Irregardless...

For some reason, people on Facebook (at least) are recently upset about irregardless existing in the Merriam-Webster dictionary of English, despite the fact that it has been around in various sources since at least 1912.  Most references to the word label it as "erroneous," or an example of substandard or dialectal English.

Some of these folks claim that irregardless is not a word, but this is clearly wrong.  Irregardless is a string of four syllables, with one prominent stress on -gard-.  This is a pretty good definition of a word in English (but not necessarily all languages!).

Furthermore, irregardless is a completely legal example of English Morphophonology, which has to do with the sound of words and smaller things (prefixes, for example) when they appear in context.

English has a Negative Prefix, /in-/, which attaches to adjectives to negate their meaning: for example inedible, indecent, etc.  This prefix is pronounced in several different ways, depending on the beginning sound of the word it attaches to:

• If the word starts with a vowel, it's pronounced in-:  inactive, inedible, inoperable, etc.
• If the words starts with a consonant, in- assimilates to the articulation of the consonant: for example, if the consonant is Labial, /m/ is used: impossible;  if the consonant is Alveolar, /n/ is used: indelible; and so on.

Now here's where it gets interesting.  If the consonant is a Liquid (/l/ or /r/) the /n/ assimilates to those consonants:

• illegal  /in-/  →  /il-/
• irrational  /in-/  →  /ir-/

So what we can conclude is that not only is irregardless a perfectly good English word, but it also follows the rules of English word-formation.

Irregardless of what some people might think of it.

How's your "grammar?"

I took this "grammar quiz" yesterday, more curious about what sorts of questions they would ask than whatever my "score" might be. As it turned out, I got them all "right."

(1) Of the 12, only 3 were really about "grammar." And one of those asked for a form (whom) that is essentially obsolete, what one writer calls "nostalgia as repression." Another asked for the past tense of "lie" (as in "lie down"); which is "lay" but that's also somewhat archaic at this point. The one legitimate grammar question had to do with subject/verb agreement (is v. are).

(2) Perhaps one (lose v. loose) was about lexicon, although this spills over into...

(3) ... spelling, which is what the rest were about, and which is not "grammar."  One of the more egregious examples of this is the distinction in spelling between the two forms pronounced [ɪts], written its and it's.  The first is possessive, 'belonging to it'; the second is the contraction of it and is.  This is not a confusion that anyone would or could make in speaking, because they're homophones!  It's only in spelling that they get separate treatment, and this is not where the grammar is.  Another frequently cited "confusion" is that of there - they're - their.  No English speaker would actually "confuse" these while using English, because they're different things: an adverb, a subject-verb contraction, and a possessive determiner.  They might confuse the spellings, but not the grammatical functions.

It would be nice if the people who make up these things would actually learn what "grammar" is.  A linguistics course might help...

"Nostalgia as repression"

Weird Al Yankovic has a new song out called "Word Crimes."  It's quite catchy and fun to listen to. It includes many complaints and grievances regarding the use of language similar to those that pop up with depressing frequency on Facebook, compiled by self-styled "grammar" experts and forwarded by people whose knowledge of the science of language is limited to what they may have learned over the years from so-called "language arts" teachers.



As with the typical Facebook "grammar" post, these complaints constitute a very mixed bag.  Many, if not most, are not really (from a linguist's perspective) about "grammar" at all, but rather about ancillary issues: spelling, punctuation, and so on.  For example, the difference between it's (the contraction of it is) and its (the possessive determiner) is strictly a spelling issue.  There is no doubt that English speakers know the difference, that is they have separate lexical entries for these homophones in their mental dictionaries. And there's no doubt that when English speakers say it's a shame they know they are producing a contraction of it is a shame; when they say its handle broke they are referring to something's handle, maybe a cup: the cup's handle broke.

Other sets of homophones can be dealt with similarly: there their they're; too two; four for fore; and so on.

One of the "crimes" Weird Al mentions: the confusion of, who and whom.  This is a bit different. The distinction here reflects a time when English was a more highly inflected language, with word endings signaling the case of a noun or pronoun.  The English noun boat had forms that included bāt for singular subject and object; bātas for plural subject and object; bātes and bāta for singular and plural possessives respectively; and bāte and bātum for singular and plural use with prepositions.

Like 'boat,' once upon a time the English interrogative/relative pronoun who (earlier hwā) had different forms for different cases.  Three of these have survived: who (the subject form); whom (the object form), and whose (the possessive form).

And, as with the forms of boat, a leveling process has been going on over the centuries. We now have only three forms for boat: boat, boats, and boat's.  The last two are now homophones, so phonologically there's just /bot/ and /bots/.  Somehow, though, English speakers know when they mean 'more than one boat' versus 'belonging to a boat'.

As for the forms of who, there's been a leveling process going on here as well. Who saw you? still works, of course, but Whom did you see? is now almost always Who did you see?  This is one of those things that makes the grammar nazis cry, but it's perfectly normal. Languages change. And English has changed quite a bit, as anyone who tries to read this sentence will realize:

Fæder ure ϸu ϸe ært on heofonum, si ϸin nama gehalgod.

Insisting that people keep using whom even though, in normal English, it has nearly disappeared, is not unlike trying to make people go back to using fæder for father.  Kind of silly.

In a book titled On Literacy, Pattison (page 162)* noted that trying to force people to use forms of language that have fallen or are falling out of usage constitutes "nostalgia as repression."  This is an apt term for this form of what amounts to abuse on the part of people who profess to be language experts, but who in fact are sadly undereducated in that area.



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*Pattison, Robert. 1984. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. Oxford University Press.

Stephen Fry on language prescriptivism

Actor Stephen Fry (the Master of Laketown in the new Hobbit movie) does a nice job of dealing with the grammar nazis, who in fact are almost never really complaining about grammar, but that's another post.

