to students of colour.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">This new paper, published today in the London Review of Education (<a href="https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.20.1.01"></a><a href="https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.20.1.01">https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.20.1.01</a>) is co-authored with 12 other people! The long list of authors is because it was really a collaborative effort and we wanted to recognise that, although the writing itself was done by the first four authors listed. The others contributed to the project design and the data collection and analysis, as well as bringing their insight and knowledge. Some of these people are colleagues in different schools at the University of Kent or from the university library, while others are undergraduate student researchers (some of whom have since graduated).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">We report on an ongoing project at the university which reviews reading lists for modules in terms of their ethnic and gender diversity, and then supports teaching staff to increase that diversity if they want to do so. It’s necessarily optional, for several reasons: for example, we need to avoid alienating people who have a lot of freedom in their roles and often resent obligatory policies that they don’t see the purpose of (which is what has happened in the past when originally good ideas were imposed top-down without the rationale filtering through). It’s also got to be on top of an already overburdened workload, a problem we note in the article. Perhaps most importantly, the work is only meaningful if it’s done with care and genuine desire for change; simply bunging a few Black authors on the list is at best missing the point and at worst actively harmful. But for those who want to do the work, and are able to do so within their contractual constraints, the library staff and the Student Success Project team have worked up <a href="https://www.kent.ac.uk/guides/reading-list-support-for-academic-staff/diversify-your-reading-list" target="_blank">a whole lot of resources</a> to help with this, so the idea is that small interventions like the one we report on can lead to longer-term change across the institution.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Working with the student researchers was the most rewarding experience. From the recruitment process onwards it was eye-opening to see how much they knew about the topic already, how committed they were, and how important it was to them. We specifically recruited (paid) researchers who themselves identified as from the category known in UK HE as ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, or minority ethnic) as our methodology meant that it was important that they bring their own experiences and stories to bear on the work. One of the researchers in particular found an especial enjoyment of—and flair for—giving talks and presentations on the work, during which he was able to reflect on the importance of the project to him personally in a way that really helped the largely white audience to understand the purpose. He got rave reviews both in the department and at the conferences where we presented the work.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">For me, a really interesting aspect was the interviews with staff. I interviewed 70-something members of the school, at all levels from graduate teaching assistants to the Head of School, and from academic and professional services teams. I approached these interviews in a very loose, informal way and kept them fairly short so as not to burden people and turn them against the project. Still, some conversations ended up being very long as people often had a lot to say! The most valuable of these, for me, were the ones that turned out to be a real conversation between me and the interviewee, both of us learning and discussing the topic, and ending up with action points or ways of proceeding with the goal of diversifying reading lists. Sometimes, this was with someone I’d never really spoken to before, but who then became an ally or a go-to person for further conversations, and someone who I knew was pushing forward the aims in their own departments. It also, unfortunately, revealed to me people who were set in their ways and refused to see any other viewpoint, or who believed that the goal was the obligatory, quota-driven approach dispelled above. You can’t change everyone’s mind, and nor should you necessarily, but I was keen to listen to people’s reasons for disagreeing with the goals of the project and sometimes those reasons showed a lack of understanding about how discrimination works and a lack of willingness to learn and grow.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">This was my first truly cross-disciplinary project, working with (primarily) sociologists and library specialists and using theories and methods from their fields. Our primary theoretical tool was Critical Race Theory, also much in the press these days, which holds that racism is baked into our systems (in this case, reading lists, courses, university structures). CRT began as a legal theory but is applicable to fields beyond its origins, and has been used in education research before. It was this that helped us to determine our methods and the way we approached the qualitative data obtained from interviews, and it was the reason for the majority of the authors (and all of the student researchers) being people of colour, as the effect of lived experience is a crucial part of the work which I, as a white person from the Global North, couldn’t contribute. I was, however, happy that some of my linguistic practice did end up in the piece, in that the student focus groups I conducted, which produced some extremely rich data, were run following the methods of a sociolinguistic interview such as ones I’ve done in the past. Learning the theories, methods and conventions of a different field has been hard work, but it’s definitely been worth it.