Noncompositional

Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman has posted on a particular comment in a thread in the WordReference forums called Help with prepositions!. The thread begins with a request for native speakers to provide judgments on several sentences, each of which has what some might call a sentence-level construction, marking them as exclamations (what a nice place you live in) or questions. All of the predicators take PPs (of various semantic obligatoriness), and the question is when is it okay to ‘strand’ the preposition.

The LL post already highlights some, say, interesting (*coughlamecough*) comments made by a strong advocate for pied-piping. But there are some other gems from both sides side of the fence. Herein, some of them to you I present.

That rule is a vestige of what is known as prescriptive grammar. The last 4 decades have produced a more scientifically oriented grammar known as descriptive grammar. (post)

Nice hedging on exactly how “scientific” descriptive grammar is.

When speaking, it would probably be best to use [p-stranding] as opposed to [pied-piping], which is technically more correct. If someone [didn’t strand their preposition], most English speakers would actually think it sounds stupid, and thus wrong.

It’s just bad grammar; it leaves the sentence “hanging”.(post)

“This is a great place you live in” “…in what? Don’t leave me hanging!” “…uh…”

There seems to be a suggestion creeping in here that an eccentric-sounding preposition coming first is more formal = better = a sign of a well-educated person. To me, it suggests exactly the opposite. Good communicators will not contort the sentence just to follow a supposed rule. If the preposition at the end bothers them, or if they think it may bother their audience, they will change the sentence. (post)

Hmm…the conclusion, I can agree with. But as for the relation to level of education, I’m skeptical.

he grammarians’ ship is going down! Someone throw them a life raft. The sun is coming up.

Up is coming the sun. ? (post)

Nice rhetoric, but unfortunately in the ‘rise’ sense, this is likely the adverb. Unless the sun is coming up something. Creepy. And in response to similar prescriptive-bashing (though with V-particle examples):

LMAO, or should that be LOMA??!! (post)

Brilliant, I say. And finally, 60 posts later, the original poster adds some words of wisdom from the CGEL

The discerning (= awake) reader may have observed that the previous post on Spoonerisms was actually a bit of an accident. The original intent was to make a small comment on a couple of lines in a particular Simpsons episode and be done with it. But as luck would have it, after reading the Wikipedia article on the little buggers I got to wondering about Spoonerisms in Japanese, and one thing led to another, and here we are. So this time, short and sweet (or so my intention goes)

In the same episode mentioned in the above-linked post, Homer, upon entering Sprawl-Mart, is in awe at the splendor that is consumer choice, and exclaims: Read more »

As has been widely observed, The Simpsons is absolutely chock-full of material for any language fan to sink her teeth into. So I thought I’d just contribute my small bit, in a couple of posts. This time I’ll focus on a line of Marge’s that involves a “Spoonerism”-type production error. Read more »

Starting a few months ago me and my friend Klinton started wondering if there was any pattern in the placing of so-called extraneous apostrophes. For whatever reason stores seemed to want to advertise pizza’s and pasta’s instead of pizzas and pastas, and there were car’s and even truck’s all over. Klinton first suggested a “place an apostrophe after words ending in vowels” rule, and this indeed seemed to be a very common occurance, though of course there was no shortage of counter examples. Then Klinton found several websites that specifically discouraged this use, some even calling them fake “rules.” For instance,

Mark says … it is common opinion that words ending in vowels take an apostrophe when plural. This is wrong.

This editorial style guide from the M&D Department at Sheffield Hallam U. has Beware of unnecessary apostrophes in the plural forms of words ending in vowels. Refer to Chambers Dictionary when in doubt.

Finally, the grammar monster remarks on the common (mis)use of the apostrophe after words that end in vowels or in the letter s, though there is no mention of any “rule” to that effect.

Unfortunately, no one makes any reference to usage manuals that actually contain this rule. The above-mentioned Chambers Dictionary has an online version here, but the usage entry for “apostrophe” didn’t mention incorrect usages explicitly, except to note that they’re no longer obligatory in “clipped” forms like bus, plane, and phone. Well, I am quite sure that the rest of the volume is quite honest in usage advising, this author must object to such permissive sentiments. Dropping the apostrophe in ‘bus, indeed. I, for one, am appalled.

But seriously, if anyone has any idea about where this rule came from, or has a pointer to any paper- or e-published material that specifically advocates it, I’d be glad to hear about it.

