Down with emphasis

I have decided I am seriously fed up with language reference works' indiscriminate use of the word "emphasis" (and related forms). The thing is that the term is essentially without meaning, except insofar as it seems to indicate that something is happening that the author lacks the sophistication, patience or intelligence to explore or describe adequately.

It tends to come up a whole lot in discussions of syntactic structures: in a Latin clause, for instance, any arrangement of S, O and V is theoretically possible; and according to all my textbooks, the choice of order is largely one of emphasis. Which means what, exactly? Are we talking about topicalization? Focus? Or some other kind of pragmatic consideration? Hell, as far as we know all kinds of factors might conceivably be involved in a fluent speaker's choices, including, for instance, how she feels personally about the constituent in question. How can a learner possibly know, or even guess, how to start using this "emphasis" correctly?

In the case of Polish, for example, although SVO is typically the least marked order, VS is statistically very likely to show up unmarkedly in intransitive clauses. This simple fact would be likely to remain completely mystifying and opaque to anyone other than a trained linguist examining a large amount of data, yet would be easy at least to mention in passing rather than allowing it to be subsumed within that abyss of "emphasis."

So...what "emphasis" means is, apparently, "when you are fluent someday, you will understand." And I know that, to some extent, there is a lot about language that works this way, as much as we try to quantify and explain everything; but I feel certain that we could be doing a better job than this.

Turkish provides some particularly egregious examples, such as the fact that any word can be repeated, ostensibly to "emphasize" it. On this Edip Akbayram CD, four of the twelve track names have a repeated word:

* İnce ince bir kar yağar (adjective: a fine/graceful snowflake falls)
* Yakar inceden inceden (adverb/prepositional phrase: it burns intensely)
* Dumanlı dumanlı oy bizim eller (derived adjective: our village is full-of-smoke)
* Sev beni beni (pronoun: love me)

This clearly extremely productive process extends to verbs as well. From Elementary Turkish by Lewis V. Thomas:

baktım "I looked (stared)"
baktım baktım "I looked hard (stared and stared)"

There is obviously a lot going on here -- the repetition seems to have different effects with different parts of speech, and in different contexts. In some cases verbal aspect may be involved ("stared and stared?" isn't that perseverative or iterative or something?); sometimes there may be semantic effects; in sev beni beni in seems like it may be a pragmatic issue, showing topicalization or contrast. Yet none of my books mention it with more than a sentence; nor do they dig deeper than to call it a matter of "emphasis." Yet I am convinced that, given its frequency, even an intermediate learner would need to understand how to interpret and produce this structure appropriately -- and that it is much more important than, say, the (rarely used) past subjunctive, which gets a full treatment spanning pages in one of these textbooks.

Perhaps the worst ever use of this concept I have encountered in the world of linguistics is not in syntax or morphology, but in phonology, in reference to the so-called "emphatic" consonants of the Semitic language family. When I first dabbled with Arabic, I struggled mightily to understand what to do with these "emphatic" coronals. Should I say them more clearly? With more air pressure? At longer duration? This is usually what is meant by "emphasis" in this language of ours when it refers to sounds. But no, no. Arabic "emphatics" are not louder, harsher, stronger, etc.; they are simply pharyngealized. To my ear they actually sound less emphatic than their "normal" counterparts. Here more than ever "emphatic" means nothing more than "somehow different, with the footnote that I cannot articulate to you what I am talking about."

The real shame in all this is not just that the authors of our language reference works lack scholastic rigor -- it's that this vast area of "emphasis" is actually incredibly fascinating, and important, but gets all but ignored by our theory of language instruction, displaced by mountains of charts and paradigms. I want to know what is going on when Turks repeat words! But how will I find out? Maybe I will have time to live in Turkey and become fluent so that I can learn through osmosis, but there are so many other things I want to do with my life; I am sad that I may never know.

Le grand chagrin

Well, I suppose it was inevitable sooner or later, and if it had to happen I am at least glad that it was another linguist, and my girlfriend to boot, who was responsible for cleaning my clock. Even so, I'm still sort of reeling from the shock.

So yes, I think it's about time I made the official announcement that Amelia has beaten me at Boggle, thereby becoming the only person ever to have done so. Rounds, that is, not whole games (yet), but still -- this past weekend we had one round that was 22 to 7, and another that was something like 12 to 3.

Clearly this is completely unacceptable, and I'm going to have to go back into intensive training or something. Yes. Up at 5 AM every day, a glass of raw eggs, and two hours of Boggle practice. Reading the OED from cover to cover couldn't hurt either.


Just prior to the aforementioned series of discomfitures: note the shameless "I'm about to embarrass yo' ass" look on her face.

Baby names, apropos of nothing in particular

I wonder what it means that the last time I made a list like this it was much more rife with unpronounceable Polish on the one hand, and unabashed hippiness on the other. I hope it's that I have developed more respect for the plight of my theoretical future children on the schoolyard and not that I have sold out and become boring in my old age.