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you <a href="https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.20.1.01" target="_blank">click through to the open-access article</a>, you can see the results of the reading list review of the departments in our study, the findings of the interviews with staff and students, and the outcome of the project in the form of the resources for shifting the balance to better reflect the population of our university.</span></p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-82313104584515682152021-09-13T11:24:00.005+01:002021-09-13T11:27:29.056+01:00To the kitchen! <p>I walked past a board advertising a new housing development and it boasted that the new flats would have <i>integrated appliances to kitchen</i>. This, I felt, is a nice example of Estate Agentese, a minority variety of English with a few unusual distinctive features. This variety seems to be acquired in adulthood, rather than as a native variety, when one becomes an estate agent and acquires the norms of the community. As such, it's likely to exhibit a lot of variation.</p>
<p>It's characterised by unnecessary verbosity, but at the same time greater levels of omission than are usual in standard English. So here, we have a redundant specification that the appliances are in the kitchen (where else would they be in a small flat without a utility room?), and a bare definite noun with no determiner (<i>to kitchen</i> rather than <i>to the kitchen</i>), which is also a feature of headlinese and other reduced written registers. We might also find high register vocabulary: they talk of <i>aspect</i> and <i>premises</i> and being <i>well-appointed</i>.</p>
<p>It was the choice of preposition that caught my eye here, though. This is a curious feature of this variety. Which preposition you use in any given sentence is notoriously difficult. You can rationalise all you like about the meaning of the word, but it is still a bit random at times. It's totally normal, for instance, to mention the dangerous creature either <i>to your left</i> or <i>on your left</i>. However, in standard English, you would expect a description of where the appliances are to be <i>in the kitchen</i>, not <i>to the kitchen</i>, which we would associate more with direction of movement. This might be a generalisation of its use in phrases like <i>to the rear of the house</i>. Or maybe it's an extension of the verb form of <i>integrate</i>, where you might integrate the appliances <i>into the kitchen</i>.</p>
<p>If you're a speaker of this variety of English, do chip in with your thoughts!</p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-23000895020595094122021-08-18T16:14:00.000+01:002021-08-18T16:14:00.740+01:00We're all laypeople sometimes<p>The word <i>layperson</i> meant, originally, a non-ordained member of the church. Well, actually maybe it didn't since it's apparently pretty a recent (1970s) version of <i>layman</i>, but you know what I mean. It also means, in a more general sense, not a member of a specialist community or not having specialist subject knowledge. So I might use it when I'm talking to students like this: </p><blockquote><p>Linguists tend to have different judgements than laypeople do.</p></blockquote><p>And then I mean, of course, non-linguists. It's a term that gets its meaning from being in opposition to something else. If I said <i>Laypeople find this sentence ambiguous</i>, you might infer that I meant non-linguists because I'm talking about linguists, but you might not. And if I was just out and about and I said <i>What do laypeople have for breakfast?</i>, the most plausible interpretation would probably have to be the 'not a member of the clergy' one. Which would be weird, but it's the only meaning of the word that is sort of independent of context. </p><p>I was thinking about this because I always use it kind of jokingly in this way, in much the same way as I refer to non-linguists as 'normal people', but I was reading <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/english-verbs-can-omit-their-objects-when-they-describe-routines/F65D77BECF79AE6B63F7F3350AE2AEA0">a recent paper by Lelia Glass</a> where she uses it totally non-ironically (as far as I can tell, anyway) to refer to people who aren't strength-training enthusiasts. I'd thought the more generalised 'non-specialist' meaning was fairly recent and not as well-established as the 'non-clergy' one, but a check on <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/layman?ref=etymonline_crossreference">Etymonline</a> tells me that I'm wrong, and both are pretty much as old as each other. While <i>lay</i> does come from a French word meaning 'secular', ever since we've used it in English, more or less, it's had the general meaning of 'non-expert' too. