Building 20 (1943-98) was in fact where the linguists hung out at MIT in my days — where the department office and faculty offices were located, where Halle and Chomsky had their (adjoining) offices, and where the grad students shared a big room — and it also housed the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, the Acoustics Lab (which gave rise to the Bose Corporation), the machine shop, ROTC, a piano repair facility, a cell-culture lab, the Ice Research Laboratory, the Tech Model Railroad Club, offices for many people in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and much more. Not bad for a temporary wooden building hastily thrown up during World War II to house MIT’s Radiation Laboratory.

When the building was (finally) demolished, my Stanford colleague Tom Wasow salvaged chunks of it to give to those of us who had worked in it. Mine is mounted in a box in my living room.

Lehrer reports on Linguistics in Building 20:

According to [Morris] Halle, he was assigned Building 20 [in the 50s, for the new linguistics program] because that was the least valuable real estate on campus, and nobody thought much of linguists. Nevertheless, he soon grew fond of the building, if only because he was able to tear down several room dividers. This allowed Halle to transform a field that was often hermetic, with grad students working alone in the library, into a group exercise, characterized by discussion, Socratic interrogation, and the vigorous exchange of clashing perspectives.

It was an unlovely, and at times uncomfortable, building, but it was a great place to be.

Here’s Building 20 as it is usually depicted, from its official main entrance on Vassar Street:

But I almost never came at it from this direction. Instead, I threaded my way through other buildings from the main entrance to MIT (on Mass. Ave.), which were connected to one another by passageways. Here’s an aerial view (Building 20 is the low building with four wings coming off a long wing.

MIT’s archives have an account of the building’s history, here. The Wikipedia short version:

Building 20 (18 Vassar Street) was a temporary wooden structure hastily erected during World War II [opened in 1943] on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since it was always regarded as “temporary”, it never received a formal name throughout its 55-year existence. The three-floor structure housed the Radiation Laboratory (or “Rad Lab”), where fundamental advances in physical electronics, electromagnetic properties of matter, microwave physics, and microwave communication principles were made. After the Rad Lab shut down after the end of World War II, Building 20 served as a “magical incubator” for many small MIT programs, research, and student activities for a half-century before it was demolished in 1998.

Then in its place came a Gehry-designed building, the Stata Center:

The Ray and Maria Stata Center … or Building 32 is a 720,000-square-foot (67,000 m2) academic complex designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The building opened for initial occupancy on March 16, 2004. It sits on the site of MIT’s former Building 20 … (link)

Quite a different matter from the building it replaced:

Note that the Stata Center is a high-rise in comparison to the low-slung (three-storey) Building 20. The horizontal layout of Building 20 encouraged chance meetings and interactions. Always a good thing.

Obama said of a push for less financial regulation and lower taxes. “And why we would want to adopt something that we just tried and did not work, doesn’t make sense.”

 

This has a relative clause (that we just tried and did not work) in which a clause with an direct object gap (we just tried ___) is coordinated with a clause with a subject gap (___ did not work) [DO + SU]. As I noted in a Language Log posting on “Amazing conjunctions” back in 2005,

coordination of a clause with an object gap … and a clause with a subject gap … is usually judged ungrammatical, though there’s some question about what condition bars it.

In fact, a 1981 paper of Gerald Gazdar’s (“Unbounded dependencies and coordinate structure”, Linguistic Inquiry 12.155-84) treats such examples as ungrammatical and attempts to give an analysis that predicts that. But examples aren’t hard to find, in writing as well as speech; I myself seem to be given to writing relative clauses with this non-parallel structure.

Some examples, beyond those in my 2005 posting, from my files:

[speech] … something that President Bush supports but has been rejected by the House.  [DO + SU] (Carl Kassell on NPR’s Morning Edition 3/28/06)

[writing]  but maybe this is a construction that writing teachers have noted and corrected in student writing for decades, but never got turned into an explicit rule in the advice literature. [DO + SU] (AMZ in a posting to ADS-L 4/4/2006)

[writing]  Something that both Foerster & Steadman and Kierzek get more or less right, but tends to be downplayed in later advice about the passive, is that how “important” the referent of Y is plays a role in choosing the voice for a clause. [DO + SU] (AMZ in a Language Log posting 7/22/06)

[writing] Coincidentally, I was just remarking to Chuck today that the use of the noun post to denote anything posted to a website is an example of a neologism that I’ve noticed but doesn’t bother me at all. [DO + SU] (Paul Kay in e-mail to me 3/28/07)

[writing] I seem to have mis-read Ron Butters’s posting on the subject, which I read as a j’accuse but was intended as a reductio. [DO + SU] (AMZ to ADS-L 2/7/08)

