I have little patience with “word of the year” hoopla; as I wrote to Paul T. (who agreed), it seems like pure marketing nonsense. (Needless to say, if people enjoy it, I don’t begrudge them their enjoyment — this is Liberty Hall, and I speak only for myself.) But Geoff Pullum has an extremely interesting point to make about the American Dialect Society’s choice of because with noun phrase (a phenomenon discussed, among many other places, in Megan Garber’s Atlantic Monthly article “English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet“) in his Log post Because syntax, namely that because is a preposition and not, as most dictionaries call it, a conjunction. He begins by going into great detail about why it isn’t a conjunction and then explains why because of isn’t a preposition before giving his own conclusion about because:
Contrary to all the dictionaries, it is a preposition. As its complement (the phrase that follows it to complete the PP) it may take either a clause (as in the PP because he holds ridiculous beliefs) or a PP with of as its head (as in the PP because of our public universities). Some prepositions can occur with no complement (as in We went in), some require an NP (as of does) some require a clause (as although does), and some require a PP (like out in those uses that do not involve exiting from delimited regions of space: notice that They did it out of ignorance is grammatical but *They did it out ignorance is not).
The change that has caught the eye of the American Dialect Society is simply that because has picked up the extra privilege already possessed by prepositions like of: it now allows a noun phrase (NP) as complement (with a subtly different shade of meaning: because money seems to express only a rather vague and non-serious commitment to the idea that the reason is financial).
It’s all good stuff; read the whole thing.
May I lay claim to spotting a new ambiguity? Since internet.
That might be an ambiguity if since were used that way, but as far as I know it’s not.
“as far as I know it’s not”: I’m sure we could do something about that.
I wonder if the loss of “of” after “because” is part of a wider phenomenon of omitting prepositions in English. For instance, I learned “out of the window” but most people around me now say “out the window”. People used to agree or disagree “on” things, but now some of them “agree things”. Similarly, some of them “travel Europe” (a less recent usage, I think) after they “graduate high school or college”.
M-L, that is really not what is going on here. I have never seen “because X” used in any way that was not ironic and specifically I have only ever seen it used to mock and opposing position by way attributing grammatical incompetence to those holding and advocating that position. So you see “Because patriarchy” on gender blogs as a way of rirdiculing someone’s facile feminist gender analysis. A similar thing is going on with the “I is X” formula. I saw a woman mock this kind of analysis with “He is not treating me like the princess I think I am. I is insult!”.
“Because X” is a formulaic expression, not some development in the propositional system.
I don’t keep up all that closely with the Young People and How They Talk On The Internet, but I have certainly seen it used more broadly than Jim thinks he has, although broadly consistently with Pullum’s “vague and non-serious” description. Although maybe “non-serious” just means “informal” or perhaps “playful” (one can be “playful” while still being “serious” for some but not all meaning of “serious,” or so I would contend). One might, for example, assert that such and such crackpot position affirmed by someone or other on the internet is wrong “because science” as a way of conveying something like “is so obviously wrong for reasons sufficiently obvious to anyone versed in science that I’m not going to waste my time and insult my interlocutors’ intelligence by spelling them out in detail.”
“Because X” is a formulaic expression [used to mock], not some development in the propositional [sic] system.
This is also my take. But as time passes, the mockery may fade and we’ll be stuck with the preposition.
I have certainly seen it used more broadly than Jim thinks he has
Me too.
I just read Pullum’s post (comments off) and the comments that follow Mark Liberman’s post on the topic. Someone commented that although adults might use the structure informarlly and jokingly, some teenagers and children were using it as normal. This is a typical evolution: some linguistic feature is used in a particular context, is picked up more generally and ends up becoming standard.
I don’t mean that it has become standard or is even on its way to becoming so, just that it would not be surprising if it did.
There’s a useful post on the grammar of because X at All Things Linguistic.
For me as for Jim, the canonical use is a sardonic summing up: “Of course they oppose it, because socialism.” But Mark Liberman’s post has lots of examples of less pointed (less successful?) uses as well. And note, Geoff Pullum isn’t arguing that this usage makes “because” a preposition; he’s arguing that it should always have been classified that way, and that this is one tiny addition to the prepositional functions it already performs.
Stu,
“Because X” is a formulaic expression [used to mock], not some development in the propositional [sic] system.”
Sic indeed. Prepostitional.
M-L,
“Someone commented that although adults might use the structure informarlly and jokingly, some teenagers and children were using it as normal. This is a typical evolution: some linguistic feature is used in a particular context, is picked up more generally and ends up becoming standard.”
This is one where all we have to do is wait to find out. it will probably be clear within the next twenty years.
If Ii look at simalr expressions, this is exactly the course they have taken. “How about we just drop it?” obviously was malformed at some point in time.
I don’t see the WOTY hoople as “marketing nonsense”; I think it’s a fun and interesting excuse to track (and discuss) lexical trends and innovations, however ephemeral they turn out to be. This is especially the case with the ADS event on account of its numerous specialist categories. Looking back on previous winners also provides a snapshot of erstwhile social/cultural preoccupations and fads.
Some years the winners are pretty uninspiring: a financial topic that dominated the headlines, for example. So “because” is an interest choice for several reasons, not least them the disagreements over its grammar. I’m also pleased because it’s a usage I’ve written about and have been following (and I picked it as my word/phrase of the year at Macmillan Dictionary Blog before Christmas).
I don’t see the WOTY hoople as “marketing nonsense”
Well, you wouldn’t, would you, being a tool of Big Lexicography? But as I said, I don’t begrudge anyone their fun; I’m just a grumpy old codger who calls ’em as he sees ’em.