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-25983313140244258702021-08-10T09:43:00.002+01:002021-08-10T09:43:53.294+01:00Perhaps I'm asking a question?<p>I've just finished reading a book called 'Statistics without tears' by Derek Rowntree. It's a basic tutorial on statistical concepts focussing on the ideas and principles, rather than walking through actual calculations in any detail. I found it useful and would recommend. But I'm here to talk about language, not statistics! </p><p>The book is written in what I would describe as a very 'careful' style. You know it - the way older academic writers tend to, with quite precise attention to punctuation. Even though the tone of this book was very informal, friendly and not at all stuffy, I felt that every colon and dash was considered. </p><p>So it was interesting to me that both times Rowntree used a sentence in the form <i>Perhaps you recall...</i>, he ended it with a question mark: <i>Perhaps you recall the idea of a confidence interval? </i>(p.183). I've had a quick look around the internet and can't find much on this topic other than a few sites peeving about the use of a question mark with <i>perhaps</i>, saying that it is not necessary and therefore wrong. There are people asking about it in English forums, indicating that it's something that might feel natural. </p><p>It seems likely, then, that it's a 'declarative question' - the same as if he'd written <i>You recall the idea of a confidence interval?</i>. These are common enough, though definitely I would say a feature of less formal writing, just as contractions like <i>I'll</i> or <i>don't </i>are, which Rowntree also uses throughout. But it is interesting that he doesn't use this form - he uses <i>perhaps</i>. The question mark itself is enough to allow the reader to see that it's a question, and to therefore know that they are not being told that they do recall the idea, but rather prompted to agree that yes, they do recall that idea. So <i>perhaps</i> adds a bit more prompting, a bit more questioning, a bit more possibility of you not in fact recalling the idea of a confidence interval but that's absolutely fine because it was a few chapters ago and it's complicated stuff so don't worry. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-70471180602050083202021-07-19T06:00:00.012+01:002021-07-26T11:06:51.619+01:00How (not) to do academic surveys<p>As you know, me and my co-author were running a survey recently that lots of you took part in (thanks!). We had 959 responses by the time it closed. Most of the data is numerical so I'll be working on the analysis for a while yet, relearning how to do all that stuff, but from a first eyeball it looks like we've got some really clear results. Turns out people's judgements on most of these things is very clear! I thought I'd reflect a little bit on the specific way we set up this survey and the methodological lessons we learnt.</p><p>We had a few questions at the end to find out a bit more about the respondents. We asked what their language background was, whether they considered themself to be a native English speaker, how much they socialise online, and whether there was anything else that they felt was relevant. We asked these questions - and these questions only - for reasons. </p><p>The 'native speaker' question was because in our corpus study, we'd found lots of examples of the construction that we'd have considered ungrammatical, and that seemed to be written by non-native speakers. However, if this is an 'internet language' phenomenon, and internet language is global, we need to consider those varieties too. Some people were surprised that we had 'other' as an option alongside yes and no. This is because people's language situations are complicated! It's not always easy to define what counts as a native speaker. We wanted people to be able to say 'well technically no, not on the narrow definition, but I think of myself as such' or whatever. And some people did. </p><p>We also asked about language background. This was because we thought it might make a difference for the reasons above, and also because we found a lot of examples of some specific types that, again, we found ungrammatical, in tweets written in Indian English, so we wanted to try to capture some of this information. I also wanted to allow people to state this in their own words. </p><p>One person (and I hope they don't mind me talking about it here) mentioned in their comment that the survey didn't take into account other varieties such as AAVE (their example). AAVE is also known as African American English or African American Language, so-called because its speakers are mostly Black Americans. It's true, we didn't explicitly ask about this, just as we didn't explicitly ask about Indian English (which we knew might behave differently) or Multicultural London English (the rough equivalent of AAL relevant to our UK context) or French (which we know also has a because-X construction). The 'language background' and 'any other information' boxes were there for people to provide any information that might be relevant there, such as 'I'm bilingual in Mainstream American English and AAL and here are the differences in my judgements' or 'This is exactly the same in French by the way'. No one did this, but they could have done. I kind of wished they would, though, and maybe I should have explicitly asked about it. I'd be interested to know if this