Getting drank

Beavertown Brewery currently have these billboard adverts up, with the slogan Out of this world beer. Drank on Earth: 

Photo: @nicholasd on instagram

The verb drink is one of our irregular verbs, as it doesn't have a past tense of drinked, adding the regular past tense ending -ed, and instead changes its vowel, so you say I drank beer not I drinked beer. It also does this for the participle, which is what you use for various things including perfect aspect (I have drunk beer) and passive (The beer was drunk by me). This passive participle is also the one we use for things like relative clauses (The beer that is drunk on Earth). 

But there is variation! Not everyone has all three of these forms in all contexts. For a lot of people, drank is used for all the non-present forms (I drank the beer, I have drank the beer), while for others, drunk is used (I drunk the beer, I have drunk the beer). For everyone, the adjective is drunk, though (no one says I am drank!), which I think is a nice indication that it's somehow separate from the verb. 

In formal English, then, this slogan would say Out of this world beer, drunk on Earth, because it's the relative clause type: this is short for which is drunk on Earth. They've chosen instead to go with the form used in more informal contexts and said Drank on Earth. 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. 

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. 

How much did it costed?

The Conversation tweeted about an article way back in 2018, when things like the World Cup still happened, and included the phrase could have costed (it's also in the article itself):

Watching the #WorldCup during working hours could have costed as much as US$10.4 billion in lost production time (in 2010).

But there are multiple ways employers can make up for this by embracing the tournament: https://t.co/qyewW8oxVQ pic.twitter.com/apqvOr9zgF

— The Conversation (@ConversationUK) June 12, 2018

In Standard English that would be could have cost – cost is irregular and has cost as its past participle as well as the bare form. In fact, costed isn't even the simple past tense of this version of the verb, as that's also cost:

It costs	Present
It cost	Past
It has cost	Perfect

 and so on. 

I say 'this version of the verb' because there's another version of cost that does have costed as the past tense: the one that means 'estimate the price of' rather than 'have a price of', as in We costed the new plans and decided that they were not viable. So there is this form costed that exists, and that you might have heard just as recently as the form cost, and you might reach for that when you're looking for the relevant form to follow the perfect auxiliary have. And then that makes it nice and similar to all the other regular verbs like could have washed, could have dusted, could have wasted, etc. 

I predicted that this mistake would be much less likely to occur with did instead of could have. While could have requires the past participle (actually it's have that requires it, so you'd also get it has lasted us ten years, and by extension possible it has costed us a fortune), did doesn't – it requires the bare form of the verb: Did it last long? rather than Did it lasted long? and so presumably you would expect Did it cost a lot rather than Did it costed a lot? 

Well, never make predictions about what kind of variation people will produce. I'll leave the actual numbers to someone else, but a google search for "did it costed" brings up results, and not just people asking if it's correct to say that (though they're the top hits). There are also examples where it's used as the simple past form, as in I wonder how much that upgrade costed. 

English, amirite? 

Unexpected adverbials

Liliane Haegeman has been here at Kent all week on an Erasmus teaching mobility visit. She's been giving four seminars on adverbial clauses, including among other things the difference between what she calls 'central' and 'peripheral' adverbial clauses. Central adverbials modify the event itself, so in this case the 'while' clause tells you the time during which the main event happened:

I took out the rubbish [while you were watching telly] 

Peripheral adverbials, meanwhile, don't tell us about event time or anything like that, but are more about the relation between the clauses or speaker attitude. In this case, the 'while' clause gives a contrastive or concessive meaning: 

I’m quite active, [while he is a total slob] 

These clauses have various properties that distinguish them. One of these properties is the tense of the verb. Central adverbial clauses (e.g. expressing time) have the same tense as the main verb, or if they don't, they're interpreted as doing so. Here, there is a future marker 'will' in the main clause, and the 'while' clause has present tense 'watch', but it's interpreted as happening at the same time as the main clause.

I'll take the rubbish out [while you watch telly]

A peripheral (e.g. contrastive) adverbial with different tenses is interpreted as being two different times:

I was fortunate to get full funding for my degree, [while he has to borrow a student loan]

The 'full funding' happened in the past (with past tense 'was') and the 'borrowing' is now (present tense 'has').

All of the above is paraphrasing what Liliane told us in the first seminar. She also said this this is something that you specifically have to tell learners of English, that they have to use present tense in this kind of clause. 'If' clauses are the same, in that they have two meanings:

If you don't understand this part, you won't be able to follow tomorrow's seminar. [if = condition]

If you didn't understand, why didn't you raise your hand and ask? [if = assumed background]

The conditional one is the one where the tense should be present even if the main clause is future, as it is here. Then, at the end of the seminar, Liliane was talking about the following one the next day, and she said this:

Even if you won't come back to the class, you have the handout. 

For this to be a normal conditional, it needs to be present tense 'Even if you don't come back'. But Liliane used the future tense marker 'won't', and then all of a sudden it was forced into the assumed background interpretation: 'Even though I understand it's the case that you won't come back...' where the implication was that she knew that we wouldn't return, and so she had given us the handout, when in fact the meaning was that she thought we would but if we didn't, we had the handout.

