More syntactic constituents

I've talked about syntactic constituents before (here), and recently another difficult regarding them came to my attention via the Famous Dave's web site. On their site you are prompted to "enter either a zip code or select a state". If this were proper VPE (Verb Phrase Ellipsis), I would be expected to (i) enter a zip code or (ii) enter select a state. Since (ii) is ungrammatical, clearly something has gone wrong here. My guess is that this phrasing resulted from a blend of (a) "enter either a zip code or a state" and (b) "either enter a zip code or select a state". Note that with (a) we get (ai) enter a zip code or (aii) enter a state, and with (b) we get (bi) enter a zip code or (bii) select a state. However, as is the request would be parsed as [enter [either [a zip code] or [select a state]]].

Different to

I've noticed that the narrator of the Discovery show "Mythbusters" uses quite a few idiosyncratic phrases. By idiosyncratic I really just mean different from what I perceive as the standard and common way of saying things; I could be wrong. One of these I noticed the other day was "different to" something. I think in pretty much all cases I would say that one thing is "different from" another, though I might could use "different than" as well. Google gives the following results:

• different from: 128M


• different than: 47.5M


• different to: 10.9M

So apparently I'm not crazy in my ranking of different from >> different than >> different to. From those google searches I also noticed that different to is apparently common in UK English, but rare in US English. I can't think of a good way to check frequencies within a given dialect on google, but I feel like different to may be more Southern. This fits with the Anglophilia of Southern English, as well as the fact that I think the Mythbusters narrator is Southern, based on some non-standard syntax and pronunciations he uses once in a while.

Syntactic constituents

I recently saw a KFC ad that gave me pause: Mix it in your bucket. Why is "mix" highlighted? My guess is that their ad campaign consists of a number of similar slogans, with the initial verb highlighted. Okay, so why did this strike me as odd? Because "it in your bucket" isn't a constituent. A syntactic constituent is, narrowly, a group of words which is entirely and exhaustively dominated by a single node, i.e., there is some syntactic node which dominates all of and only that group of words. More practically the domination doesn't have to be exhaustive: we could certainly say that "mix it" is a constituent, even though the IP node also dominates "in your bucket". But "it in your bucket"? Not even close. The most general parsing of the sentences would be [mix it][in your bucket], and most narrowly would be [[mix [it]][in [your [bucket]]]]. There's no way to derive a constituent "it in your bucket".

Linguistic pet peeves

Plenty of people have linguistic pet peeves, phonetic or syntactic variants, usually non-standarad, that they cringe upon hearing. I'll admit to my fair share of them: I have a slight adverse reaction when I hear people say "I wish I was..." or "This is him". But I'll tell you what really bugs me: people who insist that their linguistic pet peeves should be enforced upon everyone. When I hear someone say "I wish I was..." I think to myself "I wish I were..." But I don't say anything, and I don't think to myself, "Man, that person is an idiot." Language is what people say, not what's in the Strunk & White. This isn't to say that all prescriptive grammar is hogwash. Some of the prescriptive suggestions really do lead to clearer, better writing. But so much of it is just linguistic peevery. What's wrong with, "I wish I was"? Is it ambiguous? Is there something that the subjunctive adds to the meaning of the sentence? No. It's merely agreement. In fact, the subjunctive is so useless that it shows up in languages very late in their development, and it's often one of the first features to be lost. That's not to say I don't love and use the subjunctive; I just recognize that it's a personal thing, not a linguistic law.

Pronunciation of final -e

My wife and I were last night discussing the varying pronunciations of Nietzsche: nitʃi versus nitʃə. As far as I'm aware, the latter is the preferred pronunciation, based on the fact that every philosopher I know pronounces it this way (and they're the ones with most cause to use it), and that Nietzsche was German, in which a final e such as this one should, according to my scant knowledge of German, be pronounced as a schwa. So why do people say nitʃi? That's what I said until I started taking philosophy classes. My hypothesis is that it stems from final -e in the numerous Greek words and names we've borrowed into English. To give some examples from linguistic and English terminology, "apocope", "syncope", "synecdoche", or from Greek mythology, "Persephone", "Ariadne", etc. etc. When people look at a word they don't say "Hmm, what language is that from?" They have vague unconscious knowledge of how they've heard other similar words pronounced, and in this case that results in a translation of the German -e in Nietzsche to the final -e in Greek which is pronounced i. Another reason we should have linguistics classes in school.

Another argument for the necessity of language education

I was perusing Amazon.com the other day when I happened upon this gem in a review for a Sepultura album: "Surely destined to become yet another Sepultura classic, A-LEX (Russian for no law) will catapult the Brazilian masters right back into their deserved spotlight." The translation of "a-lex" seems acceptable, but from Russian? Wikipedia claims that this is from Latin ab-, 'away from' + lex, 'law'. I think more likely it's a mixture of Greek a, 'without' + Latin lex, 'law'. I would argue that this is another reason why we need linguistics education for all. I think it's reasonable to expect anyone going through even our current education system to have some basic understanding of where certain common prefixes come from, but a little bit of training in linguistics would surely benefit students even more.

Some people would no doubt question the usefulness of such training: who cares if we know the derivation of Sepultura's album title? Well I say fie on them. Ultimately you can argue the same thing for any bit of knowledge.

Person hierarchy in English?

Arnold Zwicky wrote today about agreement with disjunctive subjects, i.e., clauses in which the subject is separated by an operator such as 'or' or 'nor'. He gives examples such as Neither Barbara nor I {am, is, are} able to... and If you or I {am, are} here.... This phenomenon is one that most if not all people struggle with, and I believe it provides solid evidence against the model of the brain as a computer which simply spits out answers based on some strictly written grammar code.

There are several competing motivations here. In the former example, one of these for many people is to say things that are prescriptively correct. This would be Neither...is, because prescriptively, 'neither' is the "subject" of the sentence. Of course, most of us also want the verb to agree with the most immediate NP, in this case, 'I'. Yet Neither Barbara nor I am... definitely sounds strange, because 'am' doesn't encompass Barbara. I think I would probably choose 'are', on the basis that this particular sentence is semantically equivalent to something like We are unable to..., i.e., the subject is in some underlying way a 1st person plural. On the other hand, it is difficult to apply this kind of view to the second example. I wouldn't want to say 'am' for the same reason as above, but I also wouldn't want to say 'are' because of the conflict with the 1st person pronoun 'I', and the fact that because of the disjunct the subject is clearly singular.

I think that in some ways this can be explained by some resort to a person hierarchy in English. We typically want 1st person pronouns to come second, as in Jim and I went to the store as opposed to ?I and Jim went to the store. But this hierarchy creates problems because of the above examples, where putting 'I' first would probably result in a more natural sentence (from a verb agreement standpoint).