Review: The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition

The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition by Zoltán Dörnyei was published on Feb 19, 2009 to very little fanfare. I found out about it through an Amazon.com alert, but even though I pre-ordered it, three months later Amazon shrugged and said, "Although we'd expected to be able to send this item to you, we've since found it's not available from any of our sources at this time."

It now seems to be available, but it's not selling well at all. Today, the Amazon rank (for what that's worth; I expect these numbers jump around quite a bit) is #569,249. In comparison, Lightbown & Spada's How Languages are Learned is #1,011, Michael O'Malley's Authentic Assessment for English Language Learners: Practical Approaches for Teachers is # 7,341, and Rod Ellis's The Study of Second Language Acquisition is #44,171. Even Dornyei's other books are also selling much better (e.g. #79,777 for Research Methods in Applied Linguistics).

What about reviews? Google books says, "We haven't found any reviews in the usual places," and I didn't have any better luck. I even had trouble tracking down the table of contents (here; scroll down past the Japanese). Not sure why this text is flying so far under the radar.

Anyhow, I finally asked OUP to send me a copy, and they very kindly did on the promise that I'd write a review and post it here. So:

Firstly, the target audience was not easy for me to identify. On one hand, it seems to be aimed at people who know almost nothing about language teaching. For example, it takes half a page to explain what the grammar translation method is, adding nothing that wouldn't be familiar to anybody who'd taken a TESL certificate course. But on the other hand, many of the topics brought up would have little relevance to anyone without some background in applied linguistics and language teaching, especially if you want to make sense of it as a whole. The series is supposed to be "aimed at applied linguists, lecturers, teacher trainers, students on advanced/postgraduate courses, and practitioners interested in gaining a wider perspective on their work," but I think it might have benefited by trying to be a bit more narrow in its range. As a text in an intro-to-psycholinguistics course, though, where it is supported by lectures, discussions, and other readings, it might work well.

The first half of the book is mainly of interest to grad-students and researchers who are unfamiliar with cognitive psychology and may be interested in seeing how they personally might fit themselves and their research programs into this tile in the mosaic of academia. Dörnyei introduces and explains a multitude of approaches and terms including a brief lesson in the anatomy of the brain. There's very little here for most teachers.

The second half, however, includes more that might help teachers think about their teaching differently, but it will take a careful reader who is good at seeing analogies to extract such insights. To be fair, there are no pat solutions for teaching language, but even the final chapter on the psychology of instructed second language acquisition seems to offer very little in terms of guidance for language teachers, though Dörnyei does inlcude six keys on the final page: Language instruction should...

1. be meaning-focused and engaging while including practice activities to increase automaticity.
2. include explicit instruction.
3. pay attention to formal/structural aspects as well as meaning.
4. teach formulaic sequences.
5. include extensive exposure to massive amounts of the target language.
6. and offer many opportunities to interact in the L2.

The major thesis (there isn't really a main one) seems to be that researchers need to take a dynamic systems approach to studying second language acquisition. But since all that math is "impenetrable" to us language folk, rather than actually taking a dynamic systems approach, Dörnyei suggests that we try to take on some of its vocabulary and conceptual framework. And he tries to do so himself.

He applies the metaphor of an attractor to a number of individual factors involved in SLA, one being future self-guides (generally, the idea that a clear vision of an ideal self is a motivating force). "future self-guides can be seen as broad attractor basins subsuming a variety of components." Although I understand very little about attractors, it seems to me that Dörnyei is at least two layers deep in metaphor and may have lost sight of what an attractor actually is. On the other hand, as I said, I don't understand attractors well, so this may in fact be a very apt description.

In the end, Dörnyei does a good job of bringing much information together, but I wanted a lot more detail, not just the brief overviews offered. I did find quite a few references that I want to follow up. Three researchers really stand out as contributing disproportionately to the bibliography: Nick Ellis, Norman Segalowitz, and Jan Hulstijn along with Peter Robinson. I wonder if I'll find more of what I want in Robinson & Ellis's Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Maybe that will be my next review.

Peel board of ed gets it right

It looks like some folks at the Peel district school board (my local board) have been giving some serious thought to all the new immigrants in Brampton (more than half the school population doesn't speak English at home).

"the board has centralized the registration of immigrant students at the three new centres in Brampton, Mississauga and Malton, where newcomers are assessed and offered orientation interviews before being enrolled in one of the board's 236 schools. The centres are made possible by a $3.7 million grant from Citizenship and Immigration Canada."

The Japan Times follows the TOEIC money trail

James McCrostie has recently had two stories about the TOEIC tests published in the Japan Times. He appears to have done a lot of homework in tracking down the various players in the raveled money trail that the test takers feed.

Verbs, prepositions, and in between

Brett has raised an interesting question indeed. So, is compared a preposition? Or is it still a verb, which happens to share similar functions with prepositions?

I like the arguments presented by Brett; but I am not sure whether I am totally happy to say that compared is now a verb in one construction, now a preposition in another. Some lexical items are like that, I know, but this one?

I was thinking about this while taking a morning shower. My thoughts went like this -

The problem is that compare is a verb, pure and simple. Compared to ..., accordingly, is felt to be a participial construction. It is not like during as in during the summer; today, it is hard to imagine using dure as a verb.

Is it, then, perhaps more like the adjective interesting as in a very interesting book, which is no longer a participial form of the verb interest? Can you similarly say that compared as in Compared to ... is a preposition, no longer a participial form of the verb compare?

The problem here is that the criterion we rely on is the somewhat shaky notion of the 'understood' subject. It may be the subject of the main clause; it may be 'recoverable' from the linguistic context; or, more subtly, it may be 'interpretable' pragmatically. Right now, I am not sure whether the 'understood' subject is a grammatical property.

It is well known that coordination facts don't work well as syntactic arguments. Coordinated elements do not necessarily share a common grammatical category; they share a common function (today and on Wednesday).

So, can we perhaps say that compared shares a similar function with prepositions, say, that of clausal modifier? If we can, then we can say that a phrase headed by the past participial form of compare can modify a clause it is attached to, in the same way a phrase headed by a preposition can.

Then, if and when compared sufficiently loses its verbal properties, we will happily say 'Hi everyone, there was once a time when this was used as a verb, but now it is a preposition.' - and everyone will agree. Peace and happiness.

My shower was not long enough to pursue this further, and now I have to run; I have a second-hand book festival to go to. The beauty of a blog-post is I can leave it here, and invite comments from everyone - whom I wish a very happy Sunday.

Even more departicipial prepositions

This thread has been picked up on Language Log where thousands more eyes will see it than are likely here, leading to many interesting comments. These have pushed me to look for other "departicipial prepositions". Here are the candidate's I've found so far.

