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."

The self-righteous fury of the blogs

If you don't read Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom, you should. He has a magnificent post about the cl/rash between blogs and the mainstream media (Zimmer also writes for Discover, The New York Times, and other more traditional news sources) in which he writes,

"Take, for example, a recent righteous rant from Ben Goldacre, a British doctor who writes the blog Bad Science. Goldacre is doing fabulous work on his blog, taking on irresponsible sensationalism and misinformation about vaccines, quack medicine, and other offenses. His guns are blazing particularly hot in a recent post about some awful reporting on recent studies on prostate cancer. He concludes with this sweeping condemnation of our trade:

Journalists insist that we need professionals to mediate and explain science. From today’s story, their self belief seems truly laughable.

Goldacre is big on evidence and down on anecdote, but as Zimmer notes here, he's guilty when it comes to condemning the MSM based on cherry-picked stories.

When I am critical, as I often am, I do worry about this, and I hope that I have taken a fair line with who I blame. If I haven't I trust you to let me know.

Coordinating and stacking modifiers

One of the teachers here came by Friday with a question about commas in pre-head modifiers in NPs. In other words, she was asking about the difference between things like:

• a serious political problem
• a serious, unsolvable problem

where these are both noun phrases (NPs) headed by the noun problem and modified by two words coming before the noun. Notice that one has a comma and one doesn't.

The textbook that had led her into this said that there are two types of adjectives: cumulative and coordinate. With coordinate adjectives, you put a comma, but with cumulative ones, you don't.

It's hard to know if this is simply a confusing description of a real situation or whether it is wrong. It suggests that adjectives belong to these two types, which is wrong, but if it really means that adjectives can be listed in two ways, then that's true.

The important point is that it has nothing to do with any particular type of adjective as you can have exactly the same two adjectives with a comma or without. Rather it is a question of coordinated modifiers versus stacked (or what they call cumulative) modifiers. Coordination looks like this: (m , m) h, but stacking looks like this: (m (m h)), where m is a modifier and h is a head noun.

1a) a powerful, new tool (coord)
1b) a powerful new tool (stacked)

In 1a, we have a tool that is both new and powerful. In 1b, we have a new tool that is powerful. This is probably not a distinction worth drawing, but look at this:

2a) a powerful, political force
2b) a powerful political force

In 2a, we have a force that is powerful but also political (as opposed to, say, moral). In 2b) we have a political force that is powerful (as opposed to weak).

3a) a small, happy family
3b) a small happy family

In 3a, the family happens to be both small and happy, but in 3b, the happy family is small (in comparison to most happy families, which we may expect to be big).

Where a modifier is a noun, it is usually indicative of a type and so lends itself to stacking. This also indicates why nouns will come at or towards the end of a string of modifiers.

4a) a big, ugly brick house

But it can also be coordinated:

4b) a big, ugly, brick house

4a is a brick house that is big and ugly. 4b is a house that is big, ugly, and made of brick.

Grammatically Speaking incoherent

Richard Firsten continues to provide questionable answers to grammar question in his "Grammatically speaking" column for TESOL . I must say, I'm disheartened that nobody in the editorial department there seems to have cottoned on to it yet. This time around there are enough problems that we're going to have to break things out into multiple posts.

We'll begin with the following question: is the -ing word in this sentence a present participle or a gerund?

He was famous for consistently picking stocks that gave high returns.

Firsten answers,

"What gives this away as a present participle and not a gerund is the word consistently. A gerund is like the noun form of a verb, so if it's preceded by nothing at all or by an adjective, we can see that it's a gerund, working as a noun."

Amid the confusion here, there are two useful hints. Adjectives do not modify verbs and adverbs do not modify nouns. So if your choice is between a word being a noun and a verb, and it's being modified by an adjective, you can bet the house it's not a verb. Equally, if it's being modified by an adverb, it's not a noun.

