It end ups being a word

[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.]

English has a group of verbs that you might know as 'phrasal verbs'. It's things like cheer up, find out, turn off. They include what looks like a preposition (up, out, off) 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: 

Look can occur with no preposition at all: 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look. 

Or it can be followed by one of several prepositions: 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look at a map. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look up the address. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look in the atlas. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look to the stars as my guide. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look with my soul. 

OK, I'll stop there before it gets silly. But one of these is different from the others. Compare these two sentences: 

*I'm not sure where it is, I'll look a map at. 

I'm not sure where it is, I'll look the address up. 

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 look up is (in this case) a phrasal verb, and up 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: 

I looked up the address.

I looked the address up. 

They can't have any other preposition than the one they go with, though:  

*I looked down the address. 

But if look up 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.) 

I looked up the street and saw my friend arriving. 

*I looked the street up and saw my friend arriving. 

I looked down the street and saw my friend arriving. 

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 end up, but treated it as a single unit, putting the verbal ending on the particle, like this: 

...because it end ups reproducing the same situation they want to avoid. 

Normally, you'd expect to see ends up, not end ups. But this does make sense if you consider a phrasal verb to be a single unit. End up is a bit different from look up in that we can't move up anywhere else. It really always does have to be end up, with nothing in between them, and no other preposition than up. The parts don't really mean the same on their own (end 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. 

To the kitchen!

I walked past a board advertising a new housing development and it boasted that the new flats would have integrated appliances to kitchen. 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.

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 (to kitchen rather than to the kitchen), which is also a feature of headlinese and other reduced written registers. We might also find high register vocabulary: they talk of aspect and premises and being well-appointed.

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 to your left or on your left. However, in standard English, you would expect a description of where the appliances are to be in the kitchen, not to the kitchen, which we would associate more with direction of movement. This might be a generalisation of its use in phrases like to the rear of the house. Or maybe it's an extension of the verb form of integrate, where you might integrate the appliances into the kitchen.

If you're a speaker of this variety of English, do chip in with your thoughts!

Upstarting

We were in Brussels just before Christmas for a little holiday, and we visited a couple of lambic breweries while we were there. One of the brewers at Verzet was great and took the time to show us all round it and tell us loads about the process and their beers.

Some of the barrels at the Verzet brewery
(named after their music heroes)

He was talking about the background of the guys who work there, and he said at one point that one of them helped upstarting a brewery, meaning 'helped to start up' a brewery.

In Flemish, there are what's called 'separable verbs'. These correspond to English verbs that have a preposition-like particle as part of it, so in this case start up. The Dutch version is opstarten. You can see that the 'up' part is a prefix, so it's literally 'upstart'. Flemish does have the option of separating that prefix from the main bit of the verb, more like the English equivalent, but it doesn't always separate (based on some rules of what kind of sentence it is). You can see that he basically just anglicised the word (it's called a 'calque' when this happens).

An interesting aside: I say Dutch in the paragraph above because that's what Google Translate has, and I think that the Dutch of Flanders is not different in this respect. Where there is a difference, according to this site,* is exactly when you separate the verb. The verb remains joined together when it's the only verb in the clause, it seems. When there's another verb, as in our sentence (He helped to start up a brewery), it's more likely to be separated in the Netherlands (he helped to start a brewery up) and more likely to remain intact in Flanders (he helped to upstart a brewery).

*If you, like me, like reading about grammar, this seems to be a really comprehensive grammar of Dutch that you can download as a PDF. 

Danny Dyer should be held account for it

Danny Dyer was briefly everyone's favourite wideboy again last week when he called David Cameron a 'twat' on telly, twice. Here's a link to the Guardian's round-up of the twitter response, with video.

As well as his well-chosen epithet, he also said this:

“How comes he can scuttle off? He called all this on. Where is he? He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up, yeah, where is the geezer? I think he should be held account for it.”

He repeated that phrase: he should be held account for it. If you've been paying attention to my research interests lately, you'll know that I collect missing prepositions. The most frequently omitted preposition, by far, is to in a directional sense with a familiar location: I'm going to the pub, for instance. (The article the is also omitted; that's not relevant today.) Now, this phrase of Danny Dyer's is normally held to account. He skipped the to. Might this be the same kind of thing?

