English, Jack

iBooks Author straightjacket

2012-01-22T10:59:00.003-05:00

I downloaded iBooks Author, considering using it to publish teaching materials. The license agreement, however, is rather a barrier. Particularly this section:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are incompliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by anyavailable means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product orservice), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject tothe following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate writtenagreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distributionof your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its solediscretion not to select your Work for distribution.

So, if you just plan to make your work freely available (like this blog), that's fine. But if you want to sell it at all, then you've got to create it, submit it to Apple, and hope that they will sell it for you. If they refuse, well, you can always give it away.

The exercise is not the game

2012-01-15T12:14:00.002-05:00

In football, coaches will put cones on the ground and ask you to dribble the ball around them. This is supposed to improve your accuracy and fluency, but nobody believes that the purpose of this drill is to get better at dribbling around cones. Everybody understands that the purpose is a transfer of skills to a similar but different situation in a real football game.

Things are not so clear when it comes to the teaching of writing. It's pretty typical for writing textbooks and writing teachers to make claims like: "There are two ways of organizing a compare/contrast essay: the common traits method or the similarities/differences method." Some of them might admit that there are many ways but then present "two of the most common" or some hedge to that effect. What students typically understand from this is: this is how you play the game.

Here's what I tell my students they really mean: When you're practicing to be a better writer, sometimes following a formula or copying a structure is a useful exercise. This simplifies things for you by allowing you to focus on certain elements and ignore others. Don't confuse the exercise with the game though. It's not common for academics, journalists, bloggers, or other self-directed writers to produce five-paragraph compare/contrast essays using "the similarities/differences method." Neither should this be your goal.

Economist wants to teach English

2012-01-11T07:55:00.000-05:00

The "Johnson" blog at The Economist is looking for ideas about how the newspaper can make itself more useful to English (language?) teachers.

How do you even write a book like that?

2012-01-01T22:09:00.000-05:00

The Sisters Bothers by Patrick deWitt is a fantastic read. Or at least it is so far. The incongruity between the character of the brothers, two hired killers in the 1850s, and the formality of their dialogue is jarring but somehow fully appropriate.

'What's the matter?' asked Charlie, leaning up on his elbow beside the fire.
'A horse.'
'Where is the rider?'
'There is no rider that I can see.'
'If the rider appears, you may wake me.' He turned and fell back asleep. (pp. 76-77)

It's perfectly in line with Eli's ability to follow his genuinely kind impulses and then switch instantly to utter disregard when it's pragmatic. It's absurd and funny, but not in a Monty Python kind of way. I expect it mirrors somewhat the split between how people really spoke in the west where the book is set and how the contemporary Eastern writers of Westerns voiced their characters. DeWitt manages it with great skill.

I was a bit taken aback, though, when Charlie, mocking some trappers dressed as parodies of themselves, says, "where do you even get a hat like that?" (p. 148). This seems to be a very modern use of even, one that Mark Liberman has discussed on Language Log. Not that it's a big problem, but it did bring me out of the book and back to my default linguistic preocupations.

Grammar and Beyond, a review

2011-12-30T13:02:00.002-05:00

Cambridge has a new grammar series called Grammar and Beyond out/in the works. I got a review copy of the level 2 book by Randi Reppen. I first noticed it at the TESL Ontario conference in October and was interested in it because it's the first grammar series for English language learners I've noticed that employs the concept of determiner (please tell me in the comments if you know of others).

Unfortunately, they make a hash of it.

Let's start with the shocking mismatch between the level of grammar and vocabulary knowledge needed to read and understand the text and the level of knowledge that is being conveyed. Anybody who can understand "singular count nouns always have a determiner before them" (p. 82) already knows as much. There is no point in telling them that they should "not use a or an with plural nouns." The people who need to know this won't even be able to read the chapter with its introductory reading which begins, "identity theft is the act of using someone's personal information without permission." I mean, come on! Permission is ranked as lemma #3,254 in Mark Davies' new Word and Phrase Info corpus interface. The indefinite article is #5. For most language learners, that represents a gap of over a year between when they figured out what a means and what permission means. This problem of explaining English grammar in English to people who don't speak much English is a difficult one, but there is no excuse for completely ignoring the issue.

Part 3 is entitled "Nouns, Determiners, and Pronouns", which is really what attracted my attention in the first place. Nobody in English language teaching understands that there is a relevant function in noun phrase structure and a category of words that typically perform this function. I'll call the function specifier and the category determinative. Because they haven't noticed, they use the same term to refer to both, and they confuse themselves. This book is no different. It says "determiners are words like a, an, the, that, this, my, or our," presumably referring to a category of words, but it includes my and our which are pronouns (and are listed as such on page 105), and don't belong to the same category as the others.

Part 3 has 3 units: Unit 7: Count and Noncount Nouns, Unit 8: Articles, and Unit 9: Pronouns; Direct and Indirect Objects. Determiners show up for the first time in Unit 7, where the quote above appears. A little later, it says, "do not use a / an with noncount nouns," another no-brainer (the problem is to remember what nouns are count and noncount!), but it assures us that "you can use other determiners (my, some, this, etc.) with noncount nouns." This is, of course, true of some other determinatives, but etc. suggests each, every, another, both, and many should all be fine. They're not. If you mean "certain determiners," then say so.

Skip to page 86, Section 3, and they do say so: "you can use certain determiners and measurement words with noncount nouns. Can you give me some advice about spyware programs? She told me two interesting pieces of news." The list of allowed determiners includes: a lot of, some, a little, much, any, not much, not a lot, and not any. Of course, it ignores two of the three options given 4 pages back. Also although I would argue that a lot of is not a determinative, I don't think anybody believes that a lot by itself is.

The inclusion of piece is likely supposed to represent a "measurement word" and not a determiner, and I assume that they are grouped together because of the superficial similarity between partitives like some of the news and the phrases pieces of news. Except that partitives are not dealt with anywhere in the unit.

Then we come to the "Grammar Application" where we find "Exercise 3.1 Determiners and too and enough." This implies that enough isn't a determinative even though it is.

Overall, then, it's interesting to see the term "determiner" finally showing up in a grammar book. Now we just have to get people to understand what determinatives and specifiers are.

Simple English Wiktionary

2011-12-27T12:00:00.000-05:00

About five and a half years ago, I started contributing to the Simple English Wiktionary project. I wanted a good collection of definitions and examples for use in EAP classes, and I didn't want to be tiptoeing around copyright issues.

Why would I do this? There are already some great dictionaries for English language learners (ELLs). My favourite is the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, but it's covered by copyright. English Wiktionary is also very good, and it's copyright free, but it's generally not appropriate for ELLs. I could have just put together my own materials, but I thought I might as well make my work widely available, since the government pays much of my salary, and I hoped that by doing so I would be able to draw in like minded people and benefit from their contributions.

Unfortunately, the project has never engendered the level of collaboration I had hoped for. There have been wonderful editors (thanks, Tygrrr!), and the project has gown to include over 17,000 entries, but it's really the work of a small handful of people. As of today, I have made 12,001 edits on the project and I think it would be fair to say that I have added the bulk of the substance: the definitions and examples. Only eight people have made more than 1,000 edits, and though I appreciate every effort, the quality of the contributions has typically been poor: they were either not clear or not simple. And the examples sentences often failed to exemplify.

I still think the project has value. After all, it currently gets about 11,000 page views per day. Not everyone values it though. In the time I've been there, we've fought off a number of closure attempts.

But I'm tired. It's no fun working on it mostly alone. Before, I used to believe that if only it grew to a certain size, we'd attract more good editors. In fact, it's been the opposite. Most of the major contributors have drifted away over the years, and I'm left here feeling a bit like the Onceler.

Vending

2011-12-26T13:13:00.001-05:00

I won't be out fighting the boxing day crowds today. I saw my family off at the airport. They're already somewhere over Manitoba as I write this and well on their way to Japan. So, now that I'm here at home, I'll sit and do some reading and some blogging, and maybe go in to the gym.

But one this day of sales, I was thinking about vending. I noticed that although the verb vend lives on through its present participle, its other forms are dying. Here's what I mean:

No doubt, vending has been kept on artificial life support by vending machine, which is recorded from 1895, but its other forms are essentially dead. I don't think I've even encountered the word vended; it doesn't show up at all in either the BNC or the COCA. And yet no dictionary I've checked sees fit to point out this morphological lacuna. The blithely list the various forms without comment. Anybody who looks up this word and tries to use, say, the past tense, has been sold a bill of goods by the dictionary. They certainly haven't been vended one.

Number transparency and determiner choice

2011-12-07T09:15:00.001-05:00

A noun is said to be number transparent when the verb doesn't agree with it even when it functions as the subject in constructions like, A number of people were there. In this case, the head of the subject is singular number, but nevertheless, were agrees with plural people. What I just realized recently is that there's a big difference between a number and the number. In the COCA, [a number of * are/is] turns up 353 instances of are and only 19 of is, for a ratio of 18.6:1. In contrast, [the number of * are/is] results in only 16 instances of are and 291 of is, for a ratio of 1:18.2, almost exactly inverse.

Other determiners have other patterns. The are to is ratios are:

any number: 7:2
this number: 0:2
that number: 1:4
some number: 1:0
etc.

So, this bothers you, does it?

2011-12-04T01:17:00.001-05:00

I thought I was reasonably aware of common linguistic peeves. I generally don't like them because I don't like to dislike things, but I do understand them. Some people don't like 'free gift' as well as 'for free' - I understand. Some detest 'literally' used non-literally - all right, I get it.

But starting a sentence with 'so'? We all do, don't we? Who among us has never uttered 'So how are you?'?

Well, apparently, it is worse than I thought. Or at least it appears to be trendy to detest it - here is an interesting clip from BBC Today. There is also a New York Times article on the subject, reflecting the rise of the usage.

For now my biggest question is, will I now be able to enjoy listening to the immortal piece 'Wish You Were Here' by Pink Floyd (which starts with a double 'so': 'So, so you think you can tell ...') like I have done so many times - or will this stupid peeve thing somehow ruin the tune?

Complex determinatives

2011-11-23T13:20:00.001-05:00

[Somewhat edited after Ran's comment]
A colleague asked if the structure of the following phrases was the same:

a group of the students
the groups of students
one of the students

I told her, much to her relief, that I thought [1] and [2] were basically the same, but that [3] was different. She had been discussing this with some PhDs in linguistics who had been arguing that all three were partitive constructions and that what preceded student(s) was a (complex) determiner.

This brought to mind a section from a paper I've been working on, which is reproduced below. Here, I'm discussing the category of determinatives as presented in The Grammar Book 2nd edition by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman.

Questions are treated in chapter 13, which implies at least the following additions: whose, which, what (p. 249). Quantifiers are covered in chapter 17. "Quantifiers can be determiners or when the referent is clear, pronouns" (p. 330). The following list is given: Positive: some, a few, several, a couple of, a little, quite a few, quite a little, (a great) many, a (good) number of, a lot of, a great deal of, a good deal of, almost all, most, and all; Negative: none, no, not any, few, hardly any, scarcely any, little, just a few, only a few, just a little, only a little, not many, not much, not all, many… not, and most… not. Other quantifiers are listed in TGB on pages 277, and 334-335.

Clearly, this list represents a significant expansion on what is considered a determiner by the dictionaries. The inclusion of adverbs such as hardly, just, and not suggest those expressions including them are determiner phrases rather than determiners per se, but it is harder to account for the complex items such as a good deal of and a lot of. [7] Far from being determiners, these items are not even constituents. Rather they are sequences of the form a (adj) N of, differing from other combinations like a box of, or a carload of chiefly in that they do not typically dictate subject verb agreement in cases like A lot of students understand the value of a university degree (not *A lot of students understands…).

The main reason to believe that they are not constituents is that unlike the core members such as many, every, and this, you cannot remove the following noun and have them stand on their own. Compare:

I ate too much sushi. à I ate too much.

I ate a lot of sushi à *I ate a lot of.

Moreover, in relative constructions, the of is placed at the front, before the relative pronoun:

a lot of the damage remains unseen à

the damage, of which a lot remains unseen

It is clear that of is part of the preposition phrase of which, in which case it cannot be part of a complex determiner a lot of. Add to this the fact that these exist in both singular and plural versions (e.g., a lot/lots of), and that they may be internally modified (e.g., a very great deal of), and it becomes clear the constructions with couple, number, lot, and deal are simply the structure a (adj) N of.

Beckner and Bybee (2009) argue that these kinds of chunks often become constituents over time. One could hardly question this claim, given such words as everyone, breakfast, and nonetheless. They further claim that changes are gradual rather than abrupt, which also seems undeniable if we're dealing with language across populations. But the simple observation that some strings become constituents is not evidence for any particular string having done so. In building their case, they take the example of in spite of, which bears some similarity to a lot of, and argue that it has become a compound preposition. In particular, they point out how commonly spite appears in this string: in spite is followed by of in 99.50% of its occurrences in the Corpus of Current American English (Davies, 2008-). It is possible that strings like a lot of, are on their way to lexicalization, but currently a lot is followed by of only 72.12% of the time (Davies, 2008-). They further argue that the meaning of in spite of is far from the original meaning of spite. The same cannot be said of a lot of and lot, in particular the meaning of the plural lots. So, while these are certainly collocations worth bringing students' attention to, they are not yet constituents, and thus, not determiners. In this respect, the dictionaries had it right.

Lesson Plan Competition

2011-11-21T20:45:00.001-05:00

The TESL Toronto blog has just posted a link to the IATEFL BESIG & Cambridge University Press Lesson plan competition. If you've never commercially published teaching materials and you teach business English, this might be an interesting opportunity to get some recognition.

