As some of you know, I spend a small, but still unjustifiably large amount of time railing against linguistic prescriptivism, at least about rules that don’t matter. One of the ones that has continued to bother me since I began thinking about this topic was MSWord’s incessant complaining that “which” clauses must follow a comma while “that” clauses can under no circumstances do so. The vast majority of times I seemed to be in violation of the rule Word was applying, and on reflection I could hear no mistake in the grammar as I had it originally.
So I planned to write a post in response to this analysis of the mistake, which seemed to be to illustrate what was wrong with this distinction. It explains the commonly held view (“that” is for restrictive clauses; “which” for nonrestrictive clauses) and provides examples to demonstrate. So:
The painting, which was hanging in the foyer, was stolen.vs.
The painting that was hanging in the foyer was stolen.
But while my first reaction was to simply point out that competent language users don’t really hear a mistake when “that” and “which” are used interchangeably, I a better explanation of what is going on here:
Which and who (occasionally whom, but that’s another thread) can be used in restrictive relatives. And so can that. And, if the relative word isn’t the subject of the clause, you can also just use [ZERO] if you like.
On the other hand
In non-restrictive relative clauses, that MAY NOT be used. If you did use that, you’d have to do without the commas or intonation dip, and you’d convert the clauses to restrictive use:
The turkey that was overcooked was nonetheless flavorful.
(implies there was another one that wasn’t overcooked)I deducted the cost of the duck that I gave to an orphanage.
(implies there was another, undonated, duck)
I can see the distinction invoked here. My one reservation is the intonation dip seems to be what signals that the nonrestrictive meaning is intended, so it’s not clear that over time we won’t just increasingly find “that” following a dip. But there might be stronger resistance to this than to using “which” in restrictive clauses, having to do with broader semantic role of “that” (e.g., that it serves to pick out one thing from several; it “points to” the turkey that was overcooked versus the turkey that wasn’t).
Such are my admittedly naïve thoughts on the topic. What are yours?
Sean Carrol over at Cosmic Variance has a very nice piece today on how science and religion are not compatible. But my philosophical sense (like Spiderman’s spider-sense, only far less useful) went crazy at this sentence:
You can use words to mean whatever you want; it’s just that you will consistently be misunderstood by the ordinary-language speakers with whom you are conversing.
In fairness, I agree with the basic point. I’m really just quibbling with the word “use”. Or rather, with the claim that “you can use words to mean whatever you want,” when the second half of the sentence denies just that. Whatever you might intend by your words, if you fail to be understood by other speakers they’re not going to be of much use to you (or anyone).
Now back to your regularly scheduled internet usage.
Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that both McCain and Obama said “lipstick on a pig” before. I think it’s more than likely that Obama was at least primed to use that line by the pitbull-hockey mom joke last week. But in what respect is Obama’s use of this line sexist or an attempt to “play the gender card”? The context makes it clear that the primary meaning was an analogy for McCain dressing up his policies as ‘change’:
“That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”
Via Neil Gaiman: a blog devoted entirely to pictures of misused quotation marks. Just yesterday we find gems such as alleged candy and what are they scooping. Good stuff.
While I’m using friends from Bard as excuses to link to Neil Gaiman’s blog, here are a couple of bits for Adrianne. It seems that no matter how long you’ve been writing for a living, or how long the lines are at your book signings, some chapters:
There’s an odd point in writing, when you reach a bit that you’ve known was going to happen for years. Years and years. And then it doesn’t happen like you thought it would…
It’s as if there’s a ghost-story behind the text and nobody knows it’s there but me.
Still on Chapter Seven of The Graveyard Book, but I’m well into the last half of the chapter, and it no longer feels like I’m walking towards the horizon, with the horizon retreating as I advance… I’ve written about eleven easy pages today, and cannot wait to get back to it. If I’m still awake and writing I may pull an all-nighter.
It barely feels like I’m writing it. Mostly it feels like I’m the first one reading it.
are better than others:
The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.
I’m not sure what went on behind the scenes at One Language Log Plaza to provoke this devastating take-down, but Geoff Pullum completely fucks shit up:
Certainly, it is possible that the phrase dada kraut psych mindblowing conscience expanding sublime acid oriented arcana coelestia weirdness has roughly nine stacked attributive modifiers; but one cannot really tell, because it all depends on how it is parsed: doubtless “consciousness-expanding” (I add the helpful hyphen) is intended as a syntactic unit, but one doesn’t know about “kraut psych” and so on. This is basically the problem one finds with quotes from chimpanzee language: chimps are occasionally reported as having signed things with transcriptions like BANANA BANANA HELP REFRIGERATOR GIMME OPEN BANANA GIMME, and syntactically one does not really know where or whether to begin.Part of the problem here is that Eric is one of the younger staffers here at Language Log Plaza. They work with headsets on, they have X-men posters on their walls, they talk about whether Lara Croft’s breasts in the new Crystal Dynamics video game release are as big as before. The average age in their part of the building is approximately 19. They typically list their hobbies as (i)~being wicked cool, (ii)~dancing to their iPods in public places, (iii)~shopping at American Eagle, and (iv)~staying out all night. One does not see them at EVOO; they dine at place where the menu is a series of brightly colored pictures on glass with lights behind them, and often there is a neon sign in the window saying “BURRITOS AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD”. And their reading material does not fully meet the criteria for being called “language”.
Which raises the question: how much would you pay to see Belle Waring and Geoffrey K. Pullum in a heavyweight title bout?
Language Log, a group log housed on the UPenn computer science servers, and headed by a linguist and CS professor at UPenn, is great for things like a brief history and usage of insults ending with -ball. After the history, there’s
The Xy → Xball is not foolproof, though: silly doesn’t yield *sillball, presumably because sill is not a morpheme here. And in general polysyllabic insults don’t take -ball. [...] [I]t seems totally implausible to refer to someone as an idiotball — or a bastardball or an a**holeball either. In contrast, polysyllabic nouns for nasty substances seem plausible as a base. Thus mucousball ought to work, it seems to me, even though it’s not to be found in Google’s index. Corpus linguistics still has some limitations, I guess.
I don’t really have a lot to say about sketchballs, but I do think it’s interesting that Liberman verifies most of his arguments for the validity or invalidity of a word by “argument from Google results count.” It seems that the fact that this is a reasonable thing to do is pretty obvious to everyone who’s thought even a little about computational linguistics. For me personally, it’s one of those projects I always wanted to sit down and give a long, hard thought to, but I never did. More specifically, I wanted to use Google as part of a language generation tool, as a way to quantify the probabilty of a person using an automatically generated phrase.
Maybe one day.
On a related note, via AI-Complete, here’s a neat looking paper called automatic meaning discovery using Google.