Shibboleth

John McIntyre, the Baltimore Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk (long title), in shooting down complaints about a split infinitive, writes

It is a "rule" created by grammarians that has no foundation. H.W. Fowler, writing 80 years ago, and Theodore Bernstein, writing 40 years ago, made plain that opposition to the split infinitive is a mere shibboleth.

To me, a shibboleth is a pronunciation or other linguistic peculiarity that marks its user as belonging to a given group. It refers to the episode in Judges xii:5-6.

5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;

6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

The American Heritage Dictionary provides this definition:

1. A word or pronunciation that distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another. 2a. A word or phrase identified with a particular group or cause; a catchword. b. A commonplace saying or idea. 3. A custom or practice that betrays one as an outsider.

But clearly this is not the sense that McIntyre has in mind. Of the AHD definitions, only 2b might fit in the situation, but saying that something is merely a commonplace idea is not an attack on its veracity.

Merriam Webster gets closer.

1 a : a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning shibboleths come rolling off their lips -- Joseph Epstein> b : a widely held belief shibboleth is a myth -- L. A. Wood> c : TRUISM, PLATITUDE shibboleth that crime does not pay -- Lee Rogow>
2 a : a use of language regarded as distinctive of a particular group shibboleth of social class -- Vivian Ducat> b : a custom or usage regarded as distinguishing one group from others shibboleth, its hour dividing mankind -- Osbert Sitwell>

1a is almost what we're looking for, but "opposition to the split infinitive" is nether a word nor saying. Interestingly, the three learner dictionaries that I consulted all provide definitions that match McIntyre's use exactly:

• an old idea, custom, or principle that you think is no longer important or suitable for modern times -Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (this is the only sense they define)
• 1 an old idea, principle or phrase that is no longer accepted by many people as important or appropriate to modern life: the crumbling of old political shibboleths -Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
• If you describe a popular idea or belief as a shibboleth, you mean that it may be meaningless or wrong although many people believe it -Collins COBUILD English Dictionary.

(Whether this proves it or not, British ESL lexicography is really leading the field.)

The Online Etymology Dictionary explains, "Figurative sense of 'watchword' is first recorded 1638, and it evolved by 1862 to 'outmoded slogan still adhered to.'" The interesting thing about McIntyre's use is that it may help us see how shibboleth got from there to here. Use of the split infinitive by one group is used as a shibboleth by another (we have progressed from slaughter to mere disparagement.) However, a third group looks at this test and points out that the shibboleth has no factual basis.

It makes a good folk etymology at least.

English, Jack in the second century

This is just a gratuitous, self-congratulatory, self-fulfilling remark to recognise that English, Jack now features over 100 posts.

3500 or so English grammar rules

David Crystal has been blogging for about five months now. In one of his recent post, he explains his assertion (not to be taken too seriously) that there are 3500 English grammar rules. It's a factoid I think I may pass along to students if the opportunity arises--with caveats, of course.

Today's most unfortunate analogy

This morning, Federal Environment Minister John Bair, speaking on CBC's The Current, said that if, in the future, the new climate-control plan doesn't appear to be doing enough, "we can always put our foot on the gas."

Flick off campaign

Driving in this morning, I heard a number of Ontario's politicians on the CBC complaining about the new anti-global warming flick off campaign promoted by Environment Minister Laurel Broten. The campaign is targeted at teens and young adults, and it's just a bit too edgy to be appropriate, they say.

On the radio, the link between flick off and fuck off didn't jump out at me at all. When you look at the stylised logo, however, it becomes clear that the association is intentional.




The website also includes heading such as "ARE WE FLICKED" and "GO FLICK YOURSELF".

I can't say I find it offensive, but it does strike me as gratuitous and puerile.

Foreign Languages at Drake University

An article from Inside Higher Ed, describes the drastic changes in Drake University's approach to teaching foreign languages (note, this doesn't seem to apply to teaching English). In their DULAP program, they have removed most of their language faculty and replaced them with native-speaking informants.

Before they begin their language studies, students take a course in language-learning strategies, taught by a faculty member. This, I think, is a great first step in a situation where you have many speakers of one language planning to study other languages. It would be much more difficult to implement in a many-to-one situation like ESL, especially with low-level students, but we already try to incorporate some of this in our program here, admittedly, at a very limited level.

After that, students meet their native-speaking informants regularly in groups of 5 (4:1). This is certainly a great opportunity and is something else that would prove popular and useful in most schools.

Of course, the contentions are around the role of professional faculty, specifically regarding accountability and quality. Not all the faculty is gone. There remains a skeleton staff. The program is supervised by a faculty member, and faculty also act as a consultants to the students and oversee their progress. Presumably they are in charge of assessment and grading, if such is part of the program.

But I think that removing most of the faculty is drastic and unwarranted. It devalues their role as anything but instructors (I assume that the informants are not carrying out research duties.) And it ignores much recent research showing the value of judicious instruction in grammar and vocabulary (again I assume that informants are not doing this kind of teaching.) All in all, it does look very much like a move motivated largely by the cost-savings.

The interesting part is that it seems to have been the university faculty themselves who voted to scrap the old structure. This likely speaks to the low regard in which the teaching and learning of languages are held. I know this is confounding TESL and the teaching of foreign languages, but few universities in Canada or the states give credit for English language classes. In fact, many English language programs are completely ancillary to the rest of the university. They often have no professors, only instructors, many of whom have only an unrelated B.A. and a TESL certificate.

Getting back to foreign languages, it would be interesting to see a program that combines the best of DULAP with the more traditional models. That, however, would probably cost more money, not less, so it's not likely to appear any time soon.

English, Jack = State?

On a narcissistic search for blogs that link to this one, I typed in [link:english-jack.blogspot.com] and Google's Blog Search asked,
Did you mean: State

I can't get it to replicate it though...

(Oops! I tried again and this time they ask, Did you mean: rugby)

Extensive Reading Awards

This from Tom Robb:

Every year, the Extensive Reading Foundation recognizes the best new graded readers in English. The finalists for the 2007 Language Learner Literature Award were announced last Saturday at the IATEFL Conference in Aberdeen, Scotland (see list at the end of this message).

The ERF solicits teachers with students who can help evaluate the finalist books. This year the Award will be given in four categories: Young Learners, and three categories for Adolescents & Adults: Beginners, Intermediate, and Advanced.

In cooperation with the publishers, the ERF will arrange for two copies of each finalist book in one category to be sent to ten teachers per category who meet the following criteria:

1) The teacher or school has an extensive reading class or program in place to which the supplied titles can be added.
2) Students can read, evaluate and vote for the books by the July 20 deadline.