[writing] A handbook like this is going to be a useful resource… one that’s sensitive but eager readers will refer to again and again for tips, instruction and advice.[SU + PO] (comic strip Preteena 4/25/08, reported to me by Richard Sabey)

[speech; topicalization rather than relative clause] One of them I saw but got away. [DO + SU] (Doug Whitman 7/9/08, as reported by his father Neal on his blog)

[speech] … even the guys that didn’t like me and I didn’t like. [SU + DO] (Sgt. 1st class interviewed on NPR 11/8/09)

[writing] I was wearing something she’d never seen before and thought was really good-looking. [DO + SU] (AMZ in e-mail to friends 6/5/10)

Some speakers judge examples with non-parallel gaps to be unacceptable, others judge them to be of borderline acceptability, and still others find them acceptable, period. In the examples from me above, I produced the sentence first, then realized what its structure was, and on reflection decided that I was content with it as it stood.

toasted turkey ham cheese and sandwich

instead of what’s on the school district’s website:

toasted turkey ham and cheese sandwich

A word reversal, of adjacent words, of an unusual type.

As I noted in my “Reversal in the heat of the sexual moment” posting,

Word reversals preserve the prosody of the intended phrase, as in the porn example [You wanna fuck your shooting load!, corrected to You wanna shoot your fuckin' load!]. And, as in this example, the exchanged words are usually the same part of speech: verb for verb above, noun for noun in most cases, like Seymour sliced the knife with a salami for Seymour sliced the salami with a knife (Fromkin’s P2). (Words of unlike category are sometimes exchanged, but usually only when they’re adjacent: Does smoke Jack? for Does Jack smoke? (Fromkin’s P29).

In the lunch menu example, the exchanged words are certainly not of the same category, but they are adjacent. However, the prosody of the target phrase was not preserved; that would give unaccented cheese and accented and. Instead, the accent on the individual words was preserved: accented cheese and unaccented and.

Crucial fact: Collections of speech errors, like Fromkin’s, are taken from spontaneous speech, but the lunch menu error was from reading: Joe Burke was reading from a sheet provided by the San Francisco Unified School District. Errors in speech and errors in reading out loud are two different things, arising from different mechanisms; in particular, visual processing of the text is an important component in reading out loud. Ham cheese and sandwich would be a very unlikely speech error, but it’s entirely plausible as a reading error, resulting from visual displacement of the words.

(Hat tip to Alan Hayes, who’s an architecture student at CCA.)

[Elizabeth Closs Traugott and I have been plotting a freshman seminar at Stanford on Linguistics in the Comics. More on this in a future posting.]

Text from the CCA calendar:

Comics and queers! Two great tastes that taste great together!

The San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum is hosting a show curated by the students of CCA’s “ENGAGE: Queer Comics Project” course. The show, situated in the museum’s Small Press Spotlight area, will feature original and printed art from Bay Area artists, showcasing the remarkable world of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) comics from the last four decades. [show opened 12/17/11]

A film composed of interviews of major figures in queer cartooning conducted by the students over the course of two semesters will also be on display as well as copies of Quilt Bag, a zine of original material created by the students themselves. [QUILTBAG is an acronym for QUeer / Intersex / Lesbian / Transgender / Bisexual / Asexual / Gay]

The creators whose work will be presented are: Burton Clarke (Gay Comix), Jaime Cortez (Sexile), Ed Luce (Wuvable Oaf), Jon Macy (Teleny and Camille), Mari Naomi (Kiss and Tell), Trina Robbins (Wimmen’s Comix), Joey Alison Sayers (Just So You Know), Christine Smith (The Princess), Mary Wings (Come Out Comix), Rick Worley (A Waste of Time)

The course description:

Engage: Queer Comics Project

Queer comics have traditionally existed in a parallel universe to the rest of the comics world. These underground comics were almost exclusively serialized in gay newspapers, published by queer publishers, and sold in gay bookstores. This created an internal dialogue within the LGBT media ghetto that dealt with subject matter ranging from bawdy humor to racism within the gay community to the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic. These last forty years of LGBT comics may soon be lost to history, however, unless more attention can be brought to the work. The Queer Comics Project examines the evolution, subject matter, forms, conventions, and the future of the LGBT comics. Partnering with a major LGBT community organization, students will participate in the creation of a publication that will serve as a comprehensive survey of both the artistry and history of queer comics. As part of this larger archival project, students will have the opportunity to conduct interviews with queer comics writers and artists in an effort to create an oral history of this vitally important underground art scene.

