Noncompositional

Yesterday I was at a climbing gym working out on a treadmill (climbing isn’t my thing, generally), and noticed something interesting about the medical warning printed on it. It read (roughly):

> If you feel pain, faint, or dizzy, stop exercising immediately.

Though I’d read that warning dozens of times on many occasions, this time it garden-pathed me. The structure is [if you [feel N, A, or A]], which involves coordination of a noun with two adjectives (or their phrasal projections). But thanks to the lexical ambiguity of _faint_, I parsed it as [if you [feel pain], [faint], or], at which point I was expecting another (finite) verb phrase, but instead got _dizzy_ instead.

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Over at LL, Geoff Pullum started [a discussion](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=961) on what the existence of certain lexical items says, if anything, about the culture (let’s say “linguistic community”) in which that lexical item lives. His line (a reasonable one) is, as always, that it says zilch. Well, go over and read the comments. I have my own contribution, but it was getting long, so I’m dumping it here, with no refinements whatsoever.

Perhaps this has been said and I missed it, but here goes: simply finding a word in a dictionary that doesn’t explain modern usage and variation of usage probably means nothing for sociocultural analysis. But, if speakers of Scotts Gaelic went around talking about whiskey-tingling all the time, or if every mention of a person involved mentioning their hetero/homosexuality, _that_ would no doubt tell you something about (some parts of) the culture. But that’s _how a word is used_, or even _that a word is used_, not _that a word exists_. They’re not unrelated (duh), but quite different things.

Now, might one not make a distinction between the motivations behind the coinage of a word (or compound word; and I dare say that such motivations exist) and the ramifications (if any) of the widespread recognition and use of that word? In any field of study there is a special terminology, but the existence of those words (so long as they remain “terminology”) tells you not much other than that such a field exist(s/ed), and that some phenomena exist(s/ed) to be so named. But it’s not _nothing_. Some linguists do find it useful to explore the technological vocabulary that can be reconstructed for PIE, after all.

I’d say that the same goes for words with “expressive content” (to use Chris Potts’ term). The fact that words like “(a) homo” or “stingy” (compare “thrifty”) have attached to them some (let’s say) affective meaning says something at least about the sorts of stances taken towards sorts of activities. It says nothing about the culture as a whole (assuming such a thing exists), but the existence (and, potentially, persistence in everyday use) of the word can’t be taken as a mere accident of word coinage. [PS: one can always debate about the linguistic status of such content, I suppose]

In other cases, some coherent subculture may take to using a new word, or an old word with a different meaning, and then this word becomes used widely in the larger linguistic community (or maybe there were several steps in between). At each step, the reasons for adopting the word are no doubt complex and unknowable without a lot of time and mindreading abilities, and once a word like “gay” or whatever becomes widespread it probably doesn’t tell you anything about the culture of the linguistic community as a whole. If lexical-semantic change and spread is anything like phonetic change and spread, then the reasons for the existence of a word probably has little to do with the meaning per se and more to do with how speakers dealt with a new word – what social contexts in which to use it, how often to use it, etc. (NB: IANAS[ociophonetician]). But I’m open to the idea that lexical-semantic change and spread is actually lexical-semantically influenced — but not necessarily consciously. People surely pay attention to the meanings of the words they use, but if lexical semanticists have a job to do, most of the fine distinctions in meaning are inaccessible.

Thanks for [contributing to the Moscone Center renovation](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/18/BUF814Q1HF.DTL)!

So, you know the old (?) ABC (?) Saturday morning cartoon jingle: “After these messages, we’ll be right back.” Well, back when I was in first grade or whenever it was that I remember them from, I thought, “Why do they have it in the wrong order?! Shouldn’t it be ‘We’ll be right back after these messages’?”

In my more advanced age, I had a rather different reaction to the Target Christmas commercial with a bunch of elementary school students reciting, “There’s no place like Target / at Christmas to save.” Since it’s in verse, the order isn’t so exceptional. What’s interesting is trying to figure out the semantic parse — and if any of the various parses actually means anything different from any of the others. What’s clear, I think, is that _to save_ is an infinitival relative modifying _place_. What’s up for grabs, I suppose, is whether _at Christmas_ hooks up with _save_ or with _be_, and if _like Target_ modifies _place_, _place to save_, or _place to save at Christmas_. I think basically all of these mean about or exactly the same thing.

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I’m not sure if it’s a record, but I managed to not post for over a month. It guess it makes sense: I had a big deadline in the first week, and then an important-in-a-different-way deadline in the third week. Well, now that there’s nothing going on (wishful thinking)…

I suppose a couple things are in order. First, everyone attend the 2009 LSA Summer Institute! There are so many cool classes (and the people running the show aren’t bad, either). Unfortunately, I will in all likelihood be here and nearby for basically all of the first short session. Oh well.

Next, it seems like it was only a few years ago that (one of?) the first linguistics blog [get](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001785.html)-[togethers](http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2005/01/lsa_dinner.html) was held in the SF Bay Area, and now I suppose there may soon be another, though this time on some sort of [peninsular location](http://www.welcometosf.com/). Can’t wait, guys!

In other news, I had my first liquid-spilled-on-laptop incident several weeks ago. It was only water, and so far no ill effects have showed themselves. Very thankfully, I had purchased one of those tiny EEE PCs only a few months earlier, so I had a backup while the other one recuped.