A blog about language and linguistics by Joe McVeigh
Prof. Terttu Nevalainen held her farewell lecture at the University of Helsinki on April 5. The place was packed and I want to share some observations from the day.
Terttu was introduced with the words “You can’t work in language variation and change without being familiar with Terttu’s research.” That isn’t hyperbole, it’s an understatement. Continue reading “Prof. Terttu Nevalainen’s farewell lecture”
There a new and interactive map of the languages spoken in the United States. It’s at http://languagemap.us/ and it’s pretty fun to play with. The data comes from the US Census Bureau so you can zoom in on counties. Neat!
Over on r/linguistics, the creator answered a few questions. And there’s an FAQ on the main page.
tl;dr – From a functional perspective, thankyouverymuch is an evaluative adjunct (a type of stance adjunct) according to Downing & Locke because it is “attitudinal, reflecting the subjective or objective attitude of the speaker towards the content and sometimes also towards the addressee” (2nd ed.; pp. 73-74, 234). According to the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English, thankyouverymuch is an attitude stance adverbial, which “convey an evaluation, or assessment of expectations” of the speaker’s attitude toward the proposition (p. 384).
From a discourse perspective, Blommaert (2005) would probably see thankyouverymuch as a performative element and a way for speakers to mark an orientation to what they have just said. But I’m not great at discourse analysis, so please tell me more in the comments.
Finally, syntactically, thankyouverymuch is a finite clause.
Read more to see a deeper analysis Continue reading “What is the grammar of thankyouverymuch?”
The other day my wife asked me about the constructions try to and try and. She said it came up at work and no one seemed to know why either one was used and which one was right. I had a vague recollection about learning this in the past, but it had slipped my mind.
So it was very nice to stumble across this article while I was researching something else. It’s called “Why does Canadian English use try to but British English use try and? Let’s try and/to figure it out” and it’s by Marisa Brook and Sali A. Tagliamonte. The article appeared in American Speech 91(3).
And then I came across this post, “We’re going to explain the deal with ‘try and’ and ‘try to’.” I swear sometimes that Merriam-Webster is checking my browser history. How do they know the exact thing that I’m interested in? It’s almost like people who are interested in language are interested in the same things.
What it boils down to is that the oft-criticized try and is most common in phrases where the word try means “attempt” and it’s been around for at least as long as the supposedly more standard try to. Brook and Tagliamonte show that what happened was try and became grammaticalized, which is fancy linguist speak for saying a word or phrase goes from just giving content or lexical information in a sentence (as nouns do) to serving a grammatical function in a sentence (as the past tense –ed does for verbs, for example). This means that the and in try and no longer works as a coordinator, but now functions as the marker of an infinitive verb (the verb that comes right after it). Pretty cool.
This all happened when the verb try was undergoing a shift in meaning. It originally meant “test” or “prove” (and it still means these things), but it started to also mean “attempt,” which is the definition that probably springs to mind first for many of us.
Brook and Tagliamonte show many interesting things about the two constructions – including how their use breaks down by age and education, and the increase of try and over time – but one thing that I thought was cool is this: try and has a strong preference to be followed by the verbs be and do, while try to can work with a wide range of verbs – even though these constructions essentially mean the exact same thing. Neat-o!
Biber et al. (1999, according to Brook and Tagliamonte) claim that try and is much more common in British English than American English, but I would really like to see more research on this, especially now that there are many more corpora available. I don’t have the time now to go search other corpora but I’m going to offer this to the students in my corpus linguistics course and I’ll update this post if any of them decide to research this. And I’ll update it if I look into it myself.
But go check out Brook and Tagliamonte’s article for lots more on try to and try and – https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3701026.
Jeff Deck, an Ivy-league-educated middle-class white man, goes around the country to correct typos in everything from store signs to t-shirts to whatever else he comes across. He enlists friends (including his Ivy-league-educated co-author Benjamin D. Herson) who do not check him on his privilege, but rather enable him on his path to be as petty as possible. Deck and his friends learn little to nothing about language before, during or after their excursion. What could be a profound journey of discovery turns out to be nothing more than an aimless adventure of assholery. File this one under “Language books not worth reading”. Hunter S. Thompson would be pissed to know that these asshats stole the title of one of his books.
