Most passive verbs in English

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

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

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

Multiple of the people

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

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

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

English too easy

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

More here.

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

Numerous as a determinative

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

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

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

1. 2000 ACAD Monist: later additions to the first published versions of the preponderance of the earlier essays. Numerous of the former do advocate a discipline, the cultivation of a form of ability
2. 1996 NEWS CSMonitor: Japan, Scotland, Australia, and Kenya. # LOS ANGELES # As numerous of the more thoughtful teens interviewed observed, a lot of L.A. slang comes from

They don't really work for me either though.

The categorization of `close'

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

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

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

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

FANBO

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

Thanks to Geoff Pullum for tracking this down!

The annals of FANBOYS

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

Section 23, (p. 14) says,

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

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

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

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

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

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

[See the update]

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

PRESS RELEASE: LANGUAGES CANADA, JULY 21, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some questions about teaching

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

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

Rearing heads

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

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

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

Just in case you had wondered.

Trees and diagrams

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

Cambridge Journals Temporarily Free

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

Clear as a preposition?

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

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

Roger Ebert confuses ESL materials for native speaker materials

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

Studies about international English proficiency

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

The history of English in ten minutes

A witty series of shorts from the Open University:

Amirite?

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

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

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

Status

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

Just in case you were wondering...

In spite of a lot of evidence

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

Errors and noticing

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

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

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

Ben Zimmer at the Boston Globe

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

NSA style guide

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

The last and the most important word

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

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

Being selling

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



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

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

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

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

Per + bare NP

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

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

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

Repeated discussions

Another activity post:

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

Words as a measure of hope

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

TEDxHumber talk

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

Engineering interaction

Here's a quick idea:

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

Proved/proven

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

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

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

Some teaching activities

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

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

The exact opposite

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

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

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

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

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

Google Books Corpus with BYU interface

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

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

Applied linguists just aren't serious about statistics

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

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

The prevalence of first-person pronouns in books

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

Complementing an adjective

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dismissive "thing"

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

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

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

Bas Aarts, grammatologist

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

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

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

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

Needs and aspirations

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

hope, wish, want, desire, need

Radical Radiational Pragmatics - Japanese Nuclear Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More possessive than...

Language Wars: the Empire Strikes Back

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

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

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

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

Or is it "Turk"?

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

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

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

Antedating "jerk"

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

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

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

The FBI and splitting infinitives

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

A word for these kinds of words

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

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

Mandating the subjunctive

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

Another "Grammatically Speaking", another error

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

And gets the answer wrong.

Vocabulary, reading, and hockey sticks

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

More on semicolons

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

Enumerating the semicolon

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

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

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

Train your brain to be a memory athlete

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

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

Prescriptivist Today

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

Semantic Categories and Context in L2 Vocabulary Learning

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

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

David Paul's blog

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

What's the plural of Prius?

Toyota is asking what the plural of Prius is, and they've got a catchy video to go along with the question:

Adjectives and past participles

Returning to Leo Schmitt's most recent Grammatically Speaking column, I'd like to take up the issue of when a past participle becomes an adjective. This point comes up in the "Brain Teaser" section:

The following two sentences are grammatical. They both demonstrate the same exception to a general grammatical rule of English. What is that rule and what is the exception?

1. The Natchez Board of Aldermen last week voted unanimously to demolish the collapsed building at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin streets. (From “City to demolish collapsed building in downtown,” The Natchez Democrat.)

2. Authorities believe an escaped convict on work release ... is responsible for the blaze. (From “Investigators believe escaped convict set Roan Mountain fire,” www.tricities.com.)

Guest post from Leo Schmitt

The following is a guest post from Leo Schmitt, the new Grammatically Speaking columnist whose column I complained about here.

---------------

It is nice to know I can count on one regular reader, even if you are only looking for fodder with which to excoriate me. As I have already received some considerable flack from the more 'traditionalist' side, it is a relief to know that I can also count on criticism from supporters of alternative approaches to analyzing grammatical structures.

Intentional misunderstanding as a self-aggrandization strategy

In today's Retail, Val nicely explain's Grice's cooperative principle.

Grammatically speaking, the zombie edition

Grammatically speaking is dead. If only...

Back in September, it was announced that Richard Firsten would stop publishing his monthly column for TESOL. After years pointing out his mistakes, I thought this might be good news. When he let on that the column would not die, but that it would be incarnated by T. Leo Schmitt instead, I was cautiously optimistic. It turns out, though, that Schmitt is little better than Firsten.

