Proscribing, narrowly

Over at the NYT, Alexander Nazaryan has a rather strident article about "The fallacy of balanced literacy." Therein, he writes, "balanced literacy is an especially irresponsible approach, given that New York State has adopted the federal Common Core standards, which skew toward a narrowly proscribed list of texts, many of them nonfiction." [Now changed to narrowly prescribed.]

These texts are prescribed. That is, they're imposed, not declared unacceptable or invalid. Nevertheless, the Google Books corpus suggests narrowly proscribed is a new and growing phrase.
So, I'm curious: was this simply a typo, or did he have in mind some metaphor of narrowing down by proscription. Or was it something else?

Thinking like a freak

I listen to the Freakonomics Radio podcast from time to time, and back in May they aired an episode called "the three hardest words...," which, purportedly, were I don't know. The premise was that people hate to admit ignorance and so they hardly ever say, "I don't know."

Except that in most corpus studies, the head-and-shoulders most common, number one, top-of-the-heap three-word string in English is I don't know (It's a three-word string, not four, since -n't is an inflectional suffix, not just a contraction as is taught in elementary schools, but that's another issue.) For instance, in the 3-grams list from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. I don't know is by far the most frequent 3-gram with 199,110 instances (second is one of the at 167,785). In business meetings, we find the same results. Consider table 3.10 on p. 59 of this book, or table 5.8 on p. 183 of this paper.

Now, these are not mostly "I don't know (period)." Far more commonly, they're "I don't know if..." "I don't know what..." etc., which can often be used as a signal of disagreement rather than as an admission of ignorance. Nevertheless, the data stands in rather stark contradiction to the freaky claim. It looks pretty silly to be saying people should fess up to their ignorance, while basing the argument on a point on which you're so ignorant that you assert the most common phrase is the least (or at least the hardest).

(If you're interested in other freaky foolishness, see Joseph Heath's recent post on their simplistic view of the UK medical system.)

Audio and the OED

As I mentioned, Schwa Fire is now out, and I've been quite enjoying it. Arika Okrent (whose name I have inexplicably misread for years as Akira) has written an article called "Ghost voices" about preserving audio-tape recordings of our all-too-impermanent voices, dialects, and languages. As I was reading it, it occurred to me that the OED should include audio recordings of the quotations it uses. These should be in the dialect, and where possible the actual voice, of the original author.

Schwa Fire

Back in November, 2013, there was a proposal on Kickstarter for a new language magazine. I chipped in to sponsor it and ended up on the editorial panel as a result. The first issue is now out.

Issue 1, Season 1

May 16, 2014• Schwa Fire

The golden age of language journalism begins now. In this inaugural issue, Arika Okrent tells the story of 5,700 hours of Yiddish recordings that were almost lost ("Ghost Voices"), and Russell Cobb writes about Americans' fondness for the Englishes we used to speak and what that fondness obscures ("The Way We Talked"). Michael Erard describes and defends "language journalism," and Robert Lane Greene provides a lesson on the languages of love ("Wooing in Danish"). Also included: an English homophone puzzle.

When "syndrome" is a final "s"

1982 gave us the acronym AIDS formed from acquired immune deficiency syndrome. This is pronounced /eɪdz/. The fact that the final S is pronounced /z/ is notable, since a final s is typically pronounced /s/ (e.g., bus) unless it is an inflectional morpheme (e.g., dogs). There are cases such as news and lens, in which a final s is pronounced /z/, but the -s in news was originally a plural morpheme. That leaves lens, which comes from the Latin word for lentil. Apparently, it was pronounced /leːns/ in Latin, so why it has a final /z/ in English is something of a mystery to me. I cannot find another example of an English noun with a final s pronounced /z/.

This brings us back to AIDS. Presumably, this final /z/ was influenced by the homographs aids, the noun, and aids, the verb. But then in 2003 we got SARS. There is no English word sar, so there is no preexisting homograph from which to analogously get /sɑɹz/, but that is the only pronunciation I've ever heard. I've never heard anyone say /sɑɹs/. So this seems to be an extension of the AIDS analogy to aids.

And now today we have MERS. On CBC's Metro Morning this morning, Matt Galloway started out pronouncing it /mɜɹs/, which initially threw me. I'd been mentally pronouncing it with a final /z/, and indeed Galloway finished up with /mɜɹz/ (I couldn't tell what the person he was interviewing was saying, but I suspect she was using the /z/ form, given his shift.)

So perhaps we have a new rule developing: acronym-final s for syndrome is pronounced /z/.

As I was looking around writing this post, it appears that at least one other person has taken note of the pronunciation of MERS.

[John Wells points out "Latin fifth-declension nouns in -es have final noninflectional /z/ in English, too: species, series... Why that should apply to MERS is a further question, which I cannot answer: but compare Mars."]

