Why can't us?

Why Can't Us?
Uploaded by dano609

Keep the steak alive!

Great headline typo.

I'm feeling defensive

I feel the need to defend things. So, you know what doesn't bother me? His or her. Seriously. I think it has a nice rythm to it. Here's an example from Krugman in the NY Times.

if the market value of the house falls, the buyer can easily lose his or her entire stake.

What does everybody have against it? Oh, "It's clumsy and intrusive." So it adds 2 extra words to a sentence. BFD. That whole brevity thing is overrated. It's bad enough we're all drinking espresso in to go cups. (And by all, I mean "all of us urban elites.")

I, for one, embrace our new conjoined pronoun overlords. And I'm totally going to pad my sentences with extra morphemes.

And/or redux

Geoff Pullum has been posting a bit about and/or.

So my guess would be that and/or is a way of underlining the point that the or is to be understood in its inclusive sense rather than its exclusive sense. Sometimes you want to explicitly indicate “or more than one of the above”, and and/or does that.

I posted about this a while ago. In my original post I think I confused my exclusives and inclusives.

Anyway, one of the arguments I tried out on them was that no language has a lexical distinction between inclusive or and exlusive or. One of my bosses immediately responded, "English does, or is exclusive and and/or is inclusive." My response was that and/or isn't a word. We left it at that.But I thought to myself, I bet and/or ends up being just like or by taking on an exclusive meaning.
I was vindicated last night. I was sitting on the can reading What to Expect When You're Expecting (It's good bathroom literature!) when I came across the following in a recipe for oatmeal cookies on p. 94:

"add ground cinnamon and/or salt to taste (both optional) when you add the milk."

I was thinking or was inclusive and and/or was exclusive. My boss was thinking the other way around, but I wasn't paying attention. (Maybe that's why she's not my boss anymore.) Anyway, I now understand that and/or is inclusive, which I think is what the cookie recipe shows.

Phillies and Positive Anymore

Charlie Manuel lays down a nice positive anymore.

"I think anymore, if you can get somebody who you think might play a role in helping you, I think you'd better go get him,'' Phils manager Charlie Manuel said. "You never have enough pitching . . . Actually, that's what it's all about."

And Rich Hoffman follows his lead:

THE FESTIVITIES have begun, with fresh-faced kids expectantly lining the curbs on either side of the street and Rudy Seanez perched above the back seat of the first open convertible. If this summer is like last summer, the parade will feature 12, maybe 15 more cars. That is how many pitchers it takes anymore, more than double what you started with on Opening Day.

If if if

I was going to suggest the following to my dad:

If Clinton wins I'll vote for her in November if if Obama wins you vote for him.

But my head done frozed up.

WTF Antecedent

From a Citgo ad:

For generations we've been helping to fuel our way of life

I know what its supposed to say; 'we' is meant to refer to Citgo and 'our' to society. But it hurts my brain to get that reading. Instead I want them both to refer to Citgo.

WTF Barney

Overheard while kid was watching Barney (oh don't give me that fucking, "my kid doesn't watch Barney" crap). In this episode, Barney and his minions are playing with kites. Barney's kite is purple with green spots on it, just like him.

Barney's minion: Hey Barney, do you know how I can tell which kite is yours?
Barney: No, how?
Barney's minion: Because it has spots on it like yours!

They are just wrong

OK, we all know the story on singular they. Those evil grammar nazis are trying to force everyone to write their sentences with his or her and not use they to refer to words like everyone, noone, etc. But fearless descriptivists stand up to this nonsense shouting' "let my people be!"

Did you know that using they to refer to singular antecedents is, like 400 years old. Man, if it's good enough for Shakespeare then it's good enough for everyone. Whoo-hoo let's get the language party started!

Except, I don't really like that narrative. The whole prescriptivist argument is based on the claim that a pronoun must, MUST I TELL YOU, agree with it's antecedent.

A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in number and gender. If the antecedent is singular, the pronoun must be singular; if the antecedent is plural, the pronoun must be plural. If the antecedent is masculine, the pronoun must be masculine; if the antecedent is feminine, the pronoun must be feminine.

So it sounds like the descriptivists are just tossing the rules out the window. The real question is, is it really true that pronouns must agree with antecedents? Is it true for all pronouns in all languages or just the English ones? Or what? And what does it mean if it's not true?

Hey I know, let's take a different language at random, like, um how about Swedish? Must Swedish pronouns agree with their antecedents?

Turns out only sometimes. Here's what you need to know--in Swedish, nouns are marked for both number (singular and plural) and grammatical gender. There two grammatical genders in Swedish--common and neuter. (I know, shouldn't that be masculine and feminine? Apparently not.)

Also in Swedish, if the antecedent is a subject of a sentence and the pronoun is within that sentence, then there is a special pronoun you have to use, sig. Sig doesn't change form for different antecedents. It's the same whether the noun is common, neuter, or plural.