(You won’t be surprised to hear that I have quite a collection of queer comics.)

Another product of the CCA enterprise:

No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, edited by Justin Hall, is slated for release in April 2012! (link)

with this draft poster:

For another posting: reflections on the nouns comic and cartoon, and on the usage of sg comic, pl comics., and yes, sg comics.

(Maybe I should create a new postings category Stereotypes of Linguists.)

The professor believes that all pedants are condescending, so that condescending pedant is a redundant, pleonastic, phrase. But quite likely the student intends condescending to be a appositive rather than intersective modifier (see the pilotless drone discussion here) — reinforcing the component of condescension in pedant, rather than narrowing the reference of the noun. From the pilotless drone posting:

You might think that even the appositive reading of “pilotless drones” would be stupid, since drones are all pilotless. But look at the explicitly appositive version: “drones, which are pilotless”. This isn’t stupid at all; it REMINDS us, in a helpful way, that drones are pilotless. In general, even when the denotation of Adj is included within the denotation of N, appositive Adj N can do useful discourse work. As a bonus, since intersective Adj N is stupid in this situation, the potential ambiguity is eliminated in practice, in favor of the appositive reading.

(Of course, labeling condescending pedant as a redundancy is itself condescending pedantry, so the professor’s last sentence has the flavor, if not the actual form, of self-referentiality.)

Mike Daisey. His one-man show about Apple is going back on stage this month in New York at the Public Theater. The full show has this entire other story line about Steve Jobs that you will have to buy a theater ticket if you want to hear.

See anything notable about that last sentence? Many people don’t, though there’s some tradition in the syntactic literature for treating it as problematic.

Focus on the relative clause in that sentence:

head: this entire other story line about Steve Jobs

relative: that [ you will have to buy a theater ticket
[ if you want to hear ___ ] ]

The relative has the relativizer that plus a clause (delimited by the outside brackets) with an adverbial subordinate clause, with subordinator if,  inside it (delimited by the inside brackets). And that adverbial subordinate clause has a direct object “gap” in it (indicated by the empty underlining) — a gap that’s “filled”, in semantic interpretation, by the head. In metaphorical language that’s been standard in generative grammar since Haj Ross’s 1967 Ph.D. dissertation, the filler is “extracted from” the position of the gap.

Ross explored a variety of configurations in which extraction from particular positions seemed to be barred (compact summary by John Lawler here). Extraction from an adverbial subordinate clause is one such case; it’s a violation of Ross’s Complex NP Constraint (CNPC). So the Daisey relative clause is a violation.

But there’s a huge literature on variability in how acceptable violations of the Ross constraints are, and on the possibility that the Ross constraints are primarily (or exclusively) “soft” conditions on ease of processing, rather than “hard” conditions on grammaticality. In fact, the Daisey relative clause is of a pretty frequent type of apparent violations that seem to present very little difficulty in processing: extraction of an object, in a adverbial clause with the subordinator if or whether, with a head that’s semantically indefinite. Examples are so common, and so generally unremarkable, that I haven’t bothered to collect more than a handful.

Here are a few more, with the head boldfaced and the position of the gap indicated by empty underlining:

He [Bill Clinton] ended up saying some things that who knows if he would have said ___ if he thought that he was on the record, so to speak. (Jacob Soboroff, interviewed about citizen journalism and the 2008 race, NPR’s Morning Edition Sunday 6/15/08)

Nice treatment, and one that I’d forgotten, if I ever read ___. (Larry Horn on ADS-L 11/18/10)

There are books up there that I can’t remember whether I’ve read ___ or not. (Joshua Foer, “Secrets of a Mind-Gamer”, NYT Magazine 2/20/11, p. 32)

In this configuration, a resumptive pronoun can fill the gap (“rescuing” the CNPC violation, but yielding a type of gapless relative that isn’t standard in English) –

this entire other story line about Steve Jobs that you will have to buy a theater ticket if you want to hear it

(and similarly for the other examples). But in this case the gapped relative strikes most people as about as acceptable as the gapless alternative; certainly, neither is particularly hard to process. I don’t know if an eagle-eyed editor would insist on rewording such sentences to avoid both alternatives (because they both “sound wrong”), say by breaking them in two:

The full show has this entire other story line about Steve Jobs; you will have to buy a theater ticket if you want to hear it.

(and similarly for the other examples).

Nitpicking grammar in the digital age

With more and more communication happening digitally, is it time to stop the grammar gripes?

Steve’s first appearance:

“It’s almost impossible to speak for 30 minutes and not make a speech error,” says Steve Kleinedler, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary. “As someone who has had his grammar picked apart based on radio interviews, it’s sort of scary.”

