Category: linguistics

There’s good articles out there

Joe McVeigh4 Comments

Here is an article that I meant to write about earlier, but it got pushed down my inbox and forgotten (you all email yourselves articles that you want to read later, right?). It’s a great article on linguistics. It’s short and sweet – about one seemingly simple linguistic topic – and the journalist talked to a linguist. Hooray!

The article is on the use of There’s before plurals, as in There’s three cars outside. According to (Standard) English grammar, that’s technically wrong. But as Prof. Andreaa Calude points out, everyone uses there’s before plurals*. And the phrase may be increasing. Prof. Calude also had this wonderful thing to say:

“We measure speech by the same yardstick as writing, even though speech is done differently and has a different function,” she said. “The grammar of speech is different to the grammar of writing.”

“We’re not clued up with what happens in speech. We think it must be bad because it’s not like writing, but that’s not the case.”

I love seeing that kind of stuff in a news article.

So it’s not all bad linguistics press out there. You’d think it was if you read enough of this blog, but I wanted to mention that there are good articles out there too. Go give their writers a click for their good work: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/102419351/theres-a-reason-were-bending-the-rules-on-speech-grammar

*Side note: the article says that what comes after there’s is the subject of the sentence. I know some grammars have described it like this, but I would argue that there is the real subject of the sentence and what comes after it is a displaced or notional subject, which then gets analyzed as the subject complement (also sometimes called the predicate nominative, I think). It’s a minor point. I’m sure most people reading the article were taught that there isn’t the subject in sentences that start with there is/was/are/were.

The Tornado Twins Merger

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The Flash’s kids have the same name if you have the Don-Dawn merger.

Over on the tumblr The Chronological Superman, “Calamity” Jon Morris says

Some genuinely weird stories appear in the catalog, such as “Superman’s Lost Century,” the epic Mordru arc beginning in Adventure Comics vol.1 No.369, and the debut of Barry Allen’s immediate offspring Don and Dawn Allen a.k.a. The Tornado Twins in Adventure Comics vol 1 No.373 (Oct 1968). Who in the world would give their twins a homophone for a pair of names? I mean, the answer is Barry Allen and his wife Iris, but I pose the question rhetorically.

He’s right – the Mordru arc is a genuinely weird Superman story. No, I kid. He’s also right that the names Don and Dawn are pronounced the same by many speakers. It’s called the low back merger and it’s also what makes people pronounce the words cot and caught the same. Without the merger, the word Don is pronounced /dɑn/, while the word dawn is pronounced /dɔn/. So it’s only the vowel that distinguishes them, with the first vowel being more open and farther back in the mouth than the second vowel. But in the merger, the vowel in the word dawn shifts down to the vowel in Don and they become homophones.

Adventure_Comics_373_Tornado_Twins
First appearance of the Tornado Twins in Adventure Comics #373 by Jim Shooter and Win Mortimer (1968).

So who has this merger? Well, according to the Atlas of North American English, the merger is “is characteristic of a very large part of the geographic terrain of North America” (Lobov, Ash & Boberg 2005: 60). The Atlas gives this map, where people who are inside the green line have the merger and the green dots represent people who both hear and speak the words Don and dawn identically.

low_back_merger_map_9_1_Atlas
Map 9.1 from the Atlas of North American English by Labov, Ash & Boberg (2005).

It makes sense that the names of the Flash’s kids could be Dawn and Don. Barry Allen, aka the Flash, is from Iowa, which falls outside of the merger boundary in the image above. And he operates as the Flash in Central City, Missouri, another place outside of the low back merger area. The only thing is that the Tornado Twins Don and Dawn were born in the 30th century, which proves that the low back merger will never fully sweep across North America. Even 10 centuries from now there are places where Don and dawn are pronounced differently. Now you know.

Michelle Wolf on Fresh Air speaking about her voice

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Comedian Michelle Wolf was on NPR’s Fresh Air recently and the host, Terry Gross, asked her about her voice (at around 12:30 in this interview):

Let’s talk about your voice. I wasn’t sure how you’d sound as yourself, not on stage but just, like, talking to me. And I’d say your voice sounds, you know, sounds a little different when you’re just talking to me. Does your voice change on stage naturally? Do you emphasize certain qualities in it when you’re on stage?

I bring this up because things could have gone very bad at this moment… but they didn’t! I was bracing for some bad linguistics that thankfully never came. Wolf talks about how she wants to sound better in the interview because she respects Gross’s voice and Gross stresses that she thinks Wolf’s voice is fine and that her own voice changes when she tries to speak louder.

But this is interesting because the interview plays a clip of Wolf making jokes about people complaining about Hillary Clinton’s supposedly shrill voice. The term shrill is only applied to women and it’s some dog-whistling misogyny. As Gross and Wolf discuss in the interview, people’s voices change when they are speaking on stage – and that’s fine! Think about how Chris Rock speaks in his comedy specials. I don’t remember anyone ever asking him about his bombastic tone. Or how Jerry Seinfeld’s whining delivery (dare I say his “shrill tone”?) is endearing. No one sees that as a problem.

So it was nice to see the Fresh Air interview not go down a language-shaming rabbit hole. I wish more discussions between non-linguists on women’s voices were like this.