Examples
Peter slog sig i huvudet.
'Peter hit himself in the head.'

Lotta slog sig i huvudet.
'Lotta hit herself in the head.'

Barnen slog sig i huvudet.
'The children hit themselves in the head.'

But, sig comes in many cases, including a genitive (possesive) case which does change form based on the gender or number, sin/sitt/sina, for common, neuter, and plural nouns respectively. But, the funny thing is, it doesn't agree with the antecedent. It agrees with the noun that it is the possessor of!

Examples

Max älsker sin mamma.
'Max loves his mother.'

Nora sover i sitt rum.
'Nora is sleeping in her room.'

Martin läser sina böcker.
'Martin is reading his books.'

So there you have it. Pronouns don't ALWAYS agree with their antecedents. At least not in every language. So it' not crazy to think the same may be true in English.

But clearly, sometimes they do. I mean "Mary loves himself" is not English. And that is why I don't like the normal narrative of freewheelin' descriptivism versus dour prescriptivism. Because there is something interesting to learn about pronouns, antecedents, and agreement in the world's languages and English in particular that just gets papered over if we just kick back and get the language party started.

French hope for peace in grammar wars

Ok here's another wacky idea from the French.

Knowledge of grammatical rules is not a constraint. It's an instrument for mastering language. So it is an instrument of freedom.

That's not what I heard.

To underscore how un-American grammar really is, Spellings reminded her audience that when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez waved a copy of Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in a recent United Nations speech protesting American Middle East policy, the very next day the 1965 grammar book shot to the top of the charts at Amazon.com. “Those grammarians hate freedom,” she concluded.

Another round of Lingie nominations

We are constantly awash in faddish cliches and the latest buzz phrases. And, even though I'm no prescriptivist, the end of the year can be a good time to take out the trash. In that spirit, I introduce a new Lingie category, The Most Overused Sentence of 2006.
Here are my nominations:

1. This is your first warning.
2. Stop hitting your sister.
3. Do you have to go potty?
4. You can't have lemonade right before bedtime.

Pretty much every one on this list is a potential winner. I, for one, will be glad to say godd riddance to all of these overused sentences. So I know it's a hard decision, but vote now for your favorite Most Overused Sentence of 2006!

Are fans

My dad sometimes tells a story about how when he was growing up he had this relative named Marie but that he always thought her name was Armory. That's because his family always referred to her as "our Marie" to distinguish her from all the other Maries out there. And of course, in Philadelphia, our is correctly pronounced as are, so there you have it: our Marie --> Armory.
I immediately thought of old Armory when I read this story about Donovan McNabb's knee problems in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Right at the end there is a quote from coach Andy Reid.

"They should have been disgusted," he said. "We didn't perform the way that are fans deserved our football team to perform."

I couldn't fail to disagree with coach more. Are fans do indeed deserve our football teem to perform.

Judge's words meaningless to reporter

Here's the lede on a very bad piece of reporting:

Slang-strewn rap lyrics should be treated as a foreign language, according to a new ruling from a British High Court Judge.

Here's what the Judge actually said,

The judge said, "This led to the faintly surreal experience of three gentlemen in horsehair wigs examining the meaning of such words as 'mish mish man' and 'shizzle my nizzle'."
He added, "The words of the rap, although in a form of English, were for practical purposes a foreign language."

If ever a sentence cried out for a resumptive pronoun

It's this one:

A grainy bootleg of Big that me and Frank were masturbating in the theater as we filmed.

IT! As we filmed IT! Sheesh.

For which we stand

Arnold Zwicky has an interesting rant about the THAT rule over on Languagelog. I know he's been talking about this on ADS-L and Languagelog for awhile now. I have to say that I haven't been paying close attention. So I'm sure he's discussed this, but I wanted to bring up my favorite prescriptive conundrum.
The THAT rule says that that should only be used for restrictive relatives and which should only be used for nonresctrictive relatives. The fun part comes when you combine a restrictive relative (obligatory that) with a stranded preposition. Inorder to not strand the preposition, you need to use the which relative. But it's restrrictive!
1. *My neighbor owns the dog that Bill gave the bone to.
2. *My neighbor owns the dog to which Bill gave the bone.
Both sentences are ruled out. What's a poor boy to do. I guess this is where you fall back on the old prescriptivist standby: rewrite to avoid the problem.

Say anything

Look up language in the dictionary and you'll probably get a definition that discusses it's use as communication tooL

(2) : a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings

And some species of prescriptivists claim that prescriptivism is needed to preserve the communicative function of language. (see Liberman's type 4)

All this talk about communication seems intuitively right. We do in fact use language to communicate with each other. But it also strikes me as wrong. Was language really designed for communication? And if so, what type of communication?

