More on "versus"

I am more convinced that versus is an English coordinator and that, perhaps, it has never been a preposition. For one thing, I can only find three examples of versus X used as a complement. The first two are here:

In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence.... " (n12) BEING VERSUS AMERICA # A profound gulf between Heidegger and Tocqueville becomes obvious as soon as we compare their views on America. (from "Tocqueville's Practical Reason", by Hancock, Ralph. Perspectives on Political Science Fall 98, Vol. 27 Issue 4, p. 212.)

The redox behaviour of 1,2- and 1,3-dithiadiazoles (D), with a wide variety of R substituents has been studied by using cyclic voltammetry (CV) Most of the compounds (D) behave as reversible redox systems. Typical half-wave reduction potentials for 1,2 compounds are versus the standard calomel electrode (SCE) while those for the 1,3-isomers are 0.2V. (from the BNC; not sure about the original source)

The first one is rather hard to parse, and I'm not sure it's relevant. The second strikes me as ungrammatical. I'll get to the third below. I might turn up more examples with more searching, but none of the examples from the OED, or any of the other dictionaries I've checked, show a complement use.

Nor can I find much evidence of it being modified. I did find one example of this is just versus a computer, which is also a complement. And another example modified with just and functioning as an adjunct.

The cloth spider is lossy and this inherent loss results in hysteretic behavior with respect to reaction force versus displacement. Hysteretic refers to changing behavior of the spider, not just versus displacement but also the direction of the displacement (Fig. 1).

In general, then, versus doesn't behave very much like a preposition, and I would speculate that it this is not a new development.

"Multiple coordination" with prepositions?

In yesterday's post about slash, Geoff Pullum wrote:

With coordinators you can get what is called multiple coordination, as in red and orange and green and yellow and blue, which doesn't group the color names together in clusters of two, it just connects all of them. With prepositions you don't get that.

Last night this came back to me as I came across the words versus while reading. It's another of these Latin preposition-cum-English something-or-others. "Could you chain these without nesting," I wondered. This morning, I find that indeed you can. Here are some examples:

Slash and cum: coordinators

On p. A15 of today's Toronto Star, we find reported various discoveries: heretofore unidentified sea life and two planets transiting the same star. Another discovery was going on around the same time, but since it's in linguistics, it's almost certain to be entirely ignored by the press. Granted, the discovery has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but that would make no difference. You will simply never see a headline like "New English preposition discovered" (except, perhaps, in The Onion).

Depleting depletion

In today's Toronto Star, there's an op ed piece by John Cartwright pushing for various governments in Canada to roll back a variety of tax cuts for businesses. John Cartwright is not only wrong, but he seems to be rather confused. But since this isn't Economics, Jack, I'll leave the economic arguments up to folks who are far more qualified to make them than me.

Another gapless relative

Only a few days ago, I posted about a gapless relative. Now, from a recent NYT article: “We’ve got a method of operating the grid that the next time any sign of drought occurs, we can just,” he snapped his fingers, “build something else or turn something else on, and we’ve got enough water supply.”


This one, I think, simply got away on the speaker when that adjunct the next time any sign of drought occurs slipped in there. Simplified, this is: We've got a method that we can just build something else...

don't be able

Over at Language Log, Barbara Partee has produced an interesting coordination:

Many Americans don’t even know what the native languages of Belgians are, let alone be able to recognize accents of Belgians speaking English.

A gapless afternoon

Yesterday we had my brother and his family over. We were sitting on the deck relaxing after lunch when Craig came up with the following: It's a country in Africa which I don't even know if it exists anymore. "A gapless relative clause," though I, going inside and jotting it down so as not to forget the wording.

Newer AWL

In the most recent edition of Reading in a Foreign Language, Tom Cobb observes that the Academic Word List isn't really so academic. It was built upon the General Service List, which was never designed to be simply a high frequency word list. (It has other problems, such as being built on a small corpus of magazines.) West, who constructed the GSL, removed high-frequency items that were largely synonymous with other words in the list and replaced them with lower frequency words that provided broader semantic coverage. In effect, then, the AWL largely fills in the holes the West left behind. Words like area are really just broadly frequent words and not really academic at all.

