July, July

Sheesh, where does the summer go? To work and fun, that’s where. I’ve never had a summer before where I felt like I had so much to get done; I’ve been working fairly steadily for the last two months and don’t feel like I’ve made a dent in it! I think this is the summer where it smacks me in the face, what all the work is that successful academics actually hold down at once…I don’t even have any teaching-type responsibilities, and I still feel swamped with projects.

Anywho, so I am not sure whether that is a good explanation for why my posting has been so, so light lately, or whether the better explanation is that I simply feel that I have nothing good to say. Or perhaps that I feel all the other terrific linguabloggers are doing a perfectly fine job of saying everything themselves.

In the meantime, I’ve started re-reading The Linguistics Wars for fun, so I might post thoughts on that occasionally as I go. I’ve also started developing my dissertation project (finally!), and those thoughts will–let’s hope–be articulated clearly enough to share publicly at some soonish point. For now, let’s just say that it will involve experiments and syntax. Crazy, right?!?!

Also, would you like to see a pitch track from a news anchor reading a text from former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to his Chief of Staff Christine Beatty that says, “HELL YEAH”? Sure you do.

There is an entry in UMich’s library catalog, under search heading “Intonation,” that reads:

Yes, it’s the missing masterwork of Dwight Bolinger: Intonation and its pants. The Library is very lucky to hold such a treasure. When searching for said book on Google, it does return a Bolinger book as the first corrective result, though not the same book that the title is an aberration of (which is Intonation and its parts):

So, what do Intonation’s pants look like?

I saw this headline in the NYT today, as one of the “most-emailed” stories:

When I saw it on the teaser, I thought, “Oooh, ‘Corner Office’ conversation with someone who wants subjects, verbs, AND objects?? Is it an interview with Chomsky, or some other notable male linguistics prof?” But no. Of course it’s an interview with some truly business-y businessman, who just wants to hype up the value of “good communication skills”:

Q. What other questions do you ask [of job candidates]?

A. You want to know about their family. Where they grew up. What their parents did. Where they went to high school. What their avocations were. How many kids they had in their family. You know, what their whole background and history is.

I learned that from a C.E.O. I worked for. The C.E.O. wouldn’t really spend that much time on the résumé, but spent most of the time wanting to know everything about the person’s life, family, what they liked, where they liked to go on vacation, what their kids were like…

Q. What are you listening for as somebody describes their family, where they’re from, etc.?

A. You’re looking for a really strong set of values. You’re looking for a really good work ethic. Really good communication skills. More and more, the ability to speak well and write is important. You know, writing is not something that is taught as strongly as it should be in the educational curriculum. So you’re looking for communication skills…

It’s not just enough to be able to just do a nice PowerPoint presentation. You’ve got to have the ability to pick people. You’ve got to have the ability to communicate. When you find really capable people, it’s amazing how they proliferate capable people all through your organization. So that’s what you’re hunting for.

Q. And is there any change in the kind of qualities you’re looking for compared with 5, 10 years ago?

A. I think this communication point is getting more and more important. People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word. And when I say written word, I don’t mean PowerPoints. I don’t think PowerPoints help people think as clearly as they should because you don’t have to put a complete thought in place. You can just put a phrase with a bullet in front of it. And it doesn’t have a subject, a verb and an object, so you aren’t expressing complete thoughts.

And a lot of what we do in communication, when you write e-mail, you need to express yourself very clearly so people understand whether we’re going to L.A. today or we’re going to Boston today…

Do you hear that, people? Communication is more important NOW than EVER BEFORE. What got picked up for the headline, out of this *whole interview*, is the bit about “good communication” consisting of “complete thoughts” which means having “a subject, a verb and an object”–and that the existence of employees who can complete such thoughts by employing such a trio of parts-of-speech is apparently so rare that the demand for such is the most notable thing this CEO has to say. Language is STILL going to hell in a handbasket, everyone. So don’t start thinking it’s not. (Also, tell the NYT to use a subject, verb, and object when it wants to express thoughts!)