Different of the people

2011-11-19T18:50:00.001-05:00

A number of years ago, when I was still struggling to understand, even at a fairly basic level, what a determinative was, I suspected that different might be one. Not always of course. Clearly different is usually an adjective. But I had a feeling that it also had a secret life as a determinative. Try as I might, though, I couldn't find any evidence that it was. Until now.

At dinner tonight, my mother was telling an anecdote, and she said "different of the people commented that Marg could be unpleasant." I'm not surprised about Marg--most of us can be unpleasant at times--but I was elated to hear different used that way, and from my own mother nonetheless.

You see, adjectives just can't do that. You can't say happy of the people or good of the shirts. You can't even say brown of the crayons or interesting of the movies. But you can say different of the people. Or, at least, my mom can.

Even you surrender

2011-11-15T11:01:00.001-05:00

New Grammarology 2.0 post up at the TESL Toronto site. This time I look at the common misuse of even by English language learners and some interesting properties of focussing adverbs.

The evening/that evening

2011-11-14T20:30:00.001-05:00

We just finished reading Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life, and the kids and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But just as we were wrapping up, I stumbled in my reading, and that cool evening came out as the cool evening. Those of you who have read the book will know that a small stumble can take you out of one world and into another. In this case, it briefly took me into the world of syntax.

You see, even though, decontextualized, most of us don't see much difference between the evening and that evening, my slip actually made the entire sentence ungrammatical. I'll let you think about what context that might be true in and then explain after the jump.

The full sentence, which you can find on p. 216 of the hardcover, is "On the flat roof of the Khalifa house, that cool evening, a dinner table was set out under the stars." In this sentence, that cool evening is a noun phrase functioning as an adjunct. The interesting thing is that the choice of determiner for the NP makes a big difference. Some determiners lead to grammatical sentences, and others don't: that works but the doesn't; one works, but not a, unless you say many a cool evening. You can try out other options.

In truth, it's not simply up to the determiner. For instance, the can be made to work if you add an integrated relative as modifier of evening (i.e., the evening they arrived home, a dinner table was set out under the stars.)

I'd love to try and figure out whether there's some kind of underlying principle at work here, but I really have too much marking to do. I do hope that you have a smaller marking backlog than I do and that you might be able to enlighten me though.

Feedback on English Accent Coach

2011-11-13T15:22:00.001-05:00

A few days ago, I posted about a site called English Accent Coach. I've had a bit of feedback, which I passed on to Ron Thomson. He's given me permission to post it here.

This is very useful info for me. Thanks so much. It will help me build an FAQ page for the site. It also confirms that the best way to make this effective is to really train teachers or better help them to understand the science behind the site as some of these comments reflect common misconceptions about how pronunciation develops – and I wouldn’t expect any teacher to know this. I’ll try answering some of these in turn if it might be of help to teachers/learners.

Paul: "I failed quite a few even knowing the symbols. I think it is partly a Brit/Am thing. I only tried it briefly, but some words were incomplete so I was expecting to hear a consonant to make a complete word, as in 'hit', not 'hi....' Strangely, that threw me, too."

Yes, this is not unexpected. Teachers could try a higher level (e.g., Level 4) and see that they aren’t that bad if they’re familiar with the symbols. It IS tricky for native speakers to hear sounds in isolation. In fact, normal speakers use top down processing to disambiguate sounds. For learners, not having words is essential because, otherwise, they too will use top-down, only their top-down processing is based on faulty representations of the words. The approach in the site prevents that.

Interestingly, this conflict between top-down processing and phonetic processing causes some learners in my research to do more poorly on words than non-words. My suspicion is that this is because there are too many conflicting phonetic cues that don’t match their language. So for example, they might have a sound similar to the English word be, but not hear the vowel properly in a word like beat because they don’t have words that end in /t/. That t throws them off in the same way not having it might throw Paul off (as above).

Paul: "Just heard ha, which after 3 wrong goes matched head."

If Paul is Brit, then he’ll definitely not match the symbols easily. It’s a fallacy that there’s such a thing as a stable, IPA/Cardinal vowel system, as much as phoneticians say there is. When I listen to IPA produced by British vs. American experts, I hear very different categories. However, a British teacher, already having most of the American system won’t take long to learn the categories in the non-words.

If Paul is American, or if an American gets these wrong, then although everyone has slightly different category boundaries, consistent errors suggests the user isn’t very good at phonetic level processing – which tends to weaken at about 1 years of age – however this training will bring it back in a hurry, it just hasn’t been needed in natural communication. I can’t get into the detail of it here, but word level processing is not the same thing as phonetic level processing.

Native speakers aren’t aware of just how inaccurately we produce vowels in some words (usually related to frequency). For example, one speaker I recorded imitated my have prompt as /hɛv/ rather than /hæv/. He doesn’t sound like he has an foreign accent, and most of his words have what we’d expect. Nobody would pick up on his sloppy pronunciation of have because it’s not something totally off, like hove, and it’s a high frequency word, which listeners tend to process only superficially.

I’ve got some short, but rather technical research I could send to anyone who is interested that shows this effect. The key point is that categories aren’t particularly stable things, and so English Accent Coach is artificial in the sense that I’m actually trying to exclude obviously ambiguous or “wrong” items so that it really does allow for phonetic learning.

Paul: "I've just tried half of the vowels section again and did much better, though, if I'm honest I realise that sometimes I couldn't identify sounds automatically from the symbols."

Yes, not surprising, and I’d be surprised if Paul doesn’t quickly start reaching nearly perfect. Native speakers get there pretty quickly.

Paul: "I wonder why symbols are shown and not, say, short but complete words to which the vowel sound could be matched (e.g. for an 'oh' sound, click on 'hot'). Perhaps that would be a more effective way."

Words adversely affect/distort phonetic processing, as per above. Even symbols do since they may be previously associated with faulty/foreign phonological representations. In my previous work, I didn’t even used symbols, but nautical flags instead. The reason I use symbols now is because learners are less likely to want to learn something that seems totally bizarre (like nautical flags), unless a teacher is there to guide them. I’m hoping to create a switch eventually that will allow the use of other imagery, but that’s some time off.

Another issue is that English spelling is unpredictable, so not useful as a guide. That makes it difficult for non-native speakers to rely on since they don’t know the sound. Finally, these symbols are widely used in many dictionaries, so learners will benefit from knowing them. It’s obvious when learners have got the symbols as they quickly start getting 100% on vowels that are close to vowels in their language. When I trained Chinese speakers, after 2 or 3 sessions of 200 items, they’d get 100 on /o/, /e/, and /i/ all the time, meaning errors with the other vowels were the result of perceptual difficulties. Those three vowels that they got correct after a few trials are very similar to Mandarin counterparts.

Blair: "I've tried the site as well and I agree there are a few problems. It's not that there are no words, I think the site is clear that it's focusing on sounds only, but some of the sounds are not on the chart, to my ears. I'm native Canadian from Toronto so I don't think my accent would be perceptibly different from the people at Brock University, so I'll discount that.

There is at least one diphthong in the sounds /ei/ (play/say/May) but it is not on the chart."

In fact almost all Canadian/American vowels are diphthongs. Books just don’t say that. For example /ɪ/, which is always called a monophthong in teacher texts is more accurately described as /ɪə/. What’s important to know is that I don’t use any diphthong symbols at all for the vowels currently taught on the site. So instead of /ei/ or /ej/ I just use /e/. This is to keep it simple for learners. Too many symbols just confuses them (unless they’ve already learned them), and really, it’s not primarily about learning a symbol, it’s about categorizing all instances of a given category the same way.

Regarding the English diphthongs /aj/, /oj/ and /aw/, I decided to exclude them for now because testing showed they are too easy because they are really extreme diphthongs that move across the entire vowel space. There may be some learners who confuse them, but I’m skeptical they will for very long. At the same time, if I get feedback that these are real problems, and know what the nature of those confusions look like, then I could create a special diphthong game. Incidentally, an iPhone app version will allow users to turn on those diphthongs and should be available soon.

Blair: "The /ae/ (mat/cat/flat) has in my opinion some variance, at times I could only hear it as the short "u" (hut/mut/shut)... The stressed "i" (she/he/me) is sometimes indistinguishable from the lax /e/ (met/set/fret). Those are the ones that I remember."

Again, if it’s isolated sounds we’re talking about, then it’s not surprising. Native speakers can’t do this automatically; it requires training. In experiments, native speakers can’t get 100% anyways. My rule of thumb is that for some vowel categories, that are inherently more ambiguous (e.g., many of the lax vowels), given my relatively unambiguous training set, native speakers should get 90-95% on those vowels, while some may get 100%. Many of my phonetics students and other teachers get 100%, but only after playing through 100 about 5 times. I note that this user says he only listened to 40 sounds. I’ve never heard of someone without phonetic training doing well. However, phoneticians, including those from the United States get 100% or close to that right off the bat. In other words, teachers need to use it a few times before believing that because they don’t get 100%, it’s not good. In the linguistics world, this methodology, as built into the site is very well-attested in many research labs. There is no doubt it is effective, learners (and teachers) just need to give it a chance.

Thanks to Blair and Paul for taking the time to send feedback, and to Brett for forwarding it. It’s very helpful to me, but in terms of design and in terms of understanding how teachers will react. It really will take teachers believing in it, giving it a chance, and seeing the results for learners to benefit as the approach may not seem obviously beneficial ... if you get learners to use it for 5 to 6 trials of 200, you will be very impressed, as will they. This is much more extensive than lab-demonstrated approaches however, so those first 5-6 trials will only be the beginning. However, that’s all it takes for learners to start seeing major dividends.

Kids have trouble with language too

2011-11-07T07:15:00.000-05:00

A recent research paper from StatsCan by Miles Corak shines an interesting light on the general assumption that, although immigrant adults from a non-English/French background will struggle with language when the arrive in Canada, their children will just soak it up like sponges. The abstract says,

"The education outcomes of a cohort of immigrants who arrived in Canada as children were examined using the 2006 Census, and it was found that there may be a distinct pattern in the risk of immigrant children graduating from high school according to age at arrival. The risks of not completing high school do not vary according to age at arrival up to about the age of 9, with children arriving after that age appearing to face a distinct and growing increase in the risk that they will not graduate. Children who migrate may face different challenges in attaining high school credentials, according to their age at immigration, as a result of sensitive periods in the acquisition of a second language or the structure of the education system."

The data set here is huge with an N size of 111,302. The paper goes on to say,

"the risks of not graduating from high school are estimated to be about 15% for boys and 11% for girls who came to the country before 9 years of age. They increase by over 1 percentage point for every year past this age, reaching 20% to 25% for those arriving in the country after the age of 13. These results are robust to controls for the possibility that first exposure to English or French occurred before migration... Second, these patterns may have something to do with the challenges children face in learning a second language, since these challenges vary in a predictable way according to the linguistic distance of the language of the country of origin from English or French."

Looking at the graphs, the inflection points are surprisingly distinct, but they differ for males and females. The x axis is age of arrival.

What I find most surprising, though, is that women's chance of completing high school begins to decline with arrival after age 7 where men's chances don't begin to drop until after age 8. Footnote 10, however, points out that a different statistical procedure points to the same inflection point for men, but puts the beginning of the women's drop after age 9.

English Accent Coach

2011-11-04T11:20:00.000-05:00

Ron Thomson at Brock U has put together a website to help students learn to distinguish between English vowels and consonants. It's currently in Beta, and will be changing a bit in the next few weeks, but it looks quite useful. It's also likely good for TESL students learning about phonology and pronunciation.

It's a game-like interface that plays syllables or words containing target phonemes that have to then be identified. The sound quality is high and the the pronunciations are varied but natural. I would strongly recommend using earphones rather than speakers.

"Third-person singular voice"

2011-11-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

My students have an assignment to summarize a chapter from an introductory textbook in their field, and I recommend that they vet the chapter with me before proceeding. One student brought me Civil Law and Litigation for Paralegals by Neal R. Bevans (McGraw-Hill, 2008), which had the following blurb in the front matter:

"The author has adopted the convention of employing 'he or she' whenever the text demands the use of the third-person singular voice." (p. ix)

I would guess that this was included by an editor and not the author, but it's hard to know. Whoever put it there likely meant something like: 'wherever an epicene third-person singular pronoun is called for'. And presumably, he or she is meant to include the various shapes those words take (i.e., him or her, his or her(s), himself or herself), and who knows what in the world is meant by voice. Clearly, it's not the active/passive distinction they had in mind.

What they're really saying is, when the gender of the referent is unclear, the author avoids the lone masculine pronoun as well as what has come to be called singular they.

But for fun, let's take this literally (or at least as literally as meaning allows). If the convention were actually followed, the introduction would change from this:

"Before we can discuss the many fascinating aspects of civil litigation, we must begin with an examination of the American judicial system. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce you to the important distinctions between civil law and other types of law, as well the sources of judicial authority. Finally, we will examine the major features of both the federal and state court systems. As you will see, there any many different sources of legal authority, and each plays an important role in the overall pattern of civil litigation."

To this:

"Before we can discuss the many fascinating aspects of he or she, we must begin with he or she of he or she. He or she of he or she is to introduce you to the important distinctions between he or she and other types of he or she, as well the sources of he or she. Finally, we will examine the major features of both the federal and he or she he or she systems. As you will see, there any many different sources of he or she, and he or she plays he or she in he or she of he or she. "

Almost vs most

2011-11-02T06:37:00.000-05:00

I have a new "Grammarology 2.0" column up here on the TESL Toronto blog.

Love among the participles

2011-11-01T09:18:00.000-05:00

Geoff Pullum now blogs at the Chronicle of Higher Education. One of his recent postings brings morphology and romance together. Usually, I endeavour to make English, Jack a value added blog, but I'll let this piece speak for itself.