One of Pullum’s irritating mannerisms is that he makes technical points for shock value. CGEL says (I think rightly) that there is no hard and fast line between the gerund (nounish) and participle (adjectivish) uses of the English -ing form. But instead of adopting a neutral term like “-ing form”, it saddles us with the hybrid “gerund-participle”. Okay. But when it merges the traditional categories of preposition, adverbial particle, and subordinating conjunction (again, I think, on good grounds), it insists on using preposition for all of them, and then jumping down people’s throats when they use the older terminology in all innocence, thus conflating the terminology issue (which is trivial) with the substantive issue.
The same thing happens with CGEL’s restriction of subjunctive to the old present subjunctive; instead of saying that the old preterite subjunctive is “not a subjunctive at all”, it’s better to explain the point: that the present and the preterite have gone their separate ways enough to justify using separate top-level terms subjunctive and conditional for them.
Stan: Do you actually say “hoople” rather than “hoopla”, or was that a typo?
I agree about the craven pandering of WOTY. But with so many competing WOTYs, I would support a WOTYOTY tournament, to be held in late January, if only to have ADS, MW, and OD (dare I add GLM?) get all catty about each other’s “methodologies.”
John: It was a typo, alas, one of several in that comment. Too much screen time today, and not enough care before clicking. But being called a tool of Big Lexicography by Mr Hat has soothed me considerably!
It would have been better if Hat had said ‘because Big Lexicography’.
I’m not cool enough to say that.
Jan,
“And note, Geoff Pullum isn’t arguing that this usage makes “because” a preposition; he’s arguing that it should always have been classified that way, and that this is one tiny addition to the prepositional functions it already performs.”
Okay. Works for me. I suppose if “behind” or “beneath” can become a prepositions, “because” can too.
Stan the Man: just another running dog of Big Lexicography.
“License my roving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, because below.”
My principal reaction to everything of the WOTY kind is a curmudgeonly annoyance that seems very similar to Hat’s. Nevertheless I was happy to hear that “because [NP]” won.
Yes, exactly. If there must be a WOTY, let it be “because [NP].”
I note also that I don’t care if this particular “word of the year” is a word or not. I’m glad it was chosen because I like it.
When I was a young teen-ager in France, some slightly older girls used a phrase that I was never quite sure meant : because les mouches (yes, with the English word). I knew the English word because, but I never understood the reference to ‘the flies’. I think the purpose was the same as using because in English in order NOT to provide an explanation. In any case, it must have been a passing fashion.
I think Pullum missed the mark on this one. Pullum says that the “new because” is the same as the “old because”, with just a slight expansion of the leeway it can have in the type of its complement. He argues that the “old because” could take of-PP complements (“because of it”) and clause complements (“because it’s there”), but couldn’t have null complements or NP complements. The “new because”, he says, merely additionally allows NP complements (“because syntax”), just as some other prepositions do, like in (“in the house”) or since (“since Tuesday”).
To me, the “new because” is often willfully ungrammatical, in a way that purposefully jars. Consider the following examples (all from the web):
—Idiot thinks sports cars are now irrelevant because stupid. An adjective complement. Are there any other prepositions at all with an Adj complement?
—Michigan Rejects “War Sux” Vanity Plate Because THINK OF THE CHILDREN. An imperative clause complement. Bad, bad, bad.
I also found They left me as friend because think I’m not interested in them.. how can I fix? but that seems like mere telegraphic/texting style, not the onward march of the brave new syntax.
—Because, after all, why not? is a bit odd. I think of it as “old because”, but can’t exactly say why.
If anything, the closest parallel to the “new because” is the good old null-complement form, just because. Like the “new because”, it flaunts its non-sequitur complement to highlight an unreasonable excuse—in fact, a nonexistent one.
Empty: I too am glad they chose it because you like it.
I agree with John Cowan. Dr. Pullum’s remarks are absurd, because they presuppose that terms have meanings he would consider more logical, rather than the meanings they actually have. He’s like the peever who claims to misunderstand “I didn’t see nobody” — except he’s worse, because he should know better.
It’s not absurd to redefine terms, especially for good reasons. It’s annoying to conflate misunderstandings of substance with misuse of terms.
ML: Was there a meaning attached to because les mouches, using it for example as an absurdist excuse: “We missed meeting those people because les mouches or was it just a nonsense expression ?
Paul, I don’t remember because les mouches used within a sentence, only as a reply, but if it did occur within a sentence it could be that I just missed it. I heard the phrase a number of times in the conversation of slightly older girls, talking between themselves, not to me. The fad cannot have lasted more than a year or two, otherwise I might have heard it enough to understand how it was used, and perhaps to use it myself.
Stan: I looked up the reference at All things linguistic and found some of the interpretations (and some of the examples) very strange. The author says that the word after because in because Noun or because Verb is an interjection. Also, there is a quotation from a current dictionary which refers to the category of “subordinating conjunctions”, including which and who among those conjunctions. It seems that “subordinate” now means “dependent”, without a distinction between subordinate and relative clauses, or between the type of words which introduce them.
I am probably way behind the times in theoretical syntactic knowledge, but is this the new grammar?
Marie-Lucie:
Google France comes up with the following, in all of which because les mouches is used in the literal sense of “because of the flies”. So it seems to have hung on but now be used literally, not (at least in print) necessarily as a teenage expression, the most recent use being last September.