Students who read all the books in the category may directly cast their vote at the URL at the end of this message. Alternately, groups in the class, or the class as a whole may discuss the merits of the books and cast a group vote.

To apply, send your request to trobb@cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp stating the category for which you apply, with a brief description of your class, the number of students and their general reading level. Include your postal mailing address and contact telephone number. In the event of more than 10 teachers applying in one category, we will select for balance of country and geographical area. Preliminary decisions will be based on requests received by May 5, 2007 but requests after that date will still be honored for any categories that have fewer than 10 recipients.

We apologize that the timing of this announcement may preclude the participation of classes in parts of the world where the school year is about to close.

The finalist books in each category are:

Young Learners (3 books):

"The Boy Who Burped Too Much" (Stone Arch Books); "The Goose Girl" Classic Tales Elementary 2 (Oxford University Press); "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" Classic Tales Elementary 2 (OUP).

Adolescents and Adults

* Beginners (3 books): "Blog Love" Scholastic Readers Starter Level (Mary Glasgow/Scholastic); "Let Me Out" Cambridge English Readers Starter Level (Cambridge University Press); "The Story of Chocolate" Easyread Level One (Black Cat).

* Intermediate (4 books): "Crossroads to Love" Teen Readers Level 3 (Aschehoug/Alinea); "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" Penguin Readers Level 3 (Pearson); "Rabbit-Proof Fence" Oxford Bookworms Library Stage 3 (OUP); "Strong Medicine" Cambridge English Readers Level 3 (CUP).

* Advanced (2 books): "The Age of Innocence" Bookworms Library Stage 5 (OUP); "Barchester Towers" Oxford Bookworms Library Stage 6 (OUP).

See The Extensive Reading Foundation for further information about the LLL Award and how you may order your personal copies of the finalist books.

I haven't read any of these books, but I'll be ordering the adolescent and adult ones for our library.

Ordinate tests

I received this e-mail recently:

I am the assessment teacher of the Calgary Board of Education. My job is to assess the English level of new immigrants from all over the world who come to Canada and then recommend a grade level for them to attend school. Last year our department (of 2 teachers) assessed over 2 thousand students! We have about one hour or so for each student. Can you suggest some "quick and dirty" assessment tools for elementary and / or secondary students?

I asked around and John H.A.L. de Jong suggested what seems to be the closest thing to a solution: Ordinate's Versant test (keep in mind that John works for Pearson Language Assessments, the competition [In 2008, Pearson acquired Ordinate, so John likely had his eye on the acquisition at the time of his recommendation.]). This 10- to 12-minute test is done over the telephone or using a computer and is automatically scored. It is designed for K-12. Although there is likely to be a lot of skepticism about it, there has been a lot of research gone into validating the test (though I can't find any validation data for anyone under age 12) and it has been adopted by the Dutch government, which has concluded that in its use there is "no difference between human and machine scoring".

I remember seeing Jared Bernstein, Ordinate's president, explain his products at a JALT conference about six years ago. Everyone in the room wanted desperately to believe him, but most of us couldn't really bring ourselves to do so. When I actually tried out their PhonePass test, though, I was quite impressed with the results.

Bernstein said at the time that they had a longer version of the test, but it was no more accurate than the shorter version. Still, they made it available as a security blanket. The other odd thing that I remember about it was that the scores were out of some odd number like 13 (that may not be right). Their current tests report scores in the range from 20 to 80, but it seems to me that score users would prefer scores out of 100.

For Better Grammar or for Worse

Is "good grammar" really that difficult to learn? I suppose it depends how far your primary dialect diverges from the target dialect. There's probably a Goldilocks distance. If your dialect is already very close, you're less likely to notice any differences. If, on the other hand, it's too far away, then there will be many things to learn.

This is likely to be true in both directions. But it will depend on a certain awareness of your own dialect as being distinct. I've never been able to identify a Canadian merely on their pronunciation of out or about, but I've been tagged as Canadian because of it a goodly number of times--and by people who have far less interest in language than I do.

ELT Business News

A few notables from the corporate world of English Language Teaching:

1. Lado language schools in Japan have gone bankrupt. There are rumours that the union had just reached some sort of deal with the management days before the bankruptcy.
2. It seems that Thompson Learning, will be bought out by Bertelsmann.

Both items via ELT News.

The frogs are singing!

No, nothing at all to do with English. Just a beautiful spring evening.

Slant Room

Excitement about my brother's first collection of poetry, Slant Room, being accepted for publication by Porcupine's Quill (PQL)! It's not coming out until 2009, mind you, but that's the pace at which these things proceed I'm told. In fact, Michael had been shopping the book around for well over a year but had received few responses. A fortuitous exchange with Zachariah Wells at Career Limiting Moves, though, led to an offer within days.

Michael has won numerous awards including Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and the John Haines Poetry Award from Ice-Floe. He was also shortlisted for the 2005 CBC Literary Award. You can read his poem "Translations of Willow" here, and "Castor Gulo (poem of a beaver becoming a wolverine)" here.

I enjoy his adventurousness with language. One of the distinctive ticks of his style is bold anthimeria, as in this excerpt:

The tightship freshet lifeboats overboard to sea,
floats the saltlick surface glassy green.

Or this:

The hinge of ladder stepped
beneath the window kilters on the grass, and flies the woozy
shadow from the kitchen trying to stop it

Kilter, now there's a good verb. In practice, and in Michael's poetry, anthimeria mostly takes the form of making verbs from nouns, or verbing.

He also plays with licensing nonstandard complements, for example, by using intransitive verbs transitively, as he does here:

The houses round the cul-
de-sac are gutted, all the windows smashed,
poplars suckering the yards.

It would be nice to have some more intact poems to look at. I'll try to convince him to let me put a new piece online.



By the way, it seems that there are too many people with the name Michael Reynolds out there and he's considering using "Michael E. Reynolds" or "Michael Eden Reynolds." Any thoughts?

Sequencing vocabulary

Bob Parks is an educational lexicographer with Wordsmyth. He was exploring the idea that

"a less frequent term might be more important (to receive attention in an ESL class) if it is a superordinate of other more frequent terms whose similarity/semantic relations might not be obvious...

The point is that although "fruit" might be less frequent than "apple" or "pear", it could be considered more "important" because it acts as a vessel into which other instances can be organized and remembered. And conversely, "apple" may be more frequent than "pear" but equal in its "importance" for vocabulary learning."

My feeling is that although his idea is intuitively appealing, it depends on choosing the right examples. As a general rule, hypernyms will be more common than their hyponyms (up to the point of abstraction*). Fruit occurs 40 times per million words in the BNC, while apple occurs only 26. Cooking apple turns up but once, and newtown wonder (a kind of cooking apple) occurs not at all. If we take this the other way, food comes in at 187. This certainly looks like a good rule of thumb.