"I have a true story for you, about a rare participle that brought two hearts together and sparked a romance. You may find a tear welling up as you read this, despite the material about inflectional morphology that you have to wade through first." (Read more)

More English invasion?

2011-10-30T02:27:00.001-05:00

Earlier this month, I spent about a week in France. It was a very pleasant stay, even with my rather limited French. Because - well, I’ll show you. This is what I saw in Paris (photo taken from Google Search, because I didn't have a camera):

L'OpenTour - 2 day Pass 2 jours. I don't know about you, but I burst into laughter upon seeing this. It's a linguistic Janus. Supreme siamese compromise. The Strait of Dover finally swum through.

Well, this is just one instance; I have seen and heard more English than I had expected in less touristy towns as well.

I was going to jot down a few serious paragraphs about language contact and how all this is related to English education in Japan and so on - but no. The plain fact is, I like it when English simultaneously recoils from and embraces French, just as I like it when French recoils from and embraces English. So I thought I might share the joy with you.

Linguist Llama

2011-10-27T21:25:00.001-05:00

Now editor at TESL Ontario

2011-10-23T16:12:00.002-05:00

I've just been given the editorship at TESL Ontario's Contact Magazine. So now the grovelling begins: send me your articles, please. It's not paid, it's not peer reviewed, but it's very much appreciated. I'll also be at the TESL Ontario Conference Thursday and Friday, where I'll be attending the AGM, presenting, and checking out some presentations. I hope to see some of you there.

Direct comprehensive corrective feedback

2011-10-19T14:25:00.000-05:00

Although there is a good deal of debate surrounding how teachers should respond to student writing, my sense of the orthodox position is that indirect feedback on only selected points is the preferred type of correction. That is: most writing teachers appear to believe we should focus marking on only certain points, and we should give only hints such as vt for verb tense rather than providing the target forms to the students.

"Evidence on the Effectiveness of Comprehensive Error Correction in Second Language Writing" by Catherine G. Van Beuningen, Nivja H. De Jong, and Folkert Kuiken was just pre-published online in Language Learning. (The dissertation on which it is based is available here.) Though I have no special expertise in this area, I believe it is the most relevant and well-designed empirical study I have seen related to this question. While accepting the limitations of this paper, I think it provides clear evidence that direct comprehensive corrective feedback should probably be the default position. In other words teachers should correct, rather than simply mark, and they should do so for all errors (except spelling, which in this case benefitted more from indirect feedback).

That is not to say that the default should never be overridden, but that teachers should think twice about doing so. The article doesn't address affective factors, for example, and certain students may react negatively to overmuch correction.

And we do have to take into account the limitations, which are well addressed in the paper. It was a relatively short treatment, based on only a single feedback cycle, and shorter treatments tend to produce stronger results than longer treatments (Li, 2010). On the other hand, it was in a second language environment, where Li found smaller effect sizes than in foreign language settings.

Overall, though, I think it's a compelling paper, but this is the position I've held for years, so I'm probably guilty of confirmation bias. Here's an example of the type of feedback I provide.

Student's original text:

The animators arethe soul foundry. They are also the engineer of the human civilization.In animation industry, animation software is just vivid and lifelike tool tocreate a virtual world such as Maya, Zbrush, 3D Max and so on. However, throughthe understanding of things the animators build significant things adding theirown creativity. Ultimately they reveal people are the crystallization ofbeauty. Learning 3D animation is a good approach which includespresenting vivid expression, purifying people’s mind, and training humancreativity to everyone.

My markup:

The animators are the soul foundry. ~~They are also~~ and the engineers of the humancivilization. ~~In animation industry, a~~Animation software ~~is just vivid and lifelike~~ is the toolthey use to create a vivid and lifelike virtual world and Uultimately ~~they~~ reveal people~~are~~as the crystallization of beauty. ~~such as Maya, Zbrush, 3D Max and so on. However, t~~Through their understanding of ~~things~~ biology, physics, and human nature, the animatorsbuild these significant things, adding their own creativity. ~~Ultimately they reveal people arethe crystallization of beauty.~~ Learning 3D animation, then, is much more than learning todraw with computers. It is a ~~good approach which includes~~means for presenting vividexpression, purifying people’s minds, and training human creativity to in everyone.

Revised text:

The animators arethe soul foundry and the engineers of the human civilization.Animation software is the tool they use to create a vivid and lifelike virtualworld and ultimately reveal people as the crystallization of beauty. Through their understanding of biology,physics, and human nature, the animators build these significant things, addingtheir own creativity. Learning 3D animation, then, is muchmore than learning to draw with computers. It is a means for presenting vividexpression, purifying people’s minds, and training human creativity in everyone.

Happy dictionary day!

2011-10-16T06:30:00.002-05:00

October 16th is dictionary day in celebration of the birthday of Noah Webster, he of the famous American English dictionary. But you can celebrate any dictionary you want.

Government of Canada to change language test

2011-10-15T07:27:00.002-05:00

In a bulletin posted yesterday, the Canadian Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration gave "notice requesting comments on a proposal to require applicants to furnish upfront evidence of language ability showing achievement of at least Canadian Language Benchmark level 4 in speaking and listening with their citizenship application." The intention seems reasonable: to change from a multiple choice print test to a test more directly assessing speaking and listening. The devil will, of course, be in the details.

They are considering as system in which "administrative guidelines would provide a list of preferred language tests which are correlated with the Canadian Language Benchmarks." The problem with this is that “the benchmarks (levels) have not been empirically validated to ensure the fit of each descriptor with its level” (Vandergrift, 2006). It's hard to find tests, then, that correlate with something that doesn't itself correlate well with different language levels. At least, though, the purpose of the CLBs was specifically to address the language needs of newcomers to Canada.

There have, however, been some recent changes to the CLBs, which are being presented at next week's TESL Ontario conference. I'm planning to attend those sessions, so maybe I'll have some good news.

'Who' and 'do' insertion

2011-10-12T06:09:00.002-05:00

I've got a new "Grammarology 2.0" column up over at the TESL Toronto blog. This time, I try to help out a correspondent after someone told her that we can’t use do, does, did after who.

Seasonal deixis

2011-10-08T08:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I mentioned on Google+ that my grade-five son has a piece about horsehair worms coming out in the spring issue of Kiddo Magazine. Peter van der Woude commented, "Great" and then went on to wonder, "why do Americans always seem to insist on using the seasons to inform about schedules & releases?" continuing, "I've never heard anyone in Australia announce something as `released this Autumn' or `the Summer edition' unless it's related to sports - where the season is obvious."

It's a point I have occasionally been reminded of, but which I always seem to ethnocentrically forget: seasons are relative, just the way this, yesterday, you, and to the left are. Even though spring means the same thing to most of the English-speaking population, there are still a large number of people living south of the equator for whom spring comes around September or so.

These kinds of words and expressions are said to be deictic. Wikipedia has a good definition of deixis: "In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place."

But is it true that the Australians don't do this outside of sporting situations? I searched The Australian for instances of in the spring to see. The first hit I turned up certainly suggested that Australians are at least more sensitive to the issue.

The new iCloud, due in the Australian spring, is to be free and, among other things, it will do all the synching between your devices automatically. (link)

The Google books corpus has multiple hits for in the Australian spring, but none for in the Canadian Spring.

As was claimed, there are indeed sporting uses, but I'm not sure the season is always so obvious, especially when it's an international match.

It was possible to feel some sympathy for the hordes from India who had paid for expensive airfares and even more expensive accommodation in Barbados in the spring of 2007. (link)

Which spring is this? Barbados is in the northern hemisphere, but does it even have a spring? So does that mean we are to understand this as the Australian spring? These things can get even more complicated:

A handful of areas in Afghanistan have been stamped "green", signalling that they have been earmarked for a handover in the spring. (link)

This one is an article from the Times of London reprinted in The Australian and referring to Afghanistan. It's likely the northern hemisphere spring referenced here, but that's just a guess.

And, of course, there are examples like the one Peter complains about and claims never to have seen in Australia:

The national awards for outstanding buildings will be announced in the spring. (link)
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was published in a special Science Wars edition in the spring-summer edition of Social Text in 1996. (link)
Only 54 per cent indicated they expect gains in US equity markets over the next year, compared to 66 per cent in the survey conducted last spring. (link)
Hudson began dating Bellamy in the spring of 2010 and she announced her pregnancy in January. (link)

So, perhaps we all need occasional reminders that seasons are deictic. Thanks, Peter!

A word for the problem

2011-10-07T16:55:00.000-05:00

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen Gordon has been bemoaning the fact that current economics students don't know much about Bayesian methods. He suggests that this is a case of hysteresis, a new word for me. According to the current Wikipedia entry,

Hysteresis is the dependence of a system not just on its current environment but also on its past.

Stephen observes, "Students who aren't taught Bayesian methods almost never make the effort to learn enough to teach it when they go on to become professors." This is exactly the situation we see with English grammar: Students who aren't taught modern grammatical theory almost never make the effort to learn enough to teach it when they go on to become teachers.

Having a name for something doesn't really change much, but it's fun to know nonetheless.

Defunctionalizing nouns and verbs

2011-10-06T16:47:00.002-05:00

The NYT's blog `The Learning Network' is looking at words that are both noun and verb.

Overview | In this lesson, students play with words that can function either as nouns or verbs, depending on context.

The idea here is good, but the wording is unfortunate. Words don't `function as' nouns or verbs; that would be like saying I function as a male or a particular animal functions as a dog. Rather, the words are both nouns and verbs. You could also say they belong to both categories.

When we start to talk about function, now we're into the territory of subjects, objects, modifiers, complements, etc. If you want to dig deeper, have a look at these tree diagrams with a complete list of categories and a complete list of functions.

Demise of google labs

2011-10-01T05:55:00.002-05:00

I was watching a presentation last night, part of which was musing about the feeling that no new music genre had appeared for quite some time and, well, I kind of lost the plot after that because I started thinking about how I could check out the rise and fall of different genres using language. I started thinking that I would use Google sets to generate a list of genres and then I'd look at the frequency with which they appear in the Google books corpus over time.

But this morning, when I went to Google sets, it was gone. Not only that, but it seems that the entire Google Labs enterprise is not long for this world. This was announced about two months ago, but nobody told me about it. Anyhow, anybody know a replacement for Google sets?

40 fascinating lectures for linguistics geeks

2011-09-29T06:09:00.003-05:00

From Zoran Nesic through Google+. These lectures could potentially eat up a lot of my marking time.

Grammarology 2.0: Linking verbs

2011-09-28T06:18:00.001-05:00

My first real Grammarology 2.0 column is up on TESL Toronto's website. As promised in the introduction, it's another look at what constitutes a "linking verb".

Previous English, Jack posts related to linking verbs:
The categorization of so
The state of linking verbs

Grammarology 2.0

2011-09-26T06:20:00.000-05:00

I've started a new column for TESL Toronto which will run roughly twice a month. In it, I’ll tackle grammar questions from two viewpoints: traditional school grammar, and a more modern analysis following The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL). The introduction is now online.

Google ngrams and TED

2011-09-21T06:18:00.002-05:00

You've seen my TED talk using the Google ngram viewer, and now here's another, this time by the authors of the culturomics paper, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden. It keeps things pretty light, but the suppression of Chagall's name in the German corpus during the Nazi period was interesting.

`I' vs `the'

2011-09-17T08:41:00.001-05:00

In the Sept 3-9th edition of New Scientist, James Pennebaker discusses the individual variations in frequency with which we use pronouns and other small words, and he considers what this metric might say about our personalities and relationships. The paper version (p. 45) has a graph entitled "The real word count" with the caption "The 20 most frequently used words in the English language, across both spoken and written texts." The graph shows that I is the most common word, followed closely by the.

This prompted the following query by Mike Scott to the Corpora mailing list:

"I wrote to the author, James Pennemaker of the U of Texas, about this, expressing my surprise at the pronoun I having greater frequency than THE, as even in the spoken-only section of the BNC (10m words) we find I occurring only just over half as often as THE. His data contains a mix of spoken and written with a large amount of blog data. He reports that with all his studies in the USA and Mexico, "people always use more I more than THE. It's never close."Can anyone help here, clearing up the position? Someone with access to a really top quality corpus, more up to date and representative than the BNC?"

An interesting discussion followed, which you can see in the list archives.

Adam Kilgarriff, remarked that it all depends on text type, which is certainly true and belies the universal nature of Pennebaker's claim and that of the article graph. He goes on to say that "Asking for a more representative corpus won't help because we all have different ideas about what it should be representative of."

Thereafter commenters presented counts from a variety of corpora, which led Marc Brysbaert to observe:

Maybe we can turn the question around and use the “the/I” ratio as an index of how socially vs. description oriented a corpus is? Here is a summary of the data I have at hand.

Source	the	I	ratio

COCA (academic)	5549547	204916	0.04
COCA (newspapers)	4648992	506030	0.11
Google (books)	22914473646	2744649681	0.12
COCA (magazines)	4878925	648344	0.13
American blogs	4200000	1300000	0.31
COCA (fiction)	4534433	1576303	0.35
COCA (television programs)	4190341	1623705	0.39
Shakespearean plays	182400	239200	1.31
SUBTLEX (film subtitles)	1501908	2038529	1.36

Ken Litkowski added the following:

This discussion has focused on only one aspect of James Pennebaker's work, the 'I' frequency, and perhaps not as much on his many contributions to content analysis, which may have even more relevance to discussions on this list.