Continue reading “Book Review: The Great Typo-Hunt by Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson”
A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Gwen Rehrig tweeted a poll to ask if this sentence is acceptable to American English speakers:
[Update: The twitter account is locked, so I’m copy/pasting the poll here]
Is this sentence acceptable to other native American English speakers?: “The lady I was just talking to’s mother is a famous author.”acceptable: 66.7%unacceptable: 17.6%could go either way: 15.7%159 votes
As you can see, over 80% of people said it was either definitely or possibly acceptable. I replied that every single student in my grammar class said “Nooope. No way.” when I asked them. 🙂
But hang on, is that sentence unacceptable in Standard English? Continue reading “You can add a genitive ’s to a preposition in English”
Before Language Log beats me to it, I want to hip you to another Bad Linguistics study out there. This one is called “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches” and it’s written by Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gils Schumacher and Bert Bakker. It was published in PLoS One (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0208450).
The study analyzes almost 400,000 political speeches from different countries using a method called the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Score. The authors want to find out how complex the language in the speeches is and whether conservative or liberal politicians use more complex language. But hold up: what’s the Flesch-Kincaid score, you ask. Well, it’s a measure of how many syllables and words are in each sentence. The test gives a number that in theory can be correlated to how many years of education someone would need in order to understand the text. This is called the “readability” of the text.
So what’s the problem? Well, rather than spend too much time on it, I’ll listicle-ize the problems with this paper.
The Establishment has a great post where they tell you what to do if someone asks you to use gender-neutral pronouns to refer to them. Even though the post is short, it’s hard to pick a favorite line. It’s all just so good. But I do especially like this bit:
being preoccupied with particular grammatical usages signals not a deep concern for linguistic propriety but is instead a probably classist and very likely racist and almost certainly ableist approach to human communication
So good. Check out the rest here.
Now is the time of the Words of the Year… lists. You should have a look at the LinguaBishes list (and the rest of their site). They include words and phrases that people have been using (mostly online?) and (re)defining to express things that everyone is feeling at some point. I like their list the best.
And, not for nuthin, but the American Dialect Society’s Slang/Informal Word of the Year looks a lot like the LinguaBishes list.
I love the top definition of yeet on the Urban Dictionary, especially the third example. Yeet!
There’s another brainfart article on language in the New York Times. The author, John Williams, shows right away that he’s thinking out loud from somewhere deep inside his armchair with this one. Basically, Williams is having some vague instance of a Recency Illusion as he ties James Joyce and MGMT to Tumblr, Flickr, and other modern companies which opt out of using vowels in their names. His idea is that – apparently all of a sudden – no one is using vowels anymore. lol.
A couple of things. First, as a Twitter friend pointed out, orthography and speech do not correspond. That means that our writing system and our spelling system only have a passing resemblance to each other. Writing is not speech on paper – it’s so much less than that. You think we need vowels in writing to distinguish between words, but we really don’t. This is Linguistics 101. Williams totally whiffs on it.
Second, Williams claims that people are only now routinely removing vowels from their writing by signing their correspondence with “Yrs” (his example). He makes a reference to “Finnegans Wake” and says “Time was that you had to be an experimental weirdo to ditch vowels.” That’s a nice dig at ya boy Joyce, but ol’ Jimmy J was just stealing this style from other writers. John Adams didn’t use vowels when he signed his letters. Neither did Jane Austen. Time was when no one wrote vowels because ink and paper were precious commodities yo.
Third, I kinda have to give Williams some credit for actually reaching out to a linguist, but unfortunately it doesn’t make the article any better. Williams contacted John McWhorter to see what is going on with people dropping vowels. I don’t know how much he talked to him – I only have the quotes included in the article – but it seems like McWhorter was really phoning this one in.
Now, full disclosure: I like John McWhorter when he talks about linguistics. He’s made some highly questionable political debates and articles recently, but his linguistics stuff has always been sound. In this article, however, McWhorter says “There is a fashion in American language culture right now to be playful in a way that is often childlike. This business of leaving out the vowels and leaving you to wonder how to pronounce something, it channels this kid-ness in a way — like saying ‘because science,’ or the way we’re using -y, when we say something like, ‘well, it got a little yell-y.’”
I don’t know what McWhorter is on about here. No one wonders how to pronounce Tumblr, Flickr, MNDFL or Mdrn (except maybe NYT writers working on a deadline?). And saying “because NOUN” is not channeling “kid-ness” (what is kid-ness anyway, linguistically speaking?). And and, adding a y-sound onto the end of words is really not child-like. That’s just language-like. They’re called diminutives. Go talk to the Aussies about them. Or any other English speakers.
So yeah, stay away from the NYT Style Section’s hot takes on language.