2 – Forums orange
forum.orange.fr › Culture et Loisirs › Animaux
26 sept. 2013 – 10 messages – 3 auteurs
Tous les matins nous étions obligés de lessiver à fond les fauteuils de jardin blancs qui ne l’étaient plus because les mouches. C’est vrai que …
Plein les moustaches – Résultats Google Recherche de Livres
books.google.fr/books?isbn=2265092010
SAN-ANTONIO – 2011 – Fiction
Sa carriole contenait des quartiers de viande noirâtre, à reflets bleutés because les mouches qui venaient se goinfrer. Des bonnes femmes sortirent une à une …
Confiture de figues violettes (noires) – La Cachina
la-cachina.over-blog.com/article-12356397.html
16 sept. 2013 – Image. – Couvrez le récipient d’un torchon extra super propre , because les mouches , et laissez en l’état quelques heures, juste après la sieste .
..
4 – La Cachina
la-cachina.over-blog.com/12-categorie-10608230.html
26 août 2010 – Laissez reposer une nuit avec un torchon au dessus, because les mouches. Commencez la cuisson lentement, puis augmentez ..
There were a few more, one marked “erotique” which I will spare the readers…
.
m.-l., here are more French becauses, at Bob, dictionnaire d’argot, an interesting resource of I have never heard of before.
@John Cowan: It’s not absurd to redefine terms, but it certainly is absurd to claim that your new definitions are correct on logical grounds and therefore that all other sources are misusing the terms.
Coming from a Russian perspective, where incomplete sentences are norm, pronoun as subject is often dropped and is/are in the present tense is not used, I thought because + noun, verb or adjective was simply English adopting the use of incomplete forms as acceptable.
I don’t like fast cars because stupid – [they are] dropped.
It reached a dead-end because socialism [as a system doesn’t work]
Michigan Rejects “War Sux” Vanity Plate Because [we should] THINK OF THE CHILDREN
If you look at it that way, because is still a conjunction. It’s the sentence structure that has evolved not the word. No?
It’s the sentence structure that has evolved not the word. No?
I’m afraid not. If your analysis were correct, there would be a clear missing word or set of words that could be supplied by any English speaker, just as anyone can expand “I don’t” (as an answer to, say, “Does anyone know?”) to “I don’t know.” But if we take the title of Garber’s article “English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet,“ there is no particular omission: one person might expand it to “because the internet has expanded the range,” another to “because the internet enables grammatical creativity”… you get the idea. It really is the case that the word has developed a new usage.
Mmm, I don’t think so. “Because NOUN” can almost always be rephrased as “because of NP”. If the title had been “English Has a New Preposition, Because of the Internet”, it would be just as semantically ambiguous.
Idiot thinks sports cars are now irrelevant because stupid.
This can also be read as traditional because with an elliptical complement clause: ‘because they are stupid’, rather than ‘because he is stupid’.
ok, I take it, because.
Has anyone also noted the ‘kiddy-speak’ element in this?
– Why did you do this?
– Because!
@m-l
Is not the French use of ‘because’ comparable to the British usage of ‘sans’.
It was a common conceit at college to use ‘sans’ instead of ‘without’ (though always pronounced in an English fashion, not as in French), e.g. “I’ll have a whisky, neat, sans ice”.
I’ve noticed that since about the 1990s this has spread from Oxbridge to become much more widespread.
@Y: ‘Think of the Children’ is now, again, sarcasticallly used as an adjectival phrase, not as an actual exhortation, as in the last sentence of this: http://nplusonemag.com/the-reading-crisis
Alex: Sans has been an English word since the 14th century: the OED gives us Saunz doute swa dide þai alle bydene ‘without a doubt they all remained’. The best-known use is probably Shakespeare’s Second childishnesse, and meere obliuion / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans euery thing, and many modern uses echo it, like this from 1977: “It offers anxiety enough for the Rhodesians themselves, […] to face the prospect of starting life afresh in some harsher, colder country, sans servants, sans swimming pool, sans sunshine, sans supremacy.”
I was aware of the historical usage but thought it had fallen into disuse by the 17th century only to be revived in the late 20th century.
H, John Cowan: Right now, my best description of the “new because” is that it takes as its complement a stock phrase, to be understood as evincing an emotional response, which allows a leap of logic, either justified (“…because stupid”) or not (“…because think of the children”).
Interestingly, the “new because” does not appear comfortable with pronominal complements (*”…because you”), whereas the “old because” does (“…because of you”).
Alex: The OED’s quotations since Shakespeare are dated 1631, 1686, 1687, 1688, 1797, 1828-40, 1841, 1883, 1901, 1922, 1929, 1942, 1970, 1975, 1977, 1979. The 1841, 1975, and 1977 quotations are American, as it happens.
I think there’s another, less noted way in which the domain of because has expanded: I’ve noticed in my own speech that it can be used not only to answer questions of why, but also to answer questions of how for which the more prescriptively correct response would be something like in that. For example, if someone asks me “How is that good/interesting?”, I’ll reply, “It’s good/interesting because…”. In cases like this, in that just seems too stilted for conversational use.
Is that new? It sounds standard to me.
Yeah, I guess it might not be anything new. On an intellectual level I associate because with why (“for what reason?” “for this reason”), so I notice a certain… disjunction when I use it in answer to a how question, even though this usage does come to me naturally. If anything, this may actually demonstrate that how includes a “for what reason” sense in addition to its more commonly recognized “in what way” domain: dictionary.com lists this as one of the word’s senses, giving the example “How can you talk such nonsense?”
Pullum has a new book, The Truth About English Grammar, enthusiastically reviewed by John E. McIntyre here. A sample:
our understanding of prepositions is muddled because grammarians understood prepositions to be only pre-positioned
has this been part of actually existing english-language-teaching pedagogy in any recent era?
(to me, it sounds like a distinctively 19thC version of the Latin Is The Only True Language mode, as opposed to the anti-split-infinitive junk that’s still in circulation)
i came up in the late stages of the sentence-diagramming epoch, and the only definition/description of prepositions i can remember encountering was “anything a squirrel can be in relation to a hollow log”, which is pretty solid for practical purposes and has nothing at all to do with word order.
