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. 

Catching criminals and watching them in the act

CW: mention of public indecency behaviour in the tweet linked and below, before we get to the linguistics. 

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': 

Ten minutes seems a long time to "catch" someone doing something. I feel like that strays into "watch".

— Alan ‘join a union’ Smith (@mralanjohnsmith) December 19, 2021

As Alan says above, you can't really catch someone doing something for ten minutes. Why not? 

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'll go for a walk in an hour you mean that an hour from now, you will go for a walk, whereas I finished my homework in an hour means that it took you one hour to do your homework, and I'll do my homework in an hour is ambiguous: you'll do it in one hour's time, or it will take you one hour to finish it. Notice that I'll go for a walk in an hour 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'll go for a walk for an hour, and then you're expressing the duration of your walk. 

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, catch 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. Watch, 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). 

You can manipulate these classes, and for instance say that It took ten years to catch the criminal, 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 We finally caught the criminal on Tuesday, after ten long years!. Compare this with an 'accomplishment' like write a novel: you can say It took ten years to write my novel, but you can't say I finally wrote my novel on Tuesday, after ten long years!. You'd have to say instead that you finished it on Tuesday, because write a novel includes the process leading up to the completion as well as the completion itself, unlike catch, which is just the completion and not the process. 

The pronunciation of plantain

 Please enjoy this nice linguistic observation made by someone on twitter: 

The pronunciation of “plantain”

When a word has the suffix “-tain” it’s pronounced ‘tayn’ when it’s a verb, and ‘tin’ when it’s a noun

Verb: contain, maintain, entertain, ascertain, pertain
Noun: captain, fountain, curtain, mountain… plantain https://t.co/jXv6BEGSsN

— Sean Daley (@daleyvibes) December 17, 2021

We'll deal with the minor quibble first: –tain 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 tenere 'hold', so contain is 'hold with', maintain is 'hold in the hand', entertain is 'hold together', and so on. In the nouns it's more just an accidental similarity in that mountain, fountain etc come from French words montaigne, fontaine, etc. Plantain comes from Spanish plátano. 

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: bloodstain isn't pronounced like 'tin', but it's also not got the morpheme –tain (as it's part of stain). 

It fits with other noun/verb pronunciations, such as the stress difference on record depending on whether it's a noun (play a REcord) or a verb (reCORD the show). I listen to a lot of knitting podcasts and I've noticed this with repeat, 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 repeats. 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. 

Our –tain tweeter is making a point about the pronunciation of the final example, plantain, 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. 

I extremely like this

Just a quick one this week to point out a nice non-standard usage of the word extremely. The context was as follows: 

I extremely need a break from those things. 

Extremely can normally only modify adjectives, so extremely cold, extremely unlucky, extremely happy, and so on. Here it's modifying a verb, need, 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. 

And it works ok with extremely because even though it doesn't normally modify verbs, we do have other adverbs (which is what extremely is) which do this job: I really need a break, I desperately need a break, I so need a break. So it's not that much of a leap to bring extremely into service in this way with its usual meaning of 'to the greatest degree possible'. 

I'm going to go ahead and know it

Today in strange agency verb use: 

Screenshot of a tweet saying "Yeah if you're standing
in front of a Bentley at a Bentley dealership,
I'm going to go ahead and know that's not your car." 

Knowing isn't something that you have much control over. You can try and know things, by learning them or finding them out or whatever, but whether you know something or not is a state of mind, literally. 

It's the phrase go ahead and that gives rise to the oddness here. Without it, I'm going to know that's not your car, is fine. It means that in the scenario described, I will know a fact based on the evidence of my eyes, and my own knowledge and judgement of the likely circumstances (i.e. the car in a dealership is not necessarily your own; you'd probably take a photo of your own car somewhere else; pretending you own a Bentley is a plausible alternative to it actually being your car). 

I hadn't realised before, but go ahead and is actually a peeve for some people. Internet people ask 'why do young people say they're going to go ahead and do something'. The answers tend to be along the lines of it meaning you have the listener's tacit approval, that no one has given you a reason not to do the thing, or that it's a more decisive, proactive action. In any case, all things that one needs to deliberately decide to do – to have agency. 

And, as previously discussed, knowing something is not something that one can do deliberately. You can go ahead and reason that it's not my Bentley, you can go ahead and say that it's not my Bentley, and you can go ahead and assume that it's not my Bentley. But knowing that it's not my Bentley is a state you arrive at, whether you mean to or not. Sometimes, there are things one would rather not know – but you can't help it. 