I think not, partly because this to doesn't have the same characteristics as the commonly-omitted kind. While it is a preposition, it's part of an idiom and doesn't have any directional meaning. It just holds the whole thing together. You can function perfectly well without it without losing any meaning, as demonstrated by Danny himself. The other thing that to my mind makes it more likely that this is a simple speech error is the existence of the basically synonymous phrase held accountable. Then, the to isn't present at all, so it's a straightforward process to mix the two up and come out with held account.

Let's go Fuckoffee

I went to London last week and walked past this coffee shop, which I had heard of because it pops up on google maps. It's called Fuckoffee. (Incidentally, I've cropped out a woman wearing the same yellow leather jacket that I've got - she can fuckoffee an' all.)

The name is obviously intended to capture attention by incorporating a swearword. It works - I haven't heard of any other random coffee shops in London. But it's also a clever pun that only works if you have the exact non-standard thing that I'm researching right now: a missing preposition!

If you have the standard version of what I'm talking about, you'd say

Let's go to Costa 

or

Let's go to Fuckoffee

when you were suggesting coffee places to go to. But if you have this non-standard form, which is found in London and in various other UK places, it means you can miss out the preposition to when you're talking about certain locations or institutions, such as a familiar coffee shop. So you might say

Let's go Costa

or

Let's go Fuckoffee

which, for most people with a native London dialect, will sound exactly like Let's go for coffee.

This adverb is super interesting

The Oxford Times published a whinge about the prefix super- recently (don't click the link; you'll get the idea from this post and like all local papers, the page is full of really annoying adverts that play audio). They're unhappy about the increase in adjectives preceded by super, such as super-strong, super-expensive and super-fit.

The claims about its increased frequency are discussed for American English in this post by Neal Whitman from February this year, and are true. It is getting more common (this is super-unusual, by the way, because normally it's the frequency illusion). Whether the claim that its use over here comes from American English is true or not I don't know; I can't be bothered to check because I don't really care.

What I do care about is whether it really is a prefix in all the examples they mention. Neal has it as an adverb and I instinctively classed it as that as well before I was pointed to his post. Why, though? The Oxford Times' examples are all written with a hyphen, and they explicitly call it a prefix. I also have an intuitive hyphen when it's an attributive adjective rather than predicative (a super-compelling argument vs this argument is super compelling). Whyyyyy??

[Aside: the fact that it can be unambiguously an adjective in examples like This pudding is simply super is irrelevant. Words don't usually have a category* when considered in isolation, and only have categories when considered in context.]

With a noun, as in superyacht, I'd not hesitate to call it a prefix, regardless of whether it's written like that or as super yacht or super-yacht. And when rich is a noun, I'd class it as a prefix (the super-rich ought to pay more taxes), but when it's an adjective it's a more ambiguous (The owner of this company is super rich). This is easily explained: adverbs can't modify nouns, so super (adverb) can't modify a noun like yacht; it must be a prefix meaning something like mega- or über-.

So let's focus on the ambiguous cases where it modifies an adjective, so could be a prefix (like über-strong) or an adverb (like incredibly strong). How do we tell which it is? Intuition is notoriously unreliable.

It would be useful to know if anything else can occur between the putative adverb and the adjective. You couldn't split a prefix from its base (apart from with expletives, like un-bloody-fortunately) but you might be able to put another word between an adverb and an adjective (really very pleasant). I don't think you can with super, but it's not a super-compelling argument; you also can't put anything between very, an undisputed adverb, and an adjective (very really pleasant is awful). But you can stack it up, which is more adverbial-like (super super happy).

One argument for it being a prefix would be that it can modify just adjectives. Adverbs can modify verbs and prepositional phrases (not nouns, as noted above). But it looks like super can actually modify these too: Neal Whitman gives these examples of prepositional phrases:

Three is super off tee, but not off turf.
I was super into rollerblading which I'm not any more.

Other adverbs:

Lift super slowly, taking 10 seconds to raise and 5 to lower.
My job was to 'appear', super suddenly.

And verbs:

Their media strategy... is to kind of exalt and super serve the conservative media.
I super hate to lose.
I super want a desert tortoise!
We super like this song.

