The apostrophic War on the Holidays

I was fighting the urge to post about this piece on Slate, about how to pluralize your last name, and now officially give up. Anything that has this line is hard to resist reacting to:

It’s Christmas! Celebrate by not doing violence to the laws of pluralization.

Wow, I think, how do you do violence to the laws of pluralization? Wait ARE there laws of pluralization? Turns out there's outrage about 'stray apostrophes'. "Every year they assault me." Oh, about spelling. Got it. I won't review the green grocer's apostrophe here (but knock yourself out: here, for one.)

But plurals do get into the picture. (Say cheese.) Apparently there's deep worry about the Wolf family signing as 'The Wolves'. A card from the wolves? I'm cutting back on the eggnog at that point. They usually barely knock when they come to your house here in Wisconsin. That's what I call 'assault'.

Merry Thanksgiving and wishing you all lots of apostrophes for the holidays,
The Verb's

Found the image at a Walk in the Words. They have a nice little post on the topic.

Eye dialect and Cliven Bundy

'Eye dialect' is using non-standard spelling to try and convey features of how somebody speaks. It's often colloquial stuff, like talkin' instead of talking, but more typically strong stuff, sociolinguistically speaking, and it's often used to represent people negatively, e.g. Sarah Palin. In fact, AP represented an Obama speech with this 'g-dropping' and there was discussion of whether that was racist, as laid out here on the Log. In that post, Mark Liberman wrote this:

"Eye dialect" in transcriptions is a questionable journalistic choice, whether the speaker is Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, or Barack Obama; but it's not necessarily a racist choice, and I don't think that it was a racist choice in this case. However, there are a lot of racists out there; and many of them use eye dialect as a focus for their feelings of disgust and hat[r]ed.

The New York Times occasionally uses eye dialect, though I've never tried to track how often or exactly when. Still, I was surprised yesterday to read this story about Cliven Bundy, containing these quotes from Bundy (talking about himself):

“Cliven Bundy’s a-wondering about these people, now I’m talking about the black community, I’m a-wondering, …

It's rare to see that in contemporary print media - startling, in a way. The story continues:

He questioned whether African-Americans were “happier than they was when they was in the South in front of their homes with their chickens and their gardens and their children around them …"

Here's the clip in question with the relevant stuff starting around 1:15. Bundy speaks an emphatically non-standard English, and really does use a-prefixing and was with plural subjects, as well as negative concord ("they didn’t have nothing to do"), set for Standard sit, and so on. My immediate reaction was to wonder if this distracts from the substance. Why not write it in more standard spelling and let the content make the point?

On Saturdays, I always look forward to Charles M. Blow's editorials and today he tackles the core substance of Bundy's "fantasies" and "projections". It's not hard to devastatingly deconstruct this stuff, I suppose, but Blow lays it out nice and clean. 

Because questions

You've probably seen the Atlantic piece about because by now. I actually have been wondering about this for a long time, mostly because I read Wonkette, rightly cited as a place where you can find this construction all over the place. And it's been talked about for a while.

What's most striking about it is not that it's a preposition — it has a pretty classic distribution of a preposition (followed by nouns, etc.) and the semantics are not weird for a preposition (German wegen means something pretty similar at some level, 'on account of') — but that it takes these bare nouns. Anyway, here are some things I've wondered about here … any insights would be appreciated.

First, the creation of a new preposition from an old clause-linking element / conjunction doesn't seem so weird intuitively but the direction of such change seems to usually go in the other direction … adpositions become conjunctions. (Harris & Campbell's Historical Syntax talks about several examples, pp. 291-293 and it's pretty common in the grammaticalization lit, I think.) Is this direction — conjunction to preposition — particularly unusual? Isn't a preposition 'more grammatical' in some sense than a conjunction?