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? 

Toilet flushing instructions and recursive binary Merge

Spotted in the Duke of Cumberland loos in Whitstable this weekend, this instruction on how to flush the toilet:

Press hard
Both buttons

I interpret this as two instructions:

PRESS HARD. BOTH BUTTONS. 

You could read it as a single instruction ('Press hard both buttons') but it's awkward in English. It would be normal in, say, Spanish, but in English a more idiomatic word order is 'Press both buttons hard', or verb (press) – object (both buttons) – adverb (hard).

The way that this is broken down into two phrases can be seen as support for the idea that syntax comprises a series of operations of recursive binary Merge. That's a technical way of saying that sentences are formed by combining two elements at a time, and combining the resulting component with a new element, still two at a time.

So, for example, we might think of a sentence like Birds eat seeds as being formed as follows:

eat + seeds --> eat seeds
birds + eat seeds --> birds eat seeds

Our loo-flushing example is a little bit more complicated. We don't have a subject, because it's an instruction so there is an implicit 'you' as the presser of the buttons. We definitely want to say that both buttons is a unit (a 'constituent'), which seems intuitively right (there are also ways to test this kind of thing). Then we want to say that Press both buttons is a constituent, with the verb press combining with its object both buttons. Then we would combine that whole phrase press both buttons with the adverb hard, telling us how the action of pressing both buttons should be performed. This makes more sense than saying that the verb press combines with a constituent both buttons hard, which doesn't seem intuitively right. Adverbs tell us how verbs are done, not what nouns are like. So now we have this structure:

both + buttons --> both buttons
press + both buttons --> press both buttons
press both buttons + hard --> press both buttons hard

The fact that the adverb refers to the verb, and not to the noun, also tells us why we get the broken-up instructions in the photo. The adverb, as I said, refers to the verb. We interpret it as referring to the whole verb phrase press both buttons as the thing that has to be done in a hard manner, but in fact it's really the pressing that is to be hard. The whole phrase involves the three levels of recursive Merge (recombining constituents) shown above, giving a final nested structure like this:

[3 [2 press [1 both buttons 1] 2] hard 3]

If we want to make it much simpler, one way of doing that is to remove the recursive part of the operation, and have things combine just once. This means, if you assume that Merge is binary (that things can only combine two at a time and not three or more), that the maximum number of words you can have in an utterance is two. And that's exactly what is happening in the photo: two pairs of words (both buttons; press hard), and their juxtaposition is what tells us that one applies to the other rather than their syntactic combination.

yeet

You might have noticed that people yeet things now. It's a specific type of throwing. Here's a helpful hint I saw on twitter this week:

'Yoink' is the opposite of 'yeet'

Until as recently as January, I thought there was a regional difference in this word. The American Dialect Society had it as one of their Words of 2018, but with the meaning 'indication of surprise or excitement' - an exclamation. It was said to be onomatopoeic, the sound of yeeting something into a bin or whatever and 'pronounced with a celebratory gesture'. 

Urban dictionary seems to have only the exclamation in the older entries (though still accompanying the yeeting action of course). And as with so many new words, it may well come from black American pop culture, originating or possibly just finding new life in a dance. 

It may well have been onomatopoeic over here as well, but it was very definitely a verb of throwing, not an exclamation. What's more, because of its similarity to our Germanic-origin irregular verbs, it's got a past tense of yote and takes part in wordplay like yeeteth in the tweet above (see also twote for the past tense of tweet). 

I don't know if the two senses have always been available to everyone and it was just different bits of them got out into the mainstream, or if they've converged more recently. And I am FULLY aware of how painfully white and middle-aged and out of touch I sound just writing this post. 

Who run(s) the world?

Which of the following is correct? 

(1) Who runs the world? Girls!
(2) Who run the world? Girls! 

If your judgements match mine, you picked (1). But if you think about it, that's really weird. And it seems like at least some people find both of them OK. The two options are illustrated in these images that I collected within a day or so of each other without even looking for them: 

Who run the world? Girls

Who runs the world? [Image of a woman with a toddler, both raising their hands]

If they were statements, not questions, there wouldn't be a choice. (4) is ungrammatical in standard English and most of its varieties:

(3) Girls run the world
(4) *Girls runs the world

The reason (4) is ungrammatical (that's what the asterisk means) is because it has a plural subject (girls) and singular agreement on the verb (runs, rather than run).