In any event, here is the list of names I would actually consider bestowing as of today, girls kinda sorta in general order of predilection, boys alphabetically:

Girls

Eleanor (Ella)
Zoe
Isabel (Izzie or Bella)
Alexis (Lexie)
Imogene (Idgie)
Matilda (Tillie)
Bree

Boys

Aidan
Asher
Ethan
Ewan
Ian
Jesse
Jonas
Linus
Miles/Milo
Noah
Robin

For some reason it's much, much easier for me to think of girls' names that I like than boys' -- and I'm not quite sure why this should be. Maybe it's that, being a straight male, I've spent more time considering the aesthetics of girls' names? I'd be interested to hear about other folks' experience with this, and also your lists, if you have them.

By the way, I'm sort of embarrassed to have included Aidan in the above, considering its appalling trendiness at the moment. I'm afraid I have to say I just really do like that name for a little boy, and in my defense I did first hear it attached to an adult and not a toddler.

A suffusion of yellow

Douglas Adams' book The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is available in Finnish, entitled Sielun pitkä pimeä teehetki, which translates as "The Soul's Long Dark Teamoment."

In case you were wondering.

Lesser-Evil Politics and Endless Despair

If you are like me in feeling utterly disgusted with and unrepresented by both major political parties in this country, and I suspect you are, why do you keep voting for them? No, but seriously.

The argument that everybody endlessly gives, viz. that otherwise the other, worse, party will get elected is, frankly, asinine. It seems like some kind of mass insanity which inevitably results in nothing but the ongoing prosperity of the completely unacceptable status quo. The plain fact is that we will never have a genuine democracy in the U.S. until there are more than two viable parties to choose from, and this fact should in itself be enough to persuade anybody that voting Democrat is a Bad Idea.

I would never, ever vote for a candidate who did not openly and without reservation support same-sex marriage, a woman's right to choose, socialized medicine, funding for social programs, a firm boundary between the government (and education) and religion, massive reduction of our military budget, and environmental well-being over corporate greed -- and neither should any intelligent, responsible, ethical person.

Seriously, people, there needs to be a change in this country, and it needs to happen now. This means you. Don't support the parties whose primary goal is not to rock the boat for fear of losing Ohio.

(For information, here is a comparison of Democrat/Republican positions on a number of key issues compared with the Green Party. Note that I don't necessarily advocate the Greens specifically, but I find this chart instructive.)

More funky relativization

The story you're about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, at their surprisingly adamant insistence.

So the other day I was talking to a co-worker, Micole Arny, about the fact that she had come back from lunch very sleepy and somewhat confused, at which point she uttered the following phrase:

"Do you know what's fault it is?"

She was going to follow this up with a description of the enormous burrito she had just consumed, but was immediately interrupted by my impassioned demands to know whether she had just said what it sounded like she had just said.

It's confirmed: not only did she say this, but she felt completely unselfconscious about it even when questioned. Clearly this is an exciting development.

That this could happen is, of course, not all that surprising, especially by analogy with "whose" which sounds like "who" plus a possessive suffix (in fact, isn't "whose" hwæs in OE, the genitive of hwa "who?" This makes sense because hwæs would also be the genitive of hwæt "what," giving rise to this whole problem). It is, indeed, a fairly stupid thing about English that it lacks a standard way to relativize an inanimate possessor in a manner that doesn't sound completely ridiculous: "the book whose cover had been defaced" sounds marginally acceptable, but certainly not "Do you know whose fault it is?" with the meaning that Micole intended.

...and so we're forced to circumlocute, or if we're more adventurous, invent some new, more convenient morphology. Any bets on whether this one will be "normal" in 100 years?

Gapless relative clauses in Polish

I am thrilled to report that a few weeks ago I was finally able to capture this odd relative construction that my grandmother occasionally perpetrates in Polish. The "standard" phrase would run something like this:

Tomek, którego poznałeś...
Tommy-NOM, which-ACC meet-PAST-2SG
"Tommy, whom you met..."

Really a very normal Indo-European relativization strategy. The somewhat weirder one that my grandmother has been observed to do is as follows:

Tomek, co go poznałeś...
Tommy-NOM, what him-ACC meet-PAST-2SG
"Tommy, that you met him...," i.e., "Tommy, whom you met..."

So instead of a declined relative pronoun, we have what may be an invariable marker something like the English "that," followed by the relative clause with a retained pronoun. I have never (consciously) observed pronoun retension in Polish relative constructions in any other context.

It would be interesting to find out how common this is, and whether that "co" is really indeclinable in this construction -- under ordinary circumstances, of course, it has the full array of forms: co, czego, czemu, czym, etc. I'll have to try to come up with a test that I can administer to my grandmother without making her self-conscious.

Interestingly, by the way, my mother's usual way of phrasing this kind of relative clause in English is a nearly perfect analog to this Polish clause: "Tommy, who you met him..."

Other comparative linguists out there: how often does this pronoun-retension strategy manifest itself in Indo-European? The only IE language I'm aware of in which this is the standard is Farsi, if I'm not mistaken.