It's turtles round and round

Part I
I've been trying to understand categories better, and one of the books I've been reading in pursuit of this goal is George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. In fact, a few nights ago, I fell asleep reading it, and it must have stirred something in my mind because the next morning in the shower, it occurred to me that perhaps categories are just a distraction and it's really properties we should be looking at.
The category of red things is just a human convenience. But red is a property. Almost immediately, though, I realized that red is a category of electromagnetic waves and that electromagnetic waves are themselves a category. And from there, well, it's turtles all the way down. I set the idea aside as I dried myself and got ready to leave home.

Part II
When I got to work, our Blackboard system was down, so I couldn't do the grading I had intended to do. Distractedly I opened the Simple English Wiktionary and saw that somebody had edited the entry for preposition pace. The change was an improvement on, what I thought was a rather odd previous definition. Going through the history, though, I noticed that the older definition was one I had provided. Curious about what I had been thinking, I went to the OED's entry for pace. There I found the following example:

1995   Computers & Humanities 29 404/1,   I do not believe, pace Peirce and Derrida, that it is signs all the way down.

This struck me as a huge coincidence. The expression shows up in the Corpus of Contemporary American English about once per 150 million words. I had encountered it, or a variation thereof, twice in a morning.

Part III
I looked up the expression and found that Wikipedia has an entry (linked above). One of the citations listed there is due to John (Haj) Ross's 1967 linguistics dissertation Constraints on Variables in Syntax. I followed the link and opened up his dissertation, which indeed contains the story with the line "It's turtles all the way down."
On the next page was the Acknowledgements, which list a number of linguists, but on page x, Ross writes,

This thesis is an integral part of a larger theory of grammar which George Lakoff and I have been collaborating on for the past several years.

This is, of course, the same Lakoff whose book I had been reading the night before.

Looking to the futurate

The verb look has been used to talk about the future for a long time. Perhaps the most common use is in the expression look forward to (something). This use may be based on the metaphor that time is a landscape we move through. As such, our future should be visible to us. This is probably the same metaphor that underlies the use of go for the future in expressions like we're going to get to that in a moment.

Despite its venerable history, futurate look began a significant upsurge in about 1980, particularly, in the looking + to infinitive construction.
I noticed that this seems to be particularly common with are. Especially, you are. And even more specifically if you are. By this time we are looking at a small minority of the cases. But I wondered if it might tell us something about the meaning of the looking futurate as opposed to the going futurate. When I started looking at various corpus genres, though things got a little to complex. Maybe you have some thought to add.

The opacity of etymology

The word disseminate is a familiar one. It appears hundreds of times on my hard drive and in well over 20 email messages I've read or written in the last five years. But until today, I had never seen the seeds in the word.

We often use a plant metaphor to talk about words. Morphology is a branch of linguistics just as plant morphology is a branch of biology. Both sciences talk of roots and stems, but in linguistics, seeds aren't part of the metaphor.

The root of disseminate though is semin or semen, from the Latin word meaning seed. Dissemination is the spreading of seeds. Semin is also the root of the word seminary, literally a seed plot, but now metaphorically used to mean a place to train priests. This is also where seminar comes from. I hadn't connected up these words either.

Disseminate appears in a passage that my level-8 class is studying. It's a passage that I've been over many times with other classes, and I have had to explain the word before. But never before have I made this connection.

How could this be?

On the flip side of this are cases of people seeing connections where there are none. Consider the regular flare ups about the word niggardly based on a mistaken perception that it's based on a racial slur. There are so many opportunities for false positives. The string semen, for instance shows up in a variety of words such as basement and horsemen, and nobody would ever think it referred to seeds.

How does this noticing thing work?

Contact Magazine summer issue

The summer issue is now available here. Check it out.

New issue of Contact available

The newest issue of TESL Ontario's Contact magazine is now available. This is the research symposium issue, based on talks given each fall at TESL Ontario's conference. The issue is edited by Hedy McGarrell and David Wood. The authors are: Dianne Larsen-Freeman, Antonella Valeo, Farahnaz Faez, Douglas Fleming, Alister Cumming, Robert Kohls, Hedy McGarrell, David Wood, and Randy Appel.

Please, check it out.

Then: the meaning changes

A student wrote to me asking about the meaning and placement of then in this sentence.

The product is then designed with this target price in mind.

As I was explaining that then could be resultative (meaning something like "so that" or "in that case") or simply temporal (meaning roughly "next" or "after that"). I also pointed out that it could occur initially, medially (in a number of places), or finally:

1 The product is 2 designed with this target price in mind 3.

Then, it occurred to me that position 1 could only be interpreted as being the temporal meaning, position 2 was ambiguous, and position 3 strongly suggests the resultative meaning.

Is it just me?

New issues of Contact available

I'm now into my second year as editor of TESL Ontario's Contact magazine. You can download issues for free as far back as 2000. I've been the editor for just over a year now (volumes 38 & 39). We just put out the conference issue today, as we do every spring. I hope you enjoy it. Please, leave me a comment to let me know what you thought.

