Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for 2010

VPE mismatches

November 29, 2010

A very brief summary of the English construction known as Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), from a 2006 Language Log posting of mine:

Background about VPE: this is an English construction in which the complement of an auxiliary verb (a modal, BE, or perfect HAVE, plus a few other things for some speakers) or infinitival TO is omitted:

(1) I can’t juggle knives, but Dmitri can ___.
(2) I’m not going, but Dmitri is ___.
(3) I was attacked by the wolves, but Dmitri wasn’t ___.
(4) I’ll be unhappy, and Dmitri will be ___, too.
(5) I’ve finished my work, and Dmitri has ___, too.
(6) I don’t want to eat the sashimi, but Dmitri wants to ___.

(The “remainder” elements are bold-faced here, and the missing complements are indicated by underscores.)

Though the construction is usually known as Verb Phrase Ellipsis (sometimes Verb Phrase Deletion), the omitted phrase is not always a VP. In (4), it’s an AdjP. “VPE” isn’t a bad name, but it doesn’t tell you everything. The slogan is: Labels Are Not Definitions.

VPE requires a linguistic antecedent — it’s not enough that the appropriate verbal semantics be “in the air” — but it doesn’t require that the omitted complement match the antecedent perfectly.

I’ve been collecting VPE examples for years now. This is a summary report on the relationship between antecedent (ant) expressions and ellipses (ell) in VPE, focused on the inflectional categories of Vs.

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Posted in Ellipsis, Syntax | 2 Comments »

Data points: back-formation 11/28/10

November 28, 2010

In the Pope and prostitute news (some Language Log discussion here), occurrences of the simple back-formed verb contracept (based on contraception/contraceptive) unearthed by Paul Frank and discussed on ADS-L:

“As Sacred Heart Major Seminary professor Janet Smith put it in The Catholic World Report, ‘We must note that what is intrinsically wrong in a homosexual sexual act in which a condom is used is not the moral wrong of contraception but the homosexual act itself. In the case of homosexual sexual activity, a condom does not act as a contraceptive; it is not possible for homosexuals to contracept since their sexual activity has no procreative power that can be thwarted.’ There’s a logic here, but it’s the loopy follow-the-dots logic that led an Egyptian imam to declare that a woman can work in the same office as men who are not her relatives, as long as she breastfeeds them first.” (The Nation, December 13, 2010)

“But some theologians argue that the condom was not being used to contracept but rather to lower the risk of spreading AIDS.” (Philadelphia Enquirer, November 28, 2010)

Frank noted that contracept isn’t in the OED (it isn’t in NOAD2 or AHD4 either); that he found 6,040 raw ghits; and that One Look Dictionary says that it’s in the Random House Dictionary. David Barnhart found over 100 articles with contracepted in the Nexis database.

Larry Horn added the more complex back-formation contraceive (with a reconstructed stem -ceive), for which Barnhart found about 10 Nexis hits.

Posted in Back formation, Morphology | Leave a Comment »

Alphabets

November 27, 2010

In the NYT today, a story (by Elisabeth Malkin) about the Spanish Academy’s forthcoming spelling reforms and the reactions worldwide to them, focusing especially on objections from Spanish-speaking nations in the Americas to what is seen a dictate coming from abroad (headline: Rebelling Against Spain, This Time With Words). And a certain amount of silliness over one much-discussed aspect of the reforms, the elimination of CH and LL as separate letters of the alphabet, with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela weighing in on the issue:

If the academy no longer considers “ch” a separate letter, Mr. Chávez chortled to his cabinet, then he would henceforth be known simply as “Ávez.” (In fact, his name will stay the same, though his place in the alphabetic order will change, because “ch” used to be the letter after “c.”)

The elimination of the digraphs CH and LL as letters of the alphabet won’t change the spelling of any word, just the order of words in alphabetic lists — though that will entail a massive re-working of dictionaries (for new editions) and armies of copyeditors to ensure consistency in them and in other alphabetical lists. (Other reforms will entail re-spellings.)

Here’s the current Spanish alphabet, with 29 letters:

The revision will reduce the number of letters to 27; palatal Ñ will remain a separate letter.

