It wasn't then, but it was now

Linguists 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. 

David, picking up a nearly-empty beer: Is this mine? 

*David downs the last of the beer*

Me: Well, it was now! 

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. 

Now 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: 

I'm busy right now; I'll call you back when I'm finished. 

Or the present time give or take a few days: 

The delivery is due around now, I think. 

It can be the present time, probably extending into the future, since some past causal event or just compared to before: 

We have to submit form 3A now to claim expenses, not form 3B (since the new manager updated the policy). 

We generally have better living conditions now (compared to in the last century), though there are still too many people living in poverty.  

My now 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, It is now. 

But as I said my line, I mentally switched it from It is now. Because the beer no longer existed, I changed the tense from present (is) to past (was). I left the temporal adverbial now 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). 

This is why we have things like present perfect and past perfect, that you might have studied at school: I have drunk the beer 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 had drunk the beer 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. 

I was, in effect, trying to make now cover both the present time (our current situation) and a past time (when the beer existed). Now 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 now period compared to a before period (or then, or whatever). So it has to be present tense for a current state of affairs. 

And lastly, the reason my line was a dorky linguist joke rather than an incomprehensible failure of tenses is that the phrase It is now! has become a set phrase or 'chunk' of language. I wasn't consciously referencing the commentary of the 1966 football world cup final, 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. 

Can you buy macarons here?

Google sometimes asks me questions, via my phone, about places I've been to so that it can improve its information about businesses when people search for them. These are very revealing about what people search for, Google's insistence on not Britishising its communication, and the way that search data translates into queries.

Let's take the straightforward non-British terminology first. Google knows that these are places in the UK, and that I am a UK user. I've been annoyed before by how my phone's autocorrect only seems to know US places and spellings, and even the grammar is American (certain contractions that are more used in the UK don't come up in the suggested words, for instance). In its common questions are the following:

Is there a restroom here?
Is this place popular with travelers?
Is there a parking lot or structure?

The last one is specially for my friend and colleague Christina, who is very interested in who uses 'structure' to refer to what we (British people, I guess there might be variation but I don't know about it) would call a multi-storey (or underground) car park. A 'parking lot' is just a 'car park'.

This is lazy. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Google to translate 'restroom' to 'toilet'. It's not like it doesn't know. I included the 'travelers' one here too because I just felt that it struck slightly the wrong note. I think the word 'travellers' is too associated with the Traveller community (Gypsy or Romany people) and I would use 'tourists' in this context.

Some of the questions reveal differences in the kinds of places people might want to go. One of the questions asked me,

Does this place offer an all-you-can-drink option?

I think the last time I was somewhere with an all-you-can-drink option, with the exception of package holiday type places, was the Tuxedo Princess, a nightclub on a boat in Newcastle, where you paid a tenner entry and could drink rubbish alcopops all night. It's not really a thing in normal places. Similarly, another common question is this:

Does this place offer musical entertainment as well as dinner?

Apart from being a difficult question to answer because of the presupposition that it does offer dinner (how do you answer this about a place that offers musical entertainment but not dinner?), I don't think that dinner-plus-music is much of a thing. I certainly have never searched for it nor seen it offered as a tempting prospect anywhere except for a hideously old-fashioned restaurant that has since closed down.

Other questions, like the one above, pose problems because of the way they're asked. Take this one:

Does this place only serve vegetarian food? 

I was asked it about a pub that doesn't do food. So technically, it doesn't only serve vegetarian food, and the answer is 'no'. But that implies that it does do non-vegetarian food, as 'only' implies a sub-set of all kinds of food.

Then, take this one:

Can you drink outside on the street here? 

Well, at this pub that doesn't do food, no, you can't drink outside on the street. But it does have a really nice, big beer garden. Are people that ask this question just interested in drinking on the street, or do they more generally want to know if they can drink outdoors? That's another question, so I've been answering this literally, but I'm not sure it's the most useful thing to ask.