Second, the history of because is kinda cool: The usual story (I don't have particular reason to doubt it) is that it comes from a prepositional phrase itself, by cause. There's a lot of work out there on cycles of linguistic change this days and this seems to echo those kinds of patterns, in the sense of Elly van Gelderen's The Linguistic Cycle. Is this a known cycle? (I don't recall it from that book.)

Third, are there other prepositions that can take the pattern of stuff this does?  'For' in a certain sense does only for mass nouns, maybe: She did it for family, Homer did it for beer, they did it for love. But you can't do something for desk or howitzer, etc. There's some semantic thing going on here, surely, right? The Language Log post on this from way back touches on the issue but there's gotta be more.

Weird assertions about Sarah Palin and language in the news

Yes, it's still happening. People won't stop talking about how Sarah Palin talks. And as far as I can see, they can't stop getting it wrong. This one isn't exactly wrong about how she talks but …

A couple of our contributors apparently watch Chris Matthews on Hardball. Doesn't strike me as healthy, but two of them discovered a little oddity last night in a discussion of Sarah Palin's English. In this video, check out the discussion around 5:00 or so to get the context, with the key part beginning at 5:30:


Alex Wagner says that we should be glad that Palin uses subject-verb agreement. Fair enough. But Chris Matthews responds with this: "Predication, you mean, yeah". 'Predication' has a set of different meanings in linguistics, from pretty non-technical (where a 'predicate' is everything but the subject in a clause) to pretty technical (various syntactic and semantic issues connected with the philosophical sense of 'predication'), some of the latter pretty well explored back in the Government and Binding days (where 'government' had nothing to do with politics). But does anybody know of a usage that would make sense here?

Back in 2008 when Palin's speech — mostly her accent but sometimes her syntax — was all the rage, we blogged that stuff to hell and back. One of the big points was that people were getting it mostly wrong about how she talks. Didn't particulary expect to see it come back around like this. God help us all if she actually acts like she'll run next time around.

Regional diversity in African American English

Thanks to WBEZ for running this piece. It deals with issues of unity and diversity in African American English. They talk to the right people — Baugh, Wolfram, Preston — and the article comes to the right conclusion:

“So is AAE diverse? Is it consistent? Or does it just come down to who's listening?” I ask Baugh.
His response?
“Yes, yes, yes.”

Finally, something in the popular press that gets the point across.

Texting "might be making us less intelligent"

The NYT has a big ad this morning for paperbecause.com, about the threat that texting poses to not only language but even intelligence, laid out in detail on this page. The site is owned by Domtar, "the largest integrated manufacturer and marketer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and the second largest in the world".

The blurb says that "The severity of the educational repercussions of texting is hotly debated among the experts", and they argue that "Reports ... suggest that the younger generation is not as smart as it used to be when it comes to basic decorum for important life skills such as applying to college or for a job." But I was wondering how far they'd have to stretch to make it an ad for paper …

Indeed, in a professional context, the “laziness of language” exhibited in texting could be considered, at best, as a level of familiarity that might not be appreciated by a recruiter. At worst, it could be viewed as reflection of a lax attitude in other areas – also something you don’t want to put forward when you’re asking for a job.

So, how can paper help with this distinctly modern conundrum? Paper is a classic, commanding its own form of respect and inherently conveying formality. To print out correspondence like a resumé or college entrance essay subtly imparts the message that a candidate has taken the time to consider their application and that they are serious about achieving their aspirations. Putting a document down on paper, sealing it in an envelope and addressing it to a key contact also demonstrates an ability to properly adapt forms of communication to the right setting so you get the optimal result.

Did pen and pencil manufacturers pursue similar strategies when computers started to build a big market? Whatever, in my world, nothing says formality like vellum (image from here).

The real complaint about language is the supposed retreat of formal language. If that's happening (and that's a plausible thing), it's an interesting question what that means culturally, but I'm pretty sure it's not causing stupidity.

Now, THAT's a split infinitive

We're gonna be seeing a lot of stuff on language and politics in the coming months, no doubt. Check out John McWhorter's new CNN piece (here) as an example of that. He argues that talking folksy is good for candidates.