You both

Last night, as I was reading myself to sleep, I came across a you both. It was in something like We'll leave you both there. Hang on, I thought, how does that work? Under the analysis taken by the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the underlined word in I'll leave both there is a determinative functioning as a fused determiner head in a noun phrase. The argument, very much oversimplified, is that the answer to both what is retrievable from context. In other words, if you're talking about pencils, you could say, I'll leave both pencils there.

Language is a commons

The other evening, driving home, I heard the first part of an "Ideas" program about plagiarism on the CBC. It referenced a Harper's essay by Jonathan Lethem entitled "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism". As I was reading through the essay, which I'm quite enjoying, I came across this passage, which brings together and artistic, linguistic, and economic view of language.

"The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole."

Think again

Going back to my post of a few days ago about think and its allowed complements, I was reminded of this post from 2007 about the complementation of rethink. It's interesting to note that, where think doesn't allow open interrogative content clauses, rethink does.

• I thought about what I should do.
• *I rethought about what I should do.
• *I thought what I should do.
• I rethought what I should do.

Why are complements so arbitrary?

Words as species

The most recent edition of Reading in a Foreign Language is a festschrift for Paul Nation. Paul was one of my professors at TUJ and apart from being a very practical and productive researcher, he's also one of the friendliest and most personable folks you'd want to meet.

There's much worth reading there, but one that caught my attention was the Meara and Olmos Alcoy paper.

New Corpus from Mark Davies

Brigham Young's Mark Davies has just made available, in alpha, a new Corpus of Historical American English. If you don't know about Mark's free corpora, you should check them all out.

And hence metaphor awareness is important in language education

Or not.

An article in the most recent issue of TESOL Quarterly examines the efficacy of teaching Japanese university students the metaphors behind some phrasal verbs in comparison to simply explaining the verbs though Japanese. The treatment group (n=59), was given something like the following for each of the focussed prepositions (up, down, into, out, off):

Two answers about time

The other day, I posted an interesting pair of questions about time:

• Do you know what time it is? right
• Do you think what time it is? wrong 

• What time do you think it is? right
• What time do you know it is? wrong

The posing of the two questions together is a little confusing because the issues are distinct, but here's what I think:

Two questions about time

The following query appeared on the ETJ mailing list: Why is one item in each of the following pairs wrong?

• Do you know what time it is?    right
• Do you think what time it is?   wrong 

• What time do you think it is?   right
• What time do you know it is?    wrong

I'll post my reply after you've had some time to think about it.

What's that

Not just any that but the that in sentences like:

We try to provide the scientific information so that the people who are in a position of decision-making can make the best decisions possible.

I was actually looking at so when it occurred to me that this that is the same subordinator as the that that introduces declarative content clauses. In other words, it's exactly the same as

I know that the people who are in a position of decision-making can make the best decisions possible.

Notice in particular that in both cases that is omissible.

If my analysis is correct, it makes nonsense of any claims that so that should be used instead of so in clauses of cause, or in causes of result or in both or neither, all of which claims seem to be out there.

Most looked-up words at the NYTs

This is not new, but it's new to me. You're likely aware that if you double click on a word on the online version of the New York Times, the definition pops up. Well, it seem that the NYT keeps track of which words folks pop up most and the list, as of last June is available here. The top 10 lookups per use are:

saturnine
solipsistic
bonobo
phlogiston
epistemological
shibboleths
adenoidal
sumptuary
appurtenances
sui generis

The only ones I knew were bonobo, shibboleth, and adenoidal. I've looked up epistemological many time, but I still can't say I really know what it means. Do you fare any better than me?

TESOL Journal

The first issue of TESOL's new peer-reviewed, free, online journal, TESOL Journal, is now available.

CBC Literary Awards

Today the CBC announced the winners of the 2009 CBC literary awards. My brother, Michael Eden Reynolds, was shortlisted for his poem Outage, but was not one of the winners. Congratulations to those who did win!