1. It is the result of a colonial heritage that has permanently saddled a fundamentally Mestizo-Indian society with standards of appearance, beauty, and behavior that are not its own. Counteracting this frame of mind today, there is a significant intellectual and popular movement declaring the Mestizo-Indian phenotype as the country's proper imago mundi in opposition to the " white is beautiful " colonial mentality (Llanas Alvarez 1978). It is difficult to forecast the fate of this effort. (Nutini, Hugo G.)
2. Mexican labor force earned most, or a substantial part, of its livelihood in cash, and would therefore have seen its economic position perceptibly eroded in the late colonial decades. Compounding this secular trend there occurred a series of harvest failures and sharp price rises in articles of basic popular consumption after 1800, producing the same effects -- popular immiseration, unemployment, business collapse, cityward migrations, and so forth -- characteristic of most ancien regime economies in the grip of crises de subsistences. (Van Young, Eric)
3. It is obvious that if the galaxies are moving apart, they must have been closer together in the past. Extrapolating this trend, it seems that there must have been a time when all the matter in the universe was compressed together. Knowing the rate of expansion, we can estimate when this dense phase was. (Davies, Paul)
4. Curiously, it is possible for the universe to be finite in extent, and yet still have no center or edge. Leaving that possibility aside for now, there is a sense in which the speculation about a very distant edge to the universe is pointless if not meaningless. (Davies, Paul)
   
5. Each choice of the timeful " I " generates more of the person's destiny, his karma; the overall process in which the human person is situated requires the human selfs previous existences, its reincarnations, and the gradual development of its physical, then etheric, and still later astral bodies. Paralleling these bodily developments, there arise the sentient soul, then the intellectual soul, and currently the consciousness soul. (Oppenheim, Frank M.)
6. This is an important strand of political analysis, hostile to class conflict yet also acutely aware of the limits of contemporary capitalism, especially when it comes to redistribution of income or provision of rudimentary socio-economic opportunities. Looking more closely at Gelb's analysis, there is a poignant honesty to be found, beyond the normative stance that defends status quo corporatist politics. (Bond, Patrick)
7. Only later did more enterprising reporters discover that Disney had been offered access to federal lands for resorts, and Billy Graham, a mild precursor of today's religious extremists, had been wooed with conservative positions on social issues and the promise of a direct line to the White House. Underlying both the stump speech and the private promises, there wa one message: the difference between Nixon and his opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was wide, deep, and crucial. (Steinem, Gloria)
8. Therefore, while there is evidence of all seven tensions at play in the lives of participants, we understand resilience to be the contextually dependent optimal resolution of the tensions as they are experienced across cultures and contexts. Viewed this way, there is no objective criteria for evaluating positive outcomes since it is up to the individual (influenced, of course, by culture and context) to appraise whether his or her life at that point in time is successful. (Ungar, Michael)

So, do any of these strike you as danglers? Do you buy them as prepositions, or do you have some other explanation?

More evidence for 'compared' as a preposition

A number of people have questioned my analysis of compared as a preposition. Some have complained about basing the analysis on one flimsy sentence. here are some others:

1. Compared with the previous week, there was a trebling in the rate of flu and a doubling of the rate of flu-like illness. (Guardian newspaper)
2. Compared with the 18–44 year age group, there was no significantly higher mortality in the 45–64 year (RR=0.84, 95% CI 0.34 to 2.09), the 65–74 year (RR=1.28, 95% CI 0.50 to 3.32), and the 75–92 year (RR=1.99, 95% CI 0.72 to 5.46) (overall p=0.4) age group during the 2 years after discharge. (The Lancet)
3. As for the physical appearance of the people who left behind their stone tools and food refuse, Singer and Wymer can say little because, compared with animal bones, there are few human remains in the deposits and they are mostly fragments of skulls and jawbones and teeth. (New Scientist)
4. Montreal Central eventually served the CPR express lines as well as the CNR, but, compared with Toronto or Cincinnati Union, there was something half-hearted about it, despite the trumpetings with which it was received during the war. (non-fiction book)
5. Compared with Mitroff's earlier paper, there is much more emphasis here on linking stakeholder analysis with research into cognitive schemas, and a greater recognition that there may be problems both in identifying the schemas, often held unconsciously, and in bringing them together to inform the corporate debate about strategy. (textbook)
6. Compared with the other types of hair there are very few of them, but they play a vital role when the cat is exploring in poor light, or is hunting. (non-fiction book)

The following examples are from Time magazine:

1. Compared to the Wall Street Exchange, there is a noticeable absence of fury, frenzy; the building has indeed a somewhat musty atmosphere.
2. Compared with 1935, when there were 199, there was one in 1966 and two in 1967.
3. Still, compared with the solid growth of the 1960s, there are plenty of signs that the nation is suffering an inflationary recession.
4. Compared with the Manhattan Project, there was no German bomb program.
5. Compared with earlier days, there is less camaraderie and pack journalism, there are fewer collective safaris.
6. Compared with five years ago, there are a significantly greater number of lawyers today who are not practicing law for a living, " says Ward Bower.

Others have said that the "grammatical dangling" is insufficient evidence. Another piece of evidence comes from coordination. Typically parallelism dictates that we coordinate only like with like. It would not typically allow us to coordinate a PP with a VP. In the following sentences, however, we have a PP coordinated with a phrase headed by 'compared'.

1. Americans live very well, both by historical standards AND compared to other people in the world today.
2. A major finding, however, was that emissions at the four sites differed greatly both between sites AND compared to national trends in emissions between 1970 and 1990.

A newly discovered preposition

I believe that I may be the first person to have realized that compared is a preposition. It is not listed as such in any of the dictionaries that I consulted, and you may very well be wondering how compared could possibly be a preposition. Let me try to explain.

The obvious alternative is that it is a verb, a past participle to be precise. One property of participle verbs is that, when they function as adjuncts, they take the subject of the main clause as their subject. When people overlook the requirements, you end up with a silliness like the following (from here):

1 Now 83, and long gone from power, Britons remain fiercely divided over the reign of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Notice that we expect this to mean that Britons are 83 and long gone from power, because Britons is the subject of the main clause. When the main clause has a dummy subject, like there, again we end up with problems (from here).

2 Fearing a massive lay-off, there was a general sense of relief when the boss announced there would be no new budget cuts.

But when we replace the participle with a preposition, everything is fine.

3 After a massive lay-off, there was a general sense of anger.

Our second piece of the argument is that, despite traditional thinking to the contrary, prepositions do not actually need to come before nouns. They can come before other prepositions, as they do here:

4 She came in from out of nowhere.

Now, we can understand why compared is a preposition. Consider the following sentence:

5 Compared to ICS alone, there was a significantly greater improvement in FEV1 with the addition of LABA.

To be honest, I don't know what it means, but it seems to me that there is no problem here analogous to what we faced in 2 even though we have a dummy subject. That means compared is not a verb. Perhaps, then, it could be a preposition along the lines of after in 3 and followed by another preposition to as in 4.

There are other prepositions like this:

1. according
2. allowing
3. barring
4. compared
   
5. concerning
6. considering
7. counting
8. depending
9. excepting
10. excluding
11. failing
12. following
13. given
    
14. granted
    
15. including
16. owing
17. pending
18. pertaining
19. provided
    
20. providing
21. regarding
22. respecting
23. saving
24. seeing
25. supposing
26. touching
27. wanting

Some of these are recognized by major dictionaries. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English lists given as a preposition. And the online OED has barring, concerning, and considering among others. None, however, has the full list above, except the Simple English Wiktionary, (which by the way now has headword entries for the most common 2,000 words of English, the Basic English 850 list, and the Academic word list. All told, it now has over 10,000 entries.)