But it isn't the only possible relationship. If we look at rhetorical tropes, we get a very different pattern. Metaphor scores 9 to figure(s) of speech's 0.5 and trope's 0.18. If we drill down, we get mixed metaphor, dead metaphor, frozen metaphor and synesthetic metaphor, all of which are necessarily less common than metaphor itself.

I think it would be a tough job to convince anyone that trope is a more important word to teach than metaphor merely by dint of its being a direct hypernym. Nor would you get many takers for zeugma or synedoche just because they're sister terms. I don't think it is semantic relationships that matter but frequency.

*When I say "up to the point of abstraction", I mean that once you get higher than 'food' you start dealing with more abstract concepts like substance, matter, or physical entity, none of which are likely to be particularly common.

Theyaculpa

Marvin Kitman takes a humourous look at the recent paroxysm of American apologies.

"Wow. What was going on here, I asked myself. Was this National Apology Week?

The guilty were standing up and taking the blame for mistakes. It was Mea Culpa, instead of the usual Theyaculpa, where the culprit blames the media or anybody else."

Indeed, mea culpa is often preceded by theyaculpa. (There's more ~aculpa play on Language Log.)

Fading eh?

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The Toronto Star has an article about the retreat of the Canadian eh. It was prompted by a study (summarised here) by Sali Tagliamonte, a sociolinguist at the University of Toronto.

The article compares the frequency of I, and, like and eh in the speech of Torontonians, concluding that eh occurs "only" 519 times "accounting for a piddly 0.02% of the total."

Well, Zipf's law tells us that the percent of the total for any given word drops off very quickly. Let's look at a more meaningful measure. First of all, we should standardise our count. In Tagliamonte's corpus, 519 times is 228 times per million words. Now we can rank that against other counts, such as the frequency of words in the spoken conversation subcorpus of the British National Corpus. Doing so would put eh at the 364th most common word, right between everybody and paper. Not so piddly. On the other hand, eh in the BNC is almost twice as common, occuring 460 times per million words, or ranking 236th, so maybe the unique Canadianess of eh is questionable.

Tagliamonte's research just looks at eh at one point in time, so it's hard to make strong claims about any changes, but in an attempt to get around that problem, she's looked at use at different ages. The following chart is from her site:

I'm not sure what exactly the left axis is a percent of. Most likely it is a total of all the tags, but unless the age groups sample sizes were balanced, this could be hard to interpret. [April 17th, I now have confirmation that it is total of all tags, and that the sample sizes were balanced.] Whatever it is, it seems that eh is very unpopular among 17-29 year olds. Does that mean that eh is changing over time, or just that people prefer different tags at various stages in their lives?

For more about the meaning eh, see Mark Liberman's post here.

Verbless clauses with garden paths

CHRYSLER RECALLS PT CRUISERS. Chrysler Group
will begin recalling 38,500 PT Cruiser sedans next month to
replace rear quarter glass with defective fasteners that can
allow the glass to fall out.

With can be a complement to the verb replace in the form replace x with y. It can also occur as a comitative adjunct ascribing a property to another entity. In other words, it can mean x that has y. The latter is certainly the intended meaning, but it wasn't the one that first jumped to mind.

I often suggest to lower-level students that they combine two sentences, such as those below, using with.

• I have a nice watch. It has three buttons on one side.
  
• Becomes: I have a nice watch with three buttons on one side.
  

Generally, you can do this with a simple sentence that has have as the main verb. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls these "verbless clauses" because they have subject + predicate structure.

Clearly, though, it's not always the best choice, as Chrysler's recall notice shows.

Clogging your machinery of comprehension in Mauritius

English language education seems to be decried the world over. Mauritius is no different. Writes Raj Paneken,

"The downward trend in English language is attributable to three factors, namely grammar errors, usage of correct tenses and vocabulary spiced with orthography. With an anaemic vocabulary along with a sketchy knowledge of grammar and verbs, the student writes but gropingly."

Rote learning & vocabulary

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Over on the TESL-L list there has been a renewed round of skepticism about the value of rote learning as applied to vocabulary learning.

Before the idea that language acquisition is an innate human ability became widely accepted, rote learning was among the most common methods used by people studying foreign languages, just as it was and still is for acquiring a wide variety of other knowledge and skills. The innateness theory, however, led people to believe that language was somehow special and different, and rote learning fell out of favour. However, language is not the inseparable entity that this idea suggests. Phonology, syntax and vocabulary are all interrelated, but the learnability of each is different.

When researchers talk about an innate language ability, they are not talking about vocabulary. There may be a critical period for acquiring syntax and phonology, but vocabulary is not constrained in this way. Indeed, while a normal child of six has mostly mastered the syntax and phonology of their first language, they have learned only a fraction of their adult vocabulary and will continue to pick up new words and expressions at a fairly constant rate until they complete university. Even then, the deceleration in vocabulary learning has more to do with the dearth of new words in the environment than with the brain.

What I take from this is that vocabulary is learned more or less like any other kind of knowledge or skill. If you look at experts in most areas, from golfers to chess players to doctors to painters, they have spent massive amounts of time observing other experts, massive amounts engaged in the performance of their craft, and massive amounts of time practicing independent aspects thereof, that is learning by rote. This suggest that rote learning, done well, potentially has a significant role to play in learning vocabulary.

The difference between learning chess or painting and learning a language, is that with the first two, you can actually try them out almost right away. You may lose your first five chess games, but you will have spent an enjoyable afternoon doing so. Moreover, most people have no expectations of mastering chess. They're quite satisfied to stay at or near the level at which they began. Not so with language.

Comparatively speaking, there is much more needed in terms of second language vocabulary before you can really start to employ it either receptively or productively. And many people have this notion that they will one day be fluent in the language that they are studying.

Yet far from receiving an instant payback, language learners often find the horizon of proficiency receding into the distance as they progress and the tedium of rote practice begins to overwhelm them before they notice their results. People trying to exercise and be healthy run into similar problems.

This is a long way of saying that all the research we have tells us that rote learning, DONE WELL, is a powerful way to increase vocabulary quickly, but that it is only the disciplined student with sufficient motivation who is likely to travel this route very far.

In my Language I am Smart

Language Hat links to this 2005 audio-art piece by Serbian-born journalist Dragon Todorovic. Anyone who has had to function in another language knows exactly what he means.