It doesn't count as folksy, for most of us at least, but politicians naturally split infinitives, like the rest of us. Romney was quoted (here) as having said this:

I've been interested in seeing that the president continues to not only in speeches but in ads say things that are patently untrue.

For me, and I split infinitives happily even in formal writing and often find non-split infinitives odd or occasionally wrong, this just doesn't work. 

The decline of ain't

The Lingua Franca blog over at the Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice post from Allan Metcalf, of OK fame, on "The decline and fall of a 4-letter word". He makes a nice point:

“Ain’t” had the advantage over other four-letter words in being pure defiance or pure sincerity, not carrying any baggage of obscenity, blasphemy, or indeed any other content at all, since it is just a form of “be” or “have.”

One basic point is that it has lost its power to shock, with the key date being 1961, with the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.

I didn't first read "decline and fall" as being about taboo status but rather about frequency of usage. While spoken usage would be more interesting in many words, Google Ngram Viewer provides a pretty interesting data on this. Below are the images for English, American English and British English. (And, do I need to write it anymore?, click to embiggen.*)

Pretty surprising decline and fall, actually, and maybe surprisingly early, especially in American English — decades before Webster's Third, in fact. (And what the heck is going on with the late resurgence?)

But it's useful to have some kind of crude basis of comparison here, so I checked ain't versus isn't. That provides another little surprise:

The two words track very close until the beginning of the 20th century, diverge pretty sharply and then show roughly parallel paths with isn't far more common.

Anybody have a smart story for what's going on here?

* Oh yes, of course, because it's a chance to use embiggen.

Passive voice correctly characterized in the media!

Numerous linguabloggers, especially at the Log, have spent a lot of time on what Geoffrey Pullum (in the link just given) reasonably calls a "campaign to get journalists to stop using the term 'passive' in its grammatical sense when they have no idea what it means." The blunder is so common that I was taken aback this morning to read this in a discussion of the Iowa Caucus results:

Mr. Romney eliminated Rick Perry from the nomination contest. Of course, Mr. Romney got a lot of help from Mr. Perry himself. Maybe we should use the passive voice — Mr. Perry was eliminated from the nomination contest.

YES. That is actually the passive voice. Of course, the passage comes from Nate Silver of FiveThiryEight, who actually seems to know actual stuff, like numbers. If anybody's gonna recognize a passive, it's probably him.

I doubt that this will cheer Pullum, who's in deep on this battle, but I'm encouraged to see that it is not impossible for someone to refer to 'passive voice' in the media in a way that is consistent with how people who actually study things like the passive voice use the term.

Image from here, from the Village Voice.

What's up with 'uppity'?

I'm guessing you know by now that Rush Limbaugh has called Michelle Obama "uppity" and that he was defended by Glenn Beck. A new piece on the AtlanticWire by Elsbeth Reeve starts with this:

A lot of people have no idea that the word "uppity," when applied to black people, has racist connotations, but it's getting harder and harder to understand how public figures, in particular, are able to maintain their ignorance of the term's history. President Obama has been a well-known public figure for several years and his conservative critics, in particular, keep making the "uppity" mistake. 

Gee, it's hard for me to read this even as ironic. That there might be an American English speaker who doesn't know it's racist. Maybe. I know a lot of clueless people, nobody that clueless. But can you even choke out a joke about Limbaugh and Beck not knowing exactly what they're doing? I didn't think so.

Still, there's a question in here about language use. My sense is that people don't use the word uppity much anymore except in highly ironic ways. So, I did a quick NgramViewer check on it and a set of words with closely related meanings, namely: haughty, presumptuous, conceited, arrogant. Here's the result (click to embiggen):

If you go to the NgramViewer and play around, say with shortening the time depth to 1950 or so, you'll see that uppity has actually increased in frequency, though it's stayed relatively low, compared to the others. In fact, everything else but 'arrogant' has declined over time. (Why the other words have declined is a whole nother question.)

