a wolf angel is not a good angel

Geoff Pullum brings up some examples of dangling/misplaced modifiers in text: you know them, they show up in those lists of bloopers, like Lying on the beach, mosquitoes attacked me.

But the thing is, the examples he gives seem fine . . . given a context (which he doesn’t give in the sense of the actual surrounding sentences, but mentions this is in an article reporting that Santa Cruz will have an enrollment increase, and that the chancellor negotiated a well-paid salary for her partner).

Thrown on top of such already existing problems as traffic congestion, a water shortage and housing capacity, the angry roar of a response from residents and local government was deafening.
While a common practice in any large corporation or university, students in Santa Cruz, who have seen tuition double and classes cut, were none too pleased.

(His third example didn’t strike me as terrible, but the context was there, and the modifier, it dangled.)

I can imagine the first example coming after a sentence like “blah-de-blah-blah enrollments went up eleventy thousand percent. Thrown on top of all these other things, the residents made faces at the administration building.” In text, not so good. In speech? If you put in the implicit reference, you’d sound stilted. (”Dr. Whatever increaed enrollments. This increase, thrown on top of . . .”: no. And there is a strong movement towards writing as you would speak. The second one is less stilted to fix — “while this is a common practice”, but again, I think it’s what people would say.)

In general, if you listen to your speech, you’ll notice how much of it refers to things you’ve mentioned before by leaving those words out. (If you speak Spanish (for instance), this will sound familiar: you leave out the subject when it’s already been mentioned (ie, when it’s a pronoun). If you speak Hebrew, you’ll recognise that the copula doesn’t show up in the present tense, the other part that’s left out.) You can’t actually listen to your own speech, because then you’re overthinking everything and that makes for bad judgements about what you really do or don’t say. (I, for instance, will swear to my dying day that those stupid focus constructions in English are ungrammatical. “John, I really like”? Shoot me first. Except I say them *all the time*. And so does everyone. This is why one of my semantics profs said that you should never ask linguists for grammaticality/acceptibility judgements (but if you have to, ask a phonologist).) So you should listen to what people who are talking to you say. It’s hard to listen for structures and pay attention to the meaning, but alienating all your friends is the price you pay for cutting edge linguistics.

Can I just put this up without commenting on how actively stupid it is?

Unlike everyone else, I did not do the blogthings dialect quiz. Why? Well, (a) there’s a spelling mistake in it, and (b) half the time my answer isn’t there. (Yeah, yeah: I don’t speak American English.)

For instance: carbonated beverages are soft drinks, an easy course is a bird course, I wear running shoes (almost never, but those are the shoes), you don’t spell pyjamas with three a’s, route is pronounced “oo” if it’s a noun but “ow” if it’s a verb, and mary/marry/merry have a 2-way not a 3-way distinction.

There is debate over the icing/frosting difference; though I’m not sure there’s a difference for me, most people seem to agree that there’s a difference in how thick they are (pop quiz: which is thicker?). I do, however, only use one of the two as the verb.

My sister may or may not have missed her exam today. We were discussing about how the prof had rescheduled the course because they skipped one week because of a snowstorm, and I kept saying “so they moved the exam back?” and she said “no, they moved it forward”, and it took us a while to figure out what we were both talking about.

So, when you postpone something: do you move it back or forward?

As I was checking out my books, the librarian pointed out the “here are some books we are looking for” sheet. I made some snarky remark about the Dan Brown book, and she said she had liked it. I agreed it was compulsively readable, but it’s a bad book anyhow.

Before I finish this, an excursus on vowels in English. In particular, the ones in “beet” and “bit”, which I will identify as [i] and [I], respectively. These two vowels (as well as a bunch of other pairs) are pronounced with the tongue in the same place. The differences are length — [i] is a somewhat longer vowel — and the placement of the root of your tongue is a bit more forward in [i][1] — it’s easiest if you just pronounce these vowels and you can feel the differences. But the tongue is essentially in the same place for both.

In English, these two phonemes are distinct. In lots of other languages, they’re not: I’ve had many people borrow shits of paper from me. Usually one occurs in a few specific places (closed syllables, say) and the other occurs everywhere else (open ones). Quebec French has what’s called laxing in closed syllables (ones that end in a consonant), so you get words like petit pronounced pet[i] but petite pronounced pet[I]t: in my “phonetics” class, when the prof pointed this out by saying the two words (which, if you’re English, have clearly different vowels), half the francophones insisted that they were the exact same vowel. It was one of the more startling demonstrations I’ve seen (at least those which didn’t involve explosions); they were really vehement about it.