My favourite kind of question is the ones about weirdly specific products at random shops. I was asked of Morrison's (a low-end supermarket):

Can you get carpets here? 

And I was asked of Aldi (a cheap European supermarket):

Can you get macarons here? 

I... don't know. I suppose sometimes people ask where they can buy macarons or carpets and that translates, via algorithm, into a question for me.

Was I good?

One of the pubs I go to in Margate has these awful seaside postcard illustrations on the walls of the toilet. These are pretty tame, usually, though some of them make reasonably explicit references. They usually rely on double entendre of some kind for the joke. Here's one where the joke relies on the way that the meaning of adjectives changes in different contexts:

Good is a particularly fuzzy word. What does it mean? All we can really say is that it has some positive meaning (and even 'positive' is a bit vague). The rest, nearly all of the meaning, has to come from context. This is known as being 'underdetermined'.

Doctor Who uses this to good effect in one episode: the Doctor (played by Peter Capaldi, I think, or maybe it was Matt Smith - one of the modern ones, anyway) says early on that there is no such thing as a good dalek, meaning that they're inherently evil beings. At the end of the episode - spoiler alert - the daleks call the Doctor himself a 'good dalek', meaning that he is good at being a dalek. The difference lies in the application of the word good to some aspect of dalekhood, in which case it means 'unfeeling', 'ruthless', efficient', or whatever, or in treating it separately and giving it whatever meaning the word has when applied to animate entities more generally ('kind', 'well-meaning', etc).

The woman in the cartoon says I promised Mummy I'd be good... was I?. It's the same thing as the Doctor Who example, more or less, but good means different things again. What she promised her Mummy was that she'd be good in the sense of the term as applied to the behaviour of daughters on a night out: polite, sober, and most importantly, chaste. What she's asking the man is whether she was good at a particular activity: in other words, did she perform well at it? This conflicts with the crucial parts of how she promised her Mummy she'd behave, but it doesn't mean that good has conflicting meanings. It just has almost no meaning without a knowledge of what it applies to.

How you interpreted the title of this post out of context might give you some idea of how filthy a mind you have.

Pub crawling

There's a game for various iDevices called The Simpsons: Tapped Out, in which you have to rebuild Springfield. It's good; I'm obsessed. 

Every now and then it gets seasonal updates, and today it got an update for St Patrick's Day, which seems to be a bigger thing in the US than it is in England, where no one particularly cares about it. (I expect they do in Ireland.) Anyway, in the game, to introduce the new storyline, Homer says this: 

Notice that he says 'The day we all pub crawl to celebrate St Patrick', using 'pub crawl' as a verb. This strikes me as ungrammatical. I'm quite fascinated by this because 'pub crawl' must certainly be a British expression, borrowed into US English for the purposes of British-style (or perhaps Irish-style, in this case) pub crawling. It's my impression that in US English, the usual term for a drinking place is a 'bar'. We do use this word in UK English too, but it's not used for the more traditional pub-type places, only for the trendier type of establishment. And of course it is the place in a pub where one is served.

So what of this 'pub crawl' verb then? Well, the origin of the expression is clear: a compound noun was formed from a zero-derivation of the verb 'crawl' plus the thing that is crawled, to indicate an occasion of 'crawling' pubs. Zero-derivation is when you change the category of a word without changing its form, and is fairly common in English for the purpose of verbing nouns and nouning verbs. This noun 'pub crawl', however, seems to have been zero-derived back again into a verb in Homer's idiolect. I don't think compound nouns are very commonly turned into verbs at all in English: we have lots of compound nouns from verbs, like tin-opener, but hardly any verbs ('babysit' is an example, backformed from 'babysitter'). In fact, Homer seems to be particularly fond of them. In my morphology class, I use an example from the Simpsons of a very rare instance of a process called 'noun incorporation', and this is an exactly comparable example, also spoken by Homer:

Did I ever tell you about the time I babyshot my boss?

Here, the instrumental noun 'baby' is incorporated into the verb, giving a complex verb 'babyshoot', meaning 'to shoot someone via one's baby'. What I want to know is who in the Simpsons writing team is putting these verbs into Homer's language? I'm a big fan of their work, whoever they are.