I was not previously aware of the new Pullum book, which suggests a bad marketing strategy because I am a good prospect for it. So I am grateful to be made aware of it. Here’s a more mixed but entertaining review of it from the Grauniad: https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/28/the-truth-about-english-grammar-by-geoffrey-k-pullum-review-the-pants-rule-and-other-pipe-dreams
The Grauniad review is in line with the fine tradition of journalists being ludicrously ill-informed about linguistics. (The Economist is a splendid exception.)
The Grauniad review is in line with the fine tradition of journalists being ludicrously ill-informed about linguistics.
You beat me to it.
I think if we expect journalists to be better informed, that should be applied to ALL sciences…
I think if we expect journalists to be better informed, that should be applied to ALL sciences…
Obviously, but this is LANGUAGEhat, so we complain about errors wrt what we are most interested in…
Besides, journalists are at least aware that they need help with other sciences, so they often consult experts; they’re not even aware that linguistics is a science, so they feel free to spout off with the confidence of utter ignorance.
Yes; UK journalists (at any rate) have got more careful about gross inaccuracy in reporting medical stuff, probably because they are afraid of the consequences (unless they work for rightwing outfits where spreading misinformation is part of their actual remit.)
They evidently suffer no adverse consequences from peddling codswallop about language.
In this particular case, it seems unlikely that the learned reviewer actually did more than skim the odd page here and there (and perhaps read the blurb.)
They’ve noticed Pullum’s combative style (hard to miss) but failed to engage with any of the actual substance of what he’s telling them. As he is an admirably clear writer, this is simply negligence in a reviewer. (Perhaps P really was seriously off form in this book, but when in doubt it’s generally a good rule of thumb to blame the reporter, especially one like this who proudly flaunts their own ignorance.)
Hatters, whose appetite for the minutiae of Kusaal grammar is insatiable, will thrill to hear that Kusaal bɔzugɔ “because” seems to be a calque, presumably from English (somehow.) Literally it means “upon what?”, i.e. “why?” There is no other case at all of an interrogative pronoun being used as a relative in Kusaal (or anywhere in Oti-Volta.)
I can even point to a prescriptivist objection to it: David Spratt’s introduction to Kusaal warns the learner that it is not “proper Kusaal”, which seems surprisingly narrow-minded of him. (Kusaal has either calqued or borrowed all of its “conjunctions” apart from “and” and “or.” It seems unfair to pick on “because.”)
Membership in a crowd of people with combative style willing to dismiss any criticism beforehand as a product of ignorance can seriously hinder one’s moral and intellectual development, but if the goal is different (e.g. repeating Chomsky’s trick, the takeover of universities) it is likely a good strategy.
Are you claiming that journalists are not in fact ignorant of linguistics? Because if so, you’re very wrong.
Though of course there are a few honorable exceptions, like Michael Erard.
Or… maybe English has secretly been doing the German thing of reinterpreting directional adverbs as verb affixes.*
After all, the reason why this is nonsense up with which I shall not put is ungrammatical is precisely that put up with is a fixed unit you can’t take up (or up with) out of.
* Visible in the replacement of wohin gehst du by wo gehst do hin, still meaning “where are you going”.
@LH, I mean specifically Pullum and what DE says.
Such crowds are a thing. No, I’m not ready to say that Pullum belongs to such a crowd, I know too little about him. Also DE likes Pullum and his work and of course when someone criticises a person you like, it is quite natural to disagree with the critic. And I agree with you, as I said, journalists frequently write nonsense and annoy me a lot. I even avoid reading newspapers.
But I would be a way more narcissistic and stupid without constant efforts to prevent my development in these two directions. I have my own methods and perhaps because of what DE calls “combative style”, when Pullum is discussed I frequently come across my own warning sings.
As I understand no one here read the reviewed book. And is the review so horrible? It is a review of a popular book. The reviewer says that for Pullum only Pullum can be right (exactly what I said about ‘narcissistic and stupid’). This is definitely unpleasant. But this has little to do with linguistics. Eveything else is far less unpleasant.
@drasvi: Membership in a crowd of people with combative style willing to dismiss any criticism beforehand as a product of ignorance can seriously hinder one’s moral and intellectual development, but if the goal is different (e.g. repeating Chomsky’s trick, the takeover of universities) it is likely a good strategy.
This is pretentious schoolmarm nonsense, very likely generated by AI, in that it is free of grammatical and lexical weirdness. Using AI may not hinder your moral and intellectual development, but it will impair that of whoever reads it.
Membership in a crowd of people with combative style willing to dismiss any criticism beforehand as a product of ignorance can seriously hinder one’s moral and intellectual development
While this doubtless explains my own lack of moral and intellectual development, I really don’t think that Pullum can be reasonably accused of “dismissing any criticism beforehand as a product of ignorance.” He deduces the ignorance from the actual words of the dismissees, with copious documentation of the nature and degree of the ignorance. There is nothing like an a priori dismissal going on at all. Quite the opposite.
Pullum is not remotely like Chomsky in this.
May I suggest actually reading CGEL?
You may (in the process) notice that it is not the work of just one author (very far from it) and that it is throughout admirably free of the idea that it expresses the One Truth about English grammar.
I guarantee that the Guardian reviewer has never so much as looked at the table of contents.
Do you have an alternative word beside “ignorance” for “not actually knowing even the basics of what one is confidently opining about”? It seems an appropriate word to me …
“pretentious” – I know.
“nonsense” – it is not.