I think I got it!

In my April 12 post (What does William Safire "do?") I wondered what Safire meant by "we are living in syntax." It suddenly dawned on me, perhaps because it's Sunday: he was playing off the phrase living in sin! Get it? Living in sin....tax. Yes, folks, the Ravin' Maven thinks that using "phrasal templates" such as don't do X is (kind of?) like living in sin. You know, like, it's wrong. And you'll go to Hell for doing it.

At least he does have a sense of humor, even if he doesn't know much about the science of language. For example, in his book Fumblerules, published way back in 1991 or thereabouts, he includes the rule:

Don't verb nouns.

OK. But the rule itself, as he gives it, wouldn't make sense if it weren't possible and easy to "verb nouns" in English (let's table that motion; take 'em downtown and book 'em; etc.).

This pattern represents what some linguists call a zero-derivation: A verb can be derived from a noun by adding a zero suffix. Or prefix- it's zero, so who cares? I do prefer suffix, though, since most derivational affixes that change the lexical category of the word they attach to appear to be suffixes: to walk (verb) > walker (noun); slow (adjective) > slowly (adverb); ugly (adjective) > ugliness (noun); and so on.

Of course, this doesn't work in all languages; for example, try simply declaring that the Spanish word libro (book) is a verb. Can't be done. This is because, while all languages share some rules with all other languages (universal grammar), all languages also have rules that are shared with only some, or perhaps even no, other languages.

What does William Safire "do?"

William Safire has just finished complaining about use of the phrase I don't do X, as in the time ex-alleged president Bush was asked by a reporter about the "nuance" of his answer and he replied that Texans "don't do nuance."

Safire is a language maven; these are people who have little or no formal training in linguistics but who nevertheless believe, perhaps by virtue of the fact that they can speak and write, that they are experts on the subject of language.* The schools are filled with "language arts" teachers who pretty much fit this category. For language mavens language change is generally anathema, which is ironic since many of their favorite English authors spoke and wrote in Englishes that were very different from those that they speak and write in- but that's another blog post.

Safire provisionally traces the history of don't do X to the stereotypical line delivered by women hired as domestic servants: I don't do windows. He is informed that don't do X has become a "phrasal template," and this is where things get a little weird:

But does the ready acceptance of this “phrasal template” mean we are living in syntax, undermining the rules of order and word relationships in sentence structure on which we base our grammar?

What, if anything, does this mean? Syntax is "the rules of order and word relationships in sentence structure on which we base our grammar." So, in Safire's view, we are undermining syntax by "living in" (whatever that means) syntax?

I don't get it; but then, I don't do crazy.


*Sort of like me claiming, on the basis of the fact that I eat, digest, and poop every day, that I'm an expert on gastrointestinal functions.

Prescriptivists gone wild!

Back in the fall 2008 semester, as I was leaving a classroom I had just taught in, I met a student from China who was coming in for the next period. She asked if I could help clear up an issue she had in the English language class she was taking.

And what was this issue? She had been confronted with the following problem:

• The food tastes _____ (good, well).

She chose "good," and was told that the "correct" answer was "well." Let's think about that for a moment.

What can "the food tastes well" possibly mean? Well is a modifier that usually occurs with verbs and describes the manner in which whatever the verb represents is carried out:

• Steve Martin plays the banjo very well.

Surely this means that Steve Martin carries out the act of playing the banjo in an admirable manner. So what could "the food tastes well" mean? It can only mean that the food carried out the act of tasting in an admirable manner. But this makes no sense; food can't carry out the act of tasting. Only some entity tasting the food can do that.

This particular problem grows out of the fact that, in spoken English, "adjective" and "adverb" are not well-defined lexical categories. Of course, in standard written English, good is an adjective, and well is usually, but not always (in "I am well" well is an adjective somewhat synonymous with healthy), an adverb. But this distinction exists mostly in the minds of language mavens, not in the minds of native English speakers. I told the student that no native speaker of English would say "the food tastes well," unless they were victims of the kind of linguistic terrorism practiced by language arts and college composition teachers with no knowledge of linguistics. "The food tastes good" is what you say if you want to comment on the quality of the food.

In other words: If somehow I lose my sense of taste, I might be able to say that I can no longer taste well. It will be up to the cannibals to decide whether I taste good or not.

"Double Negatives"

A clarification. In my last post (also only my second post) I mentioned that one thing that makes me cranky is students coming to linguistics insisting, and continuing to insist even after my brilliant teaching on the subject, that "a double negative means a positive." I meant this to apply in an English speaking context, not to other natural languages in which a double negative might indeed mean a positive.

In English, "double negatives," or, as linguists prefer to call it, negative agreement or negative concord, goes back all the way to Anglo-Saxon where we find sentences like the following, written out lazily in modern spelling:

• Ne bith thaer naenig aelo gebrowen mid Estum.
  not be there not-any beer brewed among (the) Estonians.

It was only in 1762 that English Bishop Robert Lowth proposed and publicized the "rule" that double negatives should be avoided on the grounds that they violate the laws of formal logic. Teachers soon began trying to enforce the "rule," but it was a losing battle, as we can see today in the speech of all but the most anal-retentive native English speakers.

Bishop Lowth was able to do this in part because English does offer its speakers choices:

• I don't see anything.
• I don't see nothing.
• I see nothing.

But many other languages, such as Spanish, do not (nor does French, which one would think Lowth would have been familiar with):

• Yo no veo nada.
  I not see nothing
  'I don't see anything'
  

Given the history of prescriptive grammarians like Lowth atempting to rid English of negative agreement, I think there is reason to suspect that negative concord is the "natural" or default setting for natural languages, but more of that in a future post.