Category Archive

The January 2010 LSA preliminary program is available online, and UC San Diego has another strong showing, with nine presentations overall.  This compares favorably with UC Davis (4), UCLA (5), and UC Santa Cruz (6) and we’re just behind MIT and Stanford (10 each), Maryland and Johns Hopkins (11), and UMass (12).  Once again UC Berkeley is at the top, though, with 16 presentations!  Congratulations UCB!

In fact, given the current UC crisis, it’s worth noting that UC schools taken together have (co-)authors on 42 presentations total, out of (from my estimate) 333 oral presentations + 85 posters = 418 presentations in all.  That means that the University of California has had a hand in over 10% of the scholarly output in the premier annual scholarly meeting for the scientific study of language. Nothing to shake a stick at.

If you use LaTeX for linguistics paper writing, and use the tipa package for IPA and the linguex package for formatting examples, you may occasionally encounter the problem of odd formatting of examples.  Just be sure to call \usepackage{tipa} before \usepackage{linguex}, not after!

Who says it doesn’t happen?

First Black Mayor in City Known for Klan Killings

I boggled…

(http://nytimes.com/, 12:51am 22 May 2009)

The CUNY 2009 conference schedule came out a few days ago, and UCSD is pretty well represented among the talks (this is a single-track conference).  Here are some quick numbers:

UCSD: 4

Rochester:4

MIT:2

Dundee:2

USC:2

Glasgow:2

Stanford: 2

MPI – Nijmegen: 2

UC Davis: 1

Wisconsin: 1

UMass: 1

UIUC: 1

Ohio State: 1

Penn: 1

NYU: 1

York: 1

Maryland: 1

San Diego State: 1

Tied for #1 with Rochester…not bad…:)

Stanley Fish, in his most recent column, “Memo to the Superdelegates: No Principles, Please“, said several highly controversial things, most notably that the Democratic primary process isn’t really democracy, or to the extent that it is, it’s the kind that the Founding Fathers feared, and the superdelegates should limit that democracy by voting politically rather than by following the will of the people. However, he also ignited a small firestorm with a wh-pronoun, in the following sentence:

Whom do I think would make the best president?

and a couple more like it. Here’s a sampling from the comments:

• It’s interesting–and a bit dismaying–to read a piece that espouses pure principles of law and history, then lapses into a genteelism that confounds pure principles of grammar. A superdelegate might ask properly ask himself “Who do I think would make the best president…” but not “whom,” as “who” is the subject of the verb in this question rather than the object of “think.”
• Didn’t you used to teach English at a university somewhere in the US? So how come, Stan, you write, “Whom do you think would make/will be . . . ?

[ironically, this second comment brings up yet another murky grammatical corner of English, one that I've been perplexed about since high school: what is the categorial status of "used to"? My current belief is that it is an adverb with no flexibility in positioning, the main piece of evidence being that it doesn't inflect, at least in writing. Assimilation/deletion makes it hard to figure out the situation in speech.]

• “Whom do I think would make the best president?” or “Whom do I think will be the best general election candidate?” are, as you say, appropriate political questions. They are, however, ungrammatical ones. Get after your copy editor. The correct pronoun in each case (no pun intended) is “Who.”
• [N]ot content shamelessly to shill for Sen. Clinton, Prof. Fish wholly abjures his celebrated expertise in English by writing, “Whom do I think would make the best President?”
• Yes, Fish used the wrong (Who|Whom) form, because he’s pretentious, but in reality it doesn’t make any semantic difference. “Whom” is used as a signal to say “I’m being a classy writer, look at me!” and not for any expressive power that it lends to the grammar of English.

Curiously, these critiques are the opposite of the usual prescriptivist attack in which a self-styled educated language maven scolds the uneducated public for using who when whom is normatively appropriate. Is this an instance of populist prescriptivism? The last poster puts her finger on a truly important point: that the word whom truly can be a target of hypercorrection in English — that is, overusing a form that is socially associated with prestige.

However, I’m not completely convinced that hypercorrection is necessarily the source of Fish’s “error”. If we look at the unextracted (non-question) version of the sentence structure, we see that the only way of testing for the case of the position from which the wh-pronoun is extracted is using a regular pronoun:

I think (that) (he/she/I/we/they/*him/*her/*me/*us/*them) will be busy tomorrow.

On the other hand, it seems to me that it’s possible to imagine more “immediately deictic” contexts in which the accusative pronoun doesn’t seem totally out of place:

A: Who do you think we should send to the conference to present our new work, you or C?

B: I think “me” would make the best choice to send to the conference because I know that audience better.

I’m not saying that this exchange reads beautifully, but I feel as if I could imagine hearing an exchange like this. The situation reminds me a bit of a presentation I have heard Larry Horn give on reflexives, though I can’t remember where the presentation was.  If I’m at all correct, then Fish may have had in mind a meaning that would correspond to something like the following unextracted form:

I think (Clinton/Obama) would make the best choice for president.

And, by analogy, having this context in mind could have led to the offending whom.

Of course, it could just be that Fish is pretentious…

I wondered whether this was possible. Well, it is:

Unfortunately, he didn’t realize how firm the ground was he had his feet on.

– To catch a thief, about 25 minutes into the movie (spoken by Mrs. Stevens)

Who says that X -> X Conj X????

Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party.

(From the New York Times, 13 January 2008, online here)

Looking at the preliminary program for the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America shows terrific representation by UC San Diego: nine presentations (out of a total 300) are by UCSD-affiliated researchers.  Among other things, this number is ahead of UC Santa Cruz (with four), MIT (five), UMass (also five), and UCLA (seven), tied with Cornell, and only one behind Stanford and Chicago.  UC Berkeley takes the cake, however, with 18.

I encountered Will Lewis’s Online Database of Interlinear Text (ODIN) for the first time today. What a terrific idea: electronic resources are scarce for the vast majority of the world’s languages, but annotated corpora for these languages are sitting under our noses in the form of glossed examples from linguistics papers. ODIN scours the web to collect these and turn them into a searchable database. There is more to be done — both in data cleaning and in improving the search capabilities — before this resource will be usable for serious work, but it’s already a nice way of getting to online papers that cover a particular set of languages and/or linguistic phenomena. Now what would be great is a manual submission facility and encourage all linguists to submit their papers…

May 18, 2007, The New York Times, “Violence Continues in Gaza”:

Two rockets fired from Gaza had landed near Sderot, and the government bused many residents to hotels in what it refused to call an evacuation.

Interesting how this headless relative clause doesn’t technically contain the information required to identify the referent, but through pragmatic inference you can.