Odd abbreviation reveals spelling over phonetics?

It was my friend's birthday the other day so we met in a pub for lunch, which is the accepted correct way to celebrate a birthday. Another friend hadn't been to the pub before and an interesting misunderstanding ensued.

We were going to a place called LYH. It's a nice pub, though you wouldn't know it to look at it from the outside. It does good grub and nice beer. This particular friend not only hadn't been there before but hadn't even heard of it before. However, we have been several times to another pub, called Mr Lynch. (Also a nice pub, though different - less about the beer, more about the partying, but still good grub.) This friend thought that in my text message 'LYH' was an abbreviation for 'Lynch'. Don't panic folks, she realised in time and made it to the correct venue. But the question is, how did this misunderstanding occur?

I wouldn't have abbreviated that word anyway, as it happens, but if I did, I think it'd be to 'Lch' or something similar. It would have included the important sounds of the word, the initial and final consonants in this case. The particularly odd thing about abbreviating it to 'Lyh' would be that the last letter, the 'h', doesn't even represent a sound of the word 'Lynch'. In broad phonological transcription, the word is [lɪntʃ]. That last sound, the 't' and the long 's', together make the sound we write as 'ch'. At no point in saying the word 'Lynch' do you make the sound [h], which is the sound you make if you say 'huh'. This is evident if you try to say 'Lyh' as a word - doesn't sound good, does it? 


So it would have been a strange choice for me to abbreviate to if I was going off the sounds in the word. But this highlights the fact that in written communication we can dissociate ourselves from the sounds of words and refer only to the spelling. Some people do this more than others, I think, though I don't know what makes the difference. Perhaps those who read more do it more. You know sometimes on 'Come dine with me', the participants read an unfamiliar item on the menu, say it's 'taramasalata', and instead of reading out what's there, they instead guess a word they know, like 'tiramisu'? I think it's the opposite of that. 

If we do be clever

I have a pub quiz team, and one of the quizzes we go to has a bonus question which is worth five points if you get it right, but you lose five if you get it wrong. You can also choose not to play, and not take the risk.*

We were deliberating this one week, as we had an answer but it was risky, and we wondered if we should try to be clever or just play it safe. My team-mate said to me,

If we do be clever...

Copula be is not normally a verb that can take an emphatic do in Standard English. (It can in some dialects - it sounds kind of West Country to me, I think.) However, in this instance, it was required. If she had said

If we are clever...

then our cleverness is an attribute that we have, not a temporary behaviour. Be in this utterance is a dynamic verb rather than a stative one, but that doesn't quite explain it. Other verbs that can be stative and non-stative can take do:

She has two children.
She is having a baby.
If she does have a baby...

I think this might just be a lacuna, a gap in the language. There's no grammatical reason, as far as I can see, for be to act like a stative verb even when it isn't.

There are other tests for whether a verb is stative and be in this sense has mixed results:

We are being clever [progressive]
??They forced us to be clever [complement of force]
??Be clever! [imperative]
??What we did was be clever [pseudo-cleft]

*In fact, that's a linguistic issue in itself. The wording of the instructions is:

Five points for a correct answer, five away if you get it wrong or don't play.

This is ambiguous, with the scope of the disjunction not clear. Is it that there's five points off if you get it wrong OR you can choose not to play, or is it that you lose five points IF you either get it wrong OR don't play? In other words, is the structure this:

...[DisjP [DP 5 points off if you get it wrong] [Disj or [CP don't play]]]

or this:

...[CP if [DisjP [TP you get it wrong] [Disj or [TP you don't play]]]

STILL?

I snapped this graffito in the pub the other day:

I don't know who Helen Willis is, but I like the graffito.

It doesn't just say, like so many other graffiti, that X is gay: it says she's STILL gay. And STILL is all in capitals. The implication is that the writer is waiting for her to no longer be gay, and is getting impatient about it.