The fact that these are less common is slightly an issue, though - perhaps this is a prefix in the process of breaking free and making a bid for adverbialhood? It's times like these I wish I was more of a morphologist and knew how to find out. Advice welcome - anyone want to do a study?

*That's a super-controversial way of putting that. I don't mean to imply any stance on whether the category of a word is part of its inherent content, or whether the same word in more than one category is a single word that changes category rather than being two homophonous words, or anything really. I have opinions about these things but they aren't the point of this post. 

Margaret Atwood is perfect

I saw this tweet today and thought it seemed really weird.

'If I wanted for perfection, I would never write a word' - Margaret Atwood #AcWriMo #QuoteOfTheDay #JustWrite #AcWri #WritingTip pic.twitter.com/44iN7ul1R4

— PhD2Published (@PhD2Published) November 6, 2016

If you 'want for' something, then you lack it. It's usually used in the negative, such as We were poor but we wanted for nothing. Note that we wanted for nothing does not mean the same as we wanted nothing! They may very well have wanted lots of things, but didn't need them or feel a lack of them.

Want (without for) also means 'desire', however, because if you lack or need something, you may in fact also desire it, so the meanings overlap. The overlap is especially obvious if you think about a context like buying vegetables at a farmer's market. If you haven't brought your reusable bag (tut tut), the stallholder might say You'll want a bag for those. You don't specially feel a burning desire for one, but you need one, so you do also want one.

If the tweet had said 'If I wanted perfection...' then it would make a bit more sense. As it stands, Atwood seems to be saying 'If I lacked perfection, I would never write a word'. That implies that she writes because she has perfection, which is not at all the sentiment intended.

She may well be perfect, in fact - I think she's right up there in the best writers I've ever read. Top three, for sure. But it's a typo, of course... she actually said 'If I waited for perfection'.

(At) home

It's a well-known fact that home has no preposition when it occurs with go:

I went (*to) home

(The asterisk inside the brackets means that it's ungrammatical if you include to.)

And it has to have one if it's an adverbial phrase (optional extra information about the event):

I worked *(at) home today

(The asterisk outside the brackets means it's ungrammatical without at.)

There are some verbs where the preposition is optional, such as stay:

I stayed (at) home.

I think there might be some regional variation on that one, though I'm not sure.

But when it's with be, omitting or including the preposition gives a meaning difference. I ran a twitter poll to make sure I wasn't alone in this, and found overwhelming agreement with my judgements. In a context in which I've been for a night out and want to tell my friend that I've arrived back at my house safely, I would say I'm home. If my friend had rung my and wanted to know where I was, I would say I'm at home. I could use either in either context, but both I and those who responded to my twitter poll felt that the distinction above was right. So that preposition at being pronounced has a kind of locative meaning - location in a place - while omitting it has some sort of directional meaning - movement to (or arrival at) a place.

It's hard to close the windows after you've left the room

I was in a room at work today that had a sign on the inside of the door saying something like this:

CLOSE WINDOWS

BEFORE LEAVING

THE ROOM

Underlining is the written form of stress on that word (before), and that kind of stress in that position can only make the word contrastive. That is to say, it contrasts before with after and any other word from the appropriate semantic and syntactic class (while, during, etc). It also makes before the focus of the sentence, so that the rest of it seems to be already-known information. The implication is that people have been trying to close the windows after they've left the room, it hasn't worked out well, so now we're being reminded to do it before and not after we leave.

The preposition with which you are filling it in

I am currently mired in marking. As you know, I keep note of which mistakes are currently popular. One that I spotted recently was a sort of preposition doubling but with two different prepositions. Let me explain.

So, there are two things English can do. You can either move your preposition (in, in this example) along with your wh-word:

It depends on the newspapers in which you are reading them.

or you can leave it where it is:

It depends on the newspapers which you are reading them in.

It's a stylistic choice nowadays (used to be frowned upon, not so much now, and the first sounds a bit stuffy in casual conversation). Ignore the fact that which probably ought to be that in the second example (incidentally, that's evidence that this which/that rule is a bit daft). English is unusual in allowing this choice: most languages can't 'strand' the preposition and have to move it, as in the first example.

Sometimes, people get halfway through the sentence and forget they moved the preposition, and stick it in at the end as well:

It depends on the newspapers in which you are reading them in. 