To go back to our original examples, who doesn't have any information about whether it refers to a singular or a plural subject. It could be either, and (5), with a singular referent for who, is just as good as (1), where the referent is the plural girls.

(5) Who runs the world? Mark Zuckerberg. 

So that explains why it can cause either singular or plural agreement to appear on the verb.

And although I find it more natural with singular agreement, you can easily nudge it towards the plural agreement if there's a clear expectation that the answer is plural, such as if you know that the answer is either boys or girls, and you've forgotten which.

(6) Remind me, who did you say run the world? 

And that just leaves us with one mop-up, which is to say that the default if you don't have any information about number is to use the singular. That fits with the general principle that singular is the unmarked form: languages usually have some way of marking things as plural, not singular, just like English using -s for plurals and nothing for singular nouns (girl vs girls).

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. 

Is true. Or is?

Queen Oona from Disenchantment

In a dramatic departure from blogging about the Simpsons, I'm blogging about Disenchantment, the latest Matt Groening cartoon series. This is Queen Oona, a fairly minor character (the wicked step-mother in this fairytale-inspired set of characters).

Queen Oona is from the neighbouring kingdom of Dankmire, and her accent is... European. Vaguely Russian, maybe? Kind of German? Anyway, whatever it's based on, the Dankmirian language clearly has what we call 'pro-drop', 'null subjects', or 'zero anaphora'. That means that in the right context, you can leave out a subject pronoun (this Spanish example is from Wikipedia):

Está completamente seco.
is completely dry
'It's completely dry.'

In the example above, you can infer that the subject is he/she/it because the verb (está) has 3rd person singular agreement. From there, you have more or less as much information as if we'd just used the word it, and you use your normal contextual knowledge to fill in the referent, as with the English equivalent.

Oona said, in episode 6,

Is true. 

Shortly followed by

Or is? 

Both of these sentences would be totally grammatical in Oona's (let's assume Slavic) first language, where the word it can be left out. I don't know Russian so let's illustrate with Spanish again. This is the exact equivalent, and I think it's good:

Es verdad. O es? 

But the thing is, it made me laugh, and I think it was meant to. I don't know why. I came here thinking I had a good explanation: maybe because is is a clitic (a word that needs another word to lean on) in English, so this literal translation sounds just too unnatural? Maybe lack of familiarity with post-verbal null subjects, like in the question 'is (it)?' in this example? Another one to file under Things Someone Else Should (And Probably Has) Research(ed).

They's using singular verbs as well now

There's been a bit of a flurry of discussion about the use of pronouns for nonbinary people in linguist twitter lately, because of a blog post by the well-known Geoff Pullum on the well-known platform Language Log (so, a person using their position of power and privilege to complain about something that is far less onerous than constantly being misgendered). Kirby Conrod has written a good response and it was posted on Language Log, so no need to add my own comments here, especially as I'm cisgender and so don't really have anything to contribute to the debate.

What has been interesting to me is something that I hadn't seen before: people using they+3rd person singular verb, so They is joining us later. I would have always assumed that singular they took the unmarked verb form, same as all the other pronouns apart from the third person singular he, she and it, and crucially, the same as the plural they. Then the verb form follows the pronoun form, and in this sense it's the same as you, which takes the same form in singular and plural. Similarly, in German the polite form of you is identical to they and takes the same verb forms. Using the -s form, is, is logical if we think that verb form is attached to the semantic (person and) number, rather than just the form of the verb, so it shouldn't be so surprising, but nevertheless I was surprised by it. I think we haven't settled down on this yet, so I will watch developments with interest.

I like the part where it goes

There's a Simpsons episode where Marge is 'admiring' a sculpture made by Groundskeeper Willie out of kids' braces. It's hideous, obviously, and she is trying to be nice, so she says "I like this part in here, the way it, um, it goes".