I finally started using twitter, kind of for-real this time. Find me at laurensq and follow along…

(someday I hope to have occasion to create a headline that reads, “Pro-drop in the bucket”)

I saw this lede in a most-emailed NYT article yesterday and was immediately captivated by its use of two null subject sentences in a row.

English is typically considered a non-null subject language (except in the case of very “informal” language), but I have heard some arguments to the contrary, though I can’t be bothered at the moment to identify them precisely for you… The first sentence, an imperative form, is unsurprisingly missing a subject, but the second sentence is of a less common form, especially in “formal” print media. At any rate, seeing this in the NYT of all places was startling and makes me think more change is afoot in the parameterization of (American) English w/r/t null subjects.

First of all, there was something new Real Housewives-related (go figure) last week that I wanted to post, which was of what I saw as a misunderstanding between Bethenny and Alex with regards to the word “online.” I tried to find video but was unsuccessful. Anyway, so Alex was telling Bethenny about how she met her husband, and the conversation went like this, I paraphrase:

Alex: I mean, you just can’t necessarily think you’re going to find love by LOOKING for it. I met Simon when I wasn’t expecting it; we just bumped into each other online when we were both just looking for one-night stands.
Bethenny: Really. And wait, so did you sleep together on your first date?
A: No, no, I mean…[I don't remember what she said next; I think they cut to her testimonial where she started crying because of how much she loves Simon]
B: Oh, so you but I mean, you were both just… out… looking for…
A: Yeah, I mean, we met, and then we started emailing each other a lot, and it was just amazing.
B: Ah! …[the rest of the conversation was really boring]

Do you see what happened here? I *think* Bethenny interpreted “online” to meet “in line,” because New Yorkers say “online” to mean “in queue.” So she thought they were like, waiting in line for club admission or something. But then when Alex started talking about *emails*, Bethenny realized she meant “online” like “on the internet,” which if Bethenny had stopped to remember that Alex is from Kansas, she might have interpreted appropriately in the first place (although actually, I could see Alex adopting “online” to mean “queued up” in order to fit in in New York…omg I really take these characters too seriously). So once Bethenny realized that Alex had met Simon ON THE INTERNET, her reaction to what Alex was telling her completely changed. You could see it in her face. It was crazy.

So, failed initial semantic ambiguity resolution. Though not sure how much of equal competitors the two meanings are, for Bethenny. I would have to know much more about her background and grammar for that.

Also, I will be at the Expanding Literacy Studies conference in Columbus this weekend–if you happen to be reading and will be there also, say hello! (Stranger things have happened. Last week one of the prospective grad students in the dept. met me, then immediately said “Are you Polyglot Conspiracy?” And I got real embarrassed.)

Dear Bethenny Frankel,

Please stop using the word “skinny” as if it is equivalent to or in any way logically related to the word “healthy.” I really enjoy you, unironically, on the Real Housewives of New York City; even though you are hardly a housewife, you do seem fairly real, which I appreciate. But your “clever” use of the phrase “skinny girls” to market your natural foods products, your book, and yourself? It is not helping anyone. Please stop.

You use the idea of “skinny girl” as if this is something that women aspire to be. Your doing so fails to recognize the anti-fat and anti-woman culture of weight in which we live, even while you claim that what you want is to “democratize” food, diet, and nutrition. “Skinny” is a word that points to women (and men) who have unreal, unhealthy, and unattainable-for-most bodies. And your unnuanced use of the word presents unrealistic, unhealthy, unattainable bodies as if they are real and healthy, as if they are things that ought to be attained by all. In this usage, you merely reproduce the very “hierarchy” of value on weight and body that you claim, through your rhetoric of “democratization,” to want to subvert. It is a hierarchy that leads millions of people to disordered lifestyles, and that makes it impossible for women in particular to live healthily and happily with the bodies they have, even if those bodies ARE healthy.