Maybe it's just me, but I often find myself in situations where I'm struggling to say what I mean. Sometimes I have to say the same thing in different ways just to clarify the thought. And what about ineffability? I'm not talking about the mystical here, but the fact that certain sentences are ungrammatical based simply on their sytnax:

1. *What did Max eat steak and?
2. *Who did you hear the rumor that Frank kissed?

You can't say these sentences in English. You might not be able to say them in any language. Why would a communications system have that restriction?

It's kind of interesting to compare human language with other animal communication systems. Here's a typical human interaction, the type of thing you'll hear day in and day out.

Sue: Hey. How ya doing?
Bob: Not bad, and you?
Sue: Good. How about those Mets!
Bob: I'm telling you!

Compare that to a honey bee conversation (translation mine).*

Bee1: Lot's of nectar! 60 yards northeast of the hive.
Other bees travel off to nectar source.

Or to a typical vervet monkey discussion (translation mine).

Vervet 1: Look out! A Snake!
Other vervets stand up and look around.

In contrast, think about how human language fairs on communicating danger. How many times have you seen this conversation.

Fred: Hey look out for that cliff!
Barney: Huh, what? AHHHHHHHHHH

Vervets seem much better at listening to warnings.

Animal communication systems seem particularly tied to a single topic; where can I get food? is there danger? etc. But Language let's us talk about anything. But maybe not very well.


* News to me, there is some controversy as to whether bees actually use the dance to communicate at all.

The scale of the accidental gap issue

To get a number of possible words in English, we'd have to count all the possible combinations of consonants and vowels that could be created from the set of English sounds. This is kinda hard to do, but we can get a pretty good approximation.

The simplest word is made up of one syllable. Fortunately, English, like all languages, has rules about what can and cannot be a syllable. In English, A syllable consists of at least a vowel (V) which is preceded or followed by one or more consonants. Consonants at the start of the syllable are called onsets (O) and the ones at the end are called codas (C).

If we ignore all the onsets and codas with more than one consonant for simplicity, one syllable template for English looks like (O)V(C). The parentheses around the O and C indicate that the consonants are optional. This template gives us words like

eye (V)

me (CV)

on (VC)

cat (CVC)


There are about 23 different consonants that can be an onset to a syllable. And about 21 consonants that can be a coda to a syllable. There is also the possibility that the syllable has no onset or coda. That gives at total of 24 possible Onsets and 22 possible Codas (assuming 0 is an option).

Vowels are a little simpler. There are about 7 so-called long vowels that can be in a syllable with or without a coda. English has another 7 or so so-called short-vowels that have to be in a syllable with a coda. For simplicity I'm going to ignore the short vowels.

So the number of possible single syllable words is more than 3,381.

(O) V (C)
23 x 7 x 21 = 3,381

I say more because, we're ignoring the words that you can make with a short vowel in a closed syllable and any word with more than one cononant in the onset or coda.

If we further assume that two syllable words can be formed by putting any two single syllables together, the number of those would be 3,381 x 3,381. That's over 11 million! Can that be right?

One estimate I found for the number of words in English is roughly 1 million. And that's including multi-syllabic scientific words. Oxford Dictionaries estimates the number to be only around 1/4 of a million.

Could we really be using around 1/10th of the possible words? If so, there is an incredible amount of word space we can use and there should be no need for homonymy.

Accidental what now?

A little while ago, my friend Frank asked me what I thought the coolest thing in linguistics was. Another friend, Pedro, suggested accidental gaps. At the time I dismissed them as pedestrian. I mean really, so languages have extra words lying around. Big deal. But accidental gaps have gotten under my skin. Now I'm starting to think they are a big deal.

Here's why.

It's pretty clear that synonymy is rare in human language. That means people don't like to have two words that mean the same thing. Obviously, synonymy avoidance puts pressure on the speaker to have a lot of different, distinct words. Especially if you have to develop a specialized vocabulary and make fine-grained distinctions, like artists do with colors.

Given this pressure, accidental gaps seem like an anomaly. We have a desperate need for words to distinguish actions, events, things, etc. And yet here are perfectly good words like wurp and troot going unused.

Oddly enough, we think nothing of having two words that are pronounced exactly the same. In fact, homonymy seems pretty rampant. So we have words like read and reed or the two meanings of mouse, etc. We're doubling up on many words and letting others go unused.

So now I'm thinking, "Yeah accidental gaps are weird!"

There are probably a number of reasons why language is this way. It may be simply a result of evolution. It's pretty common for evolved systems to be poorly designed since natural selection is restricted to the history of the organism. It can only produce variation of what has come before; it can't redesign from scratch. Another possibility is that the two tendencies, synonymy avoidance and homonymy are design features that address two different usage pressures: production and perception.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad I rethought accidental gaps