Goldilocks

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Mr. Verb's Mr. Verb (variously characterised as mysterious, enigmatic, and ever-vigilant) ended a recent post about the line "Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for intermission. Please intermiss" with the apt observation that intermish would have been too odd and intermit too bookish, but that intermiss was "like Goldilocks' third bear said: 'just right'."

I think my first encounter with the Goldilocks trope was quite recent, and at the time I found it rather arresting. It seems that I wasn't alone. Recently it has been been spreading like a bad BBC science story. Just to make sure this isn't a recency illusion, I did a quick search of Canadian news sources.

The oldest instance I could find was: "The food fits the Goldilocks formula: not too good, not too bad, just right" in The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Aug 25, 1979. pg. P.7 by Adele Freedman, who used it a number of times in the late 70s and early 80s.

The trail then goes cold until the late 80s when we find: ''I call it the Goldilocks approach _ not too big, not too small, but just right." in The Ottawa Citizen. Ottawa, Ont.: Dec 6, 1988. pg. D.16 by Tony Atherton. From then on, there are a few hits a year, but more and more of these are in titles, such as "Goldilocks jury finds sentence is just right"; [Final Edition] The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Feb 11, 1989. p. A.7.

Most recently, there have been multiple uses per month, one example being "Goldilocks scenario proves right tonic for stocks" John Heinzl. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Feb 1, 2007. p. B.15. And a Google news search for [Goldilocks "just right" -"three bears"] turns up multiple hits per week.

Perhaps Paul Davies' book, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?, which came out in 2006, is one major vector for the recent popularity of this trope. Or not.

The thing that makes the Goldilocks fad, amusing though it is, rather ineffective is that the allusion itself doesn't appear to be very Goldilocks; it's too opaque to dispense with its accompanying "just right".

Bain on rhetoric

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My weekend encounter with Alexander Bain reminded me of my second posting on this blog. At the time, I mentioned my confusion about the writing instruction that was part of our EAP program. When I came to my current position, our 8-level intensive English language program had upper-level students write "extended paragraphs" of 300-500 words. These were not merely monster paragraphs forming part of an assignment; each was to be a complete mini-essays.

We've managed to move away from assigning paragraphs, but there are many other questionable rules of writing that continue to permeate college writing textbooks and seduce composition teachers. Alexander Bain appears to be behind a number of them.

According to James A. Berlin's Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, paragraph writing (as opposed to composition broadly speaking) got its start in the (North) American college system in the 19th century at a time when college writing was growing in popularity--growing to the point where many classes had daily compositions. The move to paragraphs was partially as a response to the overwhelming amount of marking required from longer compositions. Berlin writes,

"Alexander Bain, a Scottish rhetorician, was the first to discuss the (paragraph) systematically. Having studied actual paragraphs, Bain prescribed a set of six rules:

1. Each sentence must be related to that which preceded it;
2. parallel thought must employ parallel structure;
3. The first sentence of a paragraph should indicate the subject;
4. Each sentence should be appropriately situated within the paragraph;
5. The paragraph must display unity, and;
6. Principal and subordinate parts must be appropriately arranged...

Bain also tended to look upon the six rules as principles without exception, as did those who followed him in their use in the classroom."

He goes on to say that A. D. Hepburn, under Bain's influence, was likely the first, in his 1875 A Manual of English Rhetoric, to argue that a paragraph was a “discussion in miniature”, proposing paragraph types such as definition, contrast, and illustration.

Bain on restrictive relatives

Over at Language Log, they've taken to calling the restrictive that rule "Fowler's Rule". And from what I recall, Merriam Webster's Usage also attributes this to Fowler (1926).

I was trolling Google books for more on coordinating conjunctions, when I came across Alexander Bain's An English Grammar (published in 1863 by Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, one of the various incarnations of Longman). A section in the introduction caught my attention (click for larger images):

This is followed up on p. 23 with the following:

Interestingly, in the examples that Bain supplies to show how which can be ambiguous, he seems to completely overlook the comma, which--at least from this twenty-first-century viewpoint--removes any trace of doubt at all.

So, even if Fowler popularised the rule, Bain claims it as a novelty over 60 years earlier.

The Same in Japanese

Kieran McGovern edits a web site with reading material designed for English language learners. He was recently asking around for materials, so I sent him a short story that I wrote with a language-learner audience in mind. The story, called The same in Japanese is here. If you use it with your students, please let me know what the reaction is.

With 'should', expect the best

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Someone over on the ETJ list asks how to explain the problem with should in the following sentence: If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should die. The intent is not to express some kind of moral outrage about Bombardier, but to suggest that their airplanes are likely to drop from the sky at any moment. Yet, that's not how most native speakers of English would interpret the above.

I'm not really sure why this should be so, though I believe that it must depend to a certain extent on the ability of the addressee to comply with the utterance. Compare:

• If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should arrive on time for your flight. (advice)
• If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should arrive on time at your destination. (prediction)

Given this, "...you should *expect* to die" fixes the problem, since expectations are, as long as you're pre-warned, somewhat within your control.

Where the verb denotes something outside of your volition, there seems to be a difference between positive outcomes and negatives (at least in this particular sentence.)

• A. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should survive. (prediction)
• B. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should die. (?)
• A. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should be satisfied with the service. (prediction/advice)
• B. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should be dissatisfied with the service. (?)
• A. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should arrive on time at your destination. (prediction)
• B. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should arrive late at your destination. (?)
• A. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should have a pleasant trip. (prediction)
• B. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should have an unpleasant trip. (?)

I'm not sure how far this observation can be generalised, but there it is.

Learning languages and lobes

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Merton Bland regularly posts to the TESL-L list. Unfortunately, little of what he has to say is helpful. One of his favorite arguments goes something like this: "If our job is to bifurcate the native and target languages, any instrument (such as a bilingual dictionary) which forges chains to tie the two together is counterproductive." He backs this up with arguments like this: "A true bilingual does his processing of each language in a different hemisphere of the brain." Sometimes he changes hemispheres to lobes.

If there's a need for "bifurcation", it is in separating evidence from ideology.

The claim that a second language is processed in the other hemisphere of the brain is completely absurd as the studies cited below will show. The idea that it is processed in a distinct lobe may or may not be more correct, but it remains misleading.

It is generally agreed that there are five major lobes in the brain. The definition of 'lobe', however, is rather ambiguous and minor lobes are discussed, but not always agreed upon. Furthermore, two areas of the brain that are mainly involved in language are Wernicke's area, which spans the region between temporal and parietal lobes, and Broca's area, which is in the frontal lobe. In other words, language activity usually occurs in different lobes in monolinguals, too, not just in bilinguals.

While late L2 learners do seem to activate different (though typically adjacent) areas of the brain, the research on the overlap or lack thereof of L1 and L2 brain activation is equivocal. A summary by Vivian Cook of some available studies is here.

