Bloggers at LSA 2010

I haven’t seen any announcements yet for a proposed bloggers’ get-together at next month’s Linguistic Society of America conference in Baltimore. That’s probably because not as many of them are going to be there this year, at least judging by the preliminary program. Of course, that only says who’s presenting, not who is attending, so who knows?

I will be both attending and presenting this year. If any other bloggers (on linguistics or other topics) want to hang out this year, I suggest 9pm Friday night at the hotel bar as a possible time and place. Since I’m putting out the call, I also invite anyone who merely wants to bask in reflected linguablogger glory to come and join us (assuming a group sufficient to justify the plural).

UPDATE, 12/18/09: I meant to say Friday night, and have just made the correction above. Saturday is when the OSU folks are getting together.

Make Good Choices

Back in 2004, and again in 2007, I wrote about the unusual use of choose and choice among teachers and school administrators I’ve encountered. Now, like my posts on back to school and troops, these two have been combined and expanded into a Visual Thesaurus column, augmented with corpus data and interviews with education professionals.

In the article, there is a link to a 1953 article that employs the phrase make good choices, and here I have to confess: It was Visual Thesaurus CEO Ben Zimmer who found that attestation, which was significantly earlier than what I’d found. (The guy’s good!) What didn’t make it into the article, though, is the fact that make good choices is well-attested during the 20th century in the Google News Archive; it’s just that until the 1980s or so, most of them are irrelevant. Mostly what you get for “make good choices” before then is stuff like this:

• The flowered silks make good choices for the Spring suit if one does not care for plaid. (1914)
• The short two-button length in white kid make good choices as gifts for the holiday season. (1938)
• Dried prunes and filberts will make good choices. (1958)

Away to the Window I Flew, Tore, and Threw

I’ve written about “The Night Before Christmas” (the poem formerly known as “A Visit from St. Nicholas”) a couple of times before. Once it was to untangle the dense syntax of As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky, so up to the housetop his coursers they flew, with a sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas, too. The other time, it was on the nonparallel coordination (a multiple-level coordination, in fact, like the ones in my last post) He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, and away they all flew like the down of a thistle. Now I’ve noticed another nonparallel coordination in this poem, in a line that’s usually more noted for the ambiguity of throw up:

Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

Round On

My sister Ellen stayed with us last week, in between stops on her Midwest residency interview tour.

“Wait,” you’re saying. “You mean the same Ellen who graduated from UT Austin in 2004 has now completed medical school?”

You better believe it! Glen has been delighted to have a family member studying medicine. She’s gotten used to him calling her during the last couple of years in his capacity as a Fringe writer, asking her what the gruesome details would look like if such-and-such happened to someone. Usually her answer has been, “That couldn’t happen.” Glen’s next question is then, “OK, but if it could happen…?”

I’ve been learning some medical jargon from her, like scrub in, scrub out, and morbidity. I’ve also learned a phrase for the activity of visiting one’s hospital patients early in the morning: rounding on them.

“I thought they called that making the rounds,” I said.

“They call it that, too,” Ellen agreed, “but we also say ’rounding on.’”

The only meaning for round on I’d been aware of was to suddenly turn toward someone and say something confrontational. J. K. Rowling uses it a lot. For example:

“Don’t you want to know how Ginny got hold of that diary, Mr. Malfoy?” said Harry.
Lucius Malfoy rounded on him.
“How should I know how the stupid little girl got hold of it?” he said. (p. 336)

That meaning was just as strange to Ellen as hers was to me, so I wondered if it was a piece of British English. I couldn’t remember if I’d seen it in American-written stuff, or heard Americans say it. A quick check of the Corpus of Contemporary American English reveals that it’s definitely not just British:

• Thor was feeling well pleased with himself when Lindsey rounded on him. “Don’t you ever do that again!”
• SECOND SWAT OFFICER… What happened to right to life…? (he laughs) Starling rounds on him, hits him several times, and throws him to the ground. # STARLING # What happened to right to life? What happened to right to my life…?
• He looked like a lump, and sometimes Molly told him that, rounding on him suddenly from the big stove and laying into him without mercy.