The rest of this is nonsense. "A gerund is like the noun form of a verb." And this is "a gerund, working as a noun." So, putting those together, we get: picking described as being like the noun form of a verb, working as a noun. So, is it a noun or a verb? Firsten doesn't seem to know, or if he knows, he's not telling. Maybe he's been reading Cowan's Teacher's Grammar of English.

Anyhow, let's look at another sentence: He was famous for his tan. It would be very unhelpful to say the NP his tan is "working as a noun." Rather, we would say it's functioning as the object of the preposition for. So, being the consistent folk we are, we'd say the clause consistently picking stocks that gave high returns is functioning as the object of for in the sentence in question.

What about picking itself? It's a verb. It's modified by an adverb, as Firsten points out. So, despite some confusion, he gets us to the right answer. But rather than stopping there, he bumbles on:

"If we tweak the sentence and have He was famous for picking stocks that gave high returns, we have a gerund."

No! No! No! This is to suggests that picking is a gerund by default, and that it is only by adding the adverb consistently that we turn it into a verb. That's backwards. Rather, it is because picking is a verb that it becomes possible to modify it by an adverb. But whether there is indeed an adverb there or not is irrelevant.

Then he gets the next part right:

"We also see that picking has a direct object, stocks, so that's another way we know that in this case, picking is a present participle"

Of course, this directly contradicts what he said earlier about it being a gerund, but don't let that bother you. It doesn't seem to bother the editors at TESOL.

Next time, what is backshift?

From blogosphere to hereosphere

Goofy from Bradshaw of the future came by today and we had a nice chat. If there's anyone else reading in the Toronto area, look me up.

pre- and post- as preposition-forming prefixes

[please see the reconsideration of this post here]
This morning coming in to work, I heard Andy Barrie on CBC say something like "How is the water post-Walkerton?" I've forgotten the actual sentence, but it ended "post-Walkerton." (See here for an explanation of the Walkerton Tragedy.)

It struck me that post-Walkerton sounded, prosodically, like one word rather than two, and that, if it were one word, it would be a preposition (albeit an intransitive one, explained briefly here.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language claims that pre- and post- can form adjectives, nouns, and verbs, but doesn't allow for the possibility of prepositions. Clearly though, the word post-Walkerton as used above is neither adjective, verb, nor noun.

The other way to look at this, I suppose, is that post is itself a preposition rather than a prefix.

TOEFL TV

Just in case you needed to know, the good folks at ETS have found another way to market their juggernaut Test of English as a Foreign Language: their very own YouTube chanel. Teachers and students share their TOEFL tips in some of the most compelling TV you've seen. Actually, it's probably no worse than most of what's on YouTube.

Japanese as a distant language?

We all make mistakes, big and small. I know I do. So I usually do not criticise others for trivial mistakes. Not that I am particularly magnanimous; it is simply that, hey, life is short, let's look for good rather than bad.

So I am not lamenting nor ranting when I say I often come across strange things about the Japanese language written by, of all people, professional linguists. They baffle me. I will give you just a few examples.

While discussing Japanese classifiers on page 70 of Concise encyclopedia of grammatical categories, Craig gives the following:

empitsu ni-hon 'two (long) pencils'
inu no-hiki 'two (animal) dogs'
no' chiyo 'the (animal) chicken'
ixim wah 'the (corn) tortilla'

All these are labelled 'Japanese', which happens to be my mother tongue; yet I have difficulties. The first one is fine. The second contains a simple mistake: 'no-hiki' should read 'ni-hiki'. But I simply cannot make out what the third and fourth examples are. Maybe they are some esoteric expressions that I know nothing about - or something has gone awfully wrong (perhaps these two are from some other language).

An introduction to language and linguistics, edited by Fasold & Conner-Linton (2006), is a fine textbook, but apparently the editors did not have enough time to check certain simple facts. On page 29, you have the following warning:

In Tokyo, you want to be careful to order [bi:ru] 'a beer' rather than [biru] 'a building,' and to ask directions to a certain [tori] 'street,' rather than a [to:ri] 'gate' or [to:ri:] 'bird.'

