N N N N N N

Just a quick post before I get back to reading Seth Cable's recent article on Tlingit and Q particles. Last month CNN ran an article called "Titanic 100th cruises spark buzz, debate". Even before looking at the content of the article, I understood the basic gist of this headline: there are going to be cruises on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking, and these cruises are sparking buzz and debate. However, I find it amazing that I was easily able to understand what seems like it should have been a crash blossom. The headline is a string of six words that could almost all be nouns or verbs. Titanic and 100th can only be nouns, but the other four words could go either way. The anniversary is cruising some area called a spark buzz? Without the comma there would be been even more possible permutations.

Let's see if we can't do that

Last week Vicki Hartley wrote to ask me about "the use of a negative construction when a positive construction is simpler". One example is "I'll see if I can't do that". Strangely, this sentence means essentially the same thing as "I'll see if I can do that". Another example she asked about was, e.g., "I don't have but three students", to mean "I have only three students". The way I see it, these are two separate constructions, though there is an underlying theme.

In the first, you're saying that you'll try the opposite of what you intend. I told Vicki that I saw this as similar to what goes on in the scientific method -- we'll start with our hypothesis and try to disprove it; hopefully we'll fail. Logically, this seems to make sense, since either way the result is the same: you find out whether or not you're able to do something. On the other hand, as a speaker, I wonder if this "scientific method" approach is really what's going on here. To me "I'll see if I can't do that" really doesn't mean "I'm going to attempt to not do that". To me I can't find any semantic difference in "see if I can't" versus "see if I can". Pragmatically there are differences -- the redundant negative version seems to presuppose that there will be some difficulty associated with the course of action, hence the negative. On the other hand, it seems to also presuppose that the course of action will result in a positive outcome. To me, telling a sopping wet child "let's see if we can't find you some dry clothes" would be infelicitous if it were my child at my house. I could only felicitously say that to my child's friend at my house, where there would be no reason to expect to find them dry clothes that fit properly. (An aside: I picked this example because I associate "let's see if we can't..." with a parent talking to a child -- not sure if this is relevant to the discussion at hand.) However, I'll also say it implies that I'm relatively sure of a positive outcome (finding dry clothes that fit). If I say "let's see if we can find you some dry clothes" I don't get quite the same expectation; there's more tolerance for the negative outcome "oh well, I guess not".

The second construction is a slightly different version of the redundant negative. For me, "I don't have but three students" is slightly marked, but fully grammatical, whereas "I have but three students" sounds archaic almost to the point of ungrammaticality. So we have the following, which all entail having three students:

1) I have three students.
2) I have only three students.
3) I have but three students.
4) ?I have but only three students.
5) I don't have but three students.

I have a question mark by (4) because I'm not sure if I like it or not. I
think I don't, but it doesn't seem totally wrong. And then we have the
following, which all entail NOT having three students:

6) I don't have three students.
7) I don't have only three students.
8) *I don't have but only three students.

I'm pretty sure (8) is bad, but if it's not, I think it would mean the
positive, not the negative.

My guess is that we should treat this second construction as parallel to the first one. Despite my archaic interpretation of "I have but three students", this was definitely fine in earlier versions of English, and my guess is that many people would find it unremarkable even today. Thus "I don't have but three students" is essentially the same phenomenon as "Let's see if we can't do that". One avenue of research that might prove useful is semantic research on some of the North American languages. Salishan languages have suffixes that create a "managed to" reading (non-control transitivizers, for those in the know). Navajo has an adversative reading that indicates that a proposition is counter to expectation. Blackfoot (an unrelated language) has the same thing (which coincidentally is also the affix for "please"). This might be what we're seeing in English: variation based on presuppositions of the speaker's ability to bring into being some desired or discussed resultant state.

new Clarion blog post on writing systems

If you're interested in writing systems, check out my post this week for the Clarion Foundation blog: Writing Systems. As an amateur writer, I sometimes wax a little authorial on these posts, but if you've found them too fiction-oriented so far, know that I'm intending future posts to be more strictly linguistic in nature.

"the written word"

I was interested to see the headline "LOL -- 'Webspeak' invades Oxford dictionary" on CNN this week. The article is little more than a blurb about some new additions to the Oxford American Dictionary, but I was struck by the first line: "Are years of e-mails, text messaging and status updates finally affecting the written word?" When I read that I did a bit of a double-take, as you might be doing right now. "Hold on a sec," you might think, "aren't ALL of those things written words?" This usage takes to the extreme the idea that "the written word" as a set phrase is somehow not compositional; it doesn't literally mean "a corpus of written materials in contemporary usage", but rather some lofty edifice culled from esteemed writers and curmudgeonly literary critics. While I acknowledge that "the written word" is a semi-idiom in many dialects of American English, I would never use it quite as idiomatically as in this article -- literally juxtaposing a huge corpus of written material with the ethereal ideal of "the written word".

Despite this opening line, the article isn't critical at all of this move by the OAD. The author in fact notes that "It is nice to see Oxford attempting to get with the times" by including expressions that many of us see every day. Lexicographers are often remarkably descriptive, despite the tendency for prescription among those who use their products regularly. However, the author does fear that this will make difficult times for English teachers, as students back up their usage of TTYL and LMAO in academic writing with dictionary citations. I can certainly see English teachers cowering in terror, even though this seems to me ridiculous. As long as we talk about what is appropriate rather than correct, there's no need to fear descriptivism. For instance, I rail against those who teach that it is "incorrect" to use "which" in restrictive relative clauses, or that it is "ungrammatical" to use double modals. On the other hand, in some contexts there are reasons for teaching that it is inappropriate to use these in academic papers (although frankly I'm always against the claim that "which" should be only used for nonrestrictive relative clauses).