UWO French program adopts CEFRL

In the past I've pointed out the failings of the Canadian Language Benchmarks, and suggested the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages as a more useful document, especially for colleges. It seems that the French Studies department at the University of Western Ontario agrees.

New OED Historical Thesaurus

A while back the BBC posted a story about The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which will be published in two volumes on 8 October 2009. I expected this to be all over the lingua blogs, but didn't see much mention of it. Unfortunately, it won't be online anytime soon and will cost about $500 in paper (though Amazon.ca is advertising it for $330).

Slippery Parts of Speech

I am sure you have seen newspaper columns and TV programmes where people casually talk about stuff like adjectives and adverbs - and they are absolutely clueless. People grow up reading and watching those, and start doing it themselves. Vicious cycle.

Well, I am here to make you feel better. Much better. Just don't listen to those clueless people. Consider the following:

all the ten fine old stone houses

Poutsma, Kruisinga and Zandvoort say that only 'fine' and 'old' are adjectives. Jespersen says 'the', 'fine' and 'old' are adjectives. Sweet, Curme, and Onions say that all the words preceding 'houses' are adjectives.

They are - OK, were - all prominent grammarians, whose views are often lumped together under the label 'traditional grammar' - which is unfortunate, because they don't even agree on what adjectives are. My point is, why should we.

Wait, it gets better: grammarians don't even agree on what they should categorise words into. Some grammars recognise eight parts of speech; some nine; some six; some four; some three. So you see, there is no point in being dogmatic about what to call what.

Given all that, it is almost funny the way some people feel strongly about what they think is their own view; when it is even slightly attacked, emotional reactions can follow. Gosh, some people have a lot of growing up left to do.

You know, there are no adjectives to talk about in the whole universe - unless we agree on what they are. To reach that agreement, we discuss - which is the whole point (as well as joy, by the way) of grammar.

Grammars worth reading do just that: they tell you why they recognise such and such categories, how these categories function, and so on. In this sense, grammar is like philosophy: it is a dynamic intellectual process to get involved in, rather than a set of terminologies to accept (or reject).

So, whenever there is a question about what is the 'right' part of speech a given word belongs to, take it easy. We can discuss it, but there is no need to worry about it. If you are not sure, hey, maybe not even professional grammarians are. There is no need to bluff.

Discussions in other fora

Things have been busy around home and I haven't been blogging much lately though I've been part of a number of interesting discussions:

Over on the English Wiktionary, there's the perennial problem of how to categorize words, which becomes even worse when you start including entries like a great deal. You can follow the discussion here. On a similar note, we've also been talking about most of all.

Still working on categorization, but from a different angle, the issue of where to put Irish (as in the Irish) came up. The explanation I gave (based mostly on the CGEL) seemed to settle it: it's an adjective. You can read follow along here.

Meanwhile, on ETJ, a long thread has been going on that started with a question of how to categorize here and grew from there. If you go down to the bottom of the messages, others in the thread should be listed.

Subjects and predicates for eight-year olds

My eight-year old son goes to Japanese school every Saturday morning during the school year, and over the summer, he has some homework to do. The other day he showed me a question that he didn't understand:
「次の文の主語とじゅつ語をかきましょう。」(i.e., Write the subject and the predicate of the following sentence.)

This gave us an opportunity to talk about how to identify a subject in English and in Japanese, during which, he told me they'd been learning about verbs and adverbs at "English school" (the local elementary school).

I wasn't sure how far to go with these topics, so I kept them fairly basic, telling him that the subject usually comes before the verb, and it's usually the person or thing doing the action: pretty traditional, but good enough for now. Notice the hedges in there. I was even less sure with predicate, because I wasn't really sure how close the Japanese notion of じゅつ語 is to the English notion of predicate, and I also wasn't sure what his teacher had told him. Luckily, the sentence was 多くの花が咲いている。(i.e., Many flowers are blooming.), so the predicate was obviously just 咲いている (i.e., are blooming).

I'm glad to see these topics coming up in school, and also glad to have a chance to talk about them with my kids. I wonder when subjects and predicates will come up in "English school".

Nominated for top 100 language blogs

English, Jack has been nominated in the category of Language Professionals for the Top 100 Language Blogs 2009. Of course, there are many excellent language blogs, so you need to get reading if you're going to vote. Voting will start on July 8 and close on July 27, and the winners will be announced on July 30.

For more information on the 2009 competition and what it is all about visit lexiophiles.com.

Choosing useful collocations

I'm not very keen on making collocations a focus of my teaching, but I do like authentic example sentences, and slipping in common collocates strikes me as a useful thing to do.

I've been collecting useful examples for years over on the Simple English Wiktionary, and you are free to go there and take what you will. Unfortunately, there are also quite a few rather unnatural examples mixed in, so if you don't find what you're looking for, hie yourself over to the COCA and do a search like this one for help.

Generally speaking, an MI score of 3.0 or more is generally considered to show a genuine relationship between two words. The thing is, this score changes depending on how you search. For example, a search for words occurring within 4 words either side of help in the COCA returns an MI of 6.91 for defray, but if you search for 3 words either side, defray's MI is only 6.75. And if you only search for one word to the right, that goes up to 8.75. And then there's the question of whether you search for the form help, the verb help, the noun help, the lemmas help, etc.
Next, you need to consider not just the strength of the connection, but also its frequency. Back to our help example, contextualize has an MI of 3.29, but the collocation occurs only 10 times in that position, whereas the collocation with cope (MI=3.25) occurs over 340 times.
Along with frequency, you need to consider the range, in other words, the number of documents in which it is found. One document might use a particular collocation so often that it skews the results. Similarly, the context of various documents might be the same. Still with our help example, context has a very high MI score (MI=4.3) and a high frequency (over 1600), and occurs in a wide range of documents, but most of these documents have been taken from various web sites, all of which include the sentence, "Find Documents with Similar Topics Help Below are concepts discussed in this document."
Finally, transparency should be considered. The for sit, chair has an MI of 3.52, but it should be obvious to anyone who lives in the real world that sit is used with chair and may not be worthy of mention, whereas the relationship between help and cope is more opaque and may bear having attention drawn to it.

Dropping 'to'

Continuing on with our critique of this quarter's "Grammatically Speaking", the second query says, in part,

"One way that I focused on was the use of to alone without its verb and accompanying clause in a sentence like He can leave work early today if he has to..."

But as they so often do, a student came up with a counter example.

"They don't need to be here precisely at nine o'clock. They can come a little later if they like."

Firsten basically throws up his hands. "It's because of that old problem we have in English concerning exceptions to some rules." We'll ignore the special status he implies for English, but generally this is not a very helpful answer. It is true that there is quite a bit of variability here, and that things are messy, but I think we can explain a bit more.

To be fair, Firsten does note that, where some verbs such as want, wish, choose, and prefer accept both the to and non-to complements, like rejects to. He doesn't, however, explain this: it seems to me that if you like is idiomatic such that without if, but still in the sense of would rather do something, we need would. Compare:

• They like to come late. -> They can come whenever they like to.
  