Language Corpse/Corpus

Ever heard of the 'Bad Writing Contest'? If you haven't, take a look. It really is wonderfully amusing and amazing.

We are accustomed to seeing linguistic studies/analyses based on large corpora. We hear so much about word frequencies and collocations and all the rest. But we hardly, if ever, hear about what makes writing good or bad, based on solid, scientific linguistic studies, while we can tell bad from good writing with relative ease. There must be something there waiting to be explored ...

Meanwhile, the Bad Writing Contest: guaranteed to make you laugh out loud, and perhaps make you think too.

Google reading level

Google advanced search now has a reading-level feature which groups search results in to basic, medium, and advanced reading levels. According to Nudu, a Google employee, 

"The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced."

It seems unlikely that this will be of much value to English language learners, but it seems worth trying out. Here's this blog's breakdown by level.

Award-winning Whodunit

Hugh and Al Graham-Marr are friends from my Japan days who started up a publishing company called Abax. This year, they published Fiction In Action: Whodunit by Adam Gray and Marcos Benevides, which recently won the Duke of Edinburgh ESU English Language Book Award for 2010. The book is also notable as possibly the first commercial ELT text to also be published and made available for free under a Creative Commons license.

The subjunctive from the mouthes of babes?

My six-year-old daughter told us at dinner the other day that her teacher generally allows her class certain privileges "if we be good." The first thing that struck me is that it sounds like the subjunctive. An example would be If we be faithful to Christ, he will certainly be faithful to us from the New American Standard Bible. This seems extremely unlikely since it's an archaic form, although you can see how it would have come about. Other verbs appear in the plain present tense here, which is identical in shape to the subjunctive; both use the base form; only be has a distinct first-person present-tense form. This is probably, then, a performance error stemming from mistaken analogy.

The second was that if we be good gives be a dynamic sense that if we are good simply wouldn't have. It sounds much better than, for example, if we be hungry. Consider that you can say we're being good where you can't say *we're being hungry (unless this is some kind of dramatization of hunger).

After we adults had discussed the grammatical implications for a few minutes, my daughter said, "Oh, I mean if we are good," which I found somehow both wonderful and regrettable.

What's up?

A correspondent writes,

"What's up?" and " Not much?" come from African-American hoods... Teaching such phrases to kids is not appropriate, I believe. They will sound "Black". I am 46 years old. When I came up, we, African-Americans, were the only ones using such phrases.

This is a variation of the recency illusion. In fact, the phrase is well over a hundred years old and can be found all over the English speaking world.

TESL programs

Mariola O'Brien, one of my students from a few years back, was written up in the Toronto Star recently. The article doesn't seem to be online, but here's a PDF. It discusses her enviable work situation in Sweden as well as a variety of TESL certification options here in the GTA.

Good Reads

Carol Goar in yesterday's Toronto Star highlights a series of books for adult literacy learners. The series is published by Grass Roots Press and the books are by the following respected Canadian novelists: Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Rabindranath Maharaj, Louise Penny, Maureen Jennings, and Deborah Ellis, and financial writer Gail Vaz-Oxlade. I haven't had a chance to read any, but I look forward to reviewing them and perhaps getting them into our library. The series is set to be expanded by six new books next year.

On the same publisher's website, I also found series designed along similar concepts from British authors (Quick Reads) and Irish authors (Open Door). No doubt there is more to explore.

TESOL Position Statement on the Acquisition of Academic Proficiency in English at the Postsecondary Level

The international language teaching association TESOL has adopted a position which basically says, if you're going to fund an English language learner to go to college or university in English, you'd better be prepared to pay for them to work on their English. Indeed, English studies should not be seen as some kind of remediation, but as an "academic subject on par with other academic classes in an institution."

Saving savings

In the second half of Jan Freeman's most recent "The word", she takes on the question of whether we will be shifting to daylight saving time or daylight savings time. This is a question I took up three years ago here, concluding that both were perfectly grammatical although the singular version is more likely (and is the official choice).