Fluency and linguistics in the news

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There was some press recently about a new study which seems to claim that you can’t become fluent in a second language if you start learning it after age 10. In fact, the study* did not talk about fluency at all. As this article in the Conversation UK by Prof. Monika Schmid points out, the media misinterpreted what the study showed. I’m glad Schmid wrote this piece, which not only clears up the media’s confusion with the study, but also explains some other things about fluency in linguistics. I read the study in question and it seemed pretty legit. I have some misgivings about the idea of nativeness in language learning and about how the questionnaire says that India isn’t a “traditional English speaking country”. And also how the quiz said that “Canadians, Irish, and Scottish accept I’m finished my homework instead of with my homework,” when this is also very common in and around Philadelphia**.

games_with_words_done_my_homework

But all in all, it seems to be an interesting linguistics study that got blown out of proportion by the media. File it with the rest.

* The title of the study is “A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers”. Does anyone else find “2/3 million English speakers” ungrammatical?

**It might just be me, but the phrase “Canadians, Irish, and Scottish accept X” also seems ungrammatical. “Canadians accept X” is ok, but “Irish accept X” and “Scottish accept X” are not, at least not in my variety of English. The latter two need articles before them or the word people after them: “The Irish accept X”, “Scottish people accept X”. I don’t know of any variety where “Canadians, Irish, and Scottish accept X” is correct. This is just a bit of irony in a quiz about the grammaticality of different clauses.

Language snobs take note

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John McIntyre, an editor at the Baltimore Sun, has an excellent blog post about linguistic discrimination called “English without shame”. The whole post is great, but this paragraph stands out:

The Language Police, the Grammar Nazis, and the SNOOTS are, in fine, snobs, and I find it impossible to believe that language snobbery is nobler than snobbery about wealth, fashion, or family. It’s just one more method to score points against other people and prop up one’s self-regard.

Go read the whole post here.

The grammar of “feeling less than (X)”

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This tweet came across my TL and it interested me because of what it says and how it says it.

Since this is primarily a blog about language, I’ll focus on the how-it-says, rather than the what-it-says (and besides, the latter is just self-evident). Continue reading “The grammar of “feeling less than (X)”” →

An article on “like” that I really like

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There’s an article in on the University of Victoria’s news website about Alexandra D’Arcy’s book, Discourse Pragmatic Variation in Context: 800 Years of Like. The article is very good and you should go read it. Two of the reasons I like it are:

  1. It’s an article about language that talks to a linguist!
  2. The article talks enthusiastically about the word like – without being condescending at all!

Go here to read the article here: https://www.uvic.ca/news/topics/2018+like-linguistics-alex-darcy-book+ring

Sam Smith’s conservative linguistics

Joe McVeigh3 Comments

In researching a book on English usage (called Junk English; review coming soon), I came across an article from 2007 by Sam Smith, the journalist, essayist and co-founder of Green Party. Smith’s article is a lesson in how to NOT write about language, as he gets a number of things wrong. One day I’ll write a general post about these kinds of articles, but for now, let’s go through Smith’s post and see where the train goes off the tracks.

The article starts with this:

Sitting in Manhattan across from an editor at one of best regarded publishing houses, I asked, “Does good writing still matter?”

Ugh. Like, gag me with a spoon. This kind of comment is a red flag inside a bell inside a whistle telling me that what is about to come is going to be a bunch of pretentious crap about the good ol’ days when people knew how to use The Language (a time which was probably also when Sam Smith was in his thirties; when he was looking forward to his life, not back on it) Continue reading “Sam Smith’s conservative linguistics” →

Alice Cooper’s has the cot-caught merger

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The Alice Cooper song “Poison” features lyrics rhyming the words hot and caught:

Your mouth, so hot

Your web, I’m caught

Rhyming these words is an example of the cot–caught merger. In linguistics, a merger is when the vowel sounds of two words move together to become the same sound. If you say the words cot and caught the same way, or if hot rhymes with caught, then you have the cot–caught merger. The cot–caught merger is sometimes described as if it’s a yes-or-no phenomenon, but in reality – like in all things in linguistics – it’s more of a continuum.

Alice Cooper doesn’t really pronounce the vowels in hot and caught the exact same way. That could be because Alice Cooper is from Detroit, Michigan, a place which doesn’t have the cot–caught merger. Or maybe the other two writers of “Poison” were taking poetic license with the rhyming of these words. The other writers are Desmond Child, who’s from Gainesville, FL (a place resistant to the cot–caught merger) and John McCurry – but I don’t where he’s from. Either way, the merger is more of a yes-no-maybe-so kind of thing. That means there are speakers with the merger who live in areas where most speakers do not have the merger and vice versa. And there are speakers who have the merger only in certain words or environments, such as before nasal consonants so that the vowels in Don and dawn are merged.

Here’s Alice Cooper singing “Poison” live in 1989 (video starts at the hot/caught lyrics, but rewind it to listen to a flaming guitar solo straight outta the 80s):

You can read more about the cot-caught merger in the Atlas of North American English by Labov, Ash and Boberg (some online info here). Wikipedia also has an article on it.

Dialect Surveys of American English and World Englishes

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In my review of Joshua Katz’s book Speaking American, I mentioned that a new dialect survey was up. Much of the data in Katz’s book was drawn from an online dialect survey done by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. Here’s Ben Zimmer giving credit where credit’s due.

Vaux is now conducting the Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes with Marius L. Jøhndal. If you’re interested in world Englishes, head on over to that site, where you can also see the results without taking the survey.

Vaux also has a new survey of American English dialects available at https://www.dialectsofenglish.com/. The survey takes about 10 minutes, depending on how many questions you choose to answer and how long you spend looking at the heat maps it shows you. There are some very fun questions in there.