What would account for the uptick in uppity? A simple google search didn't shed any light but I happened to try an Ngram for uppity women and uppity woman. It was about the only collocation I could come up with that sounded like anything you might hear. The result:

If you google those, you get the goldmine I didn't find with a simple(r) search. It turns out, then, that it's not just an ironic use of the term, but a kind of 'taking back' of a once-negative phrase.

"Tim McGraw hates [lexical] semantic change."

A very perceptive student emailed with a link to the Tim McGraw video "I miss back when", saying:

when I heard the refrain of this song,  all I thought was "wow, Tim Mcgraw really hates semantic change".

Yup.

Degrammaticalization of ish

Back in the winter, even before the political fires scorched Madison, some of us were talking about the famous case of 'ish' as degrammaticalization. That is, what has traditionally been a garden variety suffix forming adjectives (green > greenish) has been liberated to become a free word. So, to give the example from the post linked above, younger speakers can have this exchange (and even old people understand it):

Q: Is he rich?
A: Ish.

Now, in considering just how free ish now is, a really bright grad student and one local linguist came up, through various intermediate discussions, with the question of whether you could actually get the ish without something that it is meant to be attached recoverable in the context. That is, in the example above, the idea is that the answer is 'richish'. We've been looking around for examples where this connection isn't so clear, which would point to a more liberated form.

The other day, while in a VW dealership, the missus pointed out this:

So, some questions: (1) To speakers who have this form, is this a good sentence? (2) If so, the answer would be 'anyone-ish', right? Does anyone-ish work for anybody as a word?

The ball came out but the whistle blew

As Wisconsin's football team is pummeling Michigan right now (sorry, Ann Arbor friends, colleagues and alums who care), the announcers have I think (at least) twice used a construction that is just impossible for me in the relevant situations: A player carrying the ball has had his forward progress stopped, an official blows the whistle to end the play and after that the ball comes loose. The comment:

The ball came out but the whistle blew.

I can only understand that statement as describing a significantly different situation, namely that the ball was fumbled and after that the whistle blew. In fact, the sentence is just odd, since if the ball came out, something else would have to happen to to trigger the whistle: it's a live ball.

To describe what actually happened, I would have to say:

The ball came out but the whistle had blown.

Do other people get the same reading? I didn't expect any variability here … I would expect this to be pretty stable.

The government and African-American English: language ideology and practice

The Guardian is running this piece by Chris McGreal, called:

US drug agency recruits speakers of 'street slang'
DEA seeks people who understand black vernacular English to translate wiretaps and stand up evidence in court

It's getting a lot of attention, and much of it along this kind of lines from what I've seen. (Yes, there had to be the Airplane video clip.) But there's a big, even massive, point about language in America in this story. The core of it is laid out in this quote from the article:

"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognised the legitimacy of this language," said H Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor. "Yet the authorities and the police are recognising that this is a language that they don't understand. It tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognising African-American speech."

Yes, and the government's de facto recognition that (most of) their employees can't understand some kinds of African-American speech makes a powerful point that should be used in future discussions about language and education.

American Speech issue on Accommodation

The new issue of American Speech is out, a special issue, co-edited by Wisconsin's own Tom Purnell together with Malcah Yaeger-Dror of Arizona. Below is part of the Table of Contents (the full ToC and abstracts are available from the links in there, obviously). If you count Purnell's work on African-American English in the Upper Midwest, this one issue shows you how rich this region is not only linguistically but now in terms of the research being done here on local varieties.

