Warning: extra care has been taken

Asda's smoked salmon trimmings have this warning on the packet:

Warning: Extra care has been taken to remove bones, although some may remain. 

If you scroll down a bit at the link, you can see it there. For most of the time it took me to make smoked salmon crostini this morning, I was trying to work out why I didn't like this phrasing. Eventually, I worked it out, and I think it's a real-life example of the misunderstanding that conjunctions and subordination work in different ways that I'm constantly correcting in my students' work.

Our online marking software allows you to create comments that you can use whenever you need them. Here's the one I created for this:

Whereas: introduces a subordinate clause (usually before the main clause). It is not followed by a comma, but the clause it introduces is. It therefore looks like this, where X and Y are complete sentences:
1. Whereas X, Y.
2. X, whereas Y.
And it does not look like this:
3. X. Whereas Y.
Although: works exactly like 'whereas'.
However: Unlike 'whereas' or 'although', when followed by a comma, it can introduce a sentence. Also unlike them, it cannot join two sentences unless you also use a semi-colon. If you're trying to do this with 'however', you probably want 'but'.
It looks like this:
1. X. However, Y.
2. X; however, Y. [but I would recommend 'X but Y' instead]
It does NOT look like this:
3. X, however Y.
4. X however, Y.
Therefore: works exactly like 'however'.

The substitution of however for but is the one that annoys me the most: it's pure 'big word syndrome', and sounds clunky.

Back to the salmon, they've used although when but would have been better. That would have given them the precise meaning they wanted to convey, namely that even though they've been totally diligent, there might even so be some bones in the salmon. That would work because but coordinates two clauses, so neither clause 1 (extra care has been taken to remove bones) nor clause 2 (some may remain) has more importance than the other and the whole of clause 1 and clause 2 together is interpreted as the warning.

The problem with although here is that it subordinates the clause that it introduces. In their formulation that's clause 2 (some may remain). This clause, because it's subordinated, can't be the main bit of that sentence and therefore can't be the warning. Only the main clause can be the warning, and the main clause is the one that's not subordinated, namely extra care has been taken to remove bones. They're warning me that they've taken extra care to remove bones, and as some extra information they note that some may remain. That's not right! If they really wanted to use although, they could have: they just need to make the warning be the main clause and although subordinate the real extra information (their claim of diligence):

[Although extra care has been taken to remove bones,] some may remain.  

German suddenly makes Esperanto make sense

As you know, I'm learning German and dabbling in Esperanto. Esperanto is primarily based on romance languages as far as the vocabulary goes, with a bit of English and German thrown in, and its cases are a bit like German. One thing that was bugging me about Esperanto was that when I learnt about subordinate clauses, there was always a comma after the main verb. Like this:

I hope, that I get something nice for Xmas. 

This is weird to me, as it's just not the way we do it in English and I can't help reading it with a strange Shatneresque style. But I have discovered that German does this (romance languages do not, at least in my experience), so it appears to be another aspect of Esperanto borrowed from German rather than the romance languages.

Lost 'lost ''lost' sign' sign' sign

A wonderful example of centre embedding from a ridiculously silly blog, via my friend Valdemar:

The image shows a lost sign, and the lost thing that it's advertising is another lost sign. And the thing that sign was advertising (before it got lost) was a lost sign... and so on. 


It's called centre embedding because, unsurprisingly, it means embedding a phrase in the centre of another one. By 'in the centre' we don't mean that it's precisely central, but rather that words from the higher-up phrase are on both sides of the embedded one. Here's an example of the more common type of embedding we find in English:

I really hate people [who don't think of others]

The bracketed part is a relative clause, which means that it tells you more about people, and it's embedded in the main clause. It's at the end, which is nice and easy to understand. We can go on for a surprisingly long time like this:

This is the farmer sowing his cornThat kept the cock that crowed in the mornThat waked the priest all shaven and shornThat married the man all tattered and tornThat kissed the maiden all forlornThat milked the cow with the crumpled hornThat tossed the dog that worried the catThat killed the rat that ate the maltThat lay in the house that Jack built!