I looked up “skinny” in the dictionary, and you know what it says?

I don’t want to be emaciated, Bethenny, and I don’t have an emaciated woman living inside of me waiting to get out, as the title of your book, “Naturally thin: Unleash your skinny girl and free yourself from a lifetime of dieting,” presumes. That title, and your enterprise, prey on women’s insecurities, women’s irrational, socialized desires to look like skinny women whom they are taught are better than them, and whom they in reality have no chance of looking like - which, by the way, is just fine, but this isn’t what we’re taught. You have said:

My goal is to have simply and logically taught millions of people how easy it is to live a healthy, sustainable life that will fit into their lifestyle regardless of age, race, socioeconomic status, career or anything else that is unique to them. Everyone deserve to live life to the fullest without sacrificing who they are!

What about people who aren’t skinny?

I think you have a noble goal, Bethenny, of helping people cut through bullshit about nutrition and food. But if you think that talking about “skinny girls” as a positive thing is doing anything to cut through bullshit about weight and body image, you are sadly mistaken, and you are being counterproductive.

Please Bethenny. Stop.

Love,
PC

Second-most emailed article currently: Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times. I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-trade pubs got in on the action.

Wheeeeeee!!!!!

[update: see, as usual, Mark Bousquet]

Yesterday I spent the last Saturday of my “spring” break watching two movies, one old and one newer. In both of these films I noticed some expressions that surprised me for their scripting; perhaps I was at the ready to notice word choice because my students’ last papers were Definition essays, mostly about “slang” words (though their definitions of what counts as “slang” varies WIDELY) that have common meanings different from their dictionary meanings.

First, I watched “The Best Years of Our Lives,” a really brilliant 1946 film about three WWII veterans returning home to “Boone City” and their families. You really should watch the movie, if you haven’t seen it. Anyhow, there were a few things people said in this film that struck me as colloquial and which I realized — after being jarred by them — I wasn’t expecting to hear in a film representing the 1940s. Some of the ones I remember are:

sold out [said by a shopowner who had sold his drugstore during the war to a big franchise]
He’s hot [said by a wife about her returning serviceman]
I must’ve been plastered [said by a serviceman about being drunk the night before]

These are all terms that are still commonly used today, and that still (to me, anyway) have a colloquial-bordering-on-slang connotation to them. They are therefore not expressions I would’ve guessed to be contemporary to 1946. I think I’ve been conditioned to think that old(ish) black-and-white films will be full of quaint expressions that don’t carry the same force today as they did “back then,” and this is in fact part of the pleasure of the experience of watching “old movies.” But this script could’ve been written today and still maintained many of the elements of conversational English that it employed in what I presume is attempted realism.

Which of course underscores a key point about conversational word meanings, which is that often they are not nearly as “new” as we manage to think they are. I mean, I had a student write about the word “hot” (adj. “sexy or attractive”) as if it were a product of *her* (18-year-old) generation, for goodness’ sake! One thing that happens when my students have written these Definition papers is that they pick words they think are recently-initiated slang words (gay, hot, shawty, kicks, piece, shady, tool, beast, booty, sick), and then they write either a) mundane papers that assume that the word is ONLY used in its slang meaning by teens, that teens invented that usage, and that “older generations” don’t understand it, or b) really interesting papers that unearth a history to the word’s slang meaning that the student hadn’t known about before. In both cases, it’s clear that the students have been inculcated to believe (or have constructed a belief themselves) that “their” “teen language” is categorically different from the language of anyone older than them. This is really interesting given that in the language ideologies biz, we typically think of language authorities (teachers, writers, etc.) as blaming teens for “ruining the language” or talking in crazy slang, yet teens themselves are (re)producing those stereotypes about their age group. So I see a lot of unarticulated identity work happening in youth culture re: words/language.