ACCOMMODATION TO THE LOCALLY DOMINANT NORM: A SPECIAL ISSUE
THOMAS C. PURNELL and MALCAH YAEGER-DROR
American Speech 2010;85 115-120
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/85/2/115?etoc

ACCOMMODATION TO THE LOCAL MAJORITY NORM BY HMONG AMERICANS IN THE TWIN CITIES, MINNESOTA
RIKA ITO
American Speech 2010;85 141-162
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/85/2/141?etoc

NORTHERN CITIES MEXICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH: VOWEL PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION
REBECCA V. ROEDER
American Speech 2010;85 163-184
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/85/2/163?etoc

By the way, if you have access to American Speech, you should also check out the "Teaching American Speech" section. Michael Adams, the current editor, has done an exemplary job of building the journal as a scholarly outlet and as something that serves the broader community.

It's a good time to be a linguist working in the Upper Midwest, I think.

Verb forms: seent, spunt, skinded

Sometimes people start off with a linguistic peeve and piece together a better picture of things. That looks like what Betty Winston Bayé of the Lousiville Courier-Journal did in this article, called

Speakers haven't 'seent' the harm of casual language

(It's short … it's better for you to read it than for me to summarize it.)

The piece caught my eye mostly because it deals with a common linguistic phenomenon that's not so common as a peeve: Many speakers simplify final consonant clusters, so that -nt is pronounced as -n, for example. So, dent gets pronounced as den. (Let's just leave aside for the moment the huge number of speakers who pronounce it with a glottal stop — that's relevant to the broader structural picture but not of immediately concern to my point.) A lot of research by sociolinguists has shown that people do this more often in words like dent that happen to end in the pattern and less often when the -t or -d is marks past tense, like in went, sent, and so on. For non-linguist readers, Winston Bayé is observing a hypercorrection, that is, where speakers who do this simplification are aware that they do it. They try to avoid it, but ending up adding a final consonant where it wouldn't normally appear, like seent for seen or spunt for spun. This bothered her enough to write a piece about it, so she talked to some linguists who make the usual points about informal speech and so on. (It's interesting that hypercorrection is really not about casual speech in some sense.)

The piece starts out feeling like it's going to be a rant about a peeve, but it seems like over the course of the article you can feel how Winston Bayé is actually wrestling with the notion of socially charged linguistic variation: We have good reasons for using distinct and distinctly non-standard varieties, but we can pay a price for it. She remains really concerned about the latter point but seems to get the former point. I don't know how journalists think about such a tone, but I find it kind of refreshing to see what's in some ways an opinion piece that lays it out that way.

US English ... "The battle for our way of life in America"

An occasional reader of this little blog just passed on a 'survey' he'd gotten from US English, one of the major English Only groups. Survey needs scare quotes here because it's precisely the kind of push-poll approach you would expect from these folks. Questions start off pretty innocent, with the first just being whether you've "noticed an increased use of foreign language in your community over the past few years". But we soon get to the meat of the matter:

I wonder how many Americans actually are "made to adapt" to foreign languages in any way more significant than pressing 1 for English.

And of course this isn't about new arrivals or anything, it's about people who refuse to learn English:
I know a lot of immigrants and I'm pretty sure I've never met one who refused to learn English.

Finally, with the plea for money, we get just how big the stakes are in this:

What can you say to that?!?!?

"Quirks of language melt away like butter on a stove"

That's the assessment of regional diversity in American English thanks to the homogenizing force of television and now the internet. You read it here first. Or second, maybe.

Christopher Caldwell attacks* the Dictionary of American Regional English in a piece called "Words that fail the test of time" in yesterday's Financial Times. (He's a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.)

The article is wrong or misleading on a whole host of points and it's not worth the hours it would take to lay those all out. Just consider one little chunk:

[DARE's] backward focus is an implicit admission that, in the television age (and even more so in the internet age), quirks of language melt away like butter on a stove. Dare might more accurately be called a historical dictionary. Its main use will be for clarifying obscure references in old oral histories.

In part, DARE is a historical dictionary. It records tons of old farming vocabulary, for instance, words that are not known or used today. Vocabulary, like the rest of language, is constantly changing. I say: Deal with it.