Kyle Dent of Xerox has recently performed an analysis of 2400 tweets, with the aim of classifying them into "Questions" and "Not Questions". He developed an elaborate NLP system to deal with these tweets. He kindly provided me with these data, so that I could examine them with my content analysis program to see how well they could be analyzed without all the NLP superstructure. I happened to run a first analysis at the time of this thread. It simply compares the two sets as a whole.

The corpus size is 31,000 words (hardly the stature of BNC, COCA, or OEC). But, curiously, both "i" and "the" hold the top two frequency positions in both:

Set                "the"    "I"
Questions            400    327
Not Questions        437    575

Wow! Could this be a classification signature? Although this is not likely, various other statistics in various combinations generated in the program may very well be. So, here we have a micro-genre analysis that confirms the other comments on this thread, much like the Known Similarity Corpora of Adam Kilgarriff (15 years ago!).

Sentiment analysis is an emerging field, but is currently dominated by heavy NLP techniques. I would suggest that techniques from content analysis might provide a nice complement.

As I said, you can read the whole discussion in the list archives.

"World's first" English language learning chatbot

2011-09-14T16:35:00.000-05:00

This video is actually posted on the website of the company hawking this "service". Incredibly, they're charging people to put themselves through this kind of torture.

Language Learner Literature Award Winners

2011-09-08T11:13:00.000-05:00

The first extensive reading world congress that wrapped up last weekend in Kyoto was, from all reports, a great success despite the typhoon. The ER Foundation has been posting videos of many of the talks on their YouTube channel.

The winners of the 2011 Language Learner Literature Awards were also announced, and the results are now up on their website. I've reproduced them below:

Young Learners

		*Aladdin* Adapted by Gill Munton and illustrated by Kristin Varner (Macmillan English Explorers, Macmillan Education), ISBN: 9780230719804 Judge's comment: It is amazing that this well-known story is absorbing and fun even if it is retold in very simple English.
Student comment: "Aladdin falls in love with the Royal Princess and wants to marry her. Then, can the magic lamp help him to realize his dream? Will the two have a happy ending forever? What will happen to the wizard? Following the plot, and you will find the answer. In a word, this is a book teaches us not only the knowledge, but also the truth of goodness and evil, beauty and ugliness. "

Adolescent & Adult: Beginner

		*Just so stories* By Rudyard Kipling. Adapted by Elizabeth Ann Moore and illustrated by Daniele Fabbri (Black Cat ), ISBN: 9788853010131 Judge's comment: These enchanting stories have the incantatory quality of oral literature and are simply a delight to read. Easy and engaging – the repetitions here bring the advantage of recycling and helping to memorise vocabulary and whole chunks of language without being monotonous or patronising. Gorgeous illustrations.
Student comment: "I love this book because it's fun and short. It's not realistic but it's not important, it's just a story. I like this type of story which explains the world funnily and with dreams."

Adolescent & Adult: Elementary

		*A Little Trouble in Dublin* By Richard MacAndrew (Cambridge Discovery Readers, Cambridge University Press), ISBN: 9788483235522 Judge's comment: This exciting book features a set of twins in Dublin, in Ireland, on a school trip, and a false bank note. The clever twins solve a mystery that has an unexpected ending.
Student comment: "This book is well designed for beginners. Furthermore, it is interesting and mysterious."

Adolescent & Adult: Intermediate

		*The Everest Story* By Tim Vicary (Oxford Bookworms Library, Oxford University Press), ISBN: 9780194236 Judge's comment: This was one of the more interesting non-fiction readers we have come across for a long time. It will be of interest to most young adult readers. Mount Everest is eternally intriguing, and here, the mountain itself is like a character from a novel. The mystery of the disappearance of George Mallory on the first British Expedition to climb Everest in 1921 is the narrative thread which links together fascinating information about the mountain and the challenge it has posed to climbers for nearly a century. Great pictures too.
Student comment: "The story is interesting and the pictures are good. With the real photos, readers imagine the story more specifically. I think the plot is also good. In the beginning, a dead body is found.... It makes us feel thrilled, and more curious about this book."

Adolescent & Adult: Upper Intermediate & Advanced

		*Dragons’ Eggs* By J. M. Newsome (Cambridge English Readers, Cambridge University Press), ISBN: 9780521179041 Judge's comment: Excellent storyline, very good development of characters, this story is pitched not only at the right level it will also appeal to the major target group of readership, young adults. The issues in this book will have positive, lasting effects on readers. This book is hard to put down as it takes you on unexpected paths.
Student comment: A reader said one scene in the book ‘... was so shocking that I couldn't stop beating my heart.’

Self control and Google Ngram Viewer

2011-09-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

In the New York Times Sunday book review, Steven Pinker reviews Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, a book that was already on my to-read list after the recent summary. In doing so, Pinker writes,

"Nonetheless, the very idea of self-control has acquired a musty Victorian odor. The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase rose in popularity through the 19th century but began to free fall around 1920 and cratered in the 1960s, the era of doing your own thing, letting it all hang out and taking a walk on the wild side."

Being the anal fact-checking type I am, I went straight to the Google Books Ngram Viewer and searched for self-control. Nothing. Not a single hit, which is rather strange since the hyphenated version is not so uncommon. But after playing around a bit, I found that the Ngram viewer seems to have some problems with hyphens. So here's the graph of the frequency of self control sans hyphen.

From this graph, it seems Pinker is about a decade early in diagnosing free-fall, and getting on 20 years late in placing the crater. In fact, by the late sixties, self control had gained back a good deal of its losses, and Pinker doesn't mention that by 2000 we were back near historical highs.

Maybe he's looking at a different graph. Perhaps he had more success with the hyphenated version, or he might be looking at one of the sub-corpora, say American English, or the English One Million. But none of the other graphs seem to match his description either. In fact, the British English graph tells a completely different story:

As I pointed out in my TEDx talk in June, even if we date the changes accurately, it's really not clear what fluctuations in the frequency of a particular phrase would mean. It would depend on many things including the change in popularity of synonyms (e.g., self restraint, willpower, etc.). It could indicate a shift in the frequency of the hyphenated and non-hyphenated spellings. And people can use self control both approvingly and dis-.

Despite the trouble with interpreting changes in word frequency over time, though, I predict that there will be a rise in the frequency of this trope in the media.

New Grammar App from Bas Aarts and Survey of English Usage

2011-09-04T18:50:00.000-05:00

Here's the press release:

The Survey of English Usage at UCL is very pleased to announce the publication of a new App for Apple hand-held devices such as the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The interactive Grammar of English (iGE) is a complete course in English grammar written for first year undergraduates, students at high schools and teachers of the English language. For more information see the iGE website.

The App is partly based on the popular Internet Grammar of English (still available), but thoroughly updated, revised and expanded.The App contains exercises which make use of hundreds of natural language examples taken from our ICE-GB corpus. Students can time themselves, or even, for additional 'jeopardy', complete exercises against the clock. Feedback is given on the students’ answers.

The App has been optimised for hand-held devices, with slick animations and optional sound effects.Anyone who has an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch can get the free 'Lite' version from the Apple App Store or iTunes. The complete version of iGE is also available.

We believe that this App is an excellent and fun way for students and the wider public to acquire a thorough knowledge of English grammar.We are particularly keen to know what colleagues think of the App. You can let us know by giving us a rating and/or review on the App Store. Alternatively, if you have any comments or suggestions do email us directly.We'd be grateful if you would consider recommending the App to your students.

Many thanks in advance.Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis.

I'll try to get back with a review in a few days. Feel free to bug me if I don't.

Determinative `numerous' not so new

2011-08-30T18:18:00.001-05:00

Via Geoff Pullum

A few days ago, we were discussing numerous as a determinative. Peter Reed has found a example from 1766.

Mortification of Sin implies these Things 1 Abstinence from the Practice of Evil. Lust is very fertile in Conception, and its Aim is to bring forth every monstrous Fœtus with which it is pregnant: Grace is a Check upon it, and stifles numerous of its Productions as soon as they are formed they never see the Light, nor become visible to any Eye, but that of the Soul itself, and unto the all penetrating Eye of God, who knows us far better than we know ourselves.

Lingua Franca (the blog)

2011-08-30T07:45:00.000-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting a new blog called "Lingua Franca" on language and writing in academe. The contributors are: Lucy Ferriss, Alan Metcalf, Geoff Pullum, Carrol Fischer Saller, and Ben Yagoda.

Extensive Reading Foundation Guide to Extensive Reading

2011-08-29T08:36:00.000-05:00

The ER Foundation has published a guide for teachers interested in extensive reading.

My TEDxHumber talk

2011-08-28T07:34:00.002-05:00

Back in June, I gave a talk at the TEDxHumber event. I've been waiting for an edited video, but in the meantime, I recently found that the "live stream" of the event is still available. The video is very jumpy but it's better than nothing. My talk starts about five and a half minutes into this clip.

I posted the text of the talk earlier.

Extensive Reading Foundation YouTube channel

2011-08-28T06:22:00.000-05:00

The Extensive Reading Foundation has set up its own YouTube Channel of ER/EL videos. These are links to existing videos on YouTube.

The ERF is looking for volunteers to maintain and update the site. This will include accepting new videos and uploading them, searching for videos, presentations, powerpoint slideshows, interviews and so on on other sites and soliciting new materials. If anyone is interested please contact Rob Waring.

What there's no accounting for

2011-08-27T17:04:00.006-05:00

A few days ago, I wrote,

"Here I am back trying to place a word in the right box, or boxes as it may be. I'm not really sure why I find this kind of work so engaging, but I suppose there's no accounting for taste."

My aunt, an editor by trade and vocation, queried the singularity of taste.

The cliche has tastes, which I've taken to mean: varieties of tastes, why you like one thing and I another. Taste sounds more general; we now have to account for the existence of taste itself -- why do we fancy (or dislike) things that don't affect our survival.

Or am I nit-picking again?

That makes sense. But the sense of an idiom is often hard to fathom, so let's go counting! Here are the relative the frequencies:

I wonder why, after more than 200 years of inferiority, the singular form has suddenly taken the lead. The OED has only the plural form from 1823, and asks us to compare the Latin de gustibus non est disputandum, but the English Wiktionary has only the singular. I can antedate the OED version to 1795.

Dictionary.com, meanwhile, claims, "first put as no disputing about tastes." I suppose, this is possible, but they both seem to appear at very much the same time. The earliest I could find this attested was 1785, a mere 10 years before the more common version.

So there are three versions of the proverbial phrase. Can you account for your preference?

Word Dynamo

2011-08-27T08:53:00.000-05:00

Dictionary.com has just released their updated vocabulary learning site Word Dynamo. It looks to be geared mostly to native speakers of English rather than English language learners, but there is a level setting, so it might turn out to be useful to ELLs too.

Most passive verbs in English

2011-08-26T12:53:00.000-05:00

According to Michael Rundell and Adam Kilgarriff, there are only 23 verbs in English that are passive more than half the time.

Figure 4: The ‘most passive’ verbs in the BNC, for which a ‘usually passive’ label might be proposed.

Percentile	Ratio	Lemma	Frequency
0.2	72.2	station	557
0.2	71.8	base	19201
0.3	71.1	destine	771
0.3	68.7	doom	520
0.4	66.3	poise	640
0.4	65.0	situate	2025
0.5	64.7	schedule	1602
0.5	64.1	associate	8094
0.6	63.2	embed	688
0.7	62.0	entitle	2669
0.8	59.8	couple	1421
0.9	58.1	jail	960
1.1	57.8	deem	1626
1.1	55.5	confine	2663
1.2	55.4	arm	1195
1.2	54.9	design	11662
1.3	53.9	convict	1298
1.5	53.1	clothe	749
1.5	52.8	dedicate	1291
1.5	52.4	compose	2391
1.6	51.5	flank	551
1.7	50.8	gear	733
1.9	50.1	levy	603

Multiple of the people

2011-08-25T08:16:00.002-05:00

In his post on numerous, yesterday, Geoff Pullum noted that philosopher James Dreier had sent him some examples of multiple as a determinative but didn't provide any examples. I couldn't find any in the COCA or BNC, but here are some from the web:

about a certain item, a book, that very likely implies that multiple of the people who visit your site are all set to make a purchase.
Right, except in the videos, multiple of the people putting them up are actually doing the objective
Multiple of the people I met were also in love with the spirituality in India, while others were enamored with the Architecture in India.
...recommended it include multiple of the people responsible for the Solaris Certification exams.
Multiple of the people have considered this acne skin care step as one of the most essential acne skin care pointers
The food is amazing, this is largely in part to the fact that multiple of the people crashing at the house are fabulous cooks
We were certainly approached and had discussions with multiple of the people who were awarded money, about whether or not we wanted to lock ...
You can also select multiple of the same object.
We analyzed a panel of viruses derived from HIV-1 NL43, which carry point mutations at single or multiple of the cleavage sites in Gag [24], [27], ...

As you can see in the last example, we also have a hint that single might head down that same path.

English too easy

2011-08-24T15:28:00.001-05:00

“It is fortunate if the first foreign language learned is not English. The initial, very quick and spectacular successes of English learning may evoke the false image in students that learning any foreign language is that simple,” reads a draft bill obtained by news website Origo.hu that would amend Hungary’s education laws.

More here.

The Hungarian students I've taught didn't exhibit this problem, but then again, I haven't taught many Hungarians, so perhaps it's a selection problem. Or not.

Numerous as a determinative

2011-08-24T11:05:00.000-05:00

Rodney Huddleston sends an interesting example from yesterday's Australian:

Many countries treat illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers far more harshly than Australia, and numerous impose mandatory detention, a provision explicitly provided for in the refugee convention.

Dictionaries treat numerous as an adjective, and I think that's right. The Australian is using it as a determinative such as many, which doesn't strike me as grammatical, and I can't find any similar examples. I do, however, find these, in which numerous is being used in the partitive construction, which typically requires a determinative.