person knows that the because-X construction is similar or different in AAL, and I would very much like to read that study, but this survey wasn't about comparing those two varieties so it was beyond our scope. We were happy to accept responses from any variety of English because we want to know how because-X works in general, and we know that it spans a number of varieties. </p><p>We asked about how much people socialise online because we think this phenomenon is more widespread, or at least familiar, to people who are more used to 'internet English'. Lots of the comments we got confirmed that other people also think this. This was a vague nod to Gretchen McCulloch's 'internet age', and in fact many people used her scale to give their answer here. This is about not how old you are in years, but in how immersed in the internet you are. It's a complex scale because there are the kiddos who've never known anything but the internet as it is now, late adopters, early adopters... age doesn't match how long you've been online. It's an interesting typology and you should read her book 'Because Internet' to find out more about it. </p><p>We didn't ask about people's age - for exactly the same reasons. Some people were surprised we didn't ask this, and gave their age in the 'any other information' question. But also I had asked about age in the survey I did in 2014, and I had no reason to ask for this information again. You should only ask about the personal information that you actually need. For those who are interested, here's the data from that survey, which was a bit sloppy so don't judge me. I hope that if you click this image you can expand it so that it's readable. It shows the acceptability ratings for 22 sentences for each of three age groups (I didn't include the oldest and youngest because there weren't many respondents in those groups), arranged by the overall rating of the youngest age group (blue bar on the left of each group) from lowest to highest. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkWuRCSfXyc9fOAKlWm0jKJT95xYk0kLZXJFE9RT4ija06mr40-KWPsrAnrnhLk8pcsU1KhNSZOu8y1-bKNknnQFe5UU_2FppA4WRZqCskrbGEOF4tDdXMWX5lbgHRwjv5J6IKomQjS6g/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A graph with 22 sentences ranked in order of acceptability rating from lowest to highest, with each one having the ratings for three different age groups. A description of the key results in words follows the image." data-original-height="865" data-original-width="1343" height="413" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkWuRCSfXyc9fOAKlWm0jKJT95xYk0kLZXJFE9RT4ija06mr40-KWPsrAnrnhLk8pcsU1KhNSZOu8y1-bKNknnQFe5UU_2FppA4WRZqCskrbGEOF4tDdXMWX5lbgHRwjv5J6IKomQjS6g/w640-h413/image.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />On the right hand side are the sentences that should be fully acceptable for everyone, like <i>I was late because I forgot to set my alarm</i>. Not much difference in the age groups here. On the left are the ones that everyone hates, like <i>I was late because that I got lost</i>. Here the millennials seem most accepting, with unusually high ratings for verb phrases and full noun phrases with articles. Gen X were particularly happy with <i>I'm edgy because if I left the oven on </i>and with the ones with prepositional phrases like <i>I'll be late because at the doctor's</i>. These are ones that could be elliptical: short for <i>I'll be late because <b>I'm </b>at the doctor's</i>. This is a much, much, older and more established construction than because-X, so it makes sense they'd interpret the sentences that way and be happier with them (still not that happy, mind). <p></p><p>From about halfway along the graph until the highest rated ones, there's a clear set where the youngest respondents, aged 18-25, were the most accepting of the sentences. These are the ones that are characteristic of because-X, so they can't really be ellipsis like the prepositional phrases above, and they have a noun or an exclamation after the <i>because</i>, like <i>I'm here because the internet,</i> <i>Studying because school </i>or<i> I can't believe she did that because honestly</i>. So yes, we think age does make a difference, but now we know this we didn't need to ask it again. We also only need to know that if a whole group of people simply doesn't accept this construction at all, maybe we need to factor that into the analysis; we're not interested in tracking the change in the construction via an apparent time study, for instance, which is one good reason for asking about age. This is not a sociolinguistic study, so sociolinguistic variables are only relevant to the extent they'll affect our results. </p><p>Another thing we didn't ask about was gender. I didn't ask about that last time, either, because I had no reason to think it would make any difference. Even more so than with age, we have no reason to believe that a whole gender of people simply don't use this construction. If there is a bit of difference among genders, that's fine - our analysis can cope with that. We want to know, for the people who use the construction, how does it behave syntactically? The gender of the language users, as long as there's not a total categorical difference, therefore isn't that informative here. Again, we aren't trying to find out who the speakers are; that's a study for another linguist. In terms of sampling it might be a problem if, for instance, we only had men taking