Complementing an adjective

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"

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

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

1. The study of writing systems and orthography. 
2. 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

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

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...

Language Wars: the Empire Strikes Back

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"?

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...]

Antedating "jerk"

[Update, March 9: This post about jerk was the result of my mishearing of Turk, so there's no antedating. See here for details.]

Another musical antedating! Last year, as I was working away with music in the background, something in the back of my mind went sproing, and I realized Art Blakey had just used I'ma in an unexpected way. I notified Mark Liberman who brought it up on Language Log.

Just now iTunes threw up Harry McClintock's 1928 recording of "Big rock candy mountain", which contains the line, where they hung the jerk who invented work. "Hey," my mind said, "I'll bet that's a very early recording of the word jerk." So I hied myself over to the OED website to check it out.

The FBI and splitting infinitives

John Markoff has an interesting article in yesterday's New York Times about the legal uses of natural language processing. Apparently, companies have begun using software to scan documents and e-mails for information relevant to legal cases rather than pay for hundreds of thousands of lawyer hours.

A word for these kinds of words

From the Jan 22 issue of New Scientist's "Feedback" column:

AT THE end of last year, Alastair Beaven asked if readers had examples of people using words in a novel sense without knowing their original meaning - and he wondered if this phenomenon has a name (25 December). He gave the example of an interpreter in Afghanistan who knew about viruses in computers, but not about biological viruses.

Mandating the subjunctive

The other day at the school council meeting, the principal of my kids' school told us that the board "mandates that there is" ...I forget. I was just struck by that is. Even knowing full well about the decline of the subjunctive, that sounded weird, so I made a note to follow it up and then tried to refocus on the topic at hand.

Another "Grammatically Speaking", another error

In this month's column Leo Schmitt takes up a question about relative pronouns, who or whom.

And gets the answer wrong.

Vocabulary, reading, and hockey sticks

Yesterday, the Modern Language Journal published new online content, among which was an interesting paper entitled "The Percentage of Words Known in a Text and Reading Comprehension" by Norbert Schmitt, Xiangying Jiang, and William Grabe. (The preprint is available for free on Schmitt's website.) It's a very readable article, clear in its description of the procedure, and well worth reading.

More on semicolons

Mark Davies has fixed the COCA and COHA, so I can now look more closely at historical uses of semicolons. Click here for a chart. It tells pretty much the same story as yesterday's post, but you can click it and find the actual usages from each decade (or even year if you care to drill down that far).

Enumerating the semicolon

The semicolon has an interesting history, which is traced rather well by Paul Collins in his 2008 Slate article. I thought I'd go back and have another look at some of the numbers, which can now be calculated with somewhat better reliability. 

This graph demonstrates the rise and fall of the semicolon in English. Its popularity peaked right around 1800 at just shy of 1% of the words. That is to say there were almost 10,000 semicolons per million words. That's a little more common than is is today.

Frequency of semicolon use (Source: Google Books Ngram viewer)

Train your brain to be a memory athlete

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article by Joshua Foer on memory training. It documents how he went from a reporter looking for a story to a participant to a the new U.S. record holder in speed cards (a memory event in which you memorize the order of a deck of cards as fast as you can).

The method he uses is the art of memory, roughly the method of loci combined with dramatic images. He mentions Dr. Yip Swee Chooi, an interview with whom you can see here. In the interview, you can see how Chooi makes connections between sounds and images.

Prescriptivist Today

If you are reading this, then you may be interested in Deborah Schaffer's article that appeared in a recent issue of English Today, entitled 'Old whine online: prescriptive grammar blogs on the Internet'. I'll say no more; go ahead and take a look if you haven't: here is a link to the journal article, and here is a direct link to the article itself in PDF.

Semantic Categories and Context in L2 Vocabulary Learning

In one of my earliest posts, I discusses how the fine work of Endel Tulving has been misunderstood by many in ESL, leading to vocabulary lessons that group semantically related words together. This is a problem because, as I wrote at the time, the semantic connections can cause the individual concepts to lose distinctness, leading the learner to confuse which word stood for which concept.

A study just published in Language Learning (online) has looked again at this issue in an interesting way and, while supporting this main conclusion, that semantic connections can lead to confusion, also might have run afoul of the same mistake in reasoning described above. Here's the abstract:

David Paul's blog

David Paul has done, perhaps, more than other single person in the last decade else to support English teachers and English teaching in Japan. Now he's started a new blog. In his first post, he talks about his creative process in writing textbook dialogue.