There are also medical uses in CoCA, though (understandably) not as many. I didn’t find an example with rounded on, but I found:

• The ENIT responder, twice per day, rounds on the general care units.
• Rounding on patients at five thirty in the morning usually turns up at least a handful of people who tell you they’d feel fine if only you assholes would stop waking them up every four hours to ask them how they’re feeling.

After Ellen learned the non-medical meaning for round on, she allowed as how attending physicians did a fair amount of that kind of rounding-on, too.

December Links

My Aunt Jane has sometimes complained about people saying “No problem” instead of “You’re welcome.” She’s far from alone, but I never really understood what the big deal was. In high school French, they teach you to say de rien, and de nada in high school Spanish, and both of those mean approximately, “It was nothing,” so why is it so bad for English to come up with a similar option? Erin McKean takes up the issue in this installment of “The Word” in The Boston Globe. I’ve pointed to other columns McKean has written for the Globe when Jan Freeman was away, but now she’s got a regular byline over there (as you’ll note in the blogroll). This is great, because now instead of poking around searching for her name there, you can pull up the archives of all the columns she’s written in this space.

Nancy Friedman gets my “You’re so literal” award for the week, with this post on some ad syntax that (we’re sorry) just can’t mean what the copywriters want it to.

From another Nancy who blogs about names, how to find a boy’s name that won’t become a girl’s name in years to come, on Nancy’s Baby Names.

Associated Press is on Twitter, with the handle APStylebook. I’ve never read any of their tweets. I have, however, been following FakeAPStylebook, which puts out several bogus grammar or style tips every day; for example, “The passive voice should be avoided by you,” and “The word ‘totally’ is redundant except when describing how rad something is.”

Now for a couple of items spotlighted by members of the American Dialect Society listserv. First there’s the father who spoke nothing but Klingon to his son for three years until I read this. Then there’s this interactive map showing the popularity of recipe search terms by region. As James Harbeck noted, there’s “a fairly rough hint of an isogloss or two.” This came out near Thanksgiving, so you can find out where stuffing is more prevalent than dressing, and vice versa, along with a lot of other Thanksgiving recipes that apparently are regional favorites.

And last for this batch of links, an AP article on preserving indigenous languages in South America. (Thanks to Karikuy on Twitter on the #linguistics tag for this one.)

Adam Discovers Singular They

For the past six months, Doug has been keenly interested in birds and other wildlife. He’s had us take him to local (and not-so-local) nature centers, installed with our help an elaborate configuration of bird feeders in the back yard, and been reading his collection of field guides (acquired mostly in one go, for his birthday) more or less cover to cover. He and his mom will have conversations about what they saw at the birdfeeder during the day.

“I saw a hairy!” he’ll say.

“And I saw a downy and a red-bellied,” his mother will tell him.

“And I saw a couple of woodpeckers!” I’ll put in. Other birds than woodpeckers come, too. We’ve had mourning doves, juncos, starlings, purple finches, nuthatches, titmouses, cardinals, and sparrows, which I’m slowly learning to identify. But more often, if I see something interesting at the feeder, I’ll say, “Look at that!”, and Doug will say, “What is it?”, and I’ll say, “A bird!”

Meanwhile, last week we got our annual letter of concern from Adam’s school, notifying us officially that he’d missed more than ten days of class. This happens just about every year, because Adam gets sick so much. As if to celebrate the occasion, Adam announced on Sunday afternoon that he felt bad, and had a fever of 100.5 to back it up. So now he’s spent two more days home sick, and I’ve been prompting him at every turn to get through some more of the makeup work he still has stacked up from his earlier absences, especially now that I’m picturing two more days’ worth piling up on his desktop at school.

As he was completing the questions on his worksheet about the prefix dis-, he suddenly said:

Sometimes they can be singular.

“Oh?” I said, trying not to divulge anything. “Give me an example.”

Adam showed me the question: “What might cause you to distrust someone?” His answer was, “One thing is if they let you down.” Someone was singular, and the they was talking about that someone, so they was singular here.