“grammatical and lexical ” – what, seriously? Then maybe because it is a stylisation. But your dissatisfaction about my English is getting tiresome. I’m sorry Stu. I explained WHY I’m not polishing it.
Otherwise, imagine I just inserted yhour whole comment in blockquote, and then posted another copy of your entire comment as a comment on the blockquote containing this very same comment.
drasvi, I did not refer to your English.
Pullum is a genuine and excellent linguist; just because you’re not familiar with his work does not mean it’s a good idea to disparage him. Once in a while, just as a useful exercise, you might try assuming that other people actually know what they are talking about. Also, DE and I do not “like” Pullum — he is not a personal friend — we respect him. Again, you might try assuming we have reasons other than simply taking sides (which you seem to think everyone other than yourself is doing).
Then I don’t really understand what you did refer to:/
(If that is a problem, of course)
Then I don’t really understand what you did refer to:/
That’s par for the course. You might be surprised that the feeling is mutual.
I wonder whether the classical rhetoric systems had a term for bratty ingenuousness. Possibly it’s a composite technique.
@LH,
1. where exactly I said that Pullum is not an excellent linguist?
2. why do you write ‘I and DE do not like “Pullum” ‘ instead of ‘DE [does not] likes Pullum and his work‘ as I wrote? Because the resulting meaning is very different?
3. why did not you answer, what is so horrible about this review ?
@DE, we are NOT disccussing any grammar book! We are discussing a popular book. Addressed to ignorant people.
Either this book is written in a way described by the reviewer or not, but all other books authored by P. have decisively nothing to do with that. And the author’s tone in turn has nothign to do with linguistics.
And what’s the point of talking of the journalist’s “ignorance” if you illustrate this ignorance with… the rule of thumb:/
“Combativeness”
If you write in a combative style you must at least be prepared that some journalists won’t like it (or worse, respond in combative style).
On the single occasion that I have directly communicated with Pullum, he was actually pretty abrupt with me. (On the other hand, I get an honourable, but alas, anonymous, mention as being “an astute commenter” in one of his papers.)
I actually do agree with drasvi’s implied view that Pullum’s combativeness can be counterproductive. Heaven knows, it’s easy to understand his response to the evidence-free maunderings of e.g. Strunk and White, but the combativeness tends to bolster the lay reader’s notion that the disagreement is somehow all about personalities rather than proper investigative methods (especially if the layman is too intellectually lazy to engage with the actual issues.) It’s a distraction, in other words.
My various (online-only) interactions with Pullum were pretty uniformly positive, and while I regret that he largely retired from online interactions with people he didn’t know well some years ago, that retirement seems to have coincided in time with the death of his wife and as a quondam widower myself I can very much understand and empathize with that. Bereavement can make one more patient with certain sorts of things and more impatient with others.
It is possible in principle that his combative-but-not-unfair style in writing intended for a readership that already knew a considerable amount about the topic might not translate well into more popularizing work intended for a less well-versed readership, but also possible in principle that it might translate just fine.
Yes: the effect may well be quite different for a readership that doesn’t already understand what has made him cross. Particularly if said readership has never previously encountered the idea that there was anything much amiss with traditional teaching on English grammar.* And also really likes Charlotte’s Web … and admires Orwell’s political writings.
* It occurs to me that, although most people have probably now absorbed the idea that it’s actually perfectly OK to end a sentence with a preposition (for example), they probably think that this represents a change from previous usage, and do not realise that the “rule” was spurious all along. So they conceptualise this as traditional versus (debased} modern usage, rather than mistaken versus correct grammatical doctrine.
our understanding of prepositions is muddled because grammarians understood prepositions to be only pre-positioned
has this been part of actually existing english-language-teaching pedagogy in any recent era?
(to me, it sounds like a distinctively 19thC version of the Latin Is The Only True Language mode, as opposed to the anti-split-infinitive junk that’s still in circulation)
I think I was told, say in the early 1970s, that prepositions always had objects, and I think no one even mentioned the possibility that “down” in “The squirrel lay down” might be a preposition.
Pullum gives his reasoning in sections 5–8 here. There’s no date, and I don’t know whether he’s changed his ideas at all since then. But it seems to me as a non-linguist that he shows that there are attractive aspects to considering prepositions and adverbs (and some conjunctions) a single category, not that that is the absolute truth and you’ll be muddled about grammar if you don’t accept it.
[cont’d] i came up in the late stages of the sentence-diagramming epoch, and the only definition/description of prepositions i can remember encountering was “anything a squirrel can be in relation to a hollow log”, which is pretty solid for practical purposes and has nothing at all to do with word order.
I don’t see how that works for prepositions about non-physical relations such as “except” and “concerning”. And a squirrel can’t have temporary responsibilities vice a hollow log.
I put scare quotes round “conjunction” in my comment on Kusaal bɔzugɔ “because”, because Kusaal doesn’t actually have a unified “conjunction” word category.
Bɔzugɔ and its sisters are actually a kind of sentence-level adverb, and can even function as verb subjects in certain circumstances.
On the other hand, all but two of Kusaal’s prepositions are loanwords, and all the loanword prepositions can also introduce non-nominalised subordinate clauses: so asɛɛ, for example, can be “except for”, or it can be “except that, unless.”
Hali “as far as, up to” can be “even” or “until” (introducing a clause) and can be used with neither a noun or clause complement, when it means “very.”
English is no less messy than Kusaal when it comes to this kind of thing. Happily.
a squirrel can’t have temporary responsibilities vice a hollow log.
Do you have even a shred of evidence for this claim ? Squirrel Nutkin was completely irresponsible, but only temporarily.
a squirrel can’t have temporary responsibilities vice a hollow log.
