Noncompositional

The other day I was attending a talk by Carlos Gussenhoven on the use of intonational features to communicate paralinguistic meaning. During the talk he was discussing the effect of pitch range on English and Dutch listeners’ perceptions of attitude (friendly, mean, off-putting, etc.). In the course of the explanation, he said (paraphrasing)

This distinction is quite salient, while this one is more subtle.

(Yes, he’s a non-native speaker, but that’s fine, since it made total sense to me) This caught my ear, because I was accustomed to thinking that “more (of a)” was used to make subtle distinctions on a scale, or perhaps even across (subtly) different scales. Consider this is a stew, while this is more of a soup, or perhaps your teacher is despotic, but mine is more stubborn. I also thought that salient and subtle were on opposite ends of some “obviousness” scale. But, as always, I realized (after talking it through with a colleague) that it’s more complicated.

There are at least two scales involved: importance and obviousness. Importance is how much attention should be paid or significance be placed on a particular phenomenon, and obviousness is how hard it is to notice the existence of such a phenomenon (and there may be another factor, namely how difficult it is to determine the importance given the observation; but I’ll ignore that for now). I made a simple chart that hopefully demonstrates the interaction of these two scales. Read more »

A question for baseball fans.

We have these terms – tying run and go-ahead run. These can be used to talk about the actual “run” (event?), or metonymically for the batter who, as they say, “represents” that run.

Now, I was watching game 1 of the world series this evening, and when I started watching, the Sox were up by 1, and it stayed like this for a long stretch of time (until the Sox scored another run). Not once did I hear anything about the “tying run” being at the place, probably for the good reason that when a team is 1 down, every batter is the tying run, so there’s no point in using that terminology. In fact, it seems like a more likely time to talk about, say, the tying run is a situation like this: a team (is at bat and) is down by some n > 1, and a batter gets on base. The next batter is then the tying run. Similarly, if a team is 1 down and someone is on base, then the batter at the plate is then the go-ahead run. I’m right on this, right? (Just checking) (Also, I’d guess that as the game gets closer to the end, these phrases get used more often, as who exactly is ahead of who becomes increasingly more important)

Now, how about this situation? It’s (oh, say) the top of the fifth inning, and home team is up by 3. One man is on, and then a 2-run homer is hit, so now they’re only 1 down. Would it be likely (appropriate) to talk about the next guy up as the “tying run”? Or is it too early in the game? Maybe there’s a more appropriate way to talk about it? Anyone? Contrast this with the situation where the batting team is down by 3, and there are two men on base – is the batter then the “tying run”? Any difference?

In her 2003 article in Linguistics and Philosophy, Craige Roberts presents a theory of definite noun phrases (i.e., those noun phrases with a the). She presents a (hearer-oriented) description of the distribution of the, as follows:

Given a context C, use of a definite NP_i presupposes that it has as antecedent a discourse referent x_i which is: (a) weakly familiar in C, and (b) unique among discourse referents in C in being contextually entailed to satisfy the descriptive content of NP_i.

What I care about now is part (a), regarding the concept of weak familiarity. Some referent is weakly familiar if “the existence of the entity in question is entailed in the context.” She uses the concept of weak familiarity to explain some uses of the definite article:

• John was murdered yesterday. The knife lay nearby.
• I remember the beginning of the war very well.
• The car has a statue on the dashboard.

In the second case, “wars, like other protracted events, are known to have a beginning, making the beginning of the war weakly familiar via entailment based on knowledge in the common ground. In the third case, mention of a (typical) car in the discourse entails the existence of a dashboard in the common ground. In the first case,

We need to accomodate that John was killed by stabbing [since there is no default means associated with murdering] … once we do this … the common ground will entail the existence of a knife as the murder weapon, licensing a weakly familiar discourse referent. (300)

It’s interesting that she chose murder as the verb for the first sentence. She could have chosen stab and not have to dealt with the extra step of accommodation, since stab entails “sharp object,” whereas murder entails “weapon” (so, conversely, she could have stuck with murder and used the weapon to illustrate the point about w.f.). I would explain this as: the discourse referent event: murder entails murder instrument (weapon). The use of a definite the knife is licensed by accommodating that knife fills the role of weapon, which means that the knife was weakly familiar after all.
Read more »

Fear not, faithful reader(s), updates are a-coming. Other considerations, however, weigh heavily upon me.

I’ve started keeping a little notebook of language-related phenomena that I want to look at in the future. A sample, you say? All right…

-NP put NP into {*sleep / *a sleep / a sleep that would last 100 years / a deep sleep}
Hmm…Zimmer principle, anyone? (okay, not really) Note that the * above do not mean “unattested,” because alas, Google reveals unto all the blinding truth.

–sooner is better vs. *better is sooner
Equation, anyone?

-Lexical units that name the role of an undergoer in some transitive action, but are not derived from a verb that denotes that action. So far: victim, effects (as in ‘his effects’), ware, and possibly original.

-He let me do anything = ‘He let me do anything I wanted to do’
-Let me do anything! = ‘Let me do anything I want to do’ (though rather stilted)
-Let me do something…anything! = ‘Let me do something, anything is fine.’

And now, as they, as they say, “say,” good night.
(or is that “And now, as, as they say, ‘they say,’ good night”?)