Bland's point is that teachers should avoid connections between the L1 and L2 (through translation) to dissociate them in the brain. Yet, one idea that seems to come from these brain studies is that the most successful bilinguals are actually those who seem to have the greatest overlap, not the greatest separation. This might mean that connections are good, not bad. Or not. Either way, they are likely inevitable.

Personally, I don't think the brain studies are ready to tell us much about how we should go about teaching language, but they're fun to look at.

If Murdock was right...

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Back in February, Deroy Murdock wrote an article in which he quotes and then incorrects John Kerry.

"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," John Kerry said during Hezbollah's war on Israel last summer. As 2004's Democratic presidential nominee should know, he should have said, "If I were president ..."

I wrote to ask Murdock what he bases his claim on, but I'm shocked to say, didn't hear back from him. So, I'll explain here why I think Kerry is right both grammatically and politically.

Murdock asks, "is it pedantic to expect linguistic excellence?" "No!" he says, and I agree, no. It does, however, seem pedantic to insist that were in counterfactuals is the excellent option.

We have been using was here for over 400 years, among the earliest-known instances being in the writings of Christopher Marlowe. It was common by the end of the 17th century and was thought acceptable enough to be employed by Defoe, Swift, and Addison and many other great writers.

A search of the British National Corpus (sorry, the American National Corpus isn't completed yet) shows if I was to be about 35% more frequent than if I were, though I have no automatic way of identifying which are actually counterfactuals. Still, it seems safe to say that counterfactual was is common both in speech and in edited prose.

Even prescriptivist usage guides support it. H.W. Fowler wrote, "Subjunctives met with today, outside the few truly living uses, are either deliberate revivals by poets for legitimate enough archaic effect, or antiquated survivals as in pretentious journalism, inflecting their context with dullness, or new arrivals possible only in an age to which the grammar of the subjunctive is not natural but artificial."

In fact, Kerry may have carefully chosen was over were. Where the present tense is the natural choice for clauses we view as facts, the past tense, when it is not indicating past time, often presents hypotheticals. Indeed, since be is the only modern English verb with a distinct irrealis form, most verbs actually rely on the past tense to indicate that the predicate does not currently obtain. But be, with its multiple possible forms, presents us with options. These options may simply be the choice between a formal were and a more colloquial was. But it may be more insidious than that. Formality is distancing, and such distance may create a perception not only that Kerry isn't president, but that he has no hope in hell of ever actually taking office. Possibly true, but not a proposition Kerry would be keen to voice.

FANBOWA?

My very first post on this blog was about FANBOYS. In that post I mused about where this mnemonic might have originated. This evening, as I was reading The Sound on the Page, by Ben Yagoda, I thought I had found my answer: Oliver Strunk. When Yagoda quoted from The Elements of Style, “place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause,” I thought, "of course!"

Strunk illustrates with two examples—one with and and one with but—before continuing with the following prescript.

"Two-part sentences of which the second member is introduced by as (in the sense of because), for, or, nor, and while (in the sense of and at the same time) likewise require a comma before the conjunction."

In other words, Strunk, while largely agreeing with the spirit of FANBOYS, differs in the details. Firstly, where we currently have FANBOYS, he had FANBOWA. (For Strunk, so was an adverb requiring a semicolon; yet is not mentioned.)

Secondly, nowhere does Strunk write, "coordinating conjunction". Instead he distinguishes between conjunctions that join independent clauses, and other conjunctions that “likewise require a comma”. This suggests that he thought for, nor, or, while, and as introduced a dependent clause, though I can’t think why or and nor are listed here.

So The Elements of Style (Geoff Pullum has called it, a "vile little assemblage of stupid advice about usage") is a little confused about or and nor, but doesn't seem to be the source I was looking for. This clue does suggest, however, that FANBOYS has its origin sometimes after 1935, when TEOS came out.

BTW, Schoolhouse Rock had it right: and, but, or & nor.

Discriminatory etymology

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John Steckley, a professor of anthropology here at Humber College, has just released a book entitled, Full Circle: Canada's First Nations, from which he was kind enough to send me the chapter on Aboriginal languages. In the chapter he points out how ridiculous it would be to simply specify that a word is of European background. Yet that, he claims, is essentially what many dictionaries do when they give the etymology of, for example, moccasin as N. Amer. Ind.

My first reaction was "how true!" followed very closely by "really?" All of the dictionaries that I could find in the house and online gave reasonable etymologies for moccasin. For example, Dictionary.com gives, "Origin: 1605-15, Americanism; - Virginia Algonquian - Proto-Algonquian *maxkeseni." Steckley gives sources, but since I only had chapter 4, I didn't have the bibliography and couldn't follow them up. I was suspicious.

This afternoon, we were down at the bookstore with the kids, so I decided to check out some other dictionaries. Sure enough, two or three had etymologies as general as "Amerind". Most Oxford dictionaries were fine, but the Oxford School Dictionary, marketed to children, had the trivialising etymology--this, despite having Greek and Dutch elsewhere. Surprisingly, it wasn't just dictionaries for the junior linguist that were at fault. The Collins Canadian Paperback Dictionary was fine, but the Collins Canadian Dictionary and Thesaurus, a big, seriously adult-looking hardcover wasn't.

Steckley does a good job clearing up the ridiculous notion, inexplicably propagated by these dictionaries, that there is but a single American Indian language, and then goes on to take apart a number of other common misconceptions about the languages of Canada's First Nations.

Writing systems and learning to read

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Over at Language Log, Bill Poser oversimplifies things somewhat when he writes,

If you have a straightforward phonological writing system and teach children to make use of that structure, most children will learn to read and write without great difficulty. The idea that learning to read and write is a lengthy and painful process is a pathology of our writing system and educational system, not a universal truth.

There are certainly grains of truth in there, but in the case of English, the phonology of the language is largely to blame for our less-than-transparent writing system. Bill puts forward the eminently sensible "frog's feet" syllabic writing system for Carrier. Would such a system work for English?

Frog's feet has roughly 200 characters representing the intersection of 6 vowel sounds and 33 consonants (not 6 x 33 because not all can be used together). By contrast, if we take the counts from the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary by John C. Wells for General American English, we have 25 consonants and 19 vowels, with one additional consonant and three additional vowels for foreign words. With a few exceptions, all of these can be used in isolation (i.e., word-initially for vowels or, for consonants, before another consonant or as the final letter in a word.) Furthermore, most of the consonants can be followed by any of the vowels. (See here for more phonotactic rules.) I can't be bothered to count the exceptions, so I'll estimate by reducing the counts by 20%. Under this estimate, you would need somewhere between 300 and 350 characters to replicate the frog's feet system for English.