our study. That would mean we couldn't generalise to all language users, and if we didn't know who the participants were we wouldn't know that and might generalise wrongly. We took the view that this was very unlikely to be the case with nearly a thousand responses. We know that at least some people of various genders took part because they told us in the comments. </p><p>So those are the things that I think we're happy with in terms of how we set up the survey. We got a lot of data that will be pretty hard to work with, because it's all free text, but it's also very rich so we'll see what we can do with it. </p><p>(cw: discussion of fatphobia)</p><p>But we also did some things that weren't quite right. The biggest one of these was one of our examples, which several people pointed out was fatphobic. The way we created our sentences was to take them from our corpus if a sentence of the right form existed, and then modify them (replacing words) to prevent them being searchable and therefore identifiable (thanks to Mercedes Durham for this tip). For ones that didn't exist, we took similar constructions that did, and modified them to be the right syntactic form. This meant, we hoped, that they were all realistic examples. In doing this, we also thought we had avoided using any that were potentially offensive or harmful (obvious examples being offensive language). Clearly, we messed this one up. I can't speak for my co-author on this but I come from a position of my personal relationship with weight being basically the default/stereotypical societal one, and therefore I have to work harder to remember not everyone's experience is the same - just like as a white person I have to remember that I might miss instances of racism and be more aware. I'm aware of campaigns like Health At Every Size, but I just wasn't aware enough here to catch this. Sorry to anyone who we triggered or upset with that sentence; lesson learnt and thanks for pointing it out to us in the survey comments. </p><p>Less harmfully, but annoyingly, we ended up using some wording that didn't chime with everyone. I thought again I'd removed anything that was region-specific (like I asked people about the verbs <i>call</i> vs <i>ring</i>), but some people mentioned that 'club together' is a British phrase (at least, they thought so). So that might affect that particular item, which is not what we wanted. Similarly, <i>on mobile</i> was a bit unidiomatic for some respondents. </p><p>One type of comment that really interested me was the ones that took issue with the wording of the survey. Some were just along the lines of 'None of these sentences make any sense to me', which is fine, we knew for some people that would be the case. But some said things like 'These are not sentences', and they didn't mean exactly that they're not grammatical, but that they don't meet the definition of a sentences and they're something else. We used the word 'sentence' in the survey because that's what normally seems familiar to people. Linguists typically don't use it in any technical sense, precisely because it doesn't have a good definition. We might use 'utterance' instead, which would have probably been more accurate for these commenters as it doesn't imply a certain form, but that's not a familiar term for everyone. I'm guessing these commenters feel that a sentence must be grammatical, and otherwise it's not a sentence, which is a position similar to the people who say that something is or is not a real word. It's a perfectly acceptable definition of a sentence for someone whose goal is grammatical writing, but it's a circular definition for a linguist so it's no good if you're studying utterances that are grammatical for some people and not others, as we were here. I'm not sure what we should have done here instead; you can make explicit that some of them might not be full grammatical sentences but we really wanted to get away from priming people to give the 'right' answer. </p><p>One last thing that I hope doesn't affect our results too much is that some people missed a part of the instructions. We had a 'fill in the blank' question. We wanted to allow for people to say nothing was missing, but we didn't want to make the questions optional as that wouldn't tell us if they thought the sentence was fine as it was or if they'd just skipped it. So we made the questions required, but said 'put an x in the box if you think it's fine as it is'. Quite a few people didn't see that part of the instructions, which we could tell because they wrote something else like 'This is fine'. So I hope that not too many people wanted to leave it blank but felt obliged to fill it in. If they did, it's OK, because we really just wanted to know what people filled in there, but still, it makes the survey annoying for them to do. </p><p>Long post, sorry! But reflecting on this was a really useful experience for me and I hope that it's interesting to you as well. You didn't have to read this far, so thanks for doing so! </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-24516058529758589202021-07-12T06:00:00.001+01:002021-07-12T06:00:00.181+01:00Let's lead led away<p>All the way back in 2013, I declared the spelling of the past tense of the verb <i>lead</i>, which is standardly spelt <i>led</i>, dead. Or ded. I'd noticed it being misspelt as <i>lead</i> so many times, including on the BBC news website, that I thought it was probably simply