That got me off track a bit. Another movie I watched yesterday was “American Me,” a 1992 film about the founders of the Mexican Mafia and prison/street gang life in LA. This movie was interesting for its subtitling practices alone — the characters codeswitch between English and Spanish a lot, both intrasententially and intersententially. Naturally, when the characters speak whole sentences in Spanish, the movie provides English subtitles, which seems normal. But then when they codeswitch within sentences, the movie ALSO provides English subtitles, which is interesting since it’s often only one word out of the whole sentence that’s in Spanish. And sometimes there would even be an English slang word in a sentence and then the whole sentence would be subtitled. Anyway, as for the relevant word that I found interesting for its inclusion, it was:

For reals? [said by a love interest to the main character after he has admitted that it's his first time ever being at the beach]

I don’t have much to say about this one, except that “for reals” was something “funny” that people in my high school (POST-1992, btw) would say to each other to be silly or ironic, instead of “for real.” I never thought about the expression or where it came from, but I’m pretty sure that at the time, we thought we’d made it up. Clearly not.

Proof of acronym lexicalization?

Yesterday we posted a question sent to us by a couple of grad students who were afraid their proffies sometimes overshared a bit - a little bit too much TMI. Well, here’s a bitchy Big Thirsty response from one of our absolutely favorite longtime correspondents.

(via Rate Your Students, which I variously recommend reading or completely avoiding, depending on how hopeful you are about whether getting a PhD is “right for you” or not, how much you dis/like your advisor and/or undergrads, your tolerance for emotionally toxic discourse which is not really necessary, etc.)

This usage — spelled out to “too much too much information” — caught my attention because last week I was reading for class about Sarah Laszlo & Kara Federmeier’s cool psycholinguistic experiments demonstrating an “acronym superiority effect.” The short of it is that there has long been demonstrated a “word superiority effect” for letter recognition: letters that people see in the context of quickly-presented words (DUCK) are more easily recognized afterwards (when forced to choose whether they saw, e.g., D or T in _***) than letters that are seen in nonwords (JBHO), and pseudowords (FAIB) garner some of the same effects. That is, orthographic representations that form ortho-phonologically “legal” (regular, abiding by the rules of orthographic-phonological [spelling] correspondence for English) strings facilitate the recognition of the individual letters within them.

Laszlo & Federmeier’s work demonstrates these same facilitative effects of acronyms, which are technically illegal in terms of orthographic-phonological correspondence rules. But compared to illegal strings that couldn’t be said to have an independent and familiar meaning (JBHO), acronyms (HDTV) garnered more accurate letter recognition. The finding of which is used to argue that familiar letter strings, even if they don’t form “good” English words according to spelling, have lexical representations in the mental lexicon (wherever/whatever it is) that are able to be directly accessed without reference to phonology (in other words, you don’t have to “translate” the orthographic representation into a phonolological representation in order to get to the lexical representation).

But there is an underlying assumption here: that acronyms *can’t* be translated via phonology, just because they aren’t orthographically regular/legal. Perhaps there are experiments showing that this is the case, but I’m not sure I buy it without knowing about such research. This is because you do *pronounce* acronyms, even when you can’t “read” them, when you see them (”dee vee dee”). [general "you" = slopping writing; whatevs] And acronyms that are lexicalized to the point of not even retaining the meaning of the words that once made them up, like the TMI case above, get “read” without getting “spelled out,” which is evident because if you tried to spell it out, it would sound bad - “*too much too much information.” So while it’s true that the role of letters in acronyms are different from the role of letters in regularly-spelled words, because they’re not compositionally related to the phonology in the same way, I’m not convinced that it’s true that letters don’t have *some* compositional relationship to phonology, which would require, rather than one big orthography-phonology translation process, but several different kinds of orthography-phonology translation processes, to deal with all the different modes of pronouncing based on orthographic input.

This is not to say that I don’t believe that acronyms have lexical representations — I totally believe that, and I think “too much TMI” probably gives a rather good type of evidence — but I just wonder about the underlying assumptions about the nature of the lexical representations with relation to the phonological component.