The Literal-Minded Linguistics Supplement

This posting is primarily for instructors of introductory linguistics classes. If you’ve sometimes directed your students to read linguistics-related blog postings, or have put linguistics humor into course packets, then I offer The Literal-Minded Linguistics Supplement for your consideration, just in time for planning winter semester/quarter syllabuses. (Yes, I say syllabuses.)

It’s 76 pages of selected and revised postings from this very blog, formatted, with table of contents, organized into sections on phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Within each section, the first entries are of general interest within the particular field. They’re followed by entries concerning language acquisition (i.e., stuff I’ve written about Doug and Adam and their peers), and then entries that deal with variation among people or over time.

Best of all, it’s freely reproducible (for a period of time). Put particular entries in course packets, or copy the whole thing if you want, with none of the troublesome “fair use” questions you’d need to ask with other material. All I ask is that you email me later and tell what worked, what didn’t, how you used it, etc.

A Panphonic Poem for Mission: Impossible 3

This weekend, I want to see Mission: Impossible 3, in spite of Tom Cruise. Wait, no. Not in spite of Tom Cruise. That sounds like Mr. Cruise doesn’t want me to go see this movie, and I want to go and see it anyway, just so he’ll make a little bit more money. I’m not too enthusiastic about doing that for this increasingly creepy, couch-jumping, not-content-to-
keep-his-cult-religion-discreetly-to-himself-instead-of-infecting-young-
women-who-fantasized-about-marrying-him-when-they-were-little-
girls-with-it celebrity. What I should say is that I want to see the movie in spite of the fact that Tom Cruise is in it. (Interesting that this ambiguity only arises when the object of in spite of is animate: I lived there in spite of the polluted air isn’t ambiguous.)

Why, you may ask, do I want to see Mission: Impossible 3 in spite of the fact that Tom Cruise is in it? That goes back to the “other story” I mentioned at the end of my last post.
MILD SPOILER AHEAD

The What and How of Self-Promotion

I know, I know: You’ve been wanting to read my dissertation, but didn’t want to download it and have to print it out or view it on a computer screen. Well, the wait is over. It has been published by Routledge, and a handsomely bound, hardcover edition of my contribution to the literature can now be yours. It’s available here (discounted), here, or from the publisher itself. It’s tastefully done, too–the f-word appears on only one page (215), and even there it’s in a quoted title.

This seems like a good time to do a post or two about some of the topics I covered in my dissertation. One of them came up just last week in a book I was reading, specifically in this sentence:

Every company has its own idea of what and how information should appear….
Richard Curtis, How to Be Your Own Literary Agent, p. 116.

Is that sentence a little odd for you? It is for me, in the coordination of what and how. I’ll expand out the coordination so that each of these words heads up its own question:

Every company has its own idea of:

• what information should appear
• how information should appear

In the what question, information is used as a noun. You can substitute other nouns for it and still have a syntactically well-formed sentence: what person should appear, what item should appear, etc.

In the how question, however, information draws on its powers as a mass noun (see previous post) to function not as a mere noun, but as a complete noun phrase! If you try to substitute an ordinary noun into this question, it won’t work: *how person should appear, *how item should appear, etc. By contrast, if you substitute a noun phrase for information, it works just fine: how the report should appear, how Kim should appear, etc.

Therefore, in the coordinated what-and-how sentence earlier, information is used simultaneously as a noun and a noun phrase. That’s pretty weird, especially being as how nouns and noun phrases are typically viewed as having different semantic types (predicates and individuals, respectively). Conventional wisdom has been that words (or phrases) can’t be used with more than one semantic type at a time–at least, not outside of puns. So is the quotation from Richard Curtis a mistake, or is it actually generated in his (and maybe other people’s) grammar? Corpus linguistic and experimental research on this kind (and other kinds) of “mixed-wh interrogative” is presented in Chapter 3 of my dissertation. Own it today!