prolonging its agony to try to preserve <i>led</i>. Of course it's still around, because inexplicably I'm not in charge, and written language doesn't change that fast. But I was reminded about it the other day and was frustrated all over again by the fact that this one is actually one that has sensible spelling and pronunciation, unlike most of our irregular past tenses. </p><p><i>Lead</i> is pronounced with an 'ee' sound, like <i>read</i>, and <i>led</i> is pronounced like <i>red</i>, so it really ought to be totally transparent and memorable and unproblematic. The problem with <i>lead/led</i> is, though, that we also have <i>read/read</i>, which is not spelt <i>red</i>, though we have another word that is. Oh and we also have the word <i>lead</i>, for the metal, which is pronounced like <i>led</i>. All of which obscures the fact that <i>lead</i> and <i>led</i> are pronounced more or less as they're spelt, unlike <i>read </i>(past tense) and <i>lead </i>(the metal). </p><p>I feel bad for it, I really do, but I also think it would just be simpler to let it slip quietly away. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-50006687120650366452021-07-05T06:00:00.002+01:002021-07-05T09:17:38.724+01:00Because linguistics, again: your help needed! <p>Have you ever used ‘because’ like this: <i>Yeah, no,
because reasons</i>? You aren’t giving a proper reason at all, you’re making a
metalinguistic comment about something. Together with Ellie Cook, one of our graduates from 2020, I’m investigating this phenomenon, which you might remember is known to linguists as ‘because X’. </p><p class="xxxmsonormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="xxxmsonormal">You might remember it because <a href="https://linguistlaura.blogspot.com/2012/07/because-reasons.html">I first wrote about ‘because X’ all the way back in 2012</a>. It was just a quick
blog post noting it as an interesting construction. A couple of people talked about <i>because</i> becoming a preposition during 2013, notably <a href="https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/because-as-a-preposition">Neal Whitman</a> and <a href="https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/because-has-become-a-preposition-because-grammar/">Stan Carey</a>. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/">This Atlantic article</a> appeared, quoting me and attributing it to <a href="https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/26522214342/because-reasons">Gretchen McCulloch</a> (to be fair, she got it from a post where Gretchen was quoting me - though with attribution). Then it was voted as <a href="https://www.americandialect.org/because-is-the-2013-word-of-the-year">2013's ‘Word of
the Year’</a> by the American Dialect Society, and I did a quick study on
it as a holiday project in early 2014. Well, it sort of snowballed since then, and
it became obvious that this seemingly unimportant point of usage variation can
tell us something about how language works. </p><p class="xxxmsonormal">I don't talk about it much on here, but behind the scenes I've been working on this off and on for a few years, picking away at little bits of it to find out what's going on. I've given <a href="https://linguistlaura.wordpress.com/conference-papers/">a few conference papers and talks</a> on the topic, including <a href="https://linguistlaura.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/edisyntalk.pdf">this</a> one and <a href="https://linguistlaura.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/konstanzbecause.pdf">this</a> one (let me know if you want the version for college students, which is very accessible and has bonus #CheekyNandos content). </p><p class="xxxmsonormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="xxxmsonormal">From that first survey, put together as a quick and fun project with no real aims in mind beyond finding out what the heck was happening, I discovered that although bare nouns like <i>because reasons</i> are frequent, it also shows up with lots of other parts of speech: <i>because
fake news </i>is a common one (with a modified noun), and <i>because just in case </i>is the slogan of a well known holiday company in the UK. It also tends to be something that is a
complete concept in itself with specific connotations (so <i>because reasons</i> means ‘because of some vague and probably not very well-thought-out unspecified reasons’). We probably share some knowledge (e.g. ‘people do things
for stupid reasons or no reason at all’), and it might have a slightly
tongue-in-cheek usage (e.g. ‘You and I both know that I have no good reason for this but let's pretend I
do’). </p>
<p class="xxxmsonormal">Lots of careful research later, and we’ve been able to
describe ‘because X’ quite precisely, as involving ‘sentence fragments’ – that
is, incomplete sentences that express a whole thought. It’s like when you say <i>Going out! </i>in answer to the question <i>What are you doing?</i>. This is really
unexpected because these sentence fragments, by definition, shouldn’t show up
within sentences! But this is what gives them their quirky sound: doing
something unexpected gives a slightly jarring pragmatic effect to make the
listener realise this isn’t normal ‘because’, giving a reason, but new ‘because