Infinitive of purpose

Lori Habermehl, a colleague here in the English Language Centre at Humber, pointed out to me an exception to the textbook descriptions of the infinitive of purpose. This is the infinitive in "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." Learners of English often seem to grasp for a preposition to express this and end up, quite reasonably, with for. A decent paraphrase of Mark Anthony's famous line might be "I've come for Caesar's funeral, not for his martyrdom." Unfortunately, "I've come for burying Caesar, not for praising him" is unidiomatic at best, and it is this type of construction that many ESL grammar books are trying to help students avoid in sections on the infinitive of purpose.

Lori then asked, what about sentences like The uranium could be used for making nuclear weapons. I had occasionally noticed that for + present participle could be used to indicate purpose, but I'd never thought properly about it and so I told her I didn't know. Quickly, though, we came up with the hypothesis that it has to do with licensing complements, and a few corpus queries later, we were pretty sure that we were right. In fact, the only verb we could find that allowed this type of construction was use. 

So it seems that infinitives of purpose are adjuncts, while the for + present participle construction is a licensed complement of use. This can be illustrated by the fact that it's common to move the infinitive to the start of the sentence, but rare for a sentence to start with for + present participle.

• To make changes, go to the edit menu.
• Go to the edit menu to make changes.
• Use the edit menu to make changes.
• ?For making changes, use the edit menu.
• Use a non-stick pan to fry the eggs.
• Use a non-stick pan for frying the eggs.
• To fry your eggs, use a non-stick pan.
• ?For frying your eggs, use a non-stick pan.
• Use a non-stick pan to make clean-up easier.
• To make clean-up easier, use a non-stick pan.
• Use a non-stick pan for making clean-up easier.
• ?For making clean-up easier, use a non-stick pan.

(To be honest, I was expecting those ? sentences to sound worse than they do. Maybe I've just talked myself into believing they sound good.)

 I don't think I've ever seen this point addressed by any grammar book.

Reading about academic fraud

The Toronto Star is now including a section of New York Times article in their Sunday edition. That's where I ran into "Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent" by Andrew Jacobs. I don't have much to add except that I'll be using this as a reading in my level 7 EAP classes where I've had to deal with a lot of plagiarism this session. I don't know exactly what effect it will have, but it can't hurt.

Taboo words as audience-awareness enhancement tools

Over the weekend I was sitting at the dining room table with a bunch of tests and essays. Everyone else was either outside or off somewhere else. I had music playing and was comfortably settled in for a long slog of marking. After some time, my mother and aunt came in from their gardening and suddenly the music, which had been such a great companion, was awkwardly loud. I jumped up and turned it down because I simply couldn't enjoy it at that volume because I expected they wouldn't enjoy it at that volume.

This reminded me of something I've noticed with my kids' language. The two of them, one in grade 1 and one in 4, will occasionally and unselfconsciously say things like "oh my god!" or "thank god!" I have no compunction against using these exact phrases myself, and I don't even notice when other adults use them. But with the kids, it rubs me the wrong way. And I will ask them not to use those expressions.

'Worldwide' as a preposition?

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language takes worldwide to be both an adverb and an adjective (p. 568). It occurred to me this morning that it's more like a preposition, but the more I thought about it, the less sure I became. At this point, I'm firmly on the fence.

Worldwide is not exactly a typical adjective. Things don't typically become worldwide. In fact, I can only find one example in the COCA:

1997 MAG AmericanCraft "...was originally invented in Japan about 300 years ago, but its use has become worldwide since the late 19th century."

The grammatical status quo

In relation to a discussion on the correct classification of ago and before, a correspondent writes,

"I think when it comes to traditional categories, we should err on the side of inertia (or conservatism) because we would otherwise be asking people (admittedly not a large group these days) to change a trusted way of thinking. It's not like we are looking at alternative proposals in a vacuum. If the arguments are equal, I would vote for the status quo."I agree. But in this case, I don't think the arguments are at all equal. 

Future tense dependent on what?

In today's NY Times, Natalie Angier makes the extraordinary claim that the future tense is dependent on science and math education.

Of course, she doesn't mean it. It would be pointless to argue that we have no future tense to begin with let alone to question how science and math education in America could possibly have anything to do with the (in)stability of a basic grammatical system of English. She's simply not making a point about language at all, so any mention of it is off topic.

But she brought it up. The question is why. Why resort to this odd rhetorical move, what Geoff Pullum calls linguification, when it contains no humour, no clever analogy, no orienting metaphor, and no poetic musicality? Why not simply say, "Our nation’s economy, global allure and future tense all depend on the strength of its scientific spine," which is presumably what she means?