Do you have even a shred of evidence for this claim ? Squirrel Nutkin was completely irresponsible, but only temporarily.
Yes. I’ve read a lot of books and seen a few hollow logs, maybe mostly in cartoons, but I’ve never encountered a hollow log with any responsibilities, let alone any that a squirrel temporarily took over. QED.
However, thanks for reminding me of my high school friend Jamie, who enjoyed saying “I’m irresponsible for that” instead of “I’m not responsible for that.”
“I’m irresponsible for that”
Very nice. I’ll be using it the next time anyone tries to pin something on me. At the latest by Tuesday of any given week.
“… just because you’re not familiar with his work does not mean it’s a good idea to disparage him.”
@Languagehat, the ONLY thing I wrote about Pullum is
“ No, I’m not ready to say that Pullum belongs to such a crowd, I know too little about him. ”
What did you call “disparaging”?
“…try assuming that other people actually know what they are talking about.”
PLEASE, tell me what ignorant things the reviewer wrote about lingustics, and have you ever read the book? Or the review?
If you can’t answer the first question and the answer to the second and third is “no” – could you just say that you have no idea what you are talking about?
As far as I know, we are discussing a specific review of a specific book by a specific journalist. NOT Pullum.
I think (maybe I’m mistaken) in the first version of your comment you even capitalised “ACTUALLY”.
Also “like”. I like certain authors. It is a poor description of what I do to my friends:/
I think you deliberately turned absolutely normal word into some sort of insult to DE (and added yourself).
And our approach to respect is somewhat different.
I do try to respect people who’re less knowlegeable than me – and their opinion.
L’Ingénu.
Part of the plot, in Frenglish:
#
Having grown up outside of European culture, he sees the world in a more ‘natural’ way, causing him to interpret things directly. Since he is unaware of what is customary, leading to comic misinterpretations. After reading the Bible, he feels he should be circumcised and calls upon a surgeon to perform the operation, which is stopped through the intervention of his ‘family’. After his first confession, he tries to force the priest to confess as well since he interprets a biblical verse to mean confessions must be made mutually and not exempting the clergy. Not expecting to be baptized in a church, they find the Child of Nature waiting in a stream, as baptisms are depicted in the Bible.
#
@JF:
i strongly disagree: a squirrel can, for example, be about a hollow log, and even all about a hollow log, and can certainly be responsible (permanently or temporarily) for all manner of things in relation to a log or on behalf of a log, as well as for the log itself.
i’ve seen many hollow logs with responsibilities, myself. some of them include holding up tabletops, containing small fires, housing an array of woodland creatures, feeding fungi, and carrying water from one place to another. squirrels, in my experience, are unreliable at the first and last, useless at the second (unless skinned, tanned, and tarred), usually irrelevant to the third, and perfectly adequate at the fourth for a limited period of time (when dead). that is, as long as they’re not in a book by brian jacques, in which case they’re perfectly capable of taking on just about any responsibility.
but as to “except” and “concerning” – as prepositions, they fit into quite limited semantic spaces. my teacher’s point was about linguistic cromulence, rather than either semantics or natural history. if putting a word into an utterance with a squirrel and log sounds odd because of its meaning, rather than simply wrong, it can operate as a preposition (as opposed to, say: *the squirrel was blue the hollow log; *the squirrel was run the hollow log; *the squirrel was city the hollow log). it’s a sniff test, not a spectroscope.
@Stu, I think I already told: specifically on languagehat I chose to simply say everything I both think and want to say. Elsewhere I would not behave like this. If at some moment I think that this behaviour is somehow bad for this forum, I’ll leave.
Pullum, 2024 The Truth About English Grammar, 1. Introduction:
Who needs euphemisms like “lingua franca”? And what is “lingua franca” afer all, what language this name is, and what language it refers to!? The language of slaves?
Just “most important”.
Definitely best to avoid the annoyance of referring to French as a historical lingua franca, having someone say “That’s why it’s called lingua franca!”, having to explain that no, it actually meant Frankish language, but no, it didn’t actually mean the Frankish language either, etc. etc.
English is definitely the most common L2, and is frequently used by speakers of other langauges. Though the question of what is the grammar of L2 English and whether Pullum wants to know such grammars is difficult.
“…the facts of how English is actually spoken and written by the people” he says and then “…we regard as competent”.
I read the first 21 pages offered by Google.
I agree with the journalist. Pullum’s comments on “traditional books” would be inappropriate in a reference work for specialists: they would have made it a more difficult reading. Same for a reference work for general public.
The book is aimed at people who never studied English grammar and who write in English (anything, not just professionaly).
“We’ll need the term “subject” quite often in what follows, and I’ll come back later to how it should be defined.”
Then in a paragraph “Subject” – after an explanation of how definitions in traditional books are “useless” – “…an often obligatory NP of which the most interesting fact is that it often requires a verb to change its form.“
I remembered a documentary about a language teacher whose student excitedly was telling that for him verbs are not “doing words” as in school but just what comes after “to” (I don’t think she’s excited by his definition, just by his personality). Here, 15:00 (I think what she is saying is slighly different from what is written, but my English is not good enough to quote her)
The traditional descriptions of “subject”, which are semantics-based, and/or fatally confuse the structure of clauses with the structure of logical propositions, really are useless. (Your scare quotes are quite unwarranted.) They don’t actually work, and they lead away from definitions that do work. This is not just Pullum being contentious and contrary. He’s simply right.
(I mentioned above that Kusaal bɔzugɔ “because” can actually be a verb subject. In English, as in Kusaal, trying to define “subject” in terms of meaning is a fundamental and irredeemable error, like defining a noun as a word that labels a thing and a verb as a word that labels a process. This does not work for any language whatsoever. It’s mere pseudogrammar.)