Oh well - no problem. Speech error. It happens. Paul McCartney is sometimes said to have sung 'this ever-changing world in which we live in' (though he thinks maybe it was actually 'in which we're living').

But today I read sentences like this from two different students:

It depends on the newspapers with which you are reading them in. 

How exciting! So I think here, the student has left the preposition at the end on purpose, because that's fine, but also felt like there really ought to be something in that space before the which, so stuck in another preposition (with) that sounds OK there. Add it to the list of 'more words = better' mistakes.

Because survey.

I made a survey, because the construction that I called 'because+noun' back in July 2012 has suddenly become word of the year and we still don't know how it works! If you could take it I would be pleased. Many thanks. If you can't see it below, it's here. 

I doubt that you would suspect this

A recent Language Log post pointed out a humorously ambiguous headline:

The joke is of course that it sounds like the kebab van drove over and duffed up the hapless teen, with the by phrase expressing the agent of the jaw-breaking incident. The intended meaning is the one in which by is a preposition, and the by phrase locates the teenager at the time of the attack (ie he was by a kebab van). Much lolz ensues.

This wasn't the only humour to be wrung from the language in the headline: commenter Bobbie made the following quip, which was immediately either genuinely or wilfully misunderstood by Victor Mair:

Bobbie is taking advantage of the fact that in English, we can say that you have broken your X (if X is a body part) and it does not mean that you did the breaking. There's a term for that which I can't remember just now. Anyway, so Bobbie says what (s)he says, implying that it is unlikely to be the case that the teenager did it himself. Victor Mair's comment was initially baffling to me, because of course American English speakers wouldn't use suspect instead - that would mean the exact opposite! Other commenters said much the same lower down the comment thread.

Some of those commenters also noted that doubt used to mean roughly what suspect means. It's sense 6d in the OED, marked as archaic, and from the examples there, you can see how the semantic shift could have happened. Just add it to the long list of English verbs whose meaning has completely reversed over time.

Prepositions in Prague

I've been in Prague, because my lovely parents took me (and my sister) there for my 30th birthday. It was beautiful and interesting and relaxing (though also tiring because there are a lot of steps and hills). 

When I go to other countries where they speak not-English I generally try to learn a few phrases so as not to be a total rudeperson. This goes down well in France, where they either don't speak English that well or just generally prefer it if you speak French (can't blame them) and luckily my French is passable enough that that works OK. In other countries they seem to have decided it's just easier if we all speak English and it's quite hard to get them to talk not-English to you. 

In Amsterdam, they can spot an English person at twenty paces and get in their English greeting before you even have a chance to say 'hallo' (which is basically English anyway, because a lot of Dutch is English with a funny accent). In Prague they aren't quite as sure, because you might be Italian or Spanish or French or German instead, so they're sometimes a bit more tentative with the English opener, so you do have a chance to go in with the Czech (and from your poor pronunciation they obviously realise that you're English). 

There's a different type of problem though. In Amsterdam, I quite happily parallel-talked, doing my best Dutch beer-ordering and thanking, and they replied in English so that I could actually understand. This worked quite well. But in Prague, it didn't go so well. If I tried to thank them in Czech, they didn't always seem to understand. This is partly because three phrasebooks gave me three different ways of saying it, so I wasn't quite as sure of myself. I'd specifically learnt some phrases, and discovered that my ten weeks of basic Russian would be quite handy (I successfully rustled up the words for 'four tickets'). 

But I think the biggest problem is that they're making it up. Those three ways of saying thank you, for instance. And look at these signs. They all show what appear to be the words 'from' and 'to' (the first one may not, but the second two definitely do), and there are THREE different ones. The second two, especially, are a dead giveaway that they're making it up, because they're saying the exact same thing. There's no way a difference in the length of time you're allowed to park changes what preposition you use with the times you're allowed to park between. 

Reminds me of Welsh, which is definitely doing a similar thing. On one weekend visit not long ago I counted at least three different way of writing 'car park' on signs in just Pembroke Dock.

[08/08/12 Update! 366daysinthelife has informed me that Po - Pa and Po - Ne mean Mon-Fri and Mon-Sun. Of course! It's so obvious once you know. Come back Czech, all is forgiven.]