• They would like to come late. -> They can come whenever they (would) like.
  

There are other interesting things to note here, however:

• The phenomenon is most common where the to infinitive is functioning as a complement rather than, say, as a subject. Compare: Can we ask for a postponement?
  Yeah, I plan to. vs
  *To (ask for a postponement) would be awkward.
  
• It's not just after verbs such as want etc. that this happens. It's also common with adjectives that take to infinitive complements:
  I don't think I'll be able (to).
  
• Where the elided VP is headed by be or auxiliary have, we usually include them:
  the print quality is not what it used to be (cf. it doesn't look like it used to)
  

Firsten's fictions

This time, in his "Grammatically Speaking" column in TESOL's Essential Teacher magazine, Richard Firsten, who has a track record for mis-explaining grammar, appears to have taken to just making stuff up. His correspondent asks,

"My friend said, "I'm going to get a sundae," and then she asked me, "How about you?" After telling her what I wanted, it suddenly dawned on me that it wouldn't sound right if my friend had said, "What about you?" Now I'm confused. Are both questions still interchangeable or not?"

Instead of simply saying, "you're deluded" or something kinder like, "either would be fine," Firsten agrees, saying,

"There are many situations in which the two questions What about . . . ? and How about . . . ? are interchangeable... But when asking about what another person wants, it's more common to use How about . . . ?"

Of course, no evidence is proffered to support this strange claim, nor is any explanation given. So it appears to be up to us, the readers, to go out and find some data.

Corpus		COCA	BNC
Total "what about you"		25	9
	asking about want to	14	4
	asking about want something	4	3
Total "how about you"		21	1
	asking about want to	10	0
	asking about want something	6	0

In other words, in direct contradiction to Firsten's confident assertion, what about you is actually more common, even when asking about what somebody wants.

I think I'd like some more scholarship and integrity from this guy. What about you?

New Yorker Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

Check it out here.

The categorisation of 'otherwise'

It occurred to me over the weekend that otherwise has the same classification problems that so does.

No time to elaborate.

Early attestations of the FANBOY(S) acronym

My earliest and still most popular post on this blog was about the FANBOYS mnemonic for recalling the "coordinating conjunctions": for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. At the time, I wondered about the source of this notion. While not pinning down the source, Karl Hagan has found a 1951 publication mentioning FANBOY (without the S).

"The earliest source (so far) is Learning to Write by Reed Smith, Bill Paxton, William Paxton, and Basil G. Meserve, 3rd ed. Heath, 1951. Google only gives a snippet view, but that's enough: '[the] chief co-ordinating conjunctions are sometimes called the fanboy words.' (p. 398)."

And then the full acronym:

"The next work found in Google Books, and the first that actually gives FANBOYS as an acronym, is dated 1970:

Gertrude B. Corcoran, Language arts in the elementary school: a modern linguistic approach, Ronald Press Co. 1970, p. 140:
'Coordinating conjunctions can be remembered by thinking of the acronym FANBOYS'."

Asians/agents

As an instructor/entertainer (sorry, I simply hate to call myself a teacher), I usually have one or more courses where I explain/present (sorry, but I just don't like to refer to what I do as 'teach') English pronunciation.

One of the many things I discuss is the inevitable similarity between such pairs as 'mince/mints' and 'prince/prints'. You can differentiate one from the other, but they tend to sound very similar. In fact, some speakers (chiefly American speakers) find it difficult to distinguish them.

Just this morning I found a delightful clip to add to my presentation material:



If you happen to know anything like this (or indeed anything of linguistic interest), please let me know. Really, I am easily pleased.

The decline of the -ly adverb

A correspondent writes, "I've been amazed at the loss of the derivational suffix -ly that routinely marks adverbs." When I pointed out that many adverbs have both the inflected and flat versions (e.g., quick), he replied, "as far as I know, quickly has been the adverb form and quick the adjective form for some time now. Dictionaries often list quick as a colloquial adverb only and not a formal one."

The OED notes "Now usually considered less formal than quickly, and found chiefly in informal or colloquial contexts." The now at the beginning of that sentence is of interest. The entry has quotations for quick as an adverb from 1300 until the present day with everything in between, and with both formal and informal examples.

In other words, this is not a change, but a continuation, though perhaps we are currently on the ebb of an -ly-ful wave. The Corpus of Current American English shows a slight decline in -ly adverb frequency from 1990-2008 with 11,515 instances per million words in 1990-1994, 11, 291 in '95-'99, 11,146 in 200-2004, and 11,074 in 2005-2008 where, over the same period, all adverbs actually increased in frequency from 35,072 PMW to 35,373.

The Time Corpus shows the same overall increase in adverb use, but for -ly adverbs, it shows a gradual increase from the 1920s with a peak in the 1970s followed by a drop off, today's levels being about the same as they were a century ago.


Also, check out Jan Freeman's "The Word" column from Sept 17, 2006.

Missing pronouns and prepositions

Yesterday's Toronto Star has a review by Raju Mudhar of Chuck Palahniuk's latest book, Pygmy. Mudhar claims, "one thing is missing from his latest narrative: pronouns like 'I' and most prepositions." Leaving aside the question of whether pronouns and prepositions constitute one thing or not, are they indeed missing?

Well, you can get the first 30 pages of the book here and see for yourself. The writing is obviously nonstandard.

"Fellow operatives already pass immigrant control, exit through secure doors and to embrace own other host family people. Operative Tibor, agent 23; operative Magda, agent 36; operative Ling, agent 19. All violate United States secure port of entry having success."

Quoted material, however, appears to be standard English, so we'll generously assume that Mudhar means that these elements are missing only outside of dialog.

Well, on the first page, we get me used three times and that's it for pronouns. Certainly less than usual for fiction, but not entirely missing. The only other pronoun I could dig up (outside of dialog) was one instance of them.

Prepositions are more common though. The first 30 pages inclde all of the top 10 prepositions (of, in, to, for, with, on, at, from, for, about) except about.

"Really, the genesis of Pygmy's language was to try to make an entire language out of a small number of largely inappropriate words. And the rules were no definite article `the,' no conjunctions and there had to be very specific redundancies, like `colour red,' `arm limb' and `baby puppy,'... There were just very specific logical rules." Palahniuk is quoted as saying.

I find only one instance of is, one of were, and two of am and no apostrophes at all. The article a is used twice and the five times. And there are lots of conjunctions; and, but, and or are all there. So, despite Palahniuk's claims of logical rules, really it just seems like a half-baked gimmick.

But then what's the point of going to all the trouble to construct an entire language around broken English anyhow? Nobody would actually be anal enough to check if you're being consistent about it, would they?

Deliberate practice & teaching TESL

I've recently been reading Practice in a Second Language. When Amazon recommended it to me, I was very interested, especially given some of the work that Robert DeKeyser has done around the issue of practice. But when I started reading it, I realised that the definition of practice around which the book is based is so milquetoast as to turn it into another bland review of general second language acquisition research.