Moreover, the elegant simplicity of the Carrier system is impractical for English. My understanding is that frog's feet uses a basic shape for each consonant, and simply rotates these to indicate the relevant vowel (diatrics are also emloyed). When you have only 6 vowels, this works beautifully. When you have 19...

Finally, the Carrier system, with its occasional isolated consonant is mostly syllabic, but with alphabetic elements. And it is well documented that syllables are something that humans can fairly easily notice and learn to read. On the other hand, the English system, with its higglety-pigglety consonant doubles, triplets, and even quadruples (e.g., sixths), would remain largely alphabetic. Alphabetic systems require phonemic awareness, and this is harder to attain than syllabic awareness.

So, Bill's right about frog's feet being easy to learn, but to suggest that a similar system would actually be practical for English, let alone make it any easier to read, strikes me as unlikely.

[Japanese also employs a syllabic writing system (actually two parallel systems) along with the kanji logographs. The Japanese system is even more compact than the Carrier one as Japanese has a smaller complement of phonemes and all syllables are either V or CV except for tsu and n. Consequently, they have only 52 characters (along with one major and one minor diatric mark).]

Different kinds of questions

Recently I was speaking with a colleague about her plans for her new low-level class. When she said that she intended to focus on question formation for the first few weeks, I asked her with some trepidation how she would be sequencing the various kinds of questions. It turned out that she didn't know what the various kinds of questions were. And she wasn't the first.

Broadly, there are yes/no questions (e.g., Is it hot in here?) and so-called wh-questions (e.g., Where do you live?). Leaving aside minor forms such as tags (e.g., It's hot, isn't it) and echoes ( e.g., You're what?) Yes/no questions can be divided into those with a need for do support and those without.

If the corresponding affirmative form of the question has only a lexical verb and no auxiliary verb, then the question form requires the insertion of (do) before the subject.

• He likes this. -> Does he like this?
• He went to Halifax. -> Did he go to Halifax?

In contrast, if the sentence has no lexical verb or includes an auxiliary, then do support is not required. Instead, the non-lexical verb is fronted (i.e., moved in front of the subject).

• You will marry me. -> Will you marry me?
• He is nice. -> Is he nice?

A similar difference exists in wh- questions; lexical verbs cannot be fronted, so, where fronting is required, do or another auxiliary is needed.

• He plays in Etobicoke. -> Where does he play?
• He has played in Etobicoke. -> Where has he played?

But, not all wh- questions are the same. The wh- words come in three flavours: pronoun (who, what), determinative (which, what), and adverb (where, when, why, how). The adverbs always require an auxiliary verb before the subject.

• Where did he go?
• How should I do it?
• Why is that happening?

In contrast, question formation with the pronouns and determiners differs depending on whether the question is about the subject or about some other noun within the sentence. If the question relates to the subject, the result is the canonical subject-verb-object sentence.

• The door went bang. -> What went bang?
• Brett can get the pizza. -> Who can get the pizza?
• This pencil is the best. -> Which pencil is the best?

Otherwise, you end up with the same situations as above with the adverbs.

• I banged the door. -> What did you bang?
• Brett can get the pizza for us. ->Who can Brett get the pizza for?
• She likes that pencil. -> Which pencil does she like?

With all this to take into account, I wonder how a teacher could possibly plan a coherent set of lessons on question formation without understanding how questions are formed. Make no mistake; I don't blame my colleague. But I do worry about TESL training programs.

Teacher training big on how, missing the what

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A few weeks ago Bill Poser claimed that (Canadian and US) teachers aren't taught how to teach reading.

"Even in states and provinces where phonics is used, teachers are generally not given the training necessary to teach it. Here in British Columbia, for example, students training to be teachers read a little bit about approaches to the teaching of reading and discuss them, but they are never taught what the sounds of English are, what the letter-to-sound rules of English are, or how to bring about phonemic awareness. Teachers who lack this knowledge are hard put to do a good job of teaching phonics."

I asked a colleague who had recently completed teacher's college here in Ontario whether this reflected her own experience there; she basically concurred with Poser.

"In teacher's college we learn how to teach different reading strategies, but we don't learn a lot about phonetics or how to teach (it). I guess in 8 months with placement included there is not enough time to go in depth into everything."

The other day, the Toronto Star had an article indicating that there is a glut of applicants to teacher's college and of recent graduates. This will likely have some positive effect on the quality of the individuals coming out, but without the education and training, there's little hope that these folks will be any better equipped to teach reading.

(By the way, I remember hearing of some irreverent wag, commenting on the difference between training and education with a simple question. "How many of you would accept sex training in public schools?")

Grammar course for ESL teachers

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The Guardian is touting an online grammar course for prospective ESL teachers offered by a private training company called Cactus. There's no doubt that more teachers need such a course; I just hope that they don't end up learning that there are no verbs in phrases and other similar nonsense. The course is accredited through the Open and Distance Learning Quality Council, an organisation that I'm unfamiliar with, but which appears to be legitimate.

John Sinclair (1933-2007)

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Elena Tognini Bonelli wrote the following obituary:

Yesterday was a very sad day for the world of linguistics. John Sinclair (b. 14 June 1933) died at his home in Florence, aged 73. He will be deeply missed by his family, his colleagues and his many friends. His death is a terrible loss to everyone who knew him. Friends and colleagues are welcome to the interment of the urn which will be at the Cimitero degli Inglesi in Florence on 28 March at 3.30pm.

John was an outstanding scholar, a first-generation modern corpus linguist and clearly one of the most open-minded and original thinkers in the field. He was Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham for most of his career and founder of the ground-breaking COBUILD project in lexical computing which revolutionised lexicography in the 1980s and resulted in a new generation of corpus-driven dictionaries and reference materials for English language learners. After his retirement from Birmingham John moved to Italy where he became President of the Tuscan Word Centre, an association devoted to promoting the scientific study of language. On the short intensive courses that the Tuscan Word Centre offered, John very generously shared his original ideas about language and linguistics with generations of younger scholars, introduced numerous students to the fascinating world of corpora and inspired many new ideas for future research in linguistics. He was an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain and a member of the Academia Europaea. John held an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Gothenburg, and Honorary Professorships in the Universities of Jiao Tong, Shangai and Glasgow.

He is gone now and it will be very hard to get used to it. John's last email to me just a couple of days ago ended "Very brief note tonight; more to follow." I will miss him.

DST

John Sakamoto, citing webexhibits.org, writes,

"Daylight Saving Time is grammatically correct. "Saving" acts as a participle, which modifies "time" and tells us about its nature. However, the phrase itself is inaccurate, since no daylight is actually saved. It is merely shifted from morning to evening."

