May 24, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
Language use in early human societies, tens of thousands of years ago, was very different from what we have today. Essentially all linguistic communication was face-to-face, symmetrical, and personal, conducted within a hunter-gatherer band or tribe or clan of at most a few hundred mutually acquainted people. Humans typically talked only to other members of their group. They used unamplified voice, eye contact, and perhaps hand signs. No writing, no mass communication.
Have things ever changed. For a year or two I have been receiving continuous, unsolicited, unwanted, asymmetrical linguistic communications from a stranger on another continent whom I have never met. A robot in the service of someone named Scott Reed has been hounding me with e-mails telling me that Scott has invited me to join his professional network on LinkedIn and wants me to accept the invitation and sign up.
I …
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May 15, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
People are surprisingly free with barefaced lies when the topic is language. A commenter in The Washington Post, purportedly commenting on an article about hopefully (though flagrantly off-thread) asserted:
If usage determines correctness, then the split infinitive is now correct. I have not seen a “whole” infinitive in years, particularly from “journalists.”
Not a single unsplit infinitive, in years? I browsed a few other articles from that day’s Post, and found that journalists in news stories didn’t seem to split infinitives at all. In hundreds of infinitival clauses I read not a single one with an adverb after the to.
Google searches for plausible word sequences revealed that split infinitives do occur on the washingtonpost.com site (as one would expect: Placing adverbs between to and the verb has always been grammatical, and remains so, as all serious usage manuals agree—the …
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May 11, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
U.S.S.R. postage stamp of extraterrestrial satellite; grammar understanding and textbooks are similarly last century.
The vast number of books, pamphlets, articles, columns, blogs, and other study aids on English grammar are virtually all afflicted with a single problem. Using loose, mushy, meaning-related notions, they make statements that are (i) stated in essentially identical terms everywhere (it resembles mass plagiarism), and (ii) almost universally accepted, especially by educated people, yet (iii) patently false, as even a minute of reflection reveals.
The minority belief that intelligent aliens visit our planet is nowhere near as strange. (i) No real consensus emerges from the reports about aliens given by those few who claim to have encountered them; (ii) the minority of Americans who…
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May 2, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
I was enormously heartened to read on Language Log recently a post by the eminent computational linguist Mark Liberman entitled “The quality of quantity” that reported on a result relating to quality judgments in wine reviews revealing a genuinely surprising correlation between quality as judged by ratings that readers of Wine Enthusiast magazine supply and a single property that accounts for some 25 percent of the variation in rating and just happens to be the very one that I have so often found myself unable to avoid in my own writing, namely that of sheer bulk, size, length, verbosity—call it what you will, excess wordiness is the failing that every first draft I write for Lingua Franca always has, the thing that I have to sit for hours each week striving to rectify by dint of rigorous tightening, rewording, erasure, paraphrase, ellipsis, anything that might help to avoid digression…
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April 23, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
In the annals of prescriptivist poppycock, a century is not very long, and a development spanning only 50 years from beginning to end counts as speedy. Let me describe one such incident, which concerns a small and very natural syntactic change in the use of a single adverb.
Many adverbs are used as manner adjuncts: He saw her clearly uses clearly as a modifier specifying the manner of the seeing. Some are used as what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls modal adjuncts, necessarily and possibly being the most basic and familiar ones. Clearly happens to have both a manner use and a modal use: Clearly he saw her is an example of the latter (modal adjuncts are often placed at the beginning of the clause; notice that this sentence doesn’t comment on the clarity of the glimpse, it says that given the evidence it’s indubitable that he saw her).
Nobody worries about these…
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April 18, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
Ben Yagoda, who knows me only from my writing, imagines me as “a sort of linguistic Yosemite Sam, constantly being provoked into a near-apoplectic rage“—the target of my fiery temper being stupid grammatical claims rather than pesky rabbits.
Well, I’m proud to be a cartoon character in the vivid dreamworld of a linguistically savvy colleague like Ben, but it ain’t true about the rage, pardner. I’m a calm, contented, and happy man. I hope people haven’t been reading the simulated towering fury at gol’darned prescriptivist varmints that I just occasionally affect for the purposes of writing entertaining posts, and mistaking it for the real me.
No, it doesn’t actually make me angry to see the prescriptive poppycock and grammatical misinformation that is spouted in journalistic and blogospheric sources every day. But a modicum of fear sometimes chills me a little. Fear at working in …
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April 10, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
Updated at 3:50 p.m. to include a link to a Daily News article analyzing the grammar of George Zimmerman.
Trenton Oldfield wrecked the Oxford-Cambridge boat race last week, plunging into the Thames and swimming right under the oars of the boats. The crews stopped dead rather than risk battering him to death with multiple oar blades. But this was not mere incompetent route planning on Oldfield’s part. It was a protest. Oldfield runs a Web site called Elitism Leads to Tyranny. He holds that the mere existence of universities like Oxford or Cambridge is an affront to democracy and a danger to the very possibility of a decent society. He deliberately sabotaged this once-a-year celebration of higher-education rivalry.
Well, once you enter politics you have to face the usual attacks from the unsleeping, snarling beast that is the worldwide amateur media. The moment you publicize some…
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April 6, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
On Tuesday, March 6, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia sponsored a lecture by an interdisciplinary artist and educator, Amy Franceschini. Her title was “Art Is a Verb.”
Now, I am of course going to do my pedantic duty qua grammarian: You wouldn’t respect me if I didn’t go ape, or at least bristle a bit. But first let me briefly note that I am not too stupid to understand what she meant: Art doesn’t just sit there like a thing, it’s a practice, something you have to do. I know all that.
But my duty calls. There is a crucial point I really must hammer home, pounding the lectern with my fist occasionally: These semantic notions like “something you do” as the basis for defining verb, or “person, place or thing” as the basis for defining noun, are utterly hopeless, notwithstanding their centuries of use. Combustion, for example, is definitely…
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March 28, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
In a Chronicle article last week Tom Bartlett spoke of “a deeply factionalized group of scholars who can’t agree on what they’re arguing about and who tend to dismiss their opponents as morons or frauds or both.” Words like “brutal,” “spiteful,” “ridiculous,” and “childish” kept coming up. Not quite the image we linguists were looking for!
He was investigating an unusual case, nastier than any I have previously seen in linguistics: a peculiarly fractious and bitter fight originally about properties of Pirahã, spoken by an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe. The acrimonious dispute has dissolved away, leaving only the acrimony behind. Let me try to summarize the facts of the strange situation.
1. Daniel Everett wrote a dissertation on Pirahã more than 25 years ago, and developed it into a 200-page descriptive chapter for the Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Volume 1, edited by…
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March 19, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
The Aspen Handbook for Legal Writers by Deborah E. Bouchoux supplies the following “Tip for correcting dangling modifiers”:
“Most sentences that include dangling modifiers are written in the passive voice. Changing to active voice corrects the dangling modifier because an actor or subject is identified in the phrase that begins the sentence.
“Example:
“When a boy, my father changed careers (passive voice).
When I was a boy, my father changed careers (active voice, actor identified in modifying phrase).”
This misidentification staggered me, even after several years of collecting published cases of people alleging passive voice in other people’s writing without knowing what passives are.
When a boy is a verbless clause consisting of a temporal word and a predicative noun phrase. It is analogous to the underlined parts of While a Senator, he was involved in a scandal, or Twice …
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