2000 ACAD Monist: later additions to the first published versions of the preponderance of the earlier essays. Numerous of the former do advocate a discipline, the cultivation of a form of ability
1996 NEWS CSMonitor: Japan, Scotland, Australia, and Kenya. # LOS ANGELES # As numerous of the more thoughtful teens interviewed observed, a lot of L.A. slang comes from

They don't really work for me either though.

The categorization of `close'

2011-08-24T10:38:00.004-05:00

Here I am back trying to place a word in the right box, or boxes as it may be. I'm not really sure why I find this kind of work so engaging, but I suppose there's no accounting for taste.

My most recent target has been close. Of course, there is the verb as in close the door, and the noun meaning `the end' (e.g., the close of the day); these are clear cut. But then there are examples like these:

Closer to the end, I'll come and get you.
The bank is close to the store.
I walk to my university because it is very close by.
Put it close to the door.
She followed very close behind the taxi.

Traditionally, these would be classified as adjectives, and that would be that. But if you accept the idea of intransitive prepositions (those that don't require objects), as set out in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and put forward by Jespersen (1924) and Jackendoff (1973), among others, then number 1, in particular might pique your curiosity.

Adjectives, you see, are supposed to be predicative. In 1, for example, something should be closer to the end, in the same way that in intrigued, she examined the walnut desk, she is curious. You can't have *intrigued, the walnut desk was examined, because the syntax suggests that the walnut desk is intrigued by something and out experience with desks belies such a notion.

Adjectives simply don't work in this non-predicative adjunct function, but prepositions do. Semantically speaking, prepositions also tend to be locative, and close is certainly that. On the other hand, prepositions, aren't supposed to be gradable or modified by very, and that makes close a highly unusual preposition (near & far are in the same boat).

Adding to the confusion, Rodney Huddleston suggests to me that close by, despite having a space is actually a compound like nearby.

And then there's 5. Here, close appears to be functioning as a modifier for the preposition behind. There are a small number of prepositions that do function as modifiers in prepositional phrases (e.g., over in the corner), but perhaps it is better to consider close an adverb here since it's similar to closely, right, immediately, just, all of which are adverbs. As Huddleston also points out to me, you couldn't substitute near there.

I've tried to capture all this in the Simple English Wiktionary entry for close.

References
Jespersen, O. (1924). The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin.
Jackendoff, R.S. (1973). The base rules for prepositional phrases. In: Stephen R. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky (eds.), Festschrift for Morris Halle. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 345-356.

FANBO

2011-08-05T06:45:00.000-05:00

Further to my previous post, it turns out that the 1932 printing of Advanced English Syntax by C.T. Onions has the same passage, but the list of "conjunctions" does NOT include yet or only. The new edition that I have is a 1985 printing, but the copyright date is 1971, which is after the 1951 mention found by Karl Hagan.

Thanks to Geoff Pullum for tracking this down!

The annals of FANBOYS

2011-08-03T09:18:00.001-05:00

For some time, I've been on the trail of the origin of the FANBOYS mnemonic for what traditional grammar calls "coordinating conjunctions". I recently got a copy of C.T. Onions's 1971 Modern English Syntax: New edition of An Advanced English Syntax prepared from the author's materials by B.D.H. Miller.

Section 23, (p. 14) says,

"Two or more sentences, clauses, phrases, or single words, linked together by one of the conjunctions

and, but, or, nor, for, yet, only

are called co-ordinate, i.e. of the same rank; and the conjunctions which link them together are called co-ordinating conjunctions."

This is FANBOY with an extra o for only, FANBOYO, if you will.

What I'm wondering is whether this is the same as Onions's original list in the 1904 edition of An Advanced English Syntax. Might any of you have access to this?

By the way, unlike many later authors, Onions does notice that, "in modern English prose, for (unlike the other co-ordinating conjunctions) can link together sentences only."

[See the update]

Languages Canada Members Grant 150 Scholarships to Japanese Youth Affected by Earthquake

2011-08-02T20:29:00.000-05:00

PRESS RELEASE: LANGUAGES CANADA, JULY 21, 2011

Languages Canada Members Grant 150 Scholarships to Japanese Youth Affected by Earthquake

Languages Canada members are awarding over $430,000 in scholarships to support Japanese youth who were affected by the Tohoku earthquake in March, 2011. So far, 32 accredited language schools have offered 150 scholarships to Japanese students over the next year.

The “Hope for Youth – Study in Canada Project” is a joint program between the Embassy of Canada, Languages Canada and Samantha Thavasa Japan Ltd. The scholarships will cover course tuition and, in most cases, accommodations. Insurance for all the participants will be provided free of charge by Guard.me Health Insurance, an associate member of Languages Canada.

“Canada and Japan have a long-standing relationship in education, and our members experience every day through their interaction with Japanese students the friendship that our countries have forged,” explains Gonzalo Peralta, Executive Director at Languages Canada. “This initiative, proposed by our members, is the best way to let Japanese students know we are here for them.”

Round-trip tickets will be offered free of charge by Air Canada and Samantha Thavasa Japan Ltd for departure dates starting October 10, 2011. The list of participating institutions will be posted on the Embassy of Canada website.

Applicants must be Japanese citizens between the ages of 15 and 30 who were affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. This includes students who lost family, homes and jobs, or were evacuated due to the nuclear accident in Fukushima.

The following Languages Canada Members have graciously offered scholarships for the Hope for Youth – Study in Canada Project:

Apex Language and Career College
Canadian College of English Language
CLLC Canadian Language Learning College
Columbia College
East Coast School of Languages
Eurocentres Canada
Global Village English Centre – Calgary
Global Village English Centre – Vancouver
Global Village English Centre Victoria
ILAC (International Language Academy of Canada)
ILSC (International Language Schools of Canada)
Interlangues Language School
Lethbridge College
LSC Language Studies Canada
Maple Leaf Academy
North Island College
Pan Pacific College
PLI Pacific Language Institute
Quest Language Studies
Saint John College, University of New Brunswick, Saint John
Saint Mary’s University – TESL Centre
St Giles International
Stewart College of Languages
Study Abroad Canada
Tamwood International College
University of Alberta English Language Program
University of Windsor
Guard.me (Health Insurance for all participants)

http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/japan-japon/

Some questions about teaching

2011-07-27T18:40:00.001-05:00

These may sound like naive questions, but they are genuine:

Is it important to teach in such a way that the content of what you teach is internally consistent? In other words, does it matter if one part of what you teach contradicts other parts? For example, does it matter that many English language teachers tell their students that linking verbs are stative verbs?
Is it important to teach in such a way that the content of what you teach is consistent with available evidence?
Is it important to teach in such a way that the content of what you teach is consistent with the truth, irrespective of the available evidence?
Do the answers to these questions depend on what you teach? In particular, would teaching an exceedingly complex system, such as a natural language, lead to different answers than teaching a less complex system, such as a programming language?
Finally, why did you answer the way you did?

Rearing heads

2011-07-17T21:01:00.002-05:00

Ever noticed that when a head is reared, it's almost certain to be ugly? Ever wonder what other kinds of heads rear up? The COCA turns up the following:

prickly, wobbly, unpretty, troublesome, sultry, scaly, ready, pontificating, polychromatic, one-eyed, monstrous, invisible, interesting, impenetrable, evil, ever-changing, emaciated, contemptible, bearish, bearded, abusive, enormous

Some, like unpretty, are boring, but I quite like the image of something rearing its wobbly head.

Just in case you had wondered.

Trees and diagrams

2011-07-16T20:45:00.007-05:00

I've had reason to draw some Reed-Kellogg diagrams lately. If you've never heard of these, you can learn straight from the original source, thanks to the magic of Google books. Click on the following to get more:

You end up with diagrams that look like this:

I found a useful tool that will draw these for your automatically, and it generally does a remarkably good job. Unfortunately, when it doesn't, or if you simply don't like the way it parses your sentence, there's no easy method for changing things, so you've either got to do some clever image editing or you're back to the start.

Modern linguists generally don't use Reed-Kellogg diagrams, preferring syntax trees, which look like this:

There's also a nice tool for these, which is generally quite flexible. It even lets you do subscripts like this:

The only problem is that I like to include both a function and a category in my trees, and there appears to be no way to turn off the subscript format, so you end up with stuff like this:

You can see that instead of Obj_dir:NP, you get Obj_dir:NP. If anybody knows how to fix this, I'd be much obliged.

More on sentence diagramming from Dave Barry: "Ask Mr Language Person":

Q: Please explain how to diagram a sentence.

A: First spread the sentence out on a clean, flat surface, such as an ironing board. Then, using a sharp pencil or X-Acto knife, locate the "predicate," which indicates where the action has taken place and is usually located directly behind the gills. For example, in the sentence: "LaMont never would of bit a forest ranger," the action probably took place in a forest. Thus your diagram would be shaped like a little tree with branches sticking out of it to indicate the locations of the various particles of speech such as your gerunds, proverbs, adjutants, etc.

Q: I don't have an ironing board.

A: Well then forget it.

Cambridge Journals Temporarily Free

2011-07-15T07:43:00.001-05:00

Cambridge Journals are free for the next six weeks, no registration necessary. If you don't have access through an institution or subscription, this is a great time to catch up on some articles about language and linguistics. In particular, you might want to check out:

Clear as a preposition?

2011-07-10T09:46:00.001-05:00

Consider clear in the following sentences. Is it most like an adjective, an adverb, or a preposition?

Soon we were clear of the town.
*Soon we became clear of the town.
*Soon we were more clear of the town.
We stayed clear of the town.
Just clear of the town I find men at work in an excavation in the sand.
There was a house just clear of the town.
A two hour walk would put them well clear of the town.

Roger Ebert confuses ESL materials for native speaker materials

2011-07-08T14:40:00.002-05:00

In Roger Ebert's blog at the Chicago Sun-Times, he's completely trashed the Macmillan Readers version of The Great Gatsby (Retold by Margaret Tarner). He can't believe that this is for typical American high school students. In fact, it isn't. The book clearly says in the front matter that it's "for learners of English," but Ebert seems to have missed that part.

There are some very good arguments against badly written graded readers, but they are pretty much the same arguments against any badly written or translated book. Ebert's position seems to be something along the lines of `write all the crap you want, but don't mess with the classics.'

When it was pointed out to him that the book is for English language learners, his response was: let them read young adult fiction. This is indeed a good solution for some learners at certain ages with certain interests, and with a pretty good level of English. Contrary to what you might think, the correlation between the age of the intended audience and the range of vocabulary used is actually much weaker than you'd imagine.

(Thanks to Clarissa C.S. Ryan (who writes Talk to the Clouds) for pointing this out via the Extensive Reading Group.)

Studies about international English proficiency

2011-07-04T14:51:00.003-05:00

This appeared a few months ago in the `Johnson' blog at The Economist, but I only stumbled across it recently. It seems that a company called EF Education First, which teaches English along with other subjects, has published a large-scale international study of English language proficiency around the world. `Johnson' sums up the study and findings well:

"EVERYONE knows the stereotypes about foreigners speaking English: Scandinavians are shockingly fluent, while the Japanese lag despite years and billions of yen spent trying. Now a big new study confirms some of those stereotypes. But it holds some surprises as well.

EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries. The top five performers were Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The bottom five were Panama, Colombia, Thailand, Turkey and Kazakhstan. Among regions, Latin America fared worst. (No African country had enough takers to make the lists’s threshold for the minimum number of participants.)"

While it's great to have such a large number of participants, the problem with this study's findings is similar to claims about proficiency based on TOEFL scores: the test takers are not likely to be representative of the population as a whole. In the case of the TOEFl tests, Japanese people will take it not quite on a lark, but certainly without serious preparation, just to gauge their English level, or even as a requirement for a job application. In countries that don't have such a test-philic culture, as much disposable income, or as easy access to the test, it's much more likely that people will wait until they feel confident before taking the test.

In the EF study, the test takers are also self-selected. As `Johnson' points out, "they were by definition connected to the internet and interested in testing their English; they will also be younger and more urban than the population at large." So, at least, the study may be comparing similar groups in different countries, but it's hard to know what to make of that.

The history of English in ten minutes

2011-06-29T20:16:00.000-05:00

A witty series of shorts from the Open University:

Amirite?

2011-06-26T19:50:00.002-05:00

Tag questions were the topic of a recent edition of "The word" in the Boston Globe, a column shared by Jan Freeman and Erin McKean, now of Wordnik. Writes McKean,

Some days it seems that the most common kind of understanding is misunderstanding: Every conversation — not to mention each e-mail, IM, or text message — is rife with opportunities for crossed circuits and hurt feelings. There’s no end of advice about how to avoid miscommunication: Keep things simple. Take your time. Be aware of cultural differences. But missing from all these communication-helper lists is a little linguistic tic that most people use every day: the tag question.

You know what tag questions are, don’t you? Tag questions are those little questioning upticks, usually found at the end of a sentence — like that don’t you? — that grease the conversational wheels.

Tag questions often feature in English language classes too. The Azar series treats them in their Fundamentals (black) book. Other topics addressed there are such things as: using how, prepositions of time, and expressing ability with can and could. So clearly this is considered a fairly basic topic.