That's why I was so excited when I came upon the concept of deliberate practice where I wasn't expecting it at all: in The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Teacher Education. Having just completed my first year teaching in our TESL program, I was looking for some ideas to help me understand and rethink how my experience there had been different from experiences teaching English.

The guide started out rather tediously with a lot of talk of politics, colonialism, and professionalism. "Our increased attention to the complexities of teacher learning," concludes the introduction, "is grounded in an epistemology of practice." For some reason, I have a personal aversion to the word epistemology, and find it difficult to take seriously texts that use it.

Anyhow, I had almost given up on it when I came across Nat Bartels's chapter, "Knowledge about language", which isn't really about knowledge about language at all, but rather about deliberate practice. (To be fair, Practice in a Second Language also starts out talking about deliberate practice, but then quickly backs away from it.)

So what is deliberate practice? It is repeated attempts at the same or similar tasks under the following conditions:

1. high motivation to attend to the task and exert effort
2. clear goals and purposes
   
3. challenging but not overly difficult tasks
4. authentic but controlled tasks
   
5. immediate feedback
   

This sounds somewhat banal. It's a lot like drill on the surface. But extensive research by Anders Ericsson and others suggests that the difference between experts and merely experienced amateurs is that experts constantly engage in deliberate practice. It is rarely because of some inherent talent. Experts problematize aspects of what they do, in other words they take the acceptable and examine it for points of weakness. They form hypotheses or get instruction about better ways to perform, and then they try them out repeatedly, attending closely to success and failure.

For teacher learners, Bartels says, practicum is not a good place to engage in deliberate practice for a number of reasons:

1. it's too complex, not allowing them to attend sufficiently to the target aspect
2. it's too difuse, not allowing numerous repetitions of the target task
3. feedback is often be delayed

On the other hand, simply talking or reading about how to do a task also fails to meet the conditions that will help learners become experts.

The TESL course that I taught was designed to move from talking about grammar to teaching grammar in peer teaching activities, and then to the practicum. Nowhere was there any opportunity for deliberate practice, but at least now I'm thinking about it.

(By the way, The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Teacher Education actually ended up being much more enlightening on the whole than I had expected. Along with the Bartels chapter, Chapter 18: The Novice Teacher Experience and Chapter 19: Teaching Expertise: Approaches, Perspectives, and Characterizations in particular were also very interesting, both for a novice teacher educator like me, and, I would expect, even to novice ESL teachers.)

Phonemics as the new thing in language testing

Alan Davies posting the following to the L-Test mailing list.

Robert Lado (1961) mentions three approaches to the role of pronunciation: ignoring it is an error; reaching for native pronunciation is wishful thinking; intelligibility is attractive but hard to define.

'Phonemics' he claims ' offers the way out of this problem ... testing pronunciation with a phonemic criterion of accuracy is the new thing' (: 140). He deals with both recognition and production of the sound segments in chapters 7 and 8 and in later chapters with stress and intonation. Because, he says, production presents more problems than testing recognition, his advice is to test production through what he calls partial production, which is wholly paper based. Yesterday's print is today's machine?

In the 1960s, recognition tests of pronunciation by means of phonemic contrasts were popular. I used two in the English Proficiency Test Battery (1965), the precursor of ELTS and IELTS. The first of these contained 65 triplets. Results indicated:

"phonemic discrimination bore little if any relation to the other components (grammar, reading and listening comprehension).... The practice of insisting on the inclusion of a phoneme test seemed rather like requiring a knowledge of astrology for students of meteorology. Hindsight has not dealt kindly with phonemic discrimination, nor indeed with phonetics more generally, displaced as it is from its central role in the linguistic sciences, a place now occupied by theories of social interaction and cognitive science."

(Davies 2008, Assessing Academic English: 21)

Stuffies

It appears that the word stuffy/stuffie is becoming the common way for children in southern Ontario and elsewhere to refer to stuffed toys.

Just thought you might want to know.

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage has been around since 2004, but it only just came to my attention recently. As the blurb says, it's the first totally new major English usage book published in the 21st century, and it's "based on the Cambridge International Corpus and the British National corpus, highlighting the points of contrast between American and British usage."

Jumping off from this trans-Atlantic difference, the website includes a diagnostic quiz, which says, "If you don't get the questions right, this is the book you need." But seven of ten "usage" differences are simply spelling variations.

The physical book itself is a lovely hardback with a glossy cover, high-quality paper, and a thoughtful use of type faces. It appears sturdy and would likely endure a good deal of use.

And the contents then? I don't plan to actually read the book cover to cover, so the following observations will be somewhat scattered:

• On the positive side, Peters doesn't begin by assuming that you know what she's talking about. The entry for passive verbs, for example, is broken into three sections: 1 the grammar of the passive, 2 style in the passive, and 3 the passive in scientific writing, with part 1 being a reasonable explanation of what a passive verb is: "one in which the subject undergoes the process or action expressed in the verb."
• If we jump over to see what a subject is, however, we run into the usual problems: "the person or thing which operates the verb." This definition simply cannot logically coexist with the definition of the passive given above. Fortunately, the book does go beyond that, though, to mention that the subject governs subject-verb agreement.
• Skipping back to the entry for passive, we find that Peters repeats the general slander against this maligned voice. Passive clauses, "are not the stuff of lively narrative when you want to know who is doing what. Used too often as in some academic and official styles, they make for dreary reading." She at least admits that the passive has its place, but she gives no examples of these dreary passives. The only examples she does give seem contrived: "The employment of staff with less than six months service will be terminated" is said to be better than, "We, the senior management, will terminate the employment of staff with less than six months service."
• On the same spread as passive is an entry for parvenu or parvenue. Apparently this is one of the 4,000 entries that Peters though was disputed enough to include. To be honest, I don't think I'd even met the word before. The COCA says it occurs about 5-15 times per 100 million words with the BNC being at the upper range of that. So, hardly a common word. But is this actually a smouldering question: parvenu or parvenue? Hmm... (Mind you, it's not like this kind of trivial point seems to be displacing weightier issues. Never did I think to look something up only to find it not addressed.)
  
• I asked my wife what to look up, and she suggested conditionals. There is indeed a short entry on conditionals, though oddly enough it seems to focus on French and Italian, viz, "English verbs have no conditional forms, and instead the modal verb would is commonly used to translate conditionals from French and Italian," (should you have the opportunity to do so...). The entry goes on to say, "conditional statements in English are often attached to a conditional clause, prefaced by if, unless or provided that, which are a type of adverbial clause." I'm not sure whether this is a subject-verb agreement error (i.e., *a conditional clause are a type of adverbial) or a factual error (i.e., if, unless or provided that, which are a type of adverbial clause).
• As I typed viz, above, I thought, "now here's a chance to put this book to use." I looked it up, and learned that the z is actually the printer's substitute for ezh (ʒ), an abbreviation for -et. Interesting, but what I really wanted to know was, should I italicize it?
• The entry for logogram, logograph, logotype, and logo is pretty much all news to me, but ignores the meaning I do know: the type of writing system exemplified by Chinese characters (e.g., 手 is the logograph for hand). On the same page, we find loony or loonie, which correctly describes the situation here in Canada (loony = adj. crazy, loonie = n. one dollar coin.)
• The entry for decimate is generally quite good with clear examples showing the reduce-by-10% sense, the reduce-to-10% sense, and the more common, but less mathematical, meaning, along various others.
• Ravage or ravish is also well done. Of ravish, Peters writes, "the two kinds of meaning have their respective clichés in ravished virgins and ravished audiences, which are symptomatic of the fact that the word is usually either euphemistic or hyperbolic."
  