Throughout the piece, Caldwell seems to be striving to make DARE sound useless. As many stories in the press about DARE — including the recent set — have noted, it is being used in forensic linguistics (yup, to track down criminals) and in medicine (where doctors actually need to know folk terms used by patients).

But surely anyone with any interest in language has by now picked up on the discussions about how dialectal diversity is increasing rather than decreasing in the United States today.

Sigh. 2009 is still young, but this may be the worst piece of language-related journalism I've read so far this year.

* Who the heck attacks dictionaries?

Image from here, in reference to Caldwell's claim — which will be met with hoots of derision here in the Upper Midwest — about lutefisk: "This is a word that will either disappear or be thoroughly integrated into mainstream English." By the way, the word is not 'from Swedish', but both Norwegian and Swedish.

Birther

You've probably picked up on birther by now, the term for those pursuing the Obama-wasn't-born-in-America-so-he-can't-be-president conspiracy theory. The birthers are pretty clear tinfoil hat folks, as reviewed briefly by The Skeptical Teacher and snarkily by Wonkette (yes, that's redundant).

The term hasn't been talked about on linguistics blogs that I know of (Mr V says, without doing a careful search), but Ben Zimmer never misses anything and he's dealt with it briefly at Double-Tongued, here. He points out the derivational connection to truther, the term for those who doubt the generally accepted view of the 9/11 attacks. In "Among the new words" (2008, vol. 83.3, p. 355), American Speech dealt with truther at some length. Here's their intro:

truther, Truther n [from truth + -er; perhaps influenced semantically by liar] Person who believes that he or she knows the truth behind some event, especially in contrast to the generally accepted explanation (compare conspiracy theorist [OEDas 1964])

Anyway, a tiny question: truther clearly has to be pronounced with a voiceless [θ], parallel to the name Luther. But with birther, we have the noun birth with [θ] and the verb to birth with [ð]. (There's a set of alternations like that, including tooth/teeth vs. to teethe. A story for another day.) I think I've only heard birther pronounced with [θ], but it doesn't actually sound all that bad to me with [ð]. Surely that form's not possible, is it?


Image from TPM.

A question about initialisms

One area of variability in contemporary English is the pronunciation of initialisms, as described by Wikipedia with discussion of difficulties in the names for these creatures:

There is … some disagreement as to what to call abbreviations that some speakers pronounce as letters and others pronounce as a word. For example, the terms URL and IRA can be pronounced as individual letters: [ˈjuːˌɑrˌɛl] and ['ɑɪˌɑrˌeɪ] respectively; or as a single word: [ˈərl] and ['ɑɪˌrʌ] respectively. Such constructions, however—regardless of how they are pronounced—if formed from initials, may be identified as initialisms without controversy.

Sorry for bringing up the issue of IRAs if you're giving any thought to retirement, but, hey, it's data. If you think about how these forms might change over time, you might expect them to become more word-like, especially as people forget what the initials stand for. That is, you might expect IRA to start out life ['ɑɪˌɑrˌeɪ] and become ['ɑɪˌrʌ], keeping the wiki-transcription as was.

But there seem to be a couple of examples of the reverse. Through college and grad school, Reserve Officer Training Corps (and its members) were more or less [ɹatsi] for me and in the circles I traveled in. This is enshrined in the anti-war-era chant, "ROTC, ROTC, just another Nazi", which only works with that pronunciation. I haven't heard that except rarely in a long time, though, and hear it almost only 'pronounced as letters' in wiki-speak. I can see the former form, especially given the chant, being understood as negative, so that a change could be socially motivated.

Similarly, when I came to Madison back in the 1970s, the Madison Area Technical College was known as [mætsi]. That pronunciation seems to be gone today, and I've abandoned it too after being corrected on it a couple of times.

Are there other examples like this? Maybe these are as odd as weak verbs becoming strong (sneak snuck, dive dove)?* Or maybe the trend doesn't work as sketched above even for these two?

*I'm not entirely convinced that those are as rare as some people claim, but that's a topic for another day.