Daylight Saving Time is indeed grammatically correct, as is Daylight Savings Time. The analysis is, however, faulty as the caveat implies. If anything at all is being saved, it's daylight, not time. So, to say that 'saving' is modifying 'time' strikes me as very odd.

I see two possible analyses. One is that it is time for saving daylight, analogous to time for reading the paper. Under this strategy you get daylight-saving time, analogous to paper-reading time. The s doesn't work here.

The other strategy is to analyse saving(s) as a noun, as in a one-time saving or a savings account. Under this strategy, daylight is a noun modifying the second noun saving(s). Now, if we look at the analogous cost saving(s), we find that the plural is more than twice as common as singular, but neither is rare.

But we're not finished. The noun phrase, daylight saving(s) is itself modifying time. While there are cases where a plural noun is used as a modifier (e.g., antiques show), it is far more common for such modifiers to be singular. Indeed, with our analogous cost saving(s), we find cost saving measures is roughly five times as common as cost savingS measures. Still, this doesn't rule out the possibility of the plural form if one wants to emphasise that there is a saving every day, as discussed here.

By the way, the daylight is saved for many individuals who would otherwise be sleeping through it in the morning, thus wasting it.

To revivify or condemn

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Over at Language Log, folks are wondering aprint (here and here) how prescriptivist rules get formulated in the first place. What moves a usage raven maven to take umbrage at something that has seemed perfectly innocuous to generations of English speakers?

Well, the other day, I came across revivify in a long but fascinating NYT Magazine article. I had never seen the word before and read it \ri-ˈvīvə-ˌfī\ instead of the correct \rē-ˈvi-və-ˌfī\. My reflex reaction was "what a silly and pointless neologism! What's wrong with revive?". But a quick search of the dictionary, reveals it's nothing of the sort.

While revive is older (circa 1400), revivify is attested from 1665. Moreover, English speakers have been able to vivify something (another new word for me) since 1535. That's a trick that revive can't do. And while both revive and revivify mean bring back to life, revivify seems to have a link to vivid that revive is simply lacking. Still, revivify is fairly rare, appearing almost never in speech and only about once every 10 million words in print.

So, here I am at a crossroads. Do I abashedly admit that I was ignorant and unobservant and welcome revivify into my vocabulary, or do I try to save face by condemning it as a mere florid redundancy? The second choice, pathetic though it is, may be one possible avenue by which language items fall into disrepute.

A woman the source of the 'he' rule?

In following up Arnold Zwicky's by-the-way attribution of the rule that only he should be used as an indefinite pronoun (e.g. Every person should make sure he...) to Lindley Murray in 1795, I came across an article, which antedates that instance by 50 years and attributes the rule to Ann Fisher.

Synesis across the Atlantic

I promise this is my last post on Richard Firsten's Grammatically Speaking column for quite some time. Again, in his most recent column, he takes a question about grammatically singular nouns, such as team and crew, with plain present tense verbs instead of the third-person s forms. This is called synesis (discussed earlier here). In response, Firsten writes

In a way, the BrE is more consistent than AmE. AmE has the police are and people are, and it's not so unusual to hear the singular or plural verb form after family. When talking about the family as a group of individuals, AmE tends to use the plural verb form; when thinking of the family as a whole unit, AmE uses the singular verb form.

I'm afraid, I don't see Richard's point about police and people. Perhaps he is confusing irregular plurals with singular collective nouns? Either way, it's not just AmE; You would never find the police is or the people is in BrE either, where police and people are the subject.

And is family as group versus a number of individuals really an AmE issue? In the British National Corpus, the string family + (3rd person singular verb) is over 1.5 times more common than the string family + (plain form verb). Not all of these are relevant, of course. They include sentences in which family is not the subject (e.g., The problems with the family are numerous & The nice thing about this family is...). Still, this distinction is clearly available to speakers of English on both sides of the Atlantic and there's no evidence in Firsten's column that BrE is more consistent than AmE (though it may be).

Another of Firsten's fumbles

Forgive me if I appear to be picking on Richard Firsten. It's just that if the guy who answers teachers' grammar questions for the largest organisation of English language teachers in the world can't do better than here, here, here, and here, then we're in trouble.

In his latest column, he agrees with Gail Sepúlveda of Monterrey, Mexico that the following are partitive genitives:

a pair of pants
a cup of coffee

Really? A partitive construction is one in which there is a part to whole relationship, as in some of the people. In this example, there is a set of people and some identifies a subset of those people (i.e., one part of the group). The same thing applies to non-count nouns, for example a little of the wine.

But that's not the relationship in either of the above phrases. Consider the difference between a pair of the pants and a pair of pants. The first is partitive, the second non-partitive. The same applies to the cup of coffee example.

To be honest, I'd never paid any attention to the term partitive though I know I've seen it a number of times before. Yesterday, I wouldn't have been able to tell one from a flux capacitor. But it just takes a few minutes' effort to find out. Unfortunately, too many of us English language teachers seem to lack the curiosity or wherewithal to identify and use good references.

Headed back again

Back in December, I discussed Richard Firsten's analysis of "She's headed for the beach." In his newest Grammatically Speaking column, he tries to explain that in the last column, he didn't mean that headed was an adjective, but merely that it was being used "adjectivally". It's not really clear what he means here, but it seems that, following this example, he would consider all participles in passive constructions like 'he was eaten' and all in progressives like 'he is eating' to be an "adjectival phrase". I don't find this either convincing or helpful.

Richard goes on to say that "is headed for the beach" is a statal passive. According to Huddleston's Introduction to the Grammar of English, "a statal passive ... attributes a certain property to the (subject), that of being in the state resulting from (an) event." Huddleston goes on to say that the participles in statal passives can also appear after other copulative verbs, as in "the vase appeared / seemed / looked broken." Neither of these properties hold true for our headed example. Being headed for the beach is not the result of an event, nor can we say "She seems headed for the beach" (a web search will turn up thousands of hits for "seems headed", but all appear to be headlinese.)

[Update: Upon further consideration, I think this IS a statal passive. I was having serious trouble dissociating the movement entailed in heading for something from the grammatical properties of the sentence. After some thought and research I now think that a defining characteristic of statal vs. dynamic verbs is that you cannot refer to a point inside dynamic verbs without using the progressive. States, in contrast, allow such reference. So we have

• At 2:00 she was headed for the beach. (2:00 is a point inside the state)
• At 2:00 she walked to the beach. (2:00 cannot be a point inside the dynamic occurrence)

To my chagrin, I now believe my initial analysis was incorrect.]

How I learned English Grammar

One of the members of the ETJ list wrote, "I was wondering for those of you who teach grammar...how did you learn grammar?" I thought I might share my journey, such as it has been.

I learned a good deal of grammar in my French immersion school in the early 70s. Of course, that was in French. When I went to Japan and began teaching English, I had a number of basic concepts, but was often at a loss to understand and explain many points. I picked up some more grammar by staying one step ahead of the students in the various textbooks like that one they (used to?) use at Nova. Still, these were not really grammar textbooks per se and what I picked up there was limited.

My first two real grammar books for teachers were Michael Lewis's The English Verb and A Teacher's Grammar: An Approach to the Central Problems of English by R. A. Close, which I just stumbled across during my regular browsing at Kinokuniya.

Later I took Temple University's M.Ed. which includes a course called New Grammars taught by Ken Schaefer. Ken took us through more traditional grammatical analysis, including sentence diagramming, and introduced us to Chomskyan transformational grammar with grammar trees and all that. The main text was The Grammar Book, which is still probably the best course in grammar for English language teachers.

Since then, I have added to my collection the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, which has lots of interesting stats, but suffers from a lack of attention to its theoretical foundation; and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which seems to me the current pinnacle of analysis. (This is not to be confused with the terrible Cambridge Grammar of English by Ron Carter and Michael McCarthy.) There is also a smaller textbook for undergrads, A Student's Introduction to English Grammar based on the CGEL.

Finally, whenever there is a grammar question, I do my best to track down an answer and explain it. You learn a great deal teaching others.

Recursion discovered at New Scientist

New Scientist magazine generally does a very good job of reporting science news. They also have a section called Feedback in which people tend to send in random amusing stories, many of which have to do with language. Take, Olaf Lipinski's story about his new shirt:

The other day he bought a shirt with black and white stripes. He was delighted with it until he read the label which says: "Wash dark colours separately".

These are all well and good, but back on Jan. 20, there was the following:

Understanding understanding

READER Stan Courtney tell us that while browsing through Scientific American he came across this in an article about autism: "For neuroscientists, this finding... represents a dramatic change in the way we understand the way we understand."

Courtney says he cannot remember seeing any other sentence like this, in which a repeated phrase actually makes sense. Has anyone else?

The follow up appeared in the Feb. 10 edition:

The way we understand the way we understand

WRITING in response to Stan Courtney's comment on repeated phrases that make sense, such as "the way we understand the way we understand" (20 January), Stewart Haywood tells us: "I watched my daughter standing in front of a mirror this morning, looking at herself looking at herself."

...David Squire's simple submission "This sentence contains 'this sentence contains'" comes as something of a relief.

Many other readers offered their own versions of this linguistic oddity, but space prevents us publishing them all, so let us conclude with the wisdom of the physicist Richard Feynman, who was there before us in this, as he was in so many things. Tim Cowell was the first of many to draw our attention to a statement made by Feynman when he was a student, which went something like this: "I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!" He repeated this to himself over and over again, apparently, as a way of sending himself off to sleep.

All of which makes you wonder: is this a phenomenon that has just caught the attention of one of the world's leading science news magazines? Do they really know so little about language and linguistics that they are unaware how fundamental the idea of recursion is? They have, after all, written about it before and here. Admittedly, this is a special limited type of recursion, but it's still pretty obvious, isn't it? I mean, my five-year-old son once told me a "story about a story about a story about a story..." and found it terrifically funny.

Can you imagine somebody writing in and saying, "I've recently noticed that light behaves both as a wave and as a particle"? But then I guess we expect people to know more about physics than about linguistics, a fact that Mark Liberman is always lamenting.

More here
A particularly disgusting (I'm not kidding!) example of this type of recursion is here (click at your own risk), other related Language Log posts being here and here. Escher made much use of recursion in his drawings, including the special case of the strange loop as illustrated in drawing hands. Finally, GNU is a recursive acronym which means GNU is not UNIX.

Google Scholar & free papers

Last week I was looking for information about using timed lexical decision tests to assess vocabulary. I forget exactly which search terms I used, but one of the papers google scholar recommended was Kempe, V., & MacWhinney, B. (1996). The crosslinguistic assessment
of foreign language vocabulary learning. Applied Psycholinguistics, 17, 149-183. For this paper, Google returned the following options: Cited by 10 - Related Articles - Cached - Web Search - BL Direct

None of these will actually take you to a copy of the paper unless you or your insitution are subcribed to BL Direct, which might lead you to suspect that there is no free version available. If, however, you go to Brian MacWhinney's web site, you'll find a free copy there for your perusal.

Still, I don't think there's any kind of sweetheart deal going on here. Danny Sullivan on searchenginewatch.com writes,

"Google says, by the way, that it does not earn money off of any new subscriptions generated between searchers and publishers."

And, in fact, if you do your google searches unflavoured, you can find the free version of the Kempe & MacWhinney paper easily. Its not even that Google Scholar never links to free papers, as the following results demonstrate:

Attention Control and Ability Level in a Complex Cognitive Skill: Attention Shifting and Second- … - group of 4 »
N Segalowitz, S Frenkiel-Fishman - Memory & Cognition, 2005 - www-psychology.concordia.ca
One of the most interesting research results of the last half-century regarding
skilled performance is that what primarily distinguishes experts from ...
Cited by 3 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search - BL Direct

So there's something odd happening here.

Some more evidence of the weirdness is that GS doesn't seem to know everything that just plain google knows. For example, if I copy the first line of the abstract and search for that in quotes, GS just shrugs its shoulders, while bare bones google serves up the required paper with its usual alacrity.

What's up? Who knows, but if you don't find a free version of a paper on GS, don't give up. It may still be out there.

Early pedantry

Whenever my 2-year old is offered rice milk, she rolls her eyes and corrects me with the brand name 「ライスミルク」じゃないよ。「ライスドリームー」。(It's not 'rice milk', it's "Rice Dreeeaam".)

College Association of Language and Literacy Annual Conference

This year, Humber College ITAL (don't ask about the ITAL bit), where I work, is hosting the College Association of Language and Literacy Annual Conference May 29 – May 31. CALL is a provincial association of college teachers, most of whom teach composition, literature, and ESL.

I'll be hosting a panel called 'Benchmarking the benchmarks'.

There have been discussions between the Ontario College Heads of Language and the government about benchmarking college English language programs and writing programs against the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB). This panel will explore the benefits and drawbacks of such a step and whether the CLB is the right tool for these programs.

If you have any thoughts on the topic, I'd appreciate your comments between now and the end of May. Also, let me know if you might drop by.