Excursus over!

As you recall, our intrepid heroine was putting away her library books and discussing the goodness of Dan Brown (= negative infinity plus one, because the hype bothers me — an illustrated edition? But I digress, again), and the librarian (francophone) was sort of embarassed that she liked it, and tried to minimise the damage by saying “well, it’s a bitch book.”

[1] I know I should be putting the other side of the comparatives in here, but it should be clear from context. I’m also oversimplifying, but that’s okay, because I’m not a phonologist or a phonetician.

Apparently no one says “brought” anymore. It is just not cool. It started with the kids at my sister’s elementary school (well, as far as *I* know that’s where it started), and now it’s hit everyone, including people at my office and a few people interviewing.

But what’s also weird is that most people don’t *notice* that everyone’s using brang as the past tense. No one blinks.

Except my mother.

I am probably guilty of doing this when I (rarely) say Saskatchewan.

But I didn’t know many people who didn’t have the “Mon as in monkey” script well-embedded when they complained about everyone outside of Montreal (& parts of Ottawa) pronouncing the name of the city wrong. Sure, they didn’t know what was wrong with the wrong and irritating pronunciation in technical terms, but . . .

I’m just glad to see other people mentioning this, though I like more irritation & bitterness, really.

(The [k(w)@bEk] issue is less divisive.)

Over at Language Log, they’re discussing whether people should be expected to use non-standard orthography for other people’s names. Bill Poser says no; SC responds and comes to no obvious conclusion.

I think the answer is obvious. You can think what you want about non-standard spellings, but in general, common courtesy means you call people what they want to be called. In text, this means writing their name as they write it (as well as using the name they want: etiquette does not require you to refer to couples as Mr. & Mrs. Husband if Mrs. Husband goes by Ms. Wife). I actually think that beginning of a sentence is an exception to the “please no capital letters” — danah boyd capitalises ‘I’ only when it comes at the beginning of a sentence, which strikes me as reasonable; I have assumed she would do the same with her name, though I am not sure.

If you have a non-standard name, then fine, expect mistakes in spelling or pronunciation (someone named Jeanne, for instance, will likely need to get used to being called Jean or Jeannie a lot if they leave French-speaking areas. How did you pronounce that name in your head?). But then you politely point out that you spell your name however you spell it, or you pronounce it however you pronounce it, and people politely fix it, instead of nattering on about how it’s a convention and thus entirely not up for debate or examination by defying them.

But that I will never end up doing real thinking about: html demonstratives.

(more…)

A few years ago, I went on a trip with some friends to Maine. My mother gave me a note with some directions (go south to Concord! go east to Portsmouth! go north to Ogunquit! though really it’s just the details of what to do around Concord, as well as how to visit Matilda when she was bitty, because it was hard(ish) to find) as well as a note about groceries to bring back and this: “If you find a lobster flag!!!”

Now I knew exactly what was meant by this: it was soon to be my cousin’s birthday, and near his parents’ house was a house where they put out these neat shaped flags, and we decided he’d like one of those, but in a lobster shape, because he loves lobsters. (For some reason, ordering online didn’t work.) So obviously if I saw one, I would buy it for him. (We didn’t see one, and instead got him the singing fish thing — or was that another time? He loved the singing trout, whenever we gave it to him. He got the flag eventually, too.)

Given all the common ground, the note made sense to me. My friends, however, being incredibly nerdy linguists (who I know don’t — or didn’t, as of a few weeks ago — read this site, so I can insult them, though it’s not really an insult inasmuch as it’s true — I am a cool nerdy linguist, by the way: keep things straight[1]) decided to make fun of the syntax. And, okay, granted that a single clause starting with if is an incomplete sentence. So we spent the rest of the weekend starting all our sentences with if (as well as some other stupid nerdy jokes, which were of course cool when I made them).

Today when I was going to find out about my mirror (needs total replacement, but is comparatively cheap! Yay! Unlike my bumper, which is another story but, unlike the mirror, not at all my fault) my father offered to come with[2], so I said “If I want to leave in 15 minutes” and first he waited for me to finish the sentence, then he made snarky comments about how could he possibly be expected to know what I meant, I could have meant anything at all, it’s not HIS fault he didn’t understand, which of course he did, he’s just an ass like that sometimes.

I mean, really: who’s the linguist in this family?

[1] On the internet, no one knows you’re not *really* cool.
[2] (a) this is a post about incomplete phrases and (b) I say it a lot anyhow.