For contrast, look at the current Welsh alphabet, with 28 letters:

Here there are plenty of digraphs — CH DD FF NG LL PH RH and TH — most of them representing “mutated” forms of basic phonemes; CH, for instance, represents the fricative /x/, a mutation of /k/. (One exception is FF, which represents /f/; the letter F represents /v/.)

The letters K Q V X and Z from the Latin alphabet are not used, since there are other spellings for borrowed words that have these letters in their spellings in source languages; for instance, K and CK from other languages, where they are pronounced with a /k/, are spelled with C, which represents /k/ in Welsh orthography, and PH from other languages, where it’s pronounced with /f/, is spelled with FF, as in FFÔN ‘phone’.

For consonants, the only real complexity is that there are two spellings for /f/: FF for a basic /f/ and PH for /f/ as a mutated form of /p/. (Vowels are another story.)

Actually, a pretty straightforward system, though it looks odd to people used to other spelling systems based on the Latin alphabet.

Posted in Spelling, Writing systems | 10 Comments »

Data points: gapless relatives 11/25/10

November 25, 2010

From a commercial for Mr. Clean (a household cleaning agent), seen recently on tv:

(1) He’s cleaning things that we don’t even know what they are.

The relative clause, boldfaced above, has no gap of “extraction” in it; instead, the pronoun they is anaphoric to the head of the relative, things. The gapped version is stunningly worse:

(2) He’s cleaning things that we don’t even know what ___ are.

In (2) the gap is inside an “anaphoric island”, a WH clause, and worse, it’s a subject gap, so using a “resumptive pronoun” instead of a gap, as in (1), repairs the problem in processing the relative clause — yielding something that’s not standard English but is comprehensible.

So (1) is an example of what I called in a Language Log posting from three years ago a ResIsland gapless relative (with a resumptive pronoun repairing an island violation). They are pretty common, and many of them have a somewhat vernacular and playful feel to them, an effect that might make the Mr. Clean commercial noticeable and memorable.

Posted in Language in advertising, Relativization, Syntax | 1 Comment »

Another Blunt Card

November 25, 2010

Another gay-related Blunt Card, this time with the back-formed verb gay marry:

With a bonus, the playful division of the compound pronoun myself into its possessive modifier (my) and nominal head (self) parts, with an intervening adjective modifier (hot) of the head. Some such divisions of reflexives with intervening modification are pretty common: my former self, my future self, my true self, my better self, your sorry self, etc., many of them serving as alternatives to also somewhat awkward nominals with an adjective plus an ordinary pronoun (the former me, the true me, etc.).

Posted in Back formation, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology | 3 Comments »

imposter vs. impostor

November 25, 2010

Maureen Dowd’s op-ed column in the NYT yesterday was headed

The Great Game Imposter

and later references to the Afghan man who passed himself off as a top Taliban commander used the spelling IMPOSTER. The day before, the headline in the news section went

Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor

and this front-page story used the spelling IMPOSTOR throughout.

The -ER spelling has appeared on Language Log, most notably in the title (and body) of a posting by Mark Liberman on 7/18/08:

Ranking fields by the difficulty of imposter detection (link)

(with comments addressing the spelling).

The facts are these: the -OR spelling is older, but the -ER spelling has been gaining on it, to the point where most current dictionaries give the -ER spelling as an alternative; both spellings are found in great numbers; but some people still consider the -ER spelling to be a mistake.

It was a bit of surprise to find the New York Times, which generally tries hard to enforce One Right Way, especially in mechanical matters, willing to let Dowd (or her editor) have the -ER spelling, and even to carry it over to the head.

Posted in Spelling, Variation | 5 Comments »

how / that

November 25, 2010

Comic Blunt Card with how used as a complementizer, roughly like that:

(Hat tip to Chris Ambidge.)

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Speech style, Syntax, Variation | 3 Comments »

Every girl every boy

November 25, 2010

A gender-subversion poster — I have a postcard version of it — from CrimethInc, adapted from a poem by Nancy R. Smith:

Posted in Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

Flagrant failure of parallelism

November 25, 2010

Writers are constantly advised that items in a list (in coordination in running text, in a bulleted list, in each level of an outline) must be parallel in form, in particular must all have the same syntactic structure (some Language Log discussion here). This is a struggle for the typical writer, who is just trying to convey a series of ideas, each in whatever form seems most natural to the writer. So we get flagrantly non-parallel lists, as on this postcard from Boston: