Language Overflow

12:39 AM

@DamkerngT. This is pretty obviously a transcript of improvised speech, and the speaker's picking up on his earlier list of questions.

Anonymous

2:30 AM

It still shows up fairly enough in academic papers, in my experience. On the Predicate Focus Construction in Korean and Japanese, On the Relation Between the Intonation Types and the Functions of Discourse Particles in Japanese, On the Predicateless Copula Construction in Japanese, On the variability of negative scope in Japanese, On the So-Called Japanese Complementizer, On the Nature of Past Events in Japanese -te i-ru Constructions, On the Type-wise Productivity of Lexical V-V Compounds in Japanese, On the Event Structure of Indirect Passive in Japanese, . . . — snailboat 18 hours ago

Anonymous

"Fairly enough"? Really, snailboat of 18 hours ago?

Anonymous

I must have mistakenly blended fairly often with often enough.

Anonymous

Poor often got left out! :-)

Anonymous

Too late to fix it now, of course.

Anonymous

Errors are interesting, though. And I sure make a lot of them! :-)

Damkerng T.

6:00 AM

0

Q: 'Not right away,' says I. - Why the third person singular?

I hope this confuses, and scares the hell out of, well, everybody. Here's a quote from an O.Henry story: Every few minutes he would remember that he was a pesky redskin, and pick up his stick rifle and tiptoe to the mouth of the cave to rubber for the scouts of the hated paleface. Now and...

grammar

"Interesting!" says I!

@snailboat I concur. I'm not sure if it's still used very often, though.

@StoneyB nods -- I guess so. I wondered why it wasn't rarer to find what is it that in plain sentences (i.e., not obvious questions).

The Bash is coming, eh?

(Why does the animation of Winterbash make me think of 'Attack on Titan'!?)

modulusshift

6:20 AM

"Yeah, I don't really know what's up with that," says I, "and it makes me wonder if this sort of thing is why most stories use the past tense these days."

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Well, I can give you an exact count of the not-so-random sample of ling papers on my hard drive.

Damkerng T.

Hah!

Anonymous

17 out of 476

Damkerng T.

I guess some of those on X's may start after a colon.

Anonymous

No, I was only counting papers that begin with that string.

Damkerng T.

6:22 AM

(I feel weird every time I add 's to a chunk of text!)

@snailboat Maybe you could find more!

Anonymous

Oh, I'm wrong, one of them had a colon!

Anonymous

Hiraiwa - Facets of Case: On the Nature of the Double-o Constraint (2002)

Damkerng T.

Ah!

Anonymous

Aoyagi - On the Predicate Focus Construction in Korean and Japanese (2006)
Fukushima - On the Type-wise Productivity of Lexical V-V Compounds in Japanese (2008)
Inada - On the "amount" relativization and its relatives (2009)
Ishihara - On the Predicateless Copula Construction in Japanese (2011)
Iwasaki - On the Nature of Past Events in Japanese -te i-ru Constructions
Kishimoto - On the variability of negative scope in Japanese (2008)
Matsui - On the Licensing of Understating NPIs ... a(n)mari and sonnani (2011)

Anonymous

The other 16 did not

Damkerng T.

6:23 AM

nods

Anonymous

Note that a pretty good portion of these papers have Japanese titles, so the actual sample to consider is probably smaller than 476 :-)

Damkerng T.

Hehe! Probably; but I remember that I've read quite a handful of papers on this or on that. It was almost like the norm!

Anonymous

It doesn't seem that rare to me personally.

modulusshift

6:56 AM

2

A: Will the word 'proportion' take 'has' or 'have' for singular?

Proportion is singular, so have is correct. Edit: Wait, shoot, that's not right at all. It is definitely have... I think what happens is that a proportion of a plural is still a plural. There's a certain amount of people in a proportion of people. Sorry for jumping the gun. Edit 2: To test,...

This was both dumb and very fun.

Anonymous

We just had a discussion about this the other day.

modulusshift

What did you come up with?

Anonymous

Maybe starting somewhere around here in the logs: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/25770848#25770848

Anonymous

Well, clearly the answer is that the noun phrase as a whole takes plural agreement, despite the apparent head being singular in form.

Anonymous

Analyses differ as to how to explain that.

modulusshift

7:00 AM

"number-transparent" is great.

I just sorta gave up when I realized that the head still determined agreement with the article, though.

Anonymous

These are sort of a special case.

Anonymous

Consider:

Anonymous

> The number of people who like Batman has risen over the years.

Anonymous

> A number of people who like Batman are at your door.

Anonymous

In the former, you're talking about the number. In the latter, you're talking about people.

Anonymous

7:03 AM

A number of is working grammatically there. You're not talking literally about a number. It's just acting like a quantifier for people.

modulusshift

Yeah, I realized that with amount. It can work both ways, depending on which definition you're using.

Anonymous

Yeah, amount is another one of those number-transparent quantificational nouns.

Anonymous

Or whatever you want to call those thingies.

modulusshift

And I can't help but think: this is the kind of thing that my brain can do without any processing, but I can't ride a bike or ask questions about people's days.

Anonymous

You can't make an exhaustive list of nouns that work that way, but CGEL lists lot, plenty, lots, bags, heaps, loads, oodles, stacks, remainder, rest, number, and couple as examples (p.350).

Anonymous

7:05 AM

Number and couple require that the complement of of be plural.

Anonymous

(Of course, only in this particular use of number and couple.)

modulusshift

Wait, whoa, this even works if the complement isn't stated explicitly in that sentence.

Anonymous

Yep :-)

modulusshift

Being a native speaker is so freaking weird.

Anonymous

One argument that the quantificational noun is actually the head of the phrase is that the of-phrase can be omitted. But it still inherits the number of whatever noun is omitted.

modulusshift

7:07 AM

Ah, okay, that's what you were referring to.

Anonymous

@modulusshift That's one reason ELL is fun! :-)

modulusshift

Oh yeah, that's why I'm here.

Agh, this also leads to weird corner cases with certain noncount nouns. After an election has taken place, announcing the results: "The electorate has spoken" or "The electorate have spoken" are both correct.

With the caveat that the first implies collective action and the second mass individual action.

Anonymous

There are lots of weird corner cases with subject-verb agreement. It's not simple at all.

Anonymous

What variety of English do you speak?

modulusshift

Um. Midwestern American, with a bunch of Southern American influence.

US.

Anonymous

7:15 AM

Both American English and British English (AmE and BrE) sometimes use "notional agreement", where the verb agrees with the semantic number of the subject rather than its grammatical number. The textbook example is the collective noun committee: The committee has/have not yet come to a decision.

Anonymous

It's significantly more widespread in BrE, though.

modulusshift

I would say has there.

Anonymous

Yeah, me too. I'm also an American English speaker.

modulusshift

But that's mostly because of how I think of committees.

Anonymous

Well, British English speakers tend to use both, depending on how they're thinking of the committee.

modulusshift

7:16 AM

They must have a strange and amicable bureaucracy if they think committees act in individual concert.

Anonymous

> The club have found 30 sponsors in their fund-raising appeal and they plan a grand official opening on Monday, May 4th when Lindford will welcome all the people and organisations who have supported them.

Anonymous

> But the club have made their final offer and will not be improving it.

Anonymous

> To celebrate the club has invited the team which played Barrow in 1962.

Anonymous

These are all from the British National Corpus.

Anonymous

Which you can search yourself, if you'd like: corpus.byu.edu/bnc

Anonymous

7:18 AM

Compare COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English: corpus.byu.edu/coca

Anonymous

The club is grammatically a singular noun phrase. That is, it's singular in form: the club, not the clubs.

modulusshift

Niice.

Anonymous

But BrE speakers in examples like the above disregard that and treat it as plural depending on how they're thinking of it.

modulusshift

I had been using Ngram Viewer for this sort of thing.

Except not for article agreement. :)

Anonymous

Google Books Ngram Viewer is a useful tool but it's very tricky to use. Since you don't have direct access to the data, and since the data has a lot of errors, and since the query tool has a number of bugs, if you aren't careful you can come to the wrong conclusion now and then ;-(

Anonymous

7:21 AM

The nice thing about corpora like BNC and COCA, accessible through the BYU interface I linked to above, is that you can look through all the results in context.

Anonymous

You can find out if your search is matching the things you intended or not.

modulusshift

Definitely. Thanks.

Anonymous

Mind you, those tools aren't perfect either, but I often find them very useful :-)

Anonymous

Google Books is a much bigger corpus, though.

modulusshift

Ngram is still fun for watching trends over decades, too.

Language changes so quickly.

Anonymous

7:22 AM

Compare also the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): corpus.byu.edu/coha

Anonymous

It's true. Be careful of comparing data in Google Books Ngram Viewer from before and after 2000.

Anonymous

There are often large changes in n-gram counts due to changes in corpus composition.

Anonymous

So although it's tempting to change that 2000 end point to 2008 in the Ngram Viewer, it's not always a good idea.

modulusshift

Huh, okay. COHA is also very cool. :)

Anonymous

It is, but it's tiny by comparison!

Anonymous

7:24 AM

It doesn't replace Google's tool :-)

Anonymous

Just more resources to use.

modulusshift

At my university, there was a group transcribing and studying the phonetics of the Supreme Court justices to see how their language changed over time, since it's one of the few places we have a large and consistent corpus of the same people speaking for decades.

They had audio recordings of the last few decades.

Anonymous

Oh, I'm familiar with that!

modulusshift

Oh really? I thought it was a very interesting project.

Anonymous

This paper, for example, uses the SCOUS corpus: Investigating /l/ Variation in English through Forced Alignment

Anonymous

7:28 AM

Hey, why did they say SCOUS corpus instead of SCOTUS?

Anonymous

Isn't it usually SCOTUS?

modulusshift

In the media, for sure. I have no clue what the "official" acronym is.

Anonymous

Me either. :-)

Anonymous

I discovered on ELL that a lot of people don't like "me either".

Anonymous

I've learned lots of things on this site I had no idea about.

modulusshift

7:30 AM

I would prefer neither there, myself.

Anonymous

Yeah, apparently it's dialectal.

modulusshift

To agree with no.

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