The problem with the absolutist view of English is that it isn't absolute. If you try to teach students that "which" should only be used for nonrestrictive relative clauses, you don't have anywhere to turn. The dictionary won't tell you this, esteemed authors don't show this usage, even the venerable old Strunk didn't keep his whichs and thats complementary (though when White came along he added the rule and edited all of Strunk's examples to make them fit the rule). Too often what people think of as "correct" grammar is simply bits and pieces of inconsistent jargon they've internalized from many different, often conflicting, sources. What students need to be taught is that academic writing is a formal style with strict rules. It's not that double modals are wrong, it's that double modals are frowned upon in academic writing. And that's a reason not to use them in such contexts if you want to get a job.

Compounds

English is mildly notorious for its non-compositional compounds. In this case I don't necessarily mean that compound words or phrases have nothing to do semantically with their components, but rather that the relation between the components is somewhat unstructured: there is no strict relation between X and Y for a compound X-Y. One relatively well-used example of this is the difference in the semantic relation between the two components in "olive oil" and "baby oil". You make olive oil by squeezing olives until the oil runs out of them. This is not how you make baby oil. In fact, the first word in "baby oil" has a completely different relation than the first word in "olive oil". In "olive oil" the first word indicates the source of the primary component, the oil. (Compounds in English and some other languages are right-headed, meaning that the component on the right gives you the category and basic sense of the compound: "olive oil" is a type of oil, not a type of olive.) In "baby oil", on the other hand, the first word tells you something about how the oil is intended to be used. You can see the same difference in "spring water" and "holy water". Holy water may in fact be spring water (I'm not sure if churches typically use bottled water, tap water, or some specially sourced water for this), but "holy water" indicates something different because it indicates what the water is going to be used for, rather than where it came from.

One thing I hadn't thought much about until recently is that it's not just N+N compounds that behave in this peculiar way. For instance, there's good reason to be afraid of baseball-sized hail, but no real reason to fear a family-sized bag of candy. Like the N+N example above, these types of adjectival compounds can refer to completely different types of relations. Hail that is baseball-sized is the size of a baseball, but a bag of candy that is family-size is not the size of a family; rather, it's a bag that is a size appropriate for a family. English is not the only language that has these types of unpredicatable compounds. Blackfoot also has some unpredictable compounds. One of my favorite of these is the word for horse, ponokáómitaa literally means elk-dog, where ponoka is 'elk' and ómitaa is a bound form of the root for 'dog'. Presumably this stems from the association of horses, when they were first encountered a few hundred years ago, with the general ungulate form and size of an elk, and with the beast-of-burden function of a dog, which the Blackfeet used to carry travois and other equipment.

double modals

Double modals are a feature of certain dialects of American English. For a long time I thought this construction was limited to the South, but I have since learned that there are other areas of the country featuring double modals, including Michigan. Some of the more common examples of double modals include "might could", as in "I might could do it" for "I might be able to do it", or "used to could", as in "I used to could do it" for "I used to be able to do it". Because these constructions are stigmatized in prescriptivist grammar (and perhaps because they don't occur in the Northeast or California), they haven't gotten a lot of attention in the linguistic literature. Given that current syntactic theory places modals in the T node, it's unclear how we should represent something like "might could".

One idea that non-speakers of the relevant dialects have is that double modals are redundant or unnecessary (in addition to of course being incorrect). However, to speakers of these dialects phrases like "might could" and "might be able to" are not in complementary distribution. In an example like "might should", the double modal indicates a very different information state than "should". A better translation would be "It might be the case that I should", expressing perhaps an irrealis deontic mood. A good example of non-speaker confusion can be found in one of the COCA hits for "might should", referring to a Southerner saying "he might should go" rather than "he might go". Of course, any person that speaks a double modal dialect knows that these two are not at all equivalent semantically or truth-conditionally. My point here is not to poke fun at those who don't know how to use double modals (although I might should poke fun at those who poke fun at those who use double modals). My point is simply that double modals enrich the English language, sometimes creating a shorter way to indicate an information state ("I might could" versus "I might be able to"), and sometimes conveying information that can't easily be conveyed any other way. It fills a niche in the same way that y'all or youse fills the want for a contrastive second person plural pronoun.

Crash blossoms

Recently the term "crash blossom" has come into use to mean a news headline so clipped and ambiguous that it becomes nearly impossible to get the correct reading the first time around. The term comes from the headline "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms", which on first glance might garner the interpretation that some violin-playing individual has something to do with something called "crash blossoms" owned or manufactured by some company JAL. In actuality the store is about a plane crash victim blossoming into a superb musician. You can check out all sorts of other examples at crashblossoms.com and Language Log (e.g., here). The reason behind this is that as we read, we construct a possible syntactic structure in our head, and when you have long strings of words where each one can be either a noun or a verb, you runs into problems. For instance, in "crash blossoms", "crash" can be a noun or a verb; "blossoms" can likewise be a plural noun or a 3rd person singular verb form.

I came across a gem the other day: "Stabbings suspect an enigma". This isn't a crash blossom that's genuinely ambiguous if you semantically interpret every word as you go, but apparently I was reading a little too fast for myself when I looked over this, because all I really saw was "N-pl V.3rd NP", which would get interpreted as some stabbings suspecting the existence of an enigma. Obviously that's not the right interpretation. Really what you get is two NPs with an omitted copula. This is not the type of thing that would be ambiguous even for a second in spoken language, since the noun and verb forms of "suspect" have differing stress. But then this type of headline isn't the kind of thing that would be spoken at all, which is why we get some great garden path sentences from terse copy editors.