“You’re right, Adam!” I said. This was amazing to me. It was only a few weeks ago that his teacher gave them all a worksheet on personal pronouns, summarizing facts for case (e.g. I vs. me), person (e.g. I vs. you or he/she/it), and number (e.g. I vs. we). I’d gone over the worksheet with Doug and Adam during supper one night, and I suspect Doug forgot about it as soon as he knew he wasn’t in danger of me asking another question about it during the next five minutes. But Adam had evidently kept the information, and was now realizing that it didn’t completely match what he knew about his language. He made my day!

“You’re thinking like a linguist!” I told him. Doug, meanwhile, was just as amazed that Adam could notice this kind of stuff as he was that I could.

“You know what I think of when I think about me and sentences and pronouns and stuff?” he asked me. “I think of you and birds!”

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Two MLCs in Ten Minutes

Listening to NPR as I drove Doug and Adam to school this morning, I heard someone talking about the Hyde Amendment. He mentioned the usual restrictions on how federal funds should be limited in paying for abortions: They shouldn’t pay for abortions “unless the pregnancy is a result of rape –”

Or incest, I thought, or … oh! I smell an imminent multiple-level coordination! I waited, and was rewarded with:

…unless the pregnancy is a result of rape, incest, or the mother’s life is in danger.

Clause: the pregnancy is a result of rape. Noun phrase (with material from preceding clause understood to turn it into a full clause): [the pregnancy is a result of] incest. Clause: the mother’s life is in danger.

I turned onto the side street, pulled into the school parking lot, and let Doug out. I’d scarcely driven two blocks away when I heard someone say during a story on the No Child Left Behind Act, “A teacher must have a college degree, a license to teach –”

I sense another MLC coming up, I thought. Right again:

A teacher must have a college degree, a license to teach, and be competent in the subject.

Verb phrase: have a college degree. Noun phrase (with material from preceding VP understood to turn it into a VP): [have] a license to teach. Verb phrase: be competent in the subject.

How about that? Two MLCs in less than ten minutes. Not only that, we have some nice variety. One of them has or for a conjunction, while the other has and. These pop up so often and in such smooth speech that I am even more convinced that they’re not errors, but something generated by speakers’ ordinary rules of coordination syntax. What would be interesting to find out would be how (or whether) the MLCs that draw the ire of grammarians differ from the ones that go under their radar.

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You Better Not Shout

Yesterday I heard a first-grade boy singing

You better not shout,
You better not cry,
You better not pout,
I’m tellin’ you why. . . .

He got distracted before he could get to “Santa Claus is coming to town”, but he already had me humming the song to myself, trying to remember what the real words were. It was hard after hearing the ones he sang, which were so close that they were interfering with my recall, but after a few seconds I managed to pull them up:

At Church

Now that Doug’s in fifth grade, he and the other fifth graders at our church are doing acolyte duty, which (I found out at the same time as Doug) means assisting in the church service by doing things like lighting the candles or bringing more bread or wine to the communion assistants. Yesterday was his first day on the schedule, and all in all it went well, except for the one candle that refused to be extinguished at the end. He was putting that snuffer on again and again, and it was like one of those relighting candles you put on someone’s birthday cake as a joke. He finally succeeded, but it meant that instead of getting out of there as soon as the last announcement was made, we had to wait for Doug to finish putting out all the candles at the ends of the pews.

One of the things he had to do was hold up the liturgy for the pastor to read during a baptism. As the baptism proceeded, my wife and I read along on an insert in the bulletin. In several places the congregation was supposed to speak; mostly short responses like “We do”, and “I renounce them”,
but also some longer passages, including the Apostles’ Creed. As I read along, I noticed this part in the middle:

Jesus Christ … who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered, died, and was buried.

It’s another multiple-level coordination! The full verb phrases are was conceived by the Holy Spirit, suffered, died, and was buried. Buried among them is the participial verb phrase born of the Virgin Mary, with the was that would complete it understood from the first VP. To be perfectly parallel, the passage would have to be one of the following:

Jesus Christ … who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered, died, and was buried.
Jesus Christ … who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, suffered, died, and was buried.

There are a few other linguistic observations I’ve collected at church, but never put into posts of their own, so I might as well put them here. First is some variation in possessive morphology I’ve noticed between the regular pastor and a newly hired associate pastor. Specifically, I’ve been noticing how they pronounce Jesus’. I’m used to seeing the bare apostrophe after Jesus — why, even Strunk and White condone it after Biblical names! However, in my dialect, the possessive suffix on a singular noun is pronounced, whether it’s written ’s or just as an apostrophe. So for me, Jesus’ is pronounced [ʤizəsəz]. That’s how the regular pastor says it, too. The associate pastor, though, pronounces it as if it were like the bare, unpronounced apostrophe that you find on plural possessive nouns. He just says [ʤizəs], which I find disconcerting in the same way as when I hear people say Texas’s or Texas’ as just [tʰɛksəs]. In fact, I wonder how our pastors would say Texas’s, and whether it would match up with how they spelled it.

Then there’s the pronunciation of worship. I’ve always pronounced it [wɔrʃəp]. It sounds a lot like warship, which is kind of funny, but for me, the two words are distinguished by the non-reduced second vowel in warship: [wɔrʃIp]. Still, maybe that’s too close for comfort for a lot of people, and I wonder if that’s why I hear the regular pastor (also my wife, and others) pronounce worship as [wrʃəp]. That’s a syllabic [r] in there (although I can’t get the IPA symbol for it to show up); it’s as if he’s saying wereship. That is, the plural past tense of be plus ship, not a person who turns into a ship during a full moon. It also sounds like the pastor is reducing the second vowel as much as possible. He and I both say [ə], but it sounds like they’re trying to eliminate it altogether, as if they were trying to say wershp, but were stopped by the phonotactic unacceptability of a [ʃp] syllable coda.

And on the subject of worship, there’s also the strange path it took from transitive to intransitive to transitive again via causativization, in that one church bulletin I read a few years ago. Worship the transitive verb is easy; people worship a god, or gods, or whatever else they find worthy of reverence. As an intransitive verb, as in We worship at such-and-such a church, it’s the same action, but the object of worship is left unsaid. (Linguists call this “unspecified object deletion” or “indefinite NP deletion”, and it happens with numerous verbs: eat, teach, write….) The next step is causativization. This often happens with intransitive verbs, which are turned into transitives with the meaning “make/let someone Verb”. You can walk, or you can walk the dog; you can sleep in a room that sleeps four. But when you causativize a verb that also exists as a transitive, you end up with ambiguities like this one:

Last week, we worshipped 372 people.

Wow. Does your church worship you?

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Cider Sentence Syntax

Doug and Adam have been learning about the tragedy of the commons this fall. Every year we pick apples at Lynd’s Fruit Farm, and also buy some of their apple cider. I can take it or leave it, myself, but Doug and Adam love the stuff, so much that this year my wife has made several more trips to Lynd’s to get more of their cider, until they closed for the season. We finished the last jug of it a week or so ago. One evening at suppertime, shortly after we’d opened that last jug, Doug was deciding what he wanted to drink. He considered having some of the cider, but then decided he’d have milk instead, so the cider would last longer.

“Go right ahead,” I said, “but Adam’s going to keep on drinking that cider with or without you.” Doug quickly changed his mind back to having cider with his supper. He’d already been sensitized to how quickly the stuff went. A few weeks earlier, we were nearing the last of an earlier haul of cider, and Doug asked incredulously, “How do we run out of cider so fast?”

“You guys keep drinking it, would be my guess,” I told him. It was true. If there was cider in the fridge, that’s what they wanted to drink, for breakfast, lunch, supper, or a snack.

“Hey!” I said. “Did you hear how I used a complete sentence as the subject of a sentence?” This was a little while after I’d done those presentations on parts of speech, phrases, and sentences for Doug’s language arts class, so I knew the topic would be fresh in Doug’s mind.

“Huh?” Doug replied.

“Yeah!” I said. “The predicate is would be my guess, and the subject is You guys keep drinking it, which is a complete sentence itself! Isn’t that cool?”

“Wow, you listen to yourself talk and figure that out?” Doug asked. “That’s amazing!”

There's a subject in that predicate!

I can hear it now: “Oh yeah? Well my dad can diagram sentences in his head!”

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