The frequency of negative tags such as isn't it? in the google books corpus shows some interesting patterns. (Note that the scales differ from graph to graph.) The most common are those with be:

Followed by do:

Not surprisingly, present tense are more common than past tense:

The most common modal is won't:

And a few laggards:

In almost all cases, there's one pronoun that is far more common than than the others, usually it and you: isn't it (aren't you), don't you, didn't it, won't it, wasn't it, haven't you, can't you. Perhaps these should simply be taught as units without any internal or systematic analysis, at least at the beginning.
Tag questions seem to have peaked in popularity around 1940. It would be interesting to see how things have changed since 2000. (The google data isn't reliable past then.)
Altogether, negative tags seem to occur perhaps 700 times per million words in published books. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English shows that they are about four times as common in conversation, and positive tags (e.g., is it?) are about one fourth as common as negative tags (p. 212).
While that's common, it's not all that common, nothing like can/could which, together occur about 240,000 times per million words, or how, which occurs about 50,000 times per million words (not all occurrences of these are the basic usages dealt with in the Black Azar.)

Status

2011-06-22T13:56:00.000-05:00

Today, English, Jack hit one of those meaningless and yet somehow notable milestones: 100,000 unique visits. I often wonder who these people are and how many of them really intended to end up reading about English, but I hope we've interested, entertained, and instructed a few of them. We've been at it since July of 2006, about a month short of five years. This is post #475. And according to Alexa, there are about four million blogs that are more popular than this one.

Just in case you were wondering...

In spite of a lot of evidence

2011-06-21T20:44:00.009-05:00

Some grammar books will tell you that a lot of is a determiner (e.g., The Grammar Book, p. 330). The problem is that these books haven't decided what they mean when they say something is a determiner. They haven't made a clear distinction between the category (e.g., noun, adjective, preposition, etc.), which I'll call determinative, and the function (subject, object, modifier, etc.), which I'll call specifier, and they tend to shift back and forth between them unwittingly.

Beyond that, though, there are many reasons to doubt that a lot of is a constituent of any sort. There are good reasons to think it's just three words that happen together a lot... um, I mean frequently. Syntactically, it differs from other combinations like a collection of, or a treeful of chiefly in that in clauses like a collection of tables was surrounded by African twig chairs, the verb typically will agree with leftmost noun, in this case singular collection, while in a lot of things have changed since you ran out on me, Ginger, the agreement is with the noun following of.

But in other respects, it's very much just any article + a noun + of combination:

the noun can be singular or plural (i.e., a lot of / lots of...)
the noun can be modified (e.g., a whole lot of...)
the string is ungrammatical without the final noun (e.g., a lot of people were mad, and *a lot of went home.)
the of can be fronted (e.g., it's known as `acid flashback,' of which a lot has been documented.)

Nevertheless, they do happen to occur as a group very commonly. In fact, in the Google books corpus, about two thirds of the instances of a lot are followed by of, and roughly the same proportion holds for the plural variant.

In a recent issue of Language Learning dedicated to complex adaptive systems, Joan Bybee and Clay Beckner argue that in spite of has become a complex preposition, not a preposition-noun-preposition string. Essentially, you've got similar arguments going there except that this time it's fronting that doesn't work (you can't say *the problems of which in spite...) and the whole string makes up about 99% of all instances of in spite instead of just 2/3 as above.

Bybee and Beckner conclude that: chunks become words over time, these relative frequencies are important pieces of information showing how wordlike a chunk has become, and that semantic meaning is similarly important. They argue that the CGEL rejects these last two ideas explicitly, and I understand them to mean that this implies a rejection or at least conflicted acceptance of the first. Moreover, they argue that "If we look at the full range of usage data, it is in fact unquestionable that in spite of has a mostly fixed status, and this fixedness must be acknowledged by a complete theory of constituency."

I think that last part is fair. Yet certainly the CGEL acknowledges some kind of gradient. For example, chapter 7, section 6.1 is "Meanings of prototypical prepositions". Similarly, on p. 1289, we find: "as so often, however, we find that while the central or prototypical cases of coordination and subordination are sharply distinct, there is no clear boundary between the peripheries of the constructions and therefore some uncertainty concerning the precise membership of the category of coordinators."

So it seems that both parties see the need to acknowledge some levels of intermediacy, even if they disagree on what the desiderata should be and where the line should be drawn. It seems to me that if you can take something apart and put it back together again, then, it must have some internal structure, regardless of how rarely you actually do so. Nor do I see any particular advantage in reanalyzing in spite of as a complex preposition. It also has to be mentioned that Bybee and Beckner give us their take on a single case, but no guidance on other cases. And finally, it's much more likely that a Prep + N + Prep would have a similar distribution to uncontroversial prepositions such as in than it is that, say, a + N + of would have a distribution that is overall similar to other determinatives. They've chosen their test case carefully.

Elsewhere, Bybee argues that "that fact that semantically, on top of functions as the opposite of under (a simpler preposition), or that in spite of is paraphrasable by despite are indicators that these originally complex expressions have taken on a unitary status" (Language, Usage and Cognition, p. 143) But following this argument, we could lump all night, for two hours, and continuously into the same category (adverb?). The same goes for on time and late. But now we're right back at our category-function confusion.

Errors and noticing

2011-06-19T09:35:00.011-05:00

Yesterday I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the constraints around the type of relative construction in the following sentences:

This is the town that I grew up in.
That's the room that we're going to use.
This is the town where I grew up.
That's the room where we're going to have the party.

It may seem obvious at first, but it's very difficult to describe a rule that covers all situations. But that's not what I set out to write about today. The point is that in trying to figure it out, I was reading and rereading the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, struggling to get all the relevant information to gather together in one part of my brain and make sense together.

It's times like this, when I'm kind of confused, that I'm likely to notice small things, and yesterday I noticed two (in one day!) tiny errors in the CGEL. The first was on p. 1045 [32] iii, which looks like this: They want to go to the place_i [where_i they went last year ___i]. In fact, the gap should be between went and last. The second was on p. 1050 [53] iii, which looks like this: She often climbed the knoll behind the mission_i, [from where_i she could look down on roofs and people]. Here, the underlined NP should include the the.

These are not the first errors I've found in the CGEL. You can see all the known errors listed here. I found the ones on pp. 219 (which somebody else actually found first), 620, and 912. Which puts my tally at 4.5 or thereabouts out of the 62 known errors. Of course, I'm sure I couldn't have found any of these if I'd had no idea what I was reading, but equally, I don't think I'd have found them if I'd been confident about what I was reading either. There's that optimum level of understanding where I'm struggling to get it, and it's there that things are most likely to catch my attention. As I was discussing this over breakfast this morning (a delicious father's days fruit salad and pancakes), my mother mentioned a sentence she'd run across in the Booker prize winning The Gathering by Anne Enright from this passage on p. 14:

It was five past seven. The talk in the foyer was of rain, and what to do with the jarvey and whether refreshments would be required; after which the knot of arrivals was pulled in a string through the front lounge door, and the two servants were left behind to wait; she in her neat chair, he with his elbow on the high reception desk, like a man standing at a bar.

In which position, they stayed for three and a half hours.

They belonged to the lower orders. Waiting was not a problem, for them.

Ada did not pretend to notice him, at first. This may have been the polite thing to do, but also I think he would have had it from the start, this trick of not existing much. And the rages he suffered in later life must have been, in 1925, the usual run of passions and young hopes. If Nugent suffered from anything, in those early days, it was decency. He was a decent man. He was not a man much used to hotels. He was not used to women who showed such twitching precision in the way they worked a glove. There was nothing in his history to prepare him for Ada Merriman. But, he was surprised to find, he was ready for her all the same.

The sentence in question is the first in the final paragraph. What in the world could it mean? Does she notice him or doesn't she? And does she later pretend to notice him? But how could you possibly pretend to notice someone unless you have actually noticed the person? Is this an error, and if so, what kind? Is it an error in the scope of negation (should it be Ada pretended not to notice him, at first.) or in vocabulary (Ada did not deign to notice him, at first)? Or is it intentional? On p. 16, we find:

But it is too late for all that. It has already happened. It happened when she walked in the door; when she looked about her, but only as far as the chair. It happened in the perfection with which she managed to be present but not seen. And all the rest was just agitation: first of all that she should notice him back (and she did-she noticed his stillness), and secondly that she should love him as he loved her; suddenly, completely, and beyond what had been allocated to them as their station.

What is it with all this noticing?

Ben Zimmer at the Boston Globe

2011-06-17T21:21:00.001-05:00

At the Boston Globe, `The Word' is usually written by Jan Freeman, but she's recently been sharing duties with Erin McKeen, former dictionary editor. Now Ben Zimmer, late of the NYT Magazine's `On Language' column seems to have joined the team. He's got a nice piece in Sunday's paper (yes, I know it's not Sunday yet, but that's the date on the article) about dictionary definitions. Check it out.

NSA style guide

2011-06-13T20:22:00.001-05:00

In case you're a style guide aficionado, you might want to know that BoingBoing has just released a PDF of the US National Security Agency's style guide which was acquired under a freedom of information request. It includes such models of clear style as:

absolute adjectives...

According to purists, a few adjectives have no comparative or superlative modifiers. These include eternal, fatal, incessant, maximum, minimum, optimum, complete, perfect, and unique.

(U) In fact, most adjectives cannot be compared because their meaning is too technical or specific, or they name a quality that cannot exist in degrees. Examples are diocesan, antinomian, aquatic, graven, and electromagnetic.

(U) Adjectives expressing qualities are never compared when used in their strict sense. When used in a modified or figurative sense, however, they have been and can be compared.

(U) Actually, respectable writers have used qualifiers through the centuries for many of the so-called absolutes. The U.S. Constitution, for example, includes the phrase "to form a more perfect union." Here "more" is used to mean "more nearly."

(U) Therefore, if you are using these adjectives in a figurative or modified sense, go ahead and modify: Sandy has a more complete understanding of Hegelian philosophy than anyone else I know. If you are using them in a literal sense, do not modify: There are no perfect humans.

(U) See the entry for unique.

And we discover that "accept means `receive with consent' or `approve of': He accepted the nomination. He could not accept the situation. It should never be confused with the verb `except'." Feel free, though to confuse it with the preposition except.

It is, however, very reasonable about the passive voice: "(U) While the active voice tends to be shorter and more direct, there are good reasons to use the passive voice. Do not use a hard-and-fast rule (`Avoid the passive voice') but consider each case carefully before deciding which to use."

Lots more to dig up here.

The last and the most important word

2011-06-12T18:49:00.000-05:00

How are we to analyze the two instances of the in the title? On p. 395, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language deals with the and the superlatives. It takes the in examples like this point is [the most important] as being a determinative functioning as a modifier. It differentiates this from examples like this is [the most important point], where it is a determinative functioning as a determiner (aka specifier) in the noun phrase. But what happens when you coordinate superlatives as in the title? Which the is the specifier?

Presumably, it would be the first one, since the specifier would precede any modifiers. But why does the second superlative require the modifier while the first doesn't?

Being selling

2011-06-11T23:54:00.002-05:00

A while ago - in fact, a few years ago - I saw this and wondered, 'Being selling? - hmm':

It occurred to me that this 'being' might be a typo for 'begins'. Still, I thought 'being selling' made sense to me (if not appropriate in the given context).

When I saw the headline "Touro College accused of being selling grades and degrees", I was more confident that this was an instance of nonfinite progressive BE. But then, when I follow the link to the original article, the interesting construction is nowhere to be found.

I don't know about you, but I happen to think that being doing something, as opposed to doing something, is a wonderful stretch of the English verbal system. Why don't people do this more often?

Over three decades ago, Halliday spoke of this as a gap to be filled (in 'On Being Teaching', which you can see cited here). My question is, is the gap being filled now? Or would I be accused of being filling the gap too forcefully?

Per + bare NP

2011-06-03T15:53:00.002-05:00

I just noticed two things about the preposition per. It is usually followed by a bare singular noun phrase (i.e., one with no determiner aka specifier). This is odd because singular NPs almost always require a specifier unless the head noun is a proper noun. We say, take one pill per day, not *take one pill per a day or *per days.

But even more interesting is that sometimes it is followed by plural noun phrases, almost always specified by 100, 1,000, 100,00, etc. (e.g., The abortion rate had dropped from nearly 30 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, to less than 2.) And then when we speak this, we typically say per thousand women, instead of per one thousand women. So is thousand functioning as a specifier in thousand women?

By the way, you do find examples like a 0.75 ERA and an average of 15 strikeouts per seven innings, but these are rare.

Repeated discussions

2011-06-03T10:18:00.001-05:00

Another activity post:

Many years ago, Paul Nation, one of the nicest people in language teaching, though now retired, introduced me to the idea of the repeated discussion, or what he calls the 4-3-2 speaking activity. You can see him describe it beginning at about 7:30 in this video:

Briefly, each student has something to talk about (graded readers are good topics for mid-level students and TED talks are interesting for higher-level students). They partner up and then have four minutes to do their talk. Then they get a new partner and do it in three minutes, and finally they repeat it a third time with yet another partner in two minutes.

I've used this many times, and though there are often a few students grumbling about the repetition, it's usually hard to shut them up at the end of each turn. It's obvious to anyone listening that fluency increases from one turn to the next, and Nation mentions research showing increased accuracy and complexity to boot. One thing I've always wondered, though, is whether this transfers to other topics.

My own reading suggests that achieving transfer is really hard, not just in language learning, but in almost any endeavour. So I was intrigued when I saw that Nel de Jong and Charles Perfetti had looked at Nation's activity and specifically at the question of transfer. Their study, Fluency Training in the ESL Classroom: An Experimental Study of Fluency Development and Proceduralization, is now available online from Language Learning. Here's the abstract:

"The present study investigates the role of speech repetition in oral fluency development. Twenty-four students enrolled in English-as-a-second-language classes performed three training sessions in which they recorded three speeches, of 4, 3, and 2 min, respectively. Some students spoke about the same topic three times, whereas others spoke about three different topics. It was found that fluency improved for both groups during training but was maintained on posttests only by the students who repeated their speeches. These students had used more words repeatedly across speeches, most of which were not specifically related to the topic. It is argued that proceduralization of linguistic knowledge represented a change in underlying cognitive mechanisms, resulting in improvements in observable fluency."

