Linguistics

Although there’s plenty of news coverage of inquiries into the “intelligence” that justified the Iraq war, coverage of events in Iraq itself seems to have declined sharply since the formal handover of sovereignty and the shutdown of the Coalition Provisional Administration. There seems to be a general media consensus that things have gone quiet, with the result that, when the usual news of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations is reported, it’s always prefaced with something like Suicide Blast Shatters a Calm (NYT 15 July) or after a week of relative calm (Seattle Times 7 July).

Regardless of the calmness or otherwise of the situation, the installation of Allawi as PM has certainly produced a new dynamic. Allawi has moved quickly to establish himself as a strongman, resolving by default the questions left unanswered in the “handover”. His announcements of emergency powers and the establishment of a security service/secret police have been criticised, but they amount to little more than the assumption of powers previously exercised by the CPA with no legal basis of any kind. The big question before the handover was whether any new military operations would be under the control of the interim government or of the American military. Allawi has moved pretty quickly to ensure that he will give the orders here, putting the onus on the American military to come to his aid if his forces run into serious resistance.

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Given the number of irregular verbs in the English language, it’s nice to know that one commonly used phrase is at least well-behaved:

• I accept responsibility.
• You accept responsibility
• He accepts responsibility

Some might argue that the modern meaning of the phrase “accept responsibility” is irksome in that it has only illocutionary significance; without the announcement that X has “accepted responsibility”, one would have the very devil of a job working out that it had happened. Might I suggest that what we ought to do is to coin a generalised version of Douglas Adams’ useful neologism “dogdyke” from his excellent book, “The Meaning of Liff”:

DOGDYKE (vb.)
Of dog-owners, to adopt the absurd pretence that the animal shitting in the gutter is nothing to do with them.

Onward to hell we all go …

Tyler Cowen[1] lists a number of economic propositions which he formerly believed, but has abandoned in the light of contrary evidence. Most of these propositions were elements of the economic orthodoxy of the 1980s and 1990s, variously referred to as Thatcherism, neoliberalism, the Washington consensus and, in Australia, economic rationalism. They include the efficacy of monetary targeting, the beneficence of free capital movements and the desirability of rapid privatisation in transition economies.

Following in the same spirit, I thought I’d list a couple of propositions on which I’ve changed my mind in the face of empirical evidence. These are elements of the Keynesian orthodoxy of the 1950s and 1960s, on which I was trained. Following Cowen, I’ll list them as false claims I used to believe

* There is a long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation

* Keynesian fiscal policy is a powerful and reliable instrument for stabilising aggregate demand

On both these issues, I’ve come to accept that Milton Friedman was largely right, and his Keynesian opponents largely wrong.

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Coming in a bit late, I have the opportunity to survey a range of blogospheric discussion of the topic of minimum wages, which largely supports the view (not surprising to anyone but an economist) that minimum wages are good for low-income workers. The traditional view among economists was that minimum wages reduced employment and thereby harmed workers, but this view has been overturned, or heavily qualified, by empirical evidence, beginning with the work of Card and Krueger.

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Talking of transatlantic language differences, I was quite surprised to see this headline in the Washington Post. And I thought Australians took sport too seriously.

I’ve been going to evening classes to try to get my German up to speed for a few weeks now and I feel I’m making a bit of progress. If I watch the “Deutsche Welle”:http://www.deutsche-welle.de/german news I can more or less work out that Schroeder is unbelievably pissed-off with Blair over the Euro referendum but can’t say so for diplomatic reasons. I’ve also been renting German movies such as “Lola Rennt”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130827/ (terrific but not so useful for language) and “Was tun, wenn’s brennt?”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0207198/ (Funny, though comedies about terrorists making bombs out of fertilizer have a decidedly retro feel these days.) Anyway, after reading “Learning French through Blaxploitation”:http://www.triptronix.net/ishbadiddle/archives/2004/04/22/13.52.15/ over at Ishbaddle, I may have the learning-by-casual-osmosis strategy the wrong way round. Watch DVDs in English and turn the German subtitles on? Anyway, I’m interested in hearing about language-learning strategies that are fun at the same time (and if anyone can throw in German movie recommedations too, that would be a plus).

Here’s a semantic construction I hadn’t heard before. (This was on SportsCenter, or some sports show, on the weekend.)

bq. (1) Nevada upset Gonzaga by 19 points on Saturday.

That isn’t, or at least wasn’t, a sentence in my dialect.

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Context can be so crucial in figuring out what a sentence means, even in subconscious processing. When I first scanned this I thought Ed Gillespie shouldn’t be so candid in front of reporters.

bq. In prepared remarks, Gillespie attacked Kerry and other Democrats, saying they are readying “the dirtiest campaign in modern presidential politics.” (From CNN)

I bet our Republican readers did not read it that way!

I hadn’t noticed this before, but Mark Kleiman has on his website a fun collection of aphorisms he co-collated with David Chu-wen Hsia. I normally stay away from aphorisms because they remind me of Wittgenstein and anything that reminds me of Wittgenstein makes me irritated, but there’s some good stuff here. What I really wanted to comment on though was the following.

bq. Masculine pronouns, and “man” for “human being,” occur throughout. English needs neuter personal pronouns, but currently lacks them. We can’t do much about that now without great loss of force. (Those who doubt this sad fact are urged to try their hands at gender-neutralizing “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.”) Our apologies to those offended.

That’s not the hardest challenge I’ve seen today. This isn’t a perfect translation into gender-neutral language, but it’s pretty close.

bq. No person has greater love than to lay down their life for their friends.

People who think ‘they’ is invariably a plural pronoun won’t like this, but they’re wrong for both etymological and ordinary language reasons.

This is a fairly rambling post on the syntax and semantics of ‘want to’ and ‘wanna’, so it’s almost all going below the fold. I would be interested to hear back if people agree or not with some of my judgments about the various cases.

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I’ve had to check myself several times when writing on CT recently. I’ve been tempted to use the word “quite” as a modifier of words like “good”. The trouble with this is that Americans (and perhaps all other English users outside the UK?) use the word as a modifier also but in a different sense from the way I would naturally do. If an English person is asked what they thought of a film or a play or a restaurant and they reply that it was “quite good”, they are likely to mean that it was good only to a moderate degree. Americans will intend and understand by the same phrase that something was absolutely, wholly or certainly good. If you tell me that my work is “quite good”, I’m likely to understand that as damning with faint praise. But If you are an American you probably meant to compliment me. Just to confuse matters, a British person who says they are “quite sure” does indeed mean that they are absolutely sure. I hope we’ve quite cleared up that misunderstanding.

Greg Beato identifies yet another irregular verb:

* We engage in refreshing, hilariously politically incorrect humor
* You (pl.) push the boundaries of good taste
* They wallow in profanity and ethnic slurs

David Langford’s indispensable “Ansible”:http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/a197.html tells us about wirtiglugs, hwinis, and (my favourite) breekbridders.

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Via Kai von Fintel, I see there’s a new blog Language Log being run by four very talented linguists. I was very pleased to see that Geoff Pullum, author of my favourite academic book, agrees with me about the learned/said controversy that erupted here soon after CT opened.