X’.</p><p class="xxxmsonormal">So what now? Well, before we can write up this research properly, we need to test a few specific things about this analysis. We've set up another survey. Where the last one necessarily took a scattergun approach, because we didn't know what was acceptable and what was not beyond just what seemed right to us, this one is more careful. Based on the predictions of a number of hypotheses, we've created another list of sentences that might sound more or less natural, and I need people's opinions on this. We need lots of people, because the more people who give their opinion, the more reliable the results are. </p><p class="xxxmsonormal">If you want to take part in this research, you can! You
can fill in the survey <a href="https://t.co/mw4poapR2r?amp=1">here</a>, which will take no more than ten minutes, giving
your own opinion on how different sentences work with 'because X'. We really need a lot of participants to get good results, so share it with anyone you think might be interested! </p><p class="xxxmsonormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-29357027564695718252021-06-28T06:00:00.001+01:002021-06-28T06:00:00.214+01:00Would the heckers like <p>I'm not sure if this counts as an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn">eggcorn</a>, which is a phrase that is reinterpreted based on some apparent meaning. It can often reveal some aspect of a speaker's accent or grammar that can be interesting to a linguist. One I like is 'taken for granite', an eggcorn for 'taken for granted', partly because for me this is nowhere near phonetically similar. This one is famous enough that people use it to make jokes, like the cartoon Rick and Morty, and <a href="https://linguistlaura.blogspot.com/2012/07/taking-words-for-granite.html">I've written about it before</a>. </p><p>The reinterpretation makes sense, because it could be something like 'set in stone' (hence granite), and it shows that some varieties have several phonological things that I don't, such as the quality of the first vowel being identical in those words, and the reduction of /nt/ to /n/, and something about the final sound as well. </p><p>So I don't know if this is an eggcorn or just a more general kind of reinterpretation. This image of a wind turbine with wilting sails comes with a caption saying,</p><p>I told em, you gotta water these things every day, would they listen? <b>would the heckers like</b>. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipqpctFln8nryuk96P-bw6IbHUPED250tjThxPNv2fr2PoDPqmy8LNGj1zrsDhAi_3qXEPDcIQRB8MaqQXtB6P8AVOC6Oouc8ocYgzMnxFcUgvReadiRVTJYAX7oGsbC9xlM2Aljgigkw/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Image of a wind turbine with drooping sails, and the caption 'I told them, you gotta water these things every day. Would they listen? Would the heckers like.'" data-original-height="577" data-original-width="357" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipqpctFln8nryuk96P-bw6IbHUPED250tjThxPNv2fr2PoDPqmy8LNGj1zrsDhAi_3qXEPDcIQRB8MaqQXtB6P8AVOC6Oouc8ocYgzMnxFcUgvReadiRVTJYAX7oGsbC9xlM2Aljgigkw/w247-h400/image.png" width="247" /></a></div><br />The phrase, as I understand it, is <i>Would they heck as like</i>. Therefore, the reanalysis here is from something that means 'They would be as likely as heck to do that' to something like 'The heckers wouldn't do that'. <p></p><p>A bit more formally, the original is <i>Would they </i>[<i>heck as like</i>] where [<i>heck as like</i>] is an expletive replacing the verb <i>listen</i> - compare <i>Would they fuck, </i>or <i>Would they my arse</i>. The reanalysis (assuming this is the right way round!) is <i>Would </i>[<i>the heckers</i>] <i>like</i>, where <i>heck </i>is part of the subject <i>the heckers </i>(compare <i>the fuckers</i>), the verb is just elided (not pronounced because it's understandable from the previous phrase) and <i>like</i> is a final particle giving something like emphasis. </p><p>This only works if you typically reduce <i>they</i> quite a bit, and also if you have a non-rhotic accent (don't pronounce the 'r' in <i>heckers</i>). I suspect the former is more likely if you also drop the h so you get a glide between <i>the</i> and '<i>eck(ers)</i>, but that is just my speculation. Oh and also it relies on the extreme flexibility of expletives and their ability to work as any part of speech! </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6294141728297871688.post-43790453234289725452021-06-21T06:00:00.006+01:002021-06-21T07:53:42.881+01:00I extremely like this <p>Just a quick one this week to point out a nice non-standard usage of the word <i>extremely</i>. The context was as follows: </p><blockquote><p>I extremely need a break from those things. </p></blockquote><p><i>Extremely</i> can normally only modify adjectives, so <i>extremely cold, extremely unlucky, extremely happy</i>, and so on. Here it's modifying a verb, <i>need</i>, which is extremely unusual and not at all like its normal behaviour. This was on twitter where one can do such things to signify metalinguistic information like hyperbole or being a bit extra. </p><p>And it works ok with <i>extremely</i> because even though it doesn't normally modify verbs, we do have other adverbs (which is what <i>extremely</i> is) which do this job: <i>I really need a break, I desperately need a break, I so need a break</i>. So it's not that much of a leap to bring <i>extremely</i> into service in this way with its usual meaning of 'to the greatest degree possible'. </p>Laurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15599735346062899537noreply@blogger.com0