Sszark the Burning

As anyone who has played the video game Diablo II can attest, the best part is the names of the unique characters. These include the venerable Frozenstein, Puke Pus the Sharp, and one that hadn't caught my eye until recently: Sszark the Burning. The real question here is, how do the game designers want us to pronounce this? Is that a long "s" at the beginning, followed by a [z]? Maybe the "ss" is a syllable nucleus, as can be the case in Blackfoot: ss.zark. Or is it an "s" followed by the Hungarian "sz" for /s/, giving a long s cluster at the beginning: ssaɹk. It's a mystery to me, but either way it's a great name.

Why we need linguistics education for all

In last month's issue of Cigar Aficionado, while reading an article on cachaca (Brazil's national liquor of choice, distilled from sugar cane but by a different method than rum), this gem of pronunciation advice caught my eye, concerning the three different c's in the word:

The first is hard, the second is the soft blend of "ch" as in "chagrin," and the third is a combination of "s" and "z" like the "c" in "facade": ka-SHAH-sa.

The first description is well-known to any speaker of English; we often talk about "hard" c's (/k/) and "soft" c's (/s/). The second description is a little confusing ("blend" of what? "c" and "h"?), but fairly transparent with the example word. The third description, however, really threw me for a loop. A combination of "s" and "z"? They seem to have picked the one feature of phonetics that truly is on or off, without any gradations (yes, there are several types of voicing, but it all comes down to either the vocal folds are vibrating or they aren't). It's clear enough what sounds they mean : /s/, as evidenced by the sample word "facade." But what the heck were they trying to describe by saying that this normal "s" sound is somewhere between /s/ and /z/? Maybe unbeknownst to me everyone else pronounces "facade" with a breathy voiced "z".

I hate lazy spammers

If you're going to phish for important information, at least get your syntax right. I was told recently in an email, "Verify your account now to avoid it closed." The intent of the message is obvious, and skitters just on the edge of being grammatical (maybe "avoid it being closed"?), but clearly this is an inexpert English user rather than a typing impaired spammer. Come on guys, have pride in what you're doing, even if that's trying to trick people in giving up their credit card information.

Any guesses on the writer's native language?

literally, technically

Semantic bleaching is something that happens all the time. In fact, I just used it: I don't mean that at every infinitesimal moment in time semantic bleaching is occurring; I merely mean that it is not uncommon to see its effects. Essentially semantic bleaching is the lessening of the force of a word. For instance, even "extremely" these days doesn't mean much. People have an interesting way of dealing with this. One of the strategies I hear most often is to use "literally," as in, "I could literally eat a horse I'm so hungry." Clearly this person does not mean that they desire to sit down and consume an entire horse. What they mean is that we use hyperbole so much in everyday speech that even saying one could eat a horse does not express the extreme hunger that person is experiencing. Hence the use of literally. My professor Tony Mattina proposed that people use "literally" essentially as the opposite of what it actually means: to mean "metaphorically". However, I think the difference is more subtle. Not all the usages I hear are strictly metaphorical. Rather, I think people are using the word "literally" not to mean literally, but simply as an intensifier.

Another (and I believe related) difference in word usage is with the word "technically". On a linguistics forum I frequent a new member posed a question about "technically". He recently voted for candidate A because he did not want candidate B to win. Thus in his mind he was technically voting against candidate B, rather than for candidate A. However, his friend argued with him, saying that since technically it is not possible to cast a vote against a candidate, he technically voted for candidate A. My take on this is that the friend is the correct one, at least in the strictest usage of the word. To me, "technically" refers to procedure, i.e., what is objectively happening at any given moment. Thus if John shoots Bill, technically all he's doing is pulling the trigger of a gun. Of course, if you believe in the slippery slope argument, where do we draw the line? Perhaps I should really say John's brain is firing electrical impulses that cause his index finger to contract.

4th of July weekend

No new posts until Monday because of the 4th of July weekend. I will be busy smoking a butt of pork and drinking mint juleps, but fear not, I'm sure I'll still be thinking about Optimality Theory.

Any X is X who X

I was struck by an odd (to my ear) phrasing by Richard Gere is a preview for what looks to be a terrible romantic comedy/drama: "Any man is a fool who doesn't appreciate you." I'm sure I've heard this construction before, but it definitely rubs me the wrong way. The problem is the isolation of the relative clause from the NP it modifies. I would always phrase such a thought as "Any X who X is X." Searching for "any * is * who *" on Google returns several hits of the same phrasing, so clearly it's not a rare construction. After careful consideration, I'm unable to make heads nor tails of it syntactically. The incorrect interpretation would be the following:

With "any" the interpretation doesn't make much sense, but replace it with "every" and there could be real ambiguity, at least in print. The only way I could see generating kind of construction syntactically is some sort of movement, where the CP starts out under the NP "any man" and then moves lower down. This is also a good example of the cognitive preference for low attachment, i.e., we want the CP "who does not appreciate you" to be attached to the lower NP, not the higher one the speaker wants us to attach it to.

Noun Incorporation

My wife brought to my attention a spectacular example of noun incorporation in pop culture: twinfanticipating. Apparently it was used to describe Angelina Jolie, who is currently pregnant with twins. It is, of course, a blend of three words: twin, infant, and anticipating. We couldn't agree on how to pronounce it. I opted for ˌtwɪnfənˈtɪsɪpejtɪŋ, preserving the stress of twin, infant, and anticipating, but using the vowel quality in infant for the second vowel, rather than the vowel quality of anticipating. My wife, on the other hand, insists that it should be ˌtwɪnfænˈtɪsɪpejtɪŋ, with the same conservation of stress, but using the vowel quality of anticipating rather than infant. My argument is that anticipating already has four syllables to itself, so infant should at least get that second syllable, even if it has to share both of them.

As for the word itself, the meaning is fairly obvious: anticipating twin infants. It is also a prime example of true noun incorporation. One of the hallmarks of true noun incorporation is that it decreases the valency of the verb. While non-verbal noun incorporation is debatable (where's the line between true incorporation and compounding, or are they the same?), verbal noun incorporation always includes a decrease in verbal valency, i.e., the number of arguments the verb takes decreases. In this case, the original phrase "anticipating twin infants" has a valency of 2: the anticipator and the twins. However, "twinfanticipating" has a valency of 1: only the anticipator is involved. We see this kind of incorporation all the time in Salishan and Wakashan languages, in which, for example, you could have a verb that refers to buying meat, so that one would say something like "I did some meat-buying this weekend." "Meat" ceases to become a separate argument of the verb and instead becomes incorporated inside the verb as a bound morpheme that contributes meaning to the specificity of the verb. Recently I've heard many English speakers do this as well: "online-shop" instead of "shop online." More interestingly, I was told by a waitress to "overlook" their list of daily specials when I was on my way to a conference a couple months ago (she meant for me to look over the list, not overlook it).