After spending a couple of hours with the book, I sadly find few entries particularly helpful. Despite the corpus-based approach, very few examples of use are typically given and though the author occasionally lets her voice shine through (as in ravish, above) these entertaining bits are not the norm. In contrast, Peters's opinions are obvious, and it's often unclear what, if any, corpus evidence has been brought to bear in forming them (as in passive, above). All in all, the hype about the book being corpus-based is accurate, but I find the actual implementation somewhat superficial. The most prominent application seems to be to the endless disputed spellings to which far too much of the book is given over: doughnut or donut; doyly, doyley, or doiley; drily or dryly; drivable or driveable; driveling or drivelling; dyarchy or diarchy; dullness or dulness, and on and on. If you really don't know which to use, you can check the COCA or the BNC for free and save yourself the cost of the book. For other issues, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage displays much more scholarship and will only cost you half as much.

English as she is spoke

In one of the comments on the previous post, Nick asks about the blog's tag line "Second thoughts on English and how she's taught". It's actually a nod to the classic, English as She Is Spoke by Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino.

But, in particular, Nick is curious about the use of personal pronouns, such as she, for inanimate objects.

"I know in French, one can take an inanimate object and treat it as though it were alive, such as "la maison" is feminine" so the pronoun would be "elle", which is "she", but in English, how is the word English a "she" and not an "it" in that sense? Just some fodder to chew on."

There are some interesting points here. Of course, it is possible for people to anthropomorphize things, as this Clavin & Hobbes strip from May 4, 1995 shows:
But is using a pronoun or determinative (e.g., French la) marked for gender really treating inanimate things as if they were alive? It certainly seems that way when we use the word gender to refer both to grammatical categories of masculine and feminine and to biological categories of male and female. But in Japanese, for example, gender is marked in the verb iru/aru いる／ある meaning roughly exist/be/have. But the gender distinction here is animate-inanimate, not male-female.

Even where the male-female-(neuter) gender is maintained, the grammatical gender doesn't always match up with the biological gender. The German word Mädchen, meaning little girl, is grammatically neutral. And there is the Dyirbal language made famous by the book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, which has the following genders:

1. animate objects, men
2. women, water, fire, dangerous things
3. edible fruit and vegetables
4. other

In other words, gender is simply a way of classifying nouns. Although it does commonly correspond to biological categories, I don't think it would be wise to conclude that by using a gender-marked pronoun, the speaker is treating something as if it is alive.

The second question, then, is why English speakers might occasionally use personal pronouns that do not match the expected uses. The she in the tag line was produced by a speaker of Portuguese who basically knew no English and was simply (I expect) following the norms of his native language, so it's not really an interesting example.

English speakers do occasionally use it and this (a determinative, not a pronoun) to refer to humans (e.g., Hi, it's Brett. or This is my bother, Michael.) And we use personal pronoun she for a variety of things from boats to rivers to moons, to something being passed between two people (e.g., here she comes.)

My sense is that such use of he is much more limited, though the OED gives,

"2. Of things not sexually distinguished:

a. Things grammatically masculine. Obs. b. Things personified as masculine, as mountains, rivers, oak-trees, etc.

with the added comment:

"It is not easy to say when grammatical gender ceased to be used, this differing according to dialect. In dialect speech, he is still used for most things of definite shape, without any feeling of personification."

But I have no idea why we do any of this...

IATEFL conference vids free online

A number of sessions and interviews from the recent IATEFL conference in Cardiff have been put online and made available for everyone, no membership or payment necessary. I'm not sure how they've chosen the links from that main menu, but if you click on each of the days at the top, you find a mixture of new presentations and presentations from the main video page.

One that caught my attention was by Jeff Stranks, whose presentation makes the point that texts given to learners as a source of information are great, but ultimately students are in our classrooms to learn English, not other stuff, so we need to also bring attention to the language in the texts: the vocabulary, the collocations, the grammar, the punctuation, and the style. Stranks presents a number of simple ways of doing this. Unfortunately, he's plagued by the perenial issue of a malfunctioning PowerPoint, but both his slides and his handout are linked to below the video. This is indeed a good idea. Students should be revisiting texts that they're familiar with and focusing on the language.

Another talk that gets it wrong is "What kind of vocabulary do advanced students need to learn?" by Stuart Redman. Granted, he's looking at advanced learners, but bringing students' attention to expressions like having second thoughts or being of two minds, as he suggests in his talk and does in his textbook, is a waste of time. The expression two minds occurs at a rate of about once per two million words. Second thoughts is more common, especially in fiction, but even there it occurs only at a rate of 5.7 times per million words. The top 2,000 words of English occur above a rate of 30 times per million words, and it would take many thousand more words to fill the gap between 30/mw and 5.7/mw. In other words, as I've said before, there's more important stuff to be teaching them.

TESL certification

If you're going to teach English as a second language here in Ontario, you need to be certified and there are a number of potential pitfalls that are rather easy to get caught in.

The first is the difference between TESL Canada and TESL Ontario. You would think that the national body would have more stringent certification requirements than the provincial body. You'd be wrong. While both organisations require an undergraduate degree, TESL Canada level 1 certification (which is the only national level available for pre-service teachers without a Master's degree in TESOL or applied linguistics) requires only 100 hours of theory and methodology study in a "recognized TESL training program or equivalent" and a supervised practicum of at least 20 hours (10 hours of observation and 10 hours of teaching). Applicants must also show evidence of English language proficiency (roughly TOEFL iBT 80).

In contrast, TESL Ontario requires 250 hours of TESL course work from an institution recognized by TESL Ontario and a supervised practicum of at least 50 hours (30 hours of observation and 20 hours of teaching). Applicants must also show evidence of English language proficiency (roughly TOEFL iBT 103).

In other words, TESL Canada level 1 certification is basically useless in Ontario.

The next problem is programs offered by non-accredited institutions. According to TESL Ontario's own application documents, the only certified institutions are Brock, Carleton, U of T, York, and U Sask; Algonquin, Centennial, Conestoga, George Brown, and Humber colleges; Thames Valley, Toronto, and York Catholic school boards; and among private institutions, the Canadian College of Educators and the Canadian Centre for Language & Cultural Studies. The teach abroad courses offered by, for example, Oxford Seminars do NOT meet TESL Ontario certification standards.

Of course, I teach in the Humber program, which far exceeds TESL Ontario requirements, and consequently produces many of the most sought-after graduates in Ontario. The program is unique in having 500 hours of coursework, and 80 hours of graduated practicum which is entirely arranged by the school (many courses leave it up to students to arrange their own practicum hours, which is becoming more and more difficult in the saturated GTA). Humber is a two-semester daytime program, but come September, it looks like we'll probably be delivering it three days a week. If you or anyone you know is interested, please get in touch.

The categorization of 'so'

The other day I got an e-mail from a colleague who asked about complements to linking verbs. As I was thinking about the various possible complements, the clause it seems so came to mind. "What in the world is so," I wondered. Not really expecting to find any help, I checked a number of dictionaries. The OED has entries for so as an adverb/conjunction and predictably other dictionaries follow suit. But that can't be right.

The word seem can take a variety of complements apart from so. These include:

1. Noun phrases (NPs) and adjective phrases (AdjPs), typically grouped as predicate complements (aka subjective complements).
   He seems happy. (AdjP)
   She seems a good sort. (NP) more common in British English
   
2. Content clauses (aka noun clauses): bare, with subordinator that, and with relative pronoun what
   It seems (that) they have arrived early.
   That did not seem what they intended to convey.
   
3. to infinitives
   It seems to be the right one.
4. Preposition phrases (PPs)
   It seems like a good solution.
   They seem out of place.
5. And, of course, the word so. [My aunt reminds me that not can also work here.]
   

They do not include:

1. Determinative phrases (DPs)
   *It seems any.
   *It seems the.
   *It seems those.
   
2. Adverb phrases (AdvPs)
   *It seems quickly.
   *It seems really.
   *It seems always.
   *It seems too.
3. Content clauses introduced by when, why, how
   *It seems how they did it.
   *It seems why they did it.
   *It seems how they did it.
4. Bare infinitives
   *It seems be OK.
   

So, if adverbs are illegal as complements [but note the possibility of not], why call so an adverb? I suppose the reasoning is: if something doesn't fit another category, it must be an adverb, but that's pretty silly.

And what do I think so is? I haven't figured that one out yet. I'll try to get back to you on it.

[Added May 25, 2009: otherwise also seems to have similar properties.]

A primmer primer

This morning on CBC, Andy Barrie said that later they would have a /prɪmɚ/ on something or other (i.e., basic information about a topic). "You mean /praɪmɚ/," I thought. But he went on to say that he used to say /praɪmɚ/ but he had been told by a listener that, in fact, the correct pronunciation was /prɪmɚ/. "That's right," chimed in Jill Dempsey. "Nonsense," I thought, never having heard anybody pronounce it that way in my life. So when I got to work, I grabbed all the dictionaries I could find.

The Oxford Canadian Dictionary gives both pronunciations, with /praɪmɚ/ listed first. I teach English as a second language, so most of the dictionaries I have on my desk are for learners of English; The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary lists only /praɪmɚ/, as does the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary, all of which are British. Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary, along with their Learner's Dictionary, gives the American pronunciation as /prɪmɚ/, but also lists /praɪmɚ/noting "chiefly British". The American Heritage Dictionary is the only one I can find that does not list the /aɪ/ pronunciation.

So, dispite the prim listener's protestations about this point, it appears that Metro Morning's host and listening audience have had another incorrection foisted upon them.

Editing poetry

My brother, Michael Eden Reynolds, has won both first and second place in Prism's inaugural poetry contest.

I am not a poet. I rarely read poetry, nor do I write it. It is neither a regret nor a point of pride, merely a reality. But I do try to take an interest in the things that people close to me are doing, so when Michael started getting his poetry published, I was curious. Unfortunately, I must admit finding much of what he sent to me opaque. There were lines I liked, and occasionally a whole poem that would grab me, but often I really didn't know where to start.

When he told me that he was having part of his manuscript edited, I became even more curious. Perhaps the editor's comments would help me understand Michael's poetry. What kind of changes would an editor make anyhow?

When Michael forwarded me the marked up manuscript, I was somewhat disappointed. There was no obvious egress from my comprehensional umbra, but strangely enough, I suddenly understood how you might go about editing something as flexible and creative as poetry, even when you don't understand the whole poem. It would be much the same as when one edits prose, only more stringent.

Now, in general, I think Strunk's injunction to omit needless words is often rather useless advice, but in poems there is more of an imperative to pack the utmost meaning into the fewest mental gestures possible. The editor Michael had engaged seemed to have it in for "gerunds and abstractions and... extra pesky small words, particularly articles." I don't believe in this kind of categorical discrimination, but suddenly I did begin to see lines that would benefit from pruning, and I offered Michael my own editing services.

I began by editing his editor, telling Michael where I agreed and where I didn't. I think he found this a bit of a relief as he had perhaps been a bit intimidated by a lot of the advice he'd received.

During this process, there were times when a more precise or apt word would occur to me. At other times, I found preachy lines where the images had already communicated what needed to be said. With this shift of attention to the technical details of the poems, more meanings began to present themselves and I was able to enter a few more poems, but I also felt that I now had permission to simply say, "I can't make any sense of this at all."

Sometimes, when Michael and I discussed these, it would turn out that he was just stretching the language too far. For example, in the following , I queried arrested... from...

Maze of one, speck of time, arrested
in my pocket from the wide and cloudless
night that apprehends me.

Michael wanted to convey that the speck time had been taken by force, but in the end, we agreed that from is not a legal complement to arrest and that the intended reading simply wasn't available to most readers.

Many times I suggested orthodox punctuation where Michael's was heterodox, often with no obvious benefit either prosodic or semantic. And occasionally, the syntax was simply muddled:

On the boat there’s a slow coil
of water heaps the prow.

became

A slow coil of water
heaps the prow.

There were also questionable metaphors. Consider the following lines:

"It’s the night before garbage day,
the wind’s as warm as a breath
of frogsong, "

I commented that although frogsong may have associations with the warmth of spring, or that it may warm the soul, "a breath of frogsong" itself doesn't strike me as warm at all.The line became:

It’s the night before garbage day,
warm wind stirring the frogs
into song,

There was also some overly-familiar rhyme and the occasional cliche: "rain against the windowpane", "heaves a sigh."

And of course, I got to make positive comments on lovely descriptions like this one of writing in a foreign script

"characters with sloping
shoulders, cats and lizards, coiled shrubs."

I will admit that much of the editing advice I provided Michael was rather mechanical, surface-level stuff: copy editing mostly. To go beyond that, I'd need to learn a lot more about poetry, something I'm afraid I probably won't do soon. But what I have learned was interesting, and it was a privilege to be able to work with Michael on this project.

Clauses vs. phrases

Our final Firsten disection for this quarter begins with the question: "Are non-finite clauses the same thing as what we used to call 'phrases'?"

The distinction between clauses and phrases is indeed a muddy one. I've shown before how it confused the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. Apparently, its authors are not alone in their confusion.

The reality of the situation is that the words are used differently by different people, or even sometimes by the same person. And that's fine. Just as long as we can figure out who's using which word what way.

Traditionally, then, a phrase is merely any contiguous group of words that has some connection in expressing a concept, but which is not in itself a clause. A clause, on the other hand, is a whole simple sentence or one part of a complex or compound sentence that contains a subject and a predicate.

These two concepts are generally distinct enough that the distinction is maintained, but things can get messy. What does it mean to contain a subject? Imperatives are thought to be clauses and are said to include implied subjects: you. But then a predicate adjunct such as speaking slowly in Speaking slowly, he explained why he disagreed also has an implied subject: he. Traditionalists, though, would not consider speaking slowly a clause.