Pullum shares her scepticism about school definitions (“…worthless” he says about “doing words”) even though he can’t offer anything different.
“In this book I’ll classify lexemes into nine different major types which modern linguists call categories. (Traditional grammars use the rather strange term “parts of speech,” which I will avoid. They’re not parts of anything, and they have nothing specifically to do with speech; apart from that, it’s a great name.)
[…..]
Verbs constitute a very large category containing thousands of the most straightforward ways of talking about voluntary or involuntary actions ([…]) or relations ([…])” (then he mentions auxiliary verbs).
PS. sorry if the first version of the comment was confusing. I inserted his definition of nouns (constitute a very large category containing tens of thousands of words, among which are the simplest ways of naming kinds of object ([…]) or substances ([…]).) instead of the definition of verbs)
though he can’t offer anything different
Completely incorrect.
He defines them in terms of how they function in clause structure. If you’re looking for him to offer an alternative definition in terms of meaning, you’ve entirely missed his key point.
The excerpts you cite are not P offering definitions of nouns and verbs, but of him alluding to the perfectly true fact that the grammatical category “noun” includes most common English words referring to things and “verbs”, the most common words referring to processes. But this is not a possible basis for defining nouns and verbs, as traditional grammar tries to do.
This is elementary modern linguistics, drasvi. It’s not some personal quirk of Pullum’s. (As the Guardian reviewer evidently also imagines.)
DE, are you referring to “the most straightforward ways of talking about voluntary or involuntary actions” (link)?
If you mean definitions he gives elsewhere, perhaps he CAN offer something different (sorry for confusion), just not a simple not-too-verbose definition for general public.
What he wrote in the book is quite similar to “doing words” which he mentions one page above.
PS. I do not mean that the problem with the definition is a problem with Pullum. It is not easy to give such definitions.
(Not a personal quirk of Quirk’s, either.)
This may give you an idea of the background, drasvi:
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/CGELtheory.pdf
None of what Pullum says here is particularly contentious as far as competent modern linguists are concerned, or particularly idiosyncratic.
Pullum is only unusual in that he is trying to express mainstream modern linguistic concepts to a lay audience: exactly the original intent of Language Log.
DE, do you mean that when teachers say that “verbs” are “doing words” they start from : “we define ‘a verb’ as….”?
it is not a definition either, “doing words” is more like a nickname!
If I tell a child that “English” is what I was speaking half a hour ago in Skype and, it is NOT a “definition”, I’m just helping her understand what I call so. She is already acquinted with it (just as she is already acquinted with verbs!) and she will determine on her own where English becomes some other language distinct from English.
Meanwhile Pullum DID actually say that he is going to define “subject”.
Instead … he descibed it. Not defined. And I don’t even think it is possible to define subject.
Mainstream modern Enlgish linguistics concepts are (among other things) Chomsky. Please, don’t explain this to anyone.
It is traumatising:)
And DE, I’m discussing a specific book written for people who never studied grammar! I know very well that books for specialists are better.
@rozele: In the definition of “preposition” you were taught, you have to exclude present participles, as “The squirrel is climbing the hollow log” is perfectly grammatical.
I see I misunderstood what the definition was intended for. One reason for my misunderstanding was the word “hollow”, which seemed to be there to make such prepositions as “in” and “through” semantically plausible. So if I’d thought of “The squirrel is feeding fungi vice the hollow log” (I assume the squirrel is dead), I’d have rejected it because the definition seemed to reject whimsy and fantasy.
DE, I repeat: I am discussing ONLY and specifically one book for general public.
I never said that anything is wrong with books Pullum writes for specialists. The theory as presented there may very well be good.
But then he tells to general public something he would not tell in a serious book (that such and such “definitons” – using his own word for what I think is not a definion – are “worthless” or “useless”) and faces the need to offer an explanation (or whatever we call it) of his own.
And he finds that it is difficult to solve this problem much differently from how others solve it.
Is there any more technical-term-sounding synonym for “lingua franca” that has caught on? Not in the sense of referring to the specific OG LF that was once used throughout the Mediterranean world of maritime commerce, but in the generic sense of “a language widely used for communication between those who are not native speakers of it when neither speaks the other’s L1 because its the usual common L2 for such communication in the relevant time/place/socioeconomic-niche.” A Finn’s first guess as to how to try to speak to a Belgian.
DE: Then there’s Haspelmath, generally a smart and careful linguist. In trying to implement his (admirable) program for a more rigorous linguistic typology, he gave up on a purely syntactical definition of some linguistic categories, and settled on supposedly universal semantic definitions like “A noun is a morph (or a root) that denotes a thing, i.e. an object or a person”, or “The A-argument is the argument of a two-participant clause that is coded like the ‘breaker’ or ‘killer’ argument of ‘break/kill’, if the other argument (the P-argument) is coded like the ‘broken thing’/‘killed animal’.”
JWB: “Lingua Franca” is as technical as it gets. I mean, it’s foreign: isn’t that enough?
I faced the same problem. I almost wrote (about English) “language of international communication” because peopel say so, but that’s imprecise (wrt English) and definitely not the same.
@Y:
Yes: I am not too taken with Haspelmath’s approach, as I have said before. Who generalises is lost …
If you try to arrive at universals by a sort of highest-common-factor approach, the more languages you feed into the mincer, the less you’ll get out at the end of the mincing.
In this case, if you end up with a definition of “noun” which is demonstrably invalid for every single natural human language that has ever been adequately examined, it seems to me to be rational to conclude that something has gone badly wrong with your methodology.