Alas, they will still be lost in Tokyo, ordering some fried gates or grilled streets in a restaurant. The correct combinations, if you care, are: [to:ri] - street, [tori:] - gate, and [tori] - bird. To my knowledge there is no such word as [to:ri:] in Japanese, except perhaps for phonetic translation for 'Tory'.

Incidentally, the same textbook (on page 410) gives a Japanese sentence meaning 'The boy who hit the dog is my brother' - but wait. The Japanese sentence says 'The boy who hit against [i.e. whose (entire) body hit] the dog is (my) brother'. Small difference on paper, big difference in the real physical world.

Even Pinker sometimes nods. In his wonderfully entertaining The stuff of thought, he gives bakatara as a Japanese word meaning 'stupid' (on p.336 of the Penguin edition); the correct word is bakatare. Yes, it's just a single small letter - a tiny letter that distinguishes, say, fad and fed ('The dog has just been fad'? hmm ...)

I will readily admit that language professionals are usually careful, indeed skilled, in dealing with foreign languages (in fact, they are the ones who get my Japanese name right every time, while banks, shops and other institutions get it wrong). George Lakoff discusses the Japanese classifiers in his Women, fire and dangerous things with admirable accuracy; yes, he checked with a Japanese speaking person (whom he thanks in the Acknowledgments). All it takes is just a little time and care.

But then, that's the hardest thing to do - especially when what you are dealing with is something as distant as the Japanese language - or, in my case, something as distant as the English language. That's why it takes me so long to translate - oops, time to get back to work. I have some translation to do, a distant trip. I'll get all trippy.

Pronunciational self delusion

I was having dinner earlier this week with a number of colleagues when the topic got around to pronunciation. After an initial discussion of being laughed at by Americans for our pronunciation of out, the conversation went something like this: A and B are Canadian, and C is British and knows a lot more about phonology than I do.

• A: Canadian English is the clearest. Even the main US networks are hiring Canadians as anchors or their anchors sound Canadian.
• B: Clearer than British English you think?
• C: Oh, yeah.
• me: Which British English?
• C: If you could hear the way my brother talks...
• me: But it just depends what you're used to, doesn't it?
• C: But Canadians pronounce all the sounds clearly. It must be easier for students learning English to study here.
  
• A & B: Sure.
• me: Come on, how do you say Toronto?
• A: toe Ron toe
• me: Really? You don't say Trawna?
  
• B: Maybe the younger people do, but not our generation.

Far be it for (OK, from) me to argue, but I just wanna point out that Patrick Corrigan's editorial cartoon in today's Toronto Star has mayor David Miller's bicycle being eaten by a pothole. A street sign in the background says, "Trawna".

The decline of the subjunctive

There's no doubt that the subjunctive in English has lost much of its historical scope. There used to be present and past subjunctive for all verbs, but the only vestige of the past subjunctive is the irrealis use of were that I referred to yesterday. When you've only got one form, it's hardly worth calling it a system. The simple past tense has taken over much of the work in sentences like If you saw it, you'd know.

Many claim that the subjunctive continues its fade today, but there are a brave few, such as Charles Finney of the University of Tennessee, who actually argue that it's making a comeback. I'm very pleased to see that Finney is at least somewhat interested in the data. He keeps a list of examples that he runs across to illustrate his point. The problem is that you can't show a revival by looking at a single point in time.

So to get a time series, I went to the TIME Corpus and the COCA and used that [pronoun] be as my stand-in for the whole of the subjunctive. I'd say it's a reasonably representative sample, though clearly far from perfect. If you're playing along at home, the query would look like this:
The result from the TIME corpus shows a clear drop off over the last century with only the 1930s and 1990s going slightly against trend. The most recent decade has, however, been very hard on the subjunctive:
The drop off in the last two decades is confirmed by the COCA, though it doesn't look quite as desperate:
The thing I found most interesting is that spoken English appears to be the biggest user of the subjunctive, though academic English isn't far behind.
So it appears that the subjunctive really is continuing its decline.