She's struggling to find a word, and none seems right. She can't find anything positive to say. So she reaches for a completely neutral word, one that doesn't mean anything, one that has basically no meaning at all. We see this again when we use go in phrases like How's it going, It goes well with that outfit, It's all going well, and so on. None of these has any sense of go in its full lexical sense, of movement away, as in I'm going to Italy on Monday. It's almost being used as a 'light' verb. These are verbs that are bleached of their meaning and just have a linking function, just making the sentence hold together. Chinese uses hit to make a noun work as a verb - where in English you can say I telephoned him, in Chinese you have to say I hit the telephone to him, or effectively I used the telephone to him. In some languages throw is used a lot - in Georgian you say that you throw a gun at someone rather than shooting them, and in Spanish I think (I overheard this so may be wrong) you'd more likely say that you throw juice at someone rather than squirt juice at them.

That's not a dumb question, innit

In my MA syntax class this week we were talking about innit and how it's going from being a tag question to a kind of discourse particle.

Tag questions (aren't we?, don't you?, won't she?) have the following properties (among others):

1. They follow the main clause 
2. They have the form of a question
3. They contain an auxiliary verb that matches the one in the main clause or is do (are, do and will in the examples above)
4. The verb agrees in person and number with the main clause verb (e.g. 1st person plural, 2nd person singular or plural, and 3rd person singular in the examples above)
5. They have the opposite polarity to the main clause (so they're often negative, following a positive main clause, but can be positive if the main clause is negated: He's not coming, is he?) (though see NB below)
6. They have a pronoun that matches the main clause subject (we, you, she above)

Isn't it is a form of tag question, then: it has all the above properties in an example like It's a funny old world, isn't it?. But in some dialects, it has crept out of these constraints and is used in a broader range of contexts, and as well as losing a lot of its phonological properties (it's reduced to innit), some of the syntactic properties in 1-6 no longer apply to it.

1: It still follows the main clause. But that's about it.

2: It may not have the form of a question. Lots of times, it's written without a question mark (OK, that's no guarantee, but it's telling). It's attached to sentences that can't possibly be questioned, like assertions on the part of the speaker: You're fit, innit. That's the speaker's opinion. How can it be questioned?

3: The verb probably doesn't match the main clause one now - in the example I just gave, it does, but you can also say I've got no money, innit, where it doesn't.

4, 6: We no longer need the agreement in person and number. In We're late, innit, the verb in the main clause is first person plural. Innit, if it comes from isn't it, is 3rd person singular. Similarly, the pronoun is it rather than the matching one in the main clause, we.

5: Generally, the polarity is opposite to that in the main clause, but only by chance: innit is negative, and more sentences are positive than negative. But I heard an example on Gogglebox this week of a negative clause followed by supposedly negative innit:

That's not actually a dumb question, innit. 

Cool, innit?

NB: Tag questions can have the same polarity as the main clause if they're both positive, but it has a different meaning. Compare: 
a. That's the bus we need to get, isn't it? 
b. That's the bus we need to get, is it? 
In a, the speaker thinks they have the correct information and wants their interlocutor to confirm it. In b, the speaker thinks that the interlocutor has the relevant information, and wants to confirm it. But we don't find negative assertions and negative tags:
*That's not the bus we need to get, isn't it? 

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. 

The object of sleep

A while back, I wrote a post about what appeared to be a causative alternation with the verb wait: I said They wait you in the bookshop. In that post, I said 'sleep doesn't have an object', and this is true: it's the prototypical example linguists use of an intransitive verb (i.e. one that doesn't have an object).

Language is a flexible beast, though, and you can get things like I slept the whole night through, where one might argue that the whole night is an object. But this isn't so clear cut, as you might prefer to say that the whole night through is an adverbial phrase modifying the verb slept, the same as if it was I slept all night or I slept for ages.

However, last week I heard an example where sleep definitely did have an object, and it was the same sort of construction as the wait example in my earlier post. I was on holiday at a folk festival with some friends, including an 11-year-old boy. His mum commented on the fact that he'd only had a short nap, and he said I know but it slept me enough. In this sentence, the subject is it (the nap) and the object is me (i.e. the sleeper). I think that's quite cool.

(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.

Lol it on yourself

This is the best thing I've seen today. Maybe all week. I present.... 'lol' used as a transitive verb!

*warning* If you watch Meet The Candidates while drinking tea, you might lol it on yourself. http://t.co/7hJn7DNC9X (cc @MattEdmondson)

— The Apprentice (@bbcapprentice) October 6, 2015

Something you never realised about factive predicates! This is epic!