(Kleinedler once had the audacity to say, during an NPR interview about the American Heritage Usage Panel, “Every year, we send out the panel a ballot full of questions asking their opinions.” This earned the scorn of one Arnold Zwicky, blogger, who took issue with “send” being followed by “out.” Apparently this is a dative alternation. Or something.)

“No one can stand up to that scrutiny,” Kleinedler contends. We agree.

Wow. I’m the bad guy, the nasty nitpicking blogger.

What Steve was trying to convey (as he’s explained to me in e-mail) is that absolutely anything can be caught when you’re being recorded. He thought this was a cute story illustrating that point. (He’s blameless in all of this.)

But the reporter wasn’t trying to discover what was going on in grammatical discussions on-line. She had a predetermined point to make — that people are nitpicking mercilessly and unreasonably about grammar on-line — and was only looking for anecdotes to illustrate that point. She wasn’t in fact listening to Steve, and I very much doubt that she even looked at the piece he was referring to; all she wanted was story fodder.

[Being interviewed by reporters is a tricky business. When I think they're trying to figure things out, and when I feel that they're willing to be challenged about their preconceptions, I'm happy to talk. When I see their agenda and agree with the thrust of their ideas, I'm willing to feed them material. Otherwise, I'm uncooperative, because anything I say is likely to be twisted in ways unacceptable to me.

(I am at the moment anxiously awaiting the results of two interviews I've granted recently: one on the word faggot for Slate, one on pornstar names for Salon. Maybe the reporters were so flummoxed by what I said that they just gave up.)]

The Tribune reporter slants her story to advance her thesis; I have to be made into one of those nasty nitpicking bloggers. I am referred to as “one Arnold Zwicky”, that is, “someone named Arnold Zwicky”, said sneeringly. And I’m identified merely as “a blogger”, with no account taken of my expertise or the aims of my blog. (Compare “One Heidi Stevens, a writer, has characterized me in print as …”)

And then this Heidi Stevens person talks about my “scorn”, says I “took issue with ‘send’ being followed by ‘out’ “, and mocks the technical term “dative alternation”. Idiot.

This is what I said at the beginning of “NP dative on the edge” (on this very blog):

This ["Every year, we send out the panel a ballot full of questions asking their opinions'] is at the very edge of grammaticality for me (and many others), though there are some who find such examples acceptable, and they occur with modest frequency.

This is scorn? I could show you scorn, and it would be ugly. Could I have been more gentle? (Hard to imagine.) And was I putting Steve down for what he said? (Of course not.)

Now, I long ago gave up the idea that most reporters would check sources, so I don’t expect that this person would have. (Though I used to be a reporter, and I like to think that I did better than this. And I’ve been interviewed, and quoted, by reporters who certainly did better.)

Of course, I never “took issue with ‘send’ being followed by ‘out’ “, and Steve never said such a thing to the reporter. Check out my posting; send out to the panel a ballot full of questions asking their opinions isn’t problematic — and send out for pizza and similar examples are so ordinary that I didn’t bother to mention them.

The problem here is that it takes some technical apparatus to characterize the phenomenon at issue. Ordinary English just won’t do, which is why I went into the technical stuff in my “NP dative on the edge” posting, trying to lead readers into the thickets.

Maybe it was a mistake for Steve to mention some of the technical stuff to the reporter; it’s subtle stuff. All it seems to have done is evoke mockery at terminology. But then she was bent on dissing me, as an example of a Bad Blogger, anyway, so she would probably have twisted anything he said to her ends.

Don’t think I’ll be answering phone calls from the Chicago Tribune.

[A practical, real-world matter: I don't get paid for any of my work these days, so if I simply refused to deal with journalists completely, it would make no difference in my life; when I do deal with them, I see that as a matter of informing the public, for the sake of the ideas. (Ok, I do get a kick out of seeing my name in print. I'm not immune to vanity. And some of these people are a lot of fun to talk to.) But lots of my friends and colleagues have occupations in which the publicity from interviews, public appearances, and the like makes a real difference to their careers or to the institutions or organizations they represent. In particular, these things sell books -- in Steve Kleinedler's case, dictionaries. Not everyone can afford the luxury of not dealing with annoyances like that Tribune reporter.]

Over on ADS-L, Stephen Goranson has antedated the word gazebo from the OED’s 1752:

Unto the painful summit of this height
A gay Gazebo does our Steps invite.

From “An essay on the pleasures and advantages of female literature … and three Poetic Landscapes” by Wetenhall Wilkes (1741). (ADS-Lers are into antedating as a kind of sport.)