Education First's English Proficiency Index

Last year, I blogged about the first English Proficiency Index here. Education First has now released their second index, and they're getting some good publicity out of it (I'm linking to them). The same problems as last year occur: self selection of participants, and need for a computer with internet access to do the test. There's also no data on test reliability and no validity arguments. Still, with 1.7 million participants over three years in more than 50 countries, you wouldn't want to completely dismiss the results either.

ER-Central.com

Another new and potentially useful site:

Extensive Reading Central is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing an Extensive Reading and Extensive Listening approach to foreign and second language learning. It was started by Dr. Rob Waring of Note Dame Seishin University, Okayama, Japan and Dr. Charles Browne of Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan as a free service to the EFL community.

Tutela

Tutela has been in beta for about a year but had its official launch during the TESL Canada conference. From their terms of use:

Tutela.ca (“Service”) is a Canadian not-for-profit online repository and community for ESL (English as a Second Language) and FSL (French as a Second Language) professionals registered to use the Service (“Users”). As a repository, the Service provides Users with access to ESL and FSL materials including classroom materials, lesson plans, assessment information, and reusable learning objects. As a community, the Service enables Users to share materials, discover new approaches, locate solutions, and network including through the use of the online meeting and webinar conferencing capabilities of the Service (“Conferencing”). The Service is supported by funding from Citizenship and Immigration Canada (“CIC”) and is owned and operated by Citadel Rock Online Communities Inc. (“Citadel”). (my bold)

I'm not really sure how this works. Tutela itself is not for profit, but Citadel is a privately owned corporation, for profit as far as I can tell. It has received a number of grants from the federal government. Just so as you know...

More Google Ngrams 2.0 POS tagging

As I wrote yesterday, there are some strange tagging decisions concerning determinatives in this corpus. It seems though, as I added in an update, that these are largely the fault of the Part-of_Speech Tagging guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project.

The problems, though, are not limited to determinatives. Subordinators are also affected. The words that, whether, and if (e.g., They told me that it was OK and They asked me whether/if it was OK) are tagged as _ADP_ (short for ADPOSITION, a more inclusive term for prepositions.) The guidelines say:

"We make no explicit distinction between prepositions and subordinating conjunctions. (The distinction is not lost, however - a preposition is an IN that precedes a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase, and a subordinate conjunction is an IN that precedes a clause).
The preposition "to" has its own special tag TO."

This makes good sense for words like because, after, and since, which have been treated as "subordinating conjunctions" but really are prepositions and function as the heads of preposition phrases. It doesn't work, though, with that, whether, and if, which function as markers of subordination and not heads. Consider the difference between these two clauses:

Language Learner Literature Award Winners

Somehow I missed the announcement, but the 2012 LLL Award Winners for books published in 2011 have been announced.

Google Ngrams 2.0 and POS tagging

As Ben Zimmer blogged yesterday, there's a new and improved version of the Google Ngram viewer. The "improved" bit has a number of elements, but one is POS tagging. This is a wonderful thing, and I'm inordinately happy about it. Unfortunately, there are some very odd quirks to deal with.

Impacting (on) complement choice

After 20 years of teaching English, I've only recently become consciously aware that my students may be applying the complementation pattern of one word to its derivationally related partner. That is, they regularly say and write things like *it influenced on the situation using a prepositional phrase complement headed by on where the verb should really just take a direct object. Notice, though, that the noun influence licenses the on PP complement that the students are using (e.g., it had no influence on the outcome).

An adverb caught modifying a noun

This morning, CBC Toronto's Metro Morning program was being broadcast remotely from the new arts and culture hub of Regent Park. Shortly before 6:00, I believe, the host, Matt Galloway, said something along the lines of "We're here at the opening officially of the new arts and culture hub." I'm going from memory, but I'm certain about the opening officially of....

What we have here is an adverb officially post modifying a noun opening. Most grammars will tell you adverbs aren't supposed to do that. It even sounds vaguely obscene. But I tell you, it's the truth.

Now, obviously, opening is deverbal, but you could say the official opening of... with the expected modification by an adjective, and you couldn't say *the officially opening of... with the adverb before the noun. More importantly, an example like *the running quickly of the race seems highly unlikely, so being deverbal isn't the whole deal.

You may think that officially must be modifying something else in the sentence, but since this is between the noun and the modifying of phrase, it's clearly internal to the noun phrase and the most obvious thing for it to be modifying in there is the head noun. When they post the podcast tomorrow, I'll try to find the exact sentence. I think you'll find that there's really nothing else in the sentence that officially could possibly have been modifying.

[Update: the podcast is now available, but it's only 25 minutes of highlights, and apparently interesting grammatical features don't qualify. A google search, though, turns up a number of relevant instances elsewhere.]