More importantly, I thought, "Hypothesis 2 was supported, in that fluency improvements were maintained over 4 weeks and transferred to new topics, but only in the two Repetition conditions" (p. 559). This is wonderful news, and certainly something I plan to share with my students in the future.

The only problem is, I can't say I fully understand the study design. I've read the procedure section a number of times, but I haven't carefully read the paper from start to finish. I'll try to get back to this when I do.

Words as a measure of hope

2011-06-01T17:00:00.003-05:00

Here's the talk I gave today at TEDxHumber as scripted. (Of course I deviated in the actual talk, which I'll link to when it goes online).
------
[Update: the video is here]

Ezra Pound wrote, "A man's hope measures his civilization." But how do you measure hope? Words are part of the conference theme, so I'd like to start with words and then see where that takes us.

A collection of texts, and therefore words, is called a corpus: body. You might have an image of linguists as being scrawny geeks, but we've actually got some of the biggest bodies around. The somewhat sinister sounding Linguistics Data Consortium has Gigaword corpora. That is they've collected texts that altogether run over a billion words in length.

Unfortunately, you've got to pay for access, but a growing number of corpora are available for free through a variety of search tools connected to graphics, just as Hans Rosling called for back in his 2005 TED talk. Mark Davies of Brigham Young University has been leading this charge and just last month released his new query engine for the Google Books corpus.

The Google servers contain what might be the single biggest publicly available collection of words in one place, if we can think of those servers as a place. And one element of this is the Google books corpus, which is especially neat because we can see how the frequency of words changes over time.

This kind of resource is important. Linguists used to go around introspecting and asking each other questions like: "So, Otto, does I wish I was sound grammatical to you or must we say I wish I were?" But now, we can easily look and see what people has been writing. So here's the result of a query of the Google books corpus from 1800 to 2000 comparing I wish I was in blue to I wish I were in red.

You can see that in published books over the last 200 years, both have been common, and we'll take that as evidence that both are grammatical. No need for navel gazing. The other neat thing you see here is this century-long rise, up to a peak in 1900, followed by a long decline. Mark Liberman, linguist at U Penn and founder of Language Log, has wonderfully called this the "great Victorian wistfulness bubble."

But getting back to hope, I thought we'd start by looking for hope there in the Google books corpus, and this is what we find: the frequency of hope in books published between 1800 and 2000.

Doesn't look like a very happy picture does it. The 1830s appear to have been a hopeful time, but there follows a long slow drop. It slides here heading into WWI and then stabilizes for almost 20 years, dropping again in the lead up to WWII. Since then there have been brief plateaus but hope has never recovered. Are we loosing hope?

We may be, but, as the theme of this conference reminds us, there's more than words.

Google “no word for hope” and you’ll find claims that Japanese and Korean, Abenaki and Kickapoo, Ukranian, Portuguese, Tamil, even the Dom language of Papua New Guinea, all lack this word. This is supposed to tell us something about these cultures, signifying, variously, their optimism or pessimism, their stoicism or joy, their wisdom or their folly. The problem is that it’s all nonsense: the self-contradictory interpretations make a mockery of any such argument, and in any case, the languages do not actually want for ways to express hope.

I’ve asked speakers of these languages (or people who study them), and it seems clear that they all have ways of saying hope. Sometimes it's a single word, the Japanese 希望 (kibo), or the Ukranian надія (nadiya). Other times, it takes a bit more to say hope. Andrew Pawley, an expert in the language family called Trans New Guinea, told me, "many of the verbal expressions Kalam has for emotions are not single words but fixed phrases. It would be a mistake to equate vocabulary with words."

A mistake indeed, but a common one. What the writers of these blogs, books, and articles that we've Googled up here have in common is a belief in the power of words. Not in the sense of “the pen is mightier than the sword” power of words, but in the sense of that single-word fetish that Pawley warns against. But more than that, these pundits hold the not-so-unusual idea that having a word, a single word as opposed to a phrase, to represent a concept, means that concept is somehow important to that society.

The flip side of this is the notion that any language having no word for a given concept must evince a cultural deficit, a philosophical paucity, a native neglect. An absence, a dearth, a dereliction, a failing, an insufficiency. With all those words for doing without, English must be a meager culture. But then again, we have as many words for plenty, so what does that tell us?

And with all the thousands of words to choose from, our pundits seem to settle on the particular words that fit their just-so stories, oh best beloved. Nothing is made of the fact that English has words for cuticle, semitone, or hook. Nor does anyone notice that we lack a direct translation for 水 and お湯, Japanese words which mean cold and warm water respectively. My wife, a native speaker of Japanese, finds it amusing when I say 水が熱い, roughly the cold water is hot.

The most famous expression of this meme is the claim that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. Now there are a number of points to address here. First of all, I'm not trying to be offensive. I know that here in Canada, we generally favour Inuit over Eskimo, but Eskimo is a language family that includes more than just Inuktitut, and despite what you've heard, it probably doesn't mean `eater of raw fish'. But more relevant to my talk, there's no evidence that they have any more words for snow than English does.

The facts of the matter, though, as they so often are, seem to be beside the point.

The point is that people don’t care how many words there are for snow. They have an argument, and they want to support it. Counting words can be interesting, but we've got to be careful what conclusions we draw from them.

So, with that warning, coming back to hope, I'll assert that every culture has a way to say it, even if it's not a single word. But how often do they use it? Do we see the same loss of hope around the Babelsphere as we saw in English? Here's the data for the Russian word надежда (nadezhda).

Again, a dramatic drop as we saw in English. Is there a pattern here? What about the Spanish esperanza?

Still a drop, but not the halving was saw in English or the 70% plummet in Russian. And then there's French espoir:

Nothing interesting here folks, move along, move along. German Hoffnung? Again little change. By the way, I don't speak all these languages, if that wasn't clear from my pronunciation.

So, it's a good thing we didn't stop after three languages. These apparent patterns can be beguiling. I'll throw up one more graph here, the simplified Chinese 希望 (Xwàng):

Now obviously this is some artifact of the data collection. Maybe Google didn't scan many books published before 1920, or they could have their dates wrong, or perhaps this has to do with the timing of the Simplification of the Chinese writing system.

Whatever it is, it's a good thing. It reminds us that these graphs are just shadows, hinting at some idea we've called hope. There are many reasons to mistrust them. And there are many reasons to think that simply counting words might not get you to the truth.

Take the Republicans south of the border. They've got this ongoing meme where they count the first person singular pronouns—I, me, my, etc.—in Barack Obama's speeches, the point being to show how full of himself the first black US president is. Washington Post columnist George Will, for example, counts 70 first person singular pronouns among the 89 sentences spoken by Michelle and Barack Obama in their address to the Olympic committee, promoting Chicago's failed bid.

The problem is that Will offers a count but no comparators. Is that a lot? Mark Liberman decided to find out. He compared the three most recent US presidents' first press conferences and who do you think used the most first person pronouns?

Obama, Bush, Clinton

2.65%, 4.49%, 3.14%

Bush in a knockout.

So comparators are obviously important, but you can't just compare anything willy-nilly. Cosma Shalizi, at the University of Michigan, draws a wonderful analogy to measuring buildings using their shadows. If you measure all the shadows at the same time, you can get a good idea of the relative differences of the building heights, but measuring building shadows over the course of a day or year as the sun shifts around overhead tells you nothing interesting about the changes in the heights of the buildings over time.

This brings me back to the idea of hope and our graphs. What does it really tell us if the frequency of the word hope in English books is declining over time? I don't honestly know, but perhaps a better understanding of the word would help.

Once again we can turn to the corpora. The linguist John Firth once said, "You shall know a word by the company it keeps." What company does hope keep?

The top five verbs coming directly before hope in the Corpus of Current American English are: lose, give, offer, bring, and restore. Yes, the list starts with lose, so maybe it's a good thing that we don't speak of hope much if all we can talk about is losing it. But when you start digging down into the data, what you find is not just "I've lost hope" but also "don't lose hope," "we will never lose hope," or "we cannot lose hope."

If there is a pattern there, a metaphor, it is that hope is a gift or perhaps a treasure. We use it to bring happiness to others. Hope is fuel. Where we see loss or emptiness, we use hope to restore or replenish. Hope allows us to move on, which touches on another fundamental human metaphor: forward is good.

But practically speaking, going forward is not always good. It also involves barriers, traps, and indeed despair. And in trying to help and bring happiness, we can do a lot of damage. Many a patient has been killed by a well-meaning, but uninformed doctor. And many ecosystems have been destroyed when the gift of a seemingly beneficial species proved ill advised. Kudzu, a plant in the pea family, was brought to the southern US in the hope of controling soil erosion. It has done so admirably, but has at the same time taken over, smothering everything in its path. A gift is not always a treasure.

So what of hope: good or bad? It's probably linked to happy thoughts, but even here it's not clear that happy thoughts are linked to long-term happiness. Psychologist Dan Gilbert, who has done a lot to advance our understanding of happiness, says that he always connected them, "but we were wrong. People who are `here and now' seem happier than those who aren't." Could it be that hope takes us out of the here and now and thereby makes us less happy?

Finally, there's the possibility that hope might make individuals happier, while at the same times making them complacent and leading to societal decline.

By now you're thinking I'm a worse vacillator than Hamlet. For God's sake, Brett, make up your mind. But that's really the problem. Too often we make up our minds without exploring all facets of the problem.

This can't be said of Humber's own Wendy O'Brien, who has looked a lot at the question of hope. In reminding us of the distinction between hope and optimism, she shows us that optimism may be a happy future feeling, taking us out of the here-and-now, but hope grounds us, compels us to action, to beginnings. This is, she says, why James Orbinski of Medecins sans Frontieres can claim to be hopeful but not optimistic. These are arguments about how people use hope, and what the word means, and, while I find Wendy's arguments compelling, I also think corpus data could be useful in examining them further. There is more to learn about hope.

But as my time is near its end, I would like to leave you with one last graph to consider, for while hope may be one measure of our civilization, surely another is need.

Thank you.

TEDxHumber talk

2011-05-25T19:03:00.001-05:00

I'll be giving a TED talk at the independent TED event being organized by a bunch of Humber folks. My topic is "Words as a measure of hope". Details follow:

Assembly Hall
1 Colonel Samuel Smith Park Drive
Toronto, ON, M8V 1K8
Canada
More about the venue »

June 1st, 2011
9:00am-5:00pm (GMT -4hrs)

Event Type (what is this?)University

This event is open to the public. Tickets are available.
Ticketing policies vary by event.

RSVP below to confirm availability with event organizer.

Attend

Engineering interaction

2011-05-25T18:56:00.002-05:00

Here's a quick idea:

Sometimes my students are more focussed on their textbooks and handouts than on interacting with each other. Let's say we're working on something like this:

Match the word with its definition and with the most appropriate sentence:

adaptation, successive, innovation, termination, displacement,

arbitrary, reinforce, denote, offset, predominantly

1. (countable & uncountable) ~ is the act of ending something.

2. (countable & uncountable) ~ is when something is made to move out of its place.

3. (countable) An ~ is a change to fit a different situation or the result of that change, especially when a story goes from book to TV or movie.

4. (transitive) If x ~ y, the loss (because) of y is balanced by x.

5. (transitive) If x ~ y, x is a sign of or has the meaning of y.

6. (transitive) If you ~ something, you make it stronger.

7. (uncountable) ~ is the process of making something new and original.

8. ~ things follow in order, one after another.

9. An ~ decision, date, manner, etc. has no logical reason for it.

10. mostly, mainly

a. Cancers were developing at younger and younger ages with each ~ generation in each family.

b. He is also disabled and requires special ~ to his home.

c. Her work during this period was ~ concerned with children learning to read.

d. Let's take 10,000 as an ~ number.

e. Our company has stayed in the lead largely by encouraging ~.

f. Recent mistakes only ~ the view that nobody cares.

g. The school will provide limited scholarships to ~ the cost of tuition.

h. The term `sales mix' is used to ~ the percentage of total sales of each product.

i. The war has caused the ~ of tens of thousands of people.

j. We will continue to do business in Asia even after ~ of the Japan program.

This is a fairly dull activity if you're doing it individually, but it becomes much more useful if you interact with somebody else, discussing your guesses, explaining words to each other, and generally being helpful.

Of course, many factors such as classroom atmosphere, personalities, and time of day will affect the amount of interaction, but one easy way to increase it is simply to make copies for only half (or one third) of the class and hand them out accordingly.

(All definitions and examples from Simple English Wiktionary.)

Proved/proven

2011-05-20T06:51:00.004-05:00

There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about the past participle of prove. I regularly notice the NY Times waffling between has proven and has proved, sometimes even from one paragraph to the next, as in this article:

Ryan’s medical update on Sanchez seemed to carry an underlying message. Sanchez has proved to be a much better quarterback this season than he was as a rookie, when Ryan made a point of not relying on Sanchez to win games on his own, especially in the playoffs.

Now that Sanchez has proven he is more capable of playing his position."

The traditional past participle is proved, which is much more common than proven in the UK even today. But in both British and American English, proven has been gaining ground, especially since the 1970s, and in the American section of the Google books corpus has all but pulled abreast of proved.

Frequency of past participles of prove in British section of Google Books corpus.

Frequency of past participles of prove in American section of Google Books corpus.

BTW, any theories about those humps around the ends of the two world wars?