I was charmed by the alliterative gay gazebo (with, of course, an older, non-sexual, sense of gay, plus the great word gazebo). The poem continues, less excitingly:

From this, when favour’d with a Cloudless Day,
We fourteen Counties all around survey.
Th’ increasing prospect tires the wandring Eyes:
Hills peep o’er Hills, and mix with distant Skies.

About the show (from the Wikipedia page):

The Big Bang Theory is an American sitcom created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady… It premiered on CBS on September 24, 2007.

The show is centered on five characters: Roommates Leonard Hofstadter and Sheldon Cooper, two physicists who work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech); Penny, a blonde waitress and aspiring actress who lives across the hall; and Leonard and Sheldon’s equally geeky and socially awkward friends and co-workers aerospace engineer Howard Wolowitz and astrophysicist Rajesh Koothrappali. The geekiness and intellect of the four guys is contrasted for comic effect with Penny’s social skills and common sense.

You can watch episodes on the show’s website, here.

The male characters certainly aren’t performing High Masculinity. Instead, they’re behaving (and talking) like geekily enthusiastic (and socially unsure) adolescents. That’s their charm, but this presentation of self doesn’t win them any masculinity points. As far as I can tell from some watching, they don’t exhibit the phonetic characteristics most closely, though very imperfectly, associated with gayness in men, but nevertheless the “geek voice” is liable to be associated with the “gay voice” just because it’s not stereotypically masculine.

It seems that the gay voice hasn’t been discussed on Language Log or, except in one brief posting, “Lisping in the elevator”, on this blog. There’s now quite a considerable literature on the topic. Here are some relevant points from the handout for a 2003 talk I gave at Cornell, “Sounding gay”:

1. The basic observation: Lots of gay men seem to give off no signals in their speech; they don’t “sound gay”. But lots of men do sound gay, and people turn out to be pretty good at picking them out.

2. What are listeners hearing? [quite a few possibilities, not all of which have panned out in phonetic studies]

3. The Femininity Connection. What counts as “femininine”?

• Failure to achieve signs of very conventional, “marked”, masculinity (ball-throwing);
• Location on a continuum away from the conventionally masculine end (rough play vs. imaginative play, disregard vs. nurturing).

4.  Are obvious gay men yearning for femininity?  (Bailey)  Or deviating from conventional masculinity?  (Zwicky)  Or doing something else?  Some researchers think that what these men are doing is not so much sounding gay as sounding flamboyant; they’re presenting themselves as a certain kind of person — involved, intense, playful — rather than sending out generic gaydar signals. In line with this, some men vary the signals from occasion to occasion. (Podesva)

cf: Cameron (1995:49): “ ‘Feminine’ and ‘masculine’ are not what we ARE, nor traits we HAVE, but effects we produce by way of particular things we DO.”

5.  The double reverse: Belief Trumps Truth. Even if some behavior actually isn’t associated with women, if people believe it is, then it is. (Cf. race.) So things that people believe are associated with women can index gay men too, if you believe that gay men are “feminine”.

And things that people believe are associated with gay men can then cause geeky guys to be identified as gay.

There’s more on the handout, including the references, and there’s been a good bit of research since I gave this talk. But this is a start.

Meanwhile, I can hope that someone will do a research project in phonetics on sounding geeky — on real-life geeks (goodness knows there are plenty around me here in Silicon Valley) or on the BBT characters.

Variations on an Explosive Theme

‘Porgy and Bess’ supplies a prism through which African-Americans have viewed their own history

When George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” — arguably the most important piece of American music written in the 20th century — first opened on Broadway in 1935, the opera’s libretto was littered with a word now shunned as an antiblack slur. The African-American residents of Catfish Row, the only slightly imaginary block in Charleston, S.C., where the opera is set, used it liberally, and so of course did the white characters during their occasional menacing visits.

Nocera goes on to tell the story of the show’s creation, the tension between its character as an opera and as a musical, the casting of black singers in it (the version I have on my iTunes is from the 1952 revival, with Leontyne Price, William Warfield, Cab Calloway, and Maya Angelou), its reception over many productions since 1935, attitudes towards the book (which focuses on the street life of poor Southern blacks), and attitudes towards the use of nigger (or Nigger) — the word now shunned — in it.

All this without using the word. The Times avoids the word, except in titles (like The Nigger of the Narcissus) and in quotations from speech, and the paper dislikes coy avoidance strategies like the N-word and the N-bomb – and really detests asterisking (n****r). So writers have to fall back on even greater indirection, as Nocera has done here.

(On obscenity — and slurs — in collision with literary merit, with links to discussions of nigger, see here.)