Firsten tries to explain this traditional idea of clauses vs. phrases and how it overlaps with the idea of being finite or non-finite.

"Non-finite clauses are the same thing as "phrases." In addition, finite clauses are the same thing as "clauses." The terminology underwent a change some years ago, and now most grammarians use the terms finite and non-finite clauses... A finite clause must have a subject and a verb that carries tense."

This rule of thumb isn't very useful as it ignores the possibility of phrases that contain no verbs at all, while mostly just switching one label for the other without adding any clarity.

So what does it mean for something to be finite? The idea of finite verb has been with us since at least the late 18th century when Lindley Murray wrote, "Finite verbs are those to which number and person appertain." This explains the reason for the label: if something is finite, it has certain limitations. A verb like runs cannot go together with just any old subject; I goes will not do. The verb go in to go, on the other hand, is not limited in this way. That is to say, it is non-finite.

Firsten's explanation is at odds with Murray's use. Murray applies the concept to verbs, where Firsten applies it to entire clauses. But given that English subject-verb agreement occurs only with present-tense verbs and with past-tense be, it seems that they agree that it applies when the verb carries the tense. Firsten doesn't stop there though. He says,

"Come with me to the next TESOL convention is also a finite clause even though the subject you is hidden and the verb is in the imperative form."

Yet, there is no tensed verb here and subject-verb agreement does not apply.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language takes a position rather closer to Firsten's than Murray's, albeit one which is much clearer while at the same time admittedly unorthodox. Like Firsten, the CGEL applies the concept to clauses, not verbs. But it is silent about a subject. Rather it includes the following as finite clauses:

1. clauses headed by tensed verbs (i.e., present tense or past tense; there is no future tense)
2. clauses headed by plain-form verbs in the imperative or the subjunctive.

This has already gone on far too long, so I'll get back to why this is a useful classification in another post.

Backshift and remote relationships

In Richard Firsten's most recent Grammatically Speaking column, he claims that was in the sentence "Was there something you needed to see me about?" is an example of backshifting.

The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics: A Handbook for Language Teaching doesn't even mention backshifting. Nor does the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Even the OED fails to mention backshift. The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, Third Edition has no entry for backshifting, but under back-shift it instructs us to see direct speech. Unfortunately, this reference resolves to an entry that is entirely unhelpful on the matter. Apparently, this term is not widely used.

But do not despair. The Oxford English Grammar steps up to the plate. George Yule also talks about backshift in Explaining English Grammar, as does the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. But these books are unanimous in defining and discussing backshift in relation to reported speech, and Firsten's topic has nothing to do with reported speech. Even Wikipedia concurs. Yule, for example, says:

"The change of forms, such as present tense (e.g., 'I am ill') to past tense (e.g., 'He said he was ill') in indirect speech."

Terminology aside, the explanation offered strikes me as generally correct. But for those of us who are obsessed with categorizing grammar, it cries out for a label. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language observes, "three uses of the preterite (past tense): past time, backshift, and modal remoteness." This last term, modal remoteness, is what we're looking at here. The question Is there something you want to see me about? is very immediate. It tramples social distance. This can make things more or less comfortable, depending on what each party gains or loses from recognizing social distance.

The point that tenses have uses beyond the signification of time is one that is not made often enough. Certainly, backshift, being one of those uses, is related to the topic at hand, but only remotely. There may actually be grammar references out there that use backshifting in the way Firsten does, but I've never come across them and some fairly anally retentive searching on my part has failed to turn up any.

[On an almost completely unrelated note, did you hear about the cosmologist who went to the costume party dressed all in red? He would move away from people and then ask them what he was. Answer: redshift]

A whole nother issue

A few days ago, I promised to get back to fixing up Richard Firsten's problematic answers to grammar questions. Although, I said I'd look at backshift, this morning, I was more in the mind to address his second letter, which poses the perennial question: why do we say a whole nother? Richard's reply:

"because it either sounds cute or humorous. And what's really interesting is that you can now find nother in some dictionaries!"

Both of these strike me as true. But one word stuck in my craw: now. A careful reader would be left with the impression that nother is a recent form, perhaps coming out of the seventies when Luke Skywalker famously whined at his uncle, "but that's a whole nother year..." You certainly wouldn't get the impression that it has been in use fairly consistently since at least the 14th century:

• "c1330 Otuel 83 Ich am comen her..To speke wi charles..& wi a knit at heet Roulond & a noer hatte oliuer."
• "c1390 MS Vernon Homilies in Archiv f. das Studium der Neueren Sprachen (1877) 57 280 He wolde him say his onswere on a noer day. "
• "1559 J. AYLMER Harborowe sig. E4, Of Paul I shal speak of at a nother time."
• "1850 ‘M. TENSAS’ Odd Leaves from Louisiana Swamp Doctor 152 Lizey Johnson's middle darter, Prinsanna,..left her husband in the state of Georgy, and kum to Luzaanny an' got marred to a nother man."
• "1963 Word Study Feb. 7, I have to grade a whole nother set of themes."

So why do we have both other and nother? The OED explains:

"From the beginning of the Middle English period, the coexistence of two forms of the indefinite article (an before vowels and a before consonants) often led to metanalysis (the same phenomenon occurs in other languages where the indefinite article ends in -n, e.g. French, Italian, etc.). Variants arising by metanalysis sometimes alliterate with words with initial n- in alliterative verse, and in some cases have become established as the regular modern forms (so that e.g. Middle English a nadder became an adder; compare also apron, auger, etc.), while conversely some vowel-initial forms have gained n- (so that e.g. Middle English an ewt became a newt; compare also nickname). The following examples show the latter process in cases where the variants arising by metanalysis did not become established as the regular modern form."

Michael Eden Reynolds facebook group

You've seen his poetry before. Now comes the facebook group!

Another thought about post-

A while ago, I mused about post- being a preposition-forming prefix. It now occurs to me that I fell into the trap of confounding the function and the category. I wrote, "Clearly though, the word post-Walkerton as used above is neither adjective, verb, nor noun." This is mistaken.

The context was How is the water post-Walkerton? Of course, post-Walkerton can be replaced with a prepositional phrase such as after Walkerton. It can also be replaced with an adverb such as recently. But what I overlooked was that it can also be replaced with a noun phrase such as these days or (with a slight adjustment to the verb tense) last year, or Monday. Given that, I think that post-Walkerton would make most sense as a noun, and that post- is not, in fact, a preposition-forming prefix.

So, it appears, sadly, that there is no productive way of creating new prepositions, though -wards is weakly productive (again, of intransitive prepositions, which many people wrongly call adverbs).

Incidentally, Geoff Pullum recently credited me with discovering post as a new preposition. This is true for certain senses of discover, but not for the sense that I was the first human to realise the situation. As commenters on Language Log have mentioned, the OED lists it. But the OED seems to miss a distinction between post and after, which commenter Mike Keesey explains nicely when he says, "'After' is neutral. 'Post' implies that the event/period in question has fundamentally changed the state of things."