Every line in that rhyme is a new embedded clause, but we can keep track of it all and it's not terribly remarkable. We actually do it quite a lot in normal speech. This example, which inspired Language Log's Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding, contains a whole stack of embedded clauses and other stuff but is completely understandable, and was produced in natural speech in an interview:

"When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie."

The thing with centre embedding is that it is totally grammatical (it does not break any of the rules of English (by which I mean the rules that speakers intuitively know and that cannot be broken, rather than the prescriptive rules that we all break in our everyday speech), but not acceptable (i.e. speakers don't say things like this and if asked, don't think they are good sentences at all). This is very different from most other grammatical puzzles that we (linguists) have, which are far more often of the type 'this is ungrammatical in most dialects but some speakers produce it - why?' or 'this theory predicts this to be ungrammatical but it's not, because it occurs in language X - why?'. 


It's really striking how quickly examples of centre embedding get impossible to parse (work out the grammar of). In the poster, we can of course easily understand the phrase with no embedding at all:

Lost sign

But then even just one layer of embedding, equivalent to I hate people who don't think of others, is a bit hard to work out:

Lost lost sign sign

And then when you get just one more, it's too hard:

Lost lost lost sign sign sign

The quotation marks help a bit here, but not much, and that's obviously no good in spoken language. This example is obviously designed for humour, and some are more or less easy to work out. Wikipedia (yeah, I'm being lazy today - I've got a PhD to write) cites this example of double embedding, attributing it to De Roeck et al (1982):

Isn't it true [that example-sentences [that people [that you know] produce] are more likely to be accepted]?

The double-embedded part that might cause trouble is the that people that you know produce part, but here it's not too difficult, perhaps because we're used to hearing know+verb constructions. But the Wikipedia page also says (summarising Karlsson 2007) that three is the maximum degree of embedding in written language, and even two is vanishingly rare in spoken language. It gives this example of super-tricky centre embedding, where the first one (with one level of embedding, and not centre embedding) is fine, but adding just one centre-embedded clause makes it incredibly difficult to parse:

A man [that a woman loves]

A man [that a woman [that a child knows] loves]

It means a man who is loved by a woman, who in turn is known by a child. But you try working that out while you're in full conversational flow. It's supposed to be basically just that while we're super-good at keeping track of relations and actions, we're really really bad at keeping track of a whole load of subjects without linking them to their predicates (what they did). 


Finally, this completely incomprehensible paragraph from SpecGram: 

An apparently new speech disorder a linguistics department our correspondent 
visited was affected by has appeared. Those affected our correspondent a local grad student called could hardly understand apparently still speak fluently. The cause experts the LSA sent investigate remains elusive. Frighteningly, linguists linguists linguists sent examined are highly contagious. Physicians neurologists psychologists other linguists called for help called for help called for help didn’t help either. The disorder experts reporters SpecGram sent consulted investigated apparently is a case of pathological center embedding.

Meta-linguistics

It's a funny old thing, researching language, because you've got to use your object of study to describe your object of study. You have to talk about language using language. Mostly, this is OK, because we can distinguish between metalinguistic mentions of language and actual use of language.

One thing that often happens (and this one isn't linguistics-specific) is that you find yourself using the non-technical version of a word more when you're talking about the technical term (or maybe you just notice it more). I'm researching questions, and I catch myself using question all the time: 'the question is how this can be applied to X' and so on.

We linguists have a fun extra game to play, however. We can use the very linguistic things that we are talking about in the language we use to talk about them. Sometimes this happens by accident, similarly to the above example. But sometimes, you see the opportunity to slip one in as a little in-joke for your readers who are paying attention. I read this sentence today:

The idea... is supported by the fact that only in embedded finite clauses is it possible to front an XP.*

This is a classic example of its type. It's talking about fronting XPs (moving phrases to the start of the clause) in embedded (subordinate) clauses, and in doing so, does just that itself. that only in embedded finite clauses is an embedded clause - it's the complement of fact (it tells you what the fact is). And within it, we have a fronted phrase, only in embedded clauses - it would normally be at the end:

It is posible to front an XP [only in embedded clauses].

Linguist humour. There are whole blog posts to be written about humorous example sentences, comedy names for new generalisations and the like.

*Reference: Breul, C. 2004. Focus structure in Generative Grammar: An integrated syntactic, semantic and intonational approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.