There's a post about Guardians of the Galaxy. It's a cute story: blockbuster film helps child appreciate slash believe in self. But it's got one of those flippin' annoying clickbait headlines, which says this:

Something you never realised about Guardians of the Galaxy. This is epic. 

The problem, apart from clickbait headlines being a problem in general, is that realise is what's called a factive verb. That means that whatever is 'realised' should be a true fact. In this case, it's 'something about Guardians of the Galaxy'. Perhaps some hidden in-joke, or an 'easter egg', or trivia about how the film was made.

Compare these examples, taken from Wikipedia and modified by me, where the # means that it's pragmatically weird (doesn't make sense) to say the second part:

Marc realised that he was in debt...
#...although in fact he wasn't in debt.
Eliza regretted drinking John's home brew...
#...and in fact she didn't drink it.

With these, which are non-factive and can be cancelled without it sounding contradictory:

Marc thought he had scored full marks...
...although in fact he had got two questions wrong.
Eliza believed she was the winner of the race...
...but in fact she had come second. 

The thing that is realised or regretted must be true, while the thing that is thought or believed might not actually be true, as long as the person thinks or believes it (they may be mistaken).

This particular post is someone's personal story, and they freely say that it's not based on any factual knowledge, just on their own personal experience of the film. This isn't a fact that we might possibly have realised, so this headline is not only annoying, it doesn't even make sense, and whoever wrote it is now on my List Of People To Tut At Should I Ever Meet Them.

Misunderstanding

I'm currently reading English for the Natives by Harry Ritchie. I might try and do a proper review sometime, but for now here's a snippet.

I knew that this book was not going to be sympathetic to my linguistic views when I saw Ritchie at the English Grammar Day this year and he went on about how wrong Chomsky was about Universal Grammar. I work within the paradigm of Generative Grammar, which is what people outside GG call 'Chomskyan' grammar. Chomsky himself does not use this term, and I dislike it as it implies uncritical acceptance of all his ideas (and, actually, the worst critics of Chomsky do assume this of his 'followers', as they inevitably call them, as if he is a cult leader).

Generative Grammar has been extremely successful, and is a flourishing research area, but there is an equally flourishing anti-GG crowd as well. Some of these people simply work within different frameworks and don't pay too much attention to us, but others actively attack Chomsky's ideas in particular. A characteristic of these people is that they tend not to engage with very up-to-date work, they tend to look at Chomsky only and no other researchers, and they often misunderstand or misrepresent things. Ritchie is not a linguist, although he has had some training, and so I'm going to put the mistake I'm about to talk about down to misunderstanding rather than deliberate misrepresentation. (One thing that is definitely misrepresentation is when he switches from a reasoned exposition of the ideas of Universal Grammar into using terms like 'magical', which is simply ridiculous when he outlined the non-magical explanation a few pages earlier.)

On page 51, during the 'ah, but it turns out Chomsky was totally wrong' section, he describes Geoffrey Sampson's work refuting Chomsky's claims using the British National Corpus. At one point, he says that he simply 'dusted down his 1947 edition of Teach Yourself Malay' to show that there is no universal distinction between nouns and verbs - apparently this language doesn't have this supposedly universal demarcation. They must think generative grammarians literally never look at other languages. If it was that easy to disprove just by looking in one book, would the theory really have stood up all these years? He even then says that English 'often dispenses with any noun-verb distinction and relies on the speaker to figure out how the word is functioning', with examples like 'cut' which can be either, depending on context.

This is such a basic misunderstanding. English and Malay both do distinguish nouns and verbs. Having them behave differently in the two different contexts precisely is distinguishing them. When cut is a noun, it can take an article, for instance ('make a cut along this line'), while it cannot when it's a verb, but then it can have a subject ('she cut the cake'), which nouns cannot. This is distinguishing nouns and verbs. Malay is even less of a good example: it actually has affixes to indicate if a word is a noun or a verb. This is not even just context: the form of the word itself distinguishes the categories.

The literature, especially popular books like this one, abounds with such fundamental errors. See, for example, the recent book by Vyvyan Evans, criticised here for its many, many misrepresentations. See also the lengthy debate about recursion, admittedly not helped by a fantastically unclear definition of recursion, but which once properly defined ought simply to have ended but trundles on regardless.

Anyway, I'm expecting the book to get much better once we're past the Chomsky-bashing, because Ritchie had a lot of interesting things to say at the English Grammar Day and spoke (and writes) in a very entertaining manner.