Another example of the same thing is a little more complicated because you need to know about Dutch word order. Dutch has 'V2', which means that the finite verb is the second constituent in the clause. So it can look like English, where you have the subject, then the verb, then the object, or it can be some other part of the sentence before the verb, like the object or an adverbial clause like the ones we just talked about. Now here's the thing: only the central adverbials can be this first element before the verb. If it's the other kind, then it doesn't 'count' and you need something else to be there, like the subject. Look at this, where the verb is in bold (example from the seminar handout):

Dutch: [Als het je interesseert,] er zal in Parijs ook een vacature zijn.
Word-for-word: If it you interests, there will in Paris also a vacancy be.
Idiomatically: 'If you are interested, in Paris there is also a vacancy.'

The 'if' clause is the kind that gives you background info, that doesn't count, so you have something else (the subject 'there') before the verb 'zal', which is now the third constituent. If you swap the order and have 'Als... zal er...', namely 'if... will there' where the 'if' clause is the one element before the verb in normal second position, it magically gets forced into the interpretation where the 'if' clause is a real conditional - the vacancy only exists if you're interested in it!

(NB: I've massively over-simplified this, and much of the week was spent learning how lots of this has interesting exceptions, and I've conflated two types of clause, etc etc. I've also paraphrased Liliane's work to write this, so consider this a citation.) 

Esperanto 2: Warning, contains meat

Esperanto has certain suffixes for various grammatical purposes, and others that add some extra meaning. One of the latter is -aĵ, which you add to the name of an animal in order to get the word for its meat. Some examples:

Chicken (the bird) - koko, chicken (meat) - kokaĵo

Cow/bull - bovo, beef - bovaĵo

One of the sentences I had to translate was kokaĵo estas viando, which means 'chicken is meat'. Now obviously the word for 'chicken' in that sentence has the 'meat' suffix already in it, so there's a certain redundancy here. It's a bit like saying chicken meat is meat in English. (Incidentally, I don't know if any other language has a suffix specifically for 'meat', and I don't know if it can be extended to fruits, for instance, as in the flesh of a peach, which I'm sure does exist in other languages.)

I was thinking about this redundancy and its counterparts in English. We don't have exactly the same thing, of course, as our words for meat are either the same (chicken, fish) or a different word entirely (beef, pork). So I suppose what we have is a kind of semantic redundancy: 'meat' is part of the meaning of beef. In other words, beef is a hyponym of meat. But someone might not know that beef is a meat (say they were learning English and you were explaining what the word meant, for instance). That wouldn't happen with Esperanto because the meaning is right there in the word if you know what the parts mean. It's 'compositional'. 

That said, people are not always that conscious of the grammatical parts of words, especially if the word is common. It's pretty usual for me to discover that many of my second and third year students can't correctly identify clauses as past or present tense, for instance. (Sorry students, if you're reading, but it's true.) They know as a native speaker what it means, but it's subconscious knowledge. 

And we have comparable redundancy in English. Imagine if you said I've been hurt in the past. Well, I've been hurt is past tense so in the past isn't necessary. It is possible that it might remove the 'immediate past' meaning that we would normally understand from the perfect tense if it's uttered out of the blue, but in context it is definitely redundant and still perfectly fine to say. Similarly, a little duckling doesn't normally mean a duckling that is particularly small compared to other ducklings, and the -ling tells us it's little anyway. 

I might need to find a fluent Esperantist to give me some 'native' speaker judgements on whether the sentence I had to translate has the 'explaining the meaning of the word' interpretation or not. 

Incidentally, Esperanto is literally the only language that uses the character ĵ, which means it's not on my computer's keyboard and is hard to type and that's annoying. 

Past tense is not past

It was the final of the Great British Bake Off last week. Now that it's been long enough for everyone to catch up, I can post this with no spoilers.

One of the contestants was Ruby, a very young baker (just 20) who divided opinion: many were annoyed by her apparent lack of confidence, thinking that it seemed fake. This seemed a bit harsh to me, but then as a university lecturer I'm well placed to see the lack of confidence that many young women have in their own abilities. Ruby has won over a lot of people with this article about the way she and the other female contestants were treated.

But lots of people loved Ruby and were rooting for her to win. She didn't, losing out to the contestant who was better in the final, as is right and proper. On twitter, The Invisible Woman tweeted her thoughts in the moments before the announcement was made:

Tweet: "'We will always remember Ruby for her perfect picnic pie...' I think that past tense is a clue."

The Invisible Woman is an intelligent woman and we all tweet things without thinking about them properly, so I just want to be clear that I'm not picking on her or making fun of her for making a mistake. Nevertheless, it is a mistake, and it's interesting to see why it might have been made.

We can distinguish between 'tense' and 'time' - we might talk about past, present, future, and so on, but we might not always talk about past time with past tense, for instance. Just imagine someone telling a story and saying 'So I start walking away, and he says...'. If we talk about tense, we mean something that is a grammatical feature of the language - an ending on a verb, or a word that functions to make the sentence past.

English has two tenses that are indicated with inflection on the verb: present (with either no ending or -s) and past (with -ed or an irregular ending):

walk - walks - walked

To indicate other tenses, other methods are used. We might discuss the future and use be going to, or just a present tense verb: The party starts at 8 tonight. Future tense can also be marked 'periphrastically' - that means with another word, will. That's what we've got in the tweet above: We will always remember. Future tense is about is non-past as tenses get. But not only that, it's not even referring to past time. It's referring to some time in the future, using future will, describing the action at that future time. The only past-ness about it is the fact that the meaning of remember refers to the past - if you remember something, you necessarily remember a past event.