Seeing Batman Begins yesterday, and in particular hearing Bale’s Batman voice, got me thinking about the ability to identify people based on various (combinations of) sensory stimuli. Take the situation where one person attempts to initiate a dialogue with another by using some typical verbal means, like calling out their name, or saying something like “hey,” or “uhh,” or what have you. Even aside from sensory input, we have several ways of determining or guessing who the caller might be, like knowledge of our surroundings and people in those surroundings, and who might be likely to call at a particular time. For instance, if it’s almost time for the 2:00 Thursday afternoon staff meeting, and you know that the guy in the next room is also going to the meeting, and it’s 2:05 and someone hucks a paper into your office from just outside reading, “Hey, better hurry to the meeting,” then you can make a pretty good guess as to who sent that message. And if instead of hucking a memo she tells you that you’re late (like a normal person would), then you’ve got even more clues. And of course if you can see the speaker, well there’s not much more your speaker identification system can ask for. Read more »

For any learner of Japanese, probably the one class of words that presents the most difficulty is that of mimetics. In Japanese, these are generally classed into two groups, gion-go (擬音語) ‘imitate-sound-word,’ which denote (surprise!) sounds in the world, and gitai-go (擬態語) ‘imitate-state-word,’ which denote states and manners of actions. There is another class, called gisee-go, which sometimes is just classed under gion-go; these words imitate vocalizations, of animals usually. And it is this final class that I experienced first-hand this morning, in my bathroom…

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Select two of the following three: (i) translated into many languages, (ii) freely available to the public, and (iii) interesting to do lexical semantic work on. That’s basically the problem that’s facing some of us at a certain lexicographic effort. In a bid to increase collaboration among some of our colleagues, as well as explore the cross-linguistic (“cross-lingual”?) similarities and differences among semantic frames already posited for English, we’ve decided that it would be a good idea to find a text available in English, German, Spanish, and Japanese, all copyright-free, and hopefully interesting to work with, and then give it the full-text annotation treatment. However, this has been harder than expected.

Up to now, FrameNet has been doing a large amount of work on texts related to WMD (non-)proliferation, as well as several WSJ articles. These are two very peculiar genres, and as such require a lot of lexicographic work in a few semantic fields (like weapons, treaty/agreement-making, conflict resolution, prediction, and so on). So we thought it might be nice to do work on some fiction, which should have a wider range of frame-evoking words (e.g., verbs, adjectives, relational nouns) of the type that would be interesting to look at crosslinguistically (motion and communication words among the trot-out examples). Unfortunately, there’s the issue copyright that rears its ugly head, and there doesn’t seem to be any archive or list of multilingual public-domain texts out there.

So, we started with some thoughts on authors likely to be widely translated – Doyle, Orwell, and Christie came to mind. Unfortunately, there’s not much freely-available Agatha Christie in other languages, and 1984 is still in copyright – but only in the US. So Holmes seemed like our best bet, but unfortunately the text we most wanted to do, Hound of the Baskervilles, is copyrighted in Japan. Other works seem unavailable in German and Spanish. Essentially, it’s been frustrating finding something that fits all of our exacting criteria. What if we were to relax the “interesting” criterion? Well, there are always news articles, international treaties, UN and Europarl documents, and so on. Surely at least the treaties are publicly available (well, at least for the signatories, or so one would hope). And they might even be fun! (note: this is the fun that means ‘superbly lame’)

And in case anyone out there has some good ideas, here are a few places to start: Project Gutenberg (and the Euro and Australian versions), the Etext center at Virginia, and , and Aozora Bunko (青空文庫).

This past Saturday I was fencing for the second time in several weeks, and our instructor decided that it might be nice for us to watch a women’s foil semifinal match from the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The two fencers were Giovanna Trillini (who ended up with bronze) and Rita Koenig (silver). It was actually quite an interesting match to watch, particularly the constrast between a very athletic, agile Trillini and the more persistent Koenig. What was indeed surprising was the incredible small number of off-target hits. As any fencer knows, if you’re consistently getting off-target hits, your technique could use a once-over. So these people are obviously quite skilled.

But to get to the point, all international fencing competitions are judged in French. That is, the director, who instructs the fencers to go “en garde,” start and stop fencing, and who calls out the action and assigns points, speaks in French only when officiating. Now, in English, it’s customary when instructing the competitors to fence to first say “en garde,” i.e., go to the en garde position, then ask “ready?” (to which you may or may not get a verbal response), and then yell, “Fence!” which starts the action. Along with each of these commands/requests are gestures. First the hands are held to either side of the body (slightly in front), palms down. Then, for “ready?” the palms are turned inward and slighly up. Then the hands are brought together (soundlessly), iconic of two fencers approaching each other.

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