Some teaching activities

2011-05-19T14:53:00.001-05:00

Though I conceived English, Jack as "second thoughts on English and how she's taught," it seems I do a lot more thinking and writing about English than I do about how it's taught. I'm not really sure why that is, but the bias is quite obvious to anyone who reads a few posts. Anyhow, recently a number of ideas have come together and I've tweaked a few activities that I use, so I plan to explain a few of them over the next few days.

One almost-universal characteristic of reading or listening texts is that they come with a set of comprehension questions. This presentation suggest two obvious options: do them for homework and take them up in class or spend some quiet time in class answering them and then take them up in class.

Of course, there are other ways to deal with them. One that I like is to print each question in large type on its own sheet of paper with the answer printed on the other side, and to hand these out one per student. When there are more students than questions, I print out more than one set.

Each student then spends a few moments understanding the question and the answer (This should facilitate accuracy and complexity in the answer). Then everyone stands up and finds a partner. Student A asks B the question while showing it. A is not allowed to simply show it or to read it. This should promote grammatical accuracy in asking the question since A has seen it and knows B is looking at it.

Next, B attempts to answer. If B is successful, A indicates as much. If, however, B is unsure, or doesn't know at all, A becomes the teacher and explains the answer to B. Having already see the/an answer A is likely to feel the authority and confidence to take on this role. When B has understood, B repeats or paraphrases A's explanation. When B has answered the entire exchange is repeated with B in the asking role. Finally, A and B exchange papers and find a new partner. In this manner, they move from student to teacher and get the opportunity to revise the question immediately, which should promote fluency.

The problem with this is that students don't have to come up with the answer themselves. It's given to them. That's good as a confidence builder and a way to support interaction, but it's bad in that they may not attend fully to it. Their easy success may also give them the idea that the task is not particularly difficult, leading them to become overconfident and perhaps not study as hard as they should.

I attempt to overcome these problems by having students repeat the activity a day or two later. The difference is that this time no answers are provided.

The exact opposite

2011-05-17T18:56:00.006-05:00

"It's all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there's your caterpillar. More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head... Meanwhile the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling.

"If I can't see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Well, today I saw one. It was in an essay by So Hyun Park, one of my students. She wrote, "soon I faced the exactly same situation as Barry Schwartz."

"Of course that's what she wrote!" I thought. "Why wouldn't she?" Adverbs modify adjectives, and same is an adjective, so you would naturally expect *the exactly same. The correct form, though, is the exact opposite.

What we have here is a situation in which one adjective exact modifies another same. This is by no means unique in English, but its rare enough that few have noticed it and even fewer will admit it. John Payne, Rodney Huddleston, and Geoff Pullum discussed it in a paper that came out last year. But as far as I know, nobody, including P, H, & P, have documented this particular case.

What makes it even more interesting is that it seems to be in alternation with another odd construction: exactly the same situation, which is notable because we have the noun phrase the same situation being modified by an adverb exactly.

And the best part of all is that it appears that this is a bit of a pattern. There are a number of adjectives that function as head in this construction:

the exact same/opposite/right/correct/appropriate/wrong

Although exact is overwhelmingly the most common modifier here, other adjectives do function as modifiers:

the exact/identical/precise/approximate/absolute same thing
the exact/extreme/complete opposite view.

Much less common, but still attested in modifier function are: diametric, absolute, total, & entire. And most of these appear to be in alternation with the -ly adverb in external modifier position:

exactly/identically/precisely/approximately/absolutely/completely the same outfit.

The only exception I've noticed is that you don't find *extremely the opposite position.

Dillard goes on, "`As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you will see deer.' But the artificial obvious is hard to see." It really is hard to see these things that are right in front of us, but it's easier if you have good students.

PS. Rodney Huddleston now points out that this is the same alternation that happens with superlatives:

absolutely the best result vs the absolute best result
approximately the best solution vs the approximate best solution

Google Books Corpus with BYU interface

2011-05-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

Mark Davies has now provided a new way to search the Google Books corpus. That would be the 155 BILLION word Google Books Corpus. His interface allows you to search not just for simple strings, the way the NGram viewer does, but to search by part of speech (e.g., you can search for hit the + NOUN). You can also get all the inflected forms of a word. For example, instead of searching separately for hit the fan, hitting the fan and hits the fan, you can just search for [hit] the fan. You can also discover collocates. For example, if you want to know what words typically come within two words after vicious, Bob's your uncle.

There's lots more fun to be had here if you explore. I think my afternoon just got all booked up.

Applied linguists just aren't serious about statistics

2011-05-11T20:33:00.000-05:00

I'm not a statistician myself, and I've never published a quantitative study, so I'm not claiming any higher moral ground here, but it's sad to see just how lax our field is when it comes to statistical reporting. In the most recent issue of Language Learning, Plonsky and Gass consider 174 studies investigating the result of students interacting with others in the target language.

"Reliability estimates are one area that, although not perfect, have been reported very well (compared to other areas of SLA research; see Norris & Ortega, 2000; Plonsky, in press). Most other statistics have been reported either insufficiently or unevenly across the sample of studies. Although almost all of the studies reported using statistical tests (see Table 5), only 25% reported setting a pre- determined level of statistical significance, 2% reported the results of a power analysis, and only 3% (five studies, three by the same author, McDonough) reported checking the assumptions of their statistical tests. A somewhat larger portion of studies reported statistical significance as an exact p-value (44%) as opposed to greater or less than a particular p-value such as .05 (61%). However, these figures appear low, again, in light of the very high percentage of studies in the sample that employed statistical tests. Furthermore, reports in this area are not only inconsistent in the aggregate; 46 studies (26%) reported both exact and relative (i.e., < or > ) p-values. Means and standard deviations were presented in 64% and 52% of the studies, respectively. These figures are also somewhat low considering the frequency of studies employing mean-based statistical tests. Moreover, those data also indicate that 12% of the studies reporting means did so without reporting the standard deviations of those means. Along these same lines, we also see that the percentage of studies reporting t values and f values was only 26% and 32% (compared to 40% of studies reporting t tests and 39% reporting ANOVAs, ANCOVAs, and/or MAN[C]OVAs). Other statistics coded for were confidence intervals, reported in only five studies (3%), effect sizes (including d values and η² for mean differences, phi coefficients for χ², r² and Cramer’s V for correlations; 18%), and whether an effect size (Cohen’s d) could be calculated from data in the report (41%). Finally and perhaps most surprisingly, 5% of the studies in the sample did not report sample size."

The prevalence of first-person pronouns in books

2011-05-10T10:46:00.014-05:00

There has been a good deal of discussion recently about C. Nathan DeWall et al., "Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics", Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3/21/2011. Mark Liberman (here) and Cosma Shalizi (here) have done a good job of explaining what's wrong with the paper and with the media's uptake.

I wondered what we would find if, instead of song lyrics, we looked at books, in particular the Google Books corpus (which, by the way Mark Davies appears to have received access to, tagged, and formatted for his usual interface. Look for an announcement on the BYU corpus site tomorrow.)

Given Liberman's and Shalizi's clear explanations of the problems with interpreting these, I won't even hazard an attempt, but I will point out that I recall reading somewhere that the Google books data post 2000 is less reliable (which is why the default cutoff date is 2000). Unfortunately, I can't find that now. Nevertheless, the sudden upswing for I, my and me are the most dramatic features of this graph, along with their long, gradual decline from 1800 until the 1980s.

For comparison, here are the other independent genitive pronouns (I've omitted his and its because the dependent and independent genitives share the same shape and her because it shares its shape with the accusative. Also, note that your is both singular and plural.)

And here are the nominative pronouns (again, excluding those that share a shape with others).

This suggest that a any increase in first person pronouns may be somewhat an artifact of English books returning to more pronominal language overall rather than specifically becoming more first-personal.

Complementing an adjective

2011-04-19T08:06:00.001-05:00

There are very few examples of English adjectives that take noun phrase (NP) complements. The CGEL lists four: due, like, unlike and worth.

Prepositions typically take NPs as complements (e.g., up the ladder) as do linking verbs (e.g., It remains a difficult problem.). Adjectives don't do that, at least not typically. But we do have the few listed above, for example: he's very like his mother or it's worth the world.

The reason I mention this is that Rodney Huddleston brought one to my attention yesterday morning: underweight. (Geoff Pullum has already blogged about it here and I've added it to the English Wiktionary.) The example that he sent is: "It's a long-run trend of foreign investors -- typically being underweight the banking sector in Australia," Mr Baker said.

To most of us who aren't in finance, though, this will sound rather odd. You may even have a burning desire to put an in between underweight and the the. But as Geoff points out, you can find lots of other examples in the financial papers if you go looking. It's feature, not a bug.

As I was marking essays this morning (which is what I should really be doing now), I realized this is another piece of evidence that to-infinitives do not "function as nouns" despite the common claim that they do. The fact is, English is endowed with plenty of adjectives that take to-infinitives as complements, (e.g., able to, likely to, hard to, etc.) In none of these cases can an actual NP take the place of the infinitive. Moreover, of the adjectives that actually do take NP complement, only due takes to-infinitives complement. Even then, the meaning of due somebody is not the same as due to go.

So what do these to-infinitives function as? Oh, this and that: mostly subjects, adjuncts, and of course, complements in adjective phrases.

Dismissive "thing"

2011-04-07T10:02:00.002-05:00

Again, following up on a Mark Liberman post, "The thing thing", this morning, I went looking for early instances of the dismissive use of thing, as in I'm not too keen on that vision thing. The first clear instance I found was from a 1914 playscript by Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, The Movie Man. Referring to the planned execution of Fernandez, Devlin says, "Don’t forget to have Gomez postpone that shooting thing."

I also searched the COCA and COHA for [th* NOUN thing], which obviously has other uses, and came up with the following time and genre distributions, which are, I suppose, pretty much what you'd expect.

I've also added an entry for this meaning in the English Wiktionary.

Bas Aarts, grammatologist

2011-03-31T09:56:00.003-05:00

Oxford has recently published the Oxford Modern English Grammar by Bas Aarts. It is a relatively slim and accessible reference grammar at a reasonable price. It is modern both in that it looks at modern English and that it takes account of modern linguistic description. If you find the CGEL daunting, this might be a good alternative for you. Although Aarts has not adopted all the innovations in the CGEL, he does follow it in many respects.

Interestingly, Aarts is described on the OUP website as "one of Britain's leading grammatologists." This word was new to me, but when I looked it up, the OED has, of grammatology

The study of writing systems and orthography.
Literary Theory. The critical analysis of the relation between text, spoken language, and meaning.

As far as I can tell, neither of those descriptions applies to Aarts, a linguist who seems to focus on syntax. Any guesses?
[Update: April 4. The word has now been changed to grammarian. I guess it was just a mistake.]

Needs and aspirations

2011-03-22T07:24:00.002-05:00

This is just a quick graphic followup to Mark Liberman's recent discovery of the Great Victorian Wistfulness Bubble. Make of it what you will.

hope, wish, want, desire, need

Radical Radiational Pragmatics - Japanese Nuclear Edition

2011-03-21T09:47:00.003-05:00

Like everybody else in Japan (or elsewhere), I have been reading and hearing about radiation levels around the troubled nuclear power plant. It cannot really be good news - I mean, what do you expect from a nuclear plant that has been hit by a huge earthquake, and then by a massive tsunami. There have been a couple of explosions. Radiation levels keep going up. Meanwhile, tap water in the area has been found contaminated; so have milk and spinach now.

But it is not like the end of the world, really. The whole incident is pretty much confined to that particular area. You just want to know the facts - just how things are.

And that's exactly what we are not getting from Japanese officials. You are all sympathetic at first: yeah, of course things are chaotic. But now, over a week later, you start wondering, what the hell is this, really?

They repeat abstruse phrases like 'The radiation level is higher than what is considered safe, but it is not critical, so it should not be a matter to be concerned'. But of course they themselves are concerned, which is why they are telling that to everybody in the first place. This is a remarkably interesting use of language.

As I was listening to yet another strange official statement, I was reminded of a passage from Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which goes like this:

'I know you don't mean any harm. But there's just too much talk like this. I hear it all the time, it's been allowed to go on, and it's not right.... The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.'

I think there is a little more than the Gricean maxims business in this 'telling and not telling'. In any case, it is not working; am I witnessing a Japanese pragmatics meltdown?

More possessive than...

2011-03-15T14:44:00.000-05:00

Language Wars: the Empire Strikes Back

2011-03-09T00:57:00.002-05:00

The Language Wars: A History of Proper English by Henry Hitchings is out now. It is one of those books that I would definitely like to have a look at. You can take a look, and even watch the author talk about it here.

I would love to order a copy right now - a Kindle edition if possible (please!) - but here is the thing: it is available only in the UK right now, as far as I know. Not yet in Japan, in the US, or in Canada. Why, oh why? Is this the British Empire striking back?

This is not the first time, and I have never got used to this. Yes, I can order one from amazon.uk. Yes, I can sort of understand it takes time to put ink on paper. But why not just release a digital version internationally?

OK, at least I have something to look forward to. And you know about the book now. That's good.

Or is it "Turk"?

2011-03-07T07:11:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I thought I'd scored a bit of a coup by finding the earliest known use of jerk to mean a stupid person. But Ben Zimmer posted it to the American Dialect Society mailing list, where Doug Wilson suggests it's Turk, not jerk. Listen here and tell me what you think.

I can't find an authoritative source for the lyrics. The web certainly prefers jerk to Turk by about a factor of 10 to 1. But there's the book, Nowhere in America: the Big Rock Candy Mountain and other comic utopias, which claims to use the lyrics by permission of McClintock's estate, and it has Turk.

[Update, March 9: Royalty Recovery Inc negotiated the royalties for McClintock's estate for the O Brother album. Sadly, Jeff Gandel from Royalty Recovery confirms that the original lyric is Turk. Oh well...]