I notice that in drasvi’s (probably incomplete) snippet on Pullum’s definition of “subject”, he seems to invoke the language-specific fact that English verbs agree in number with their subjects. This criterion is of no use in Kusaal (or many other languages), but to go from facts like that to the conclusion that “subject” is not a useful notion cross-linguistically at all strikes me as perverse. I think it arises from a sort of realism, in the sense of attaching an ontological status to generalisations which is unwarranted. I suppose that if your whole shtick is coming up with generalisations, it’s natural to want to attach magical properties to them. Even when your actual method seems to create generalisations with remarkably little, er, substance.
There’s a related problem that not all word-classes for a given language can necessarily be defined with the same degree of rigor. It’s I think a fairly common observation that you can have pretty clear senses of what “nouns” and “verbs” are in English but “adverbs” is to some extent an internally heterogenous junk-drawer category for leftovers. So if Pullum is trying to reclassify some “adverbs” as “prepositions” maybe they were unusually vulnerable to such an effort.
“Fire” is the classic example (going back to Bloomfield hisownself, IIRC) of a word which is an underived noun in a vast number of languages from all over, but refers to neither a thing nor a person.
The fact that it doesn’t refer to a thing often strikes even linguists as paradoxical, an example of just how influential the error is on our traditional thinking about grammar.
(That’s before you get into the whole multitude of abstract and deverbal nouns etc which you find in most languages. Any purportedly universal theory which tries to relegate them to marginal status is simply risibly inadequate.)
There’s a related problem that not all word-classes for a given language can necessarily be defined with the same degree of rigor.
Very true. And as one of best of all linguists said: “All grammars leak.”
Complete rigour is an illusion, best left to Chomskyites.
I deny that “thing” has such a narrow semantic scope that fire is not a thing. Wiktionary’s sense 1 of “thing” (“That which is considered to exist as a separate entity, object, quality or concept.”) certainly seems spacious enough.
Now that I think of it, looking at Haspelmath’s first definition, none of the nouns in it — noun, morph, root, thing, object, person — denote what I would call an object or a person. You can get into defining what an object is, but then what have you gained?
JWB: same problem. This is just kicking it down the road. What are an object, a concept, an entity?
Semantics is tough. Syntactic categories are much more straightforward to define, even though they vary from language to language.
@Y: The words “object,” “concept,” and “entity” are all nouns. At least in English. But I literally don’t understand what Bloomfield’s aha point was supposed to be re fire. Essentially no one who has uncritically absorbed the Schoolhouse Rock account (“a noun is a person, place, or thing”) is unaware that there are plenty of frequently-uttered nouns whose referents are processes or abstractions rather than concrete physical objects you can deal with the way Dr. Johnson dealt with the large stone with which he refuted (to his own satisfaction) Bishop Berkeley. Rather than find the “person place or thing” account of nouns unsatisfactory, they simply assume a broad-scope meaning of “thing.”
@JWB:
The thing about “fire” is that it refers, primarily, to a process (supposedly the domain of verbs, in the traditional meaning-based classification.)
So what you are saying (obviously rightly) is that English “thing” may refer to an instance of a process. English, like the great majority of human languages, has vast numbers of nouns which do not refer to objects or people.
However, Haspelmath (which is who I was taking issue with) specifies that by “thing” he means only “object or person.”
“Fire” is neither. You actually can make a case that “fire” is not “really” a noun properly speaking, but the case has to be made at a truly breathtaking level of abstraction from the facts of the vast majority of individual languages, with wholly gratuitous semantic epicycles. This is obfuscation by generalisation at its most pointless and sterile.
Haspelmath’s definition also excludes the vast majority of English nouns (as you point out.)
@David E.: I can’t account for Haspelmath, although perhaps we should be charitable because I don’t think English is the man’s native language. “Fire” the mass noun is a thing just like “fire” the count noun (referring to individual instances) is a thing. Justice is a thing, as is injustice. The somewhat abstract “mankind” or “humanity” are things, just as individual men and/or humans are things. I agree that neither sort of fire is an “object” in the usual sense, although a given object may of course happen to be on fire.
@DE, are you proposing not to use ‘noun’ at all or do you have a formal definition applicable to all languages?
And how do you decide what to call a “noun” and what to call a “verb” and what to call an “object” when describing a language? I think you rely on semantics.
My point is that it’s a lot cleaner and easier to say that in English, an object, an entity, and a concept all take the indefinite article, and all can be the subject of a verb, e.g. walk together into a bar with syntactic impunity.
@JWB:
The trouble with the Schoolhouse Rock account (“a noun is a person, place, or thing”) that you cite is actually exactly this flexibility of “thing”: it could refer to anything at all, including actions, processes, states and quailities.
The definition does not in fact limit the set of words that could be called nouns at all: the illusion that it works is generated by the fact that most English nouns occur in the same kind of syntactic relationships as the actual noun “thing” (e.g. after articles, as verb subjects): the real way of setting up word classes has been piggybacked on without acknowledgement, using the speaker’s own knowledge of the language. It’s a con: the purported grammatical wisdom actually just parasitises the speaker’s own competence.
@DE, …formal definitions come into play later.
When you have already identified Klingon nouns, verbs and subjects (if it has something like “subject”) and faced a variety of ambiguous situations. But the initial identification will be based on semantics and nothing else.
are you proposing not to use ‘noun’ at all or do you have a formal definition applicable to all languages?
In order: No. And No. Why ever would I need such an impossible thing before being allowed to say “noun”?
And how do you decide what to call a “noun” and what to call a “verb” and what to call an “object” when describing a language? I think you rely on semantics.
This is language-specific, in principle, although in practice there is not nearly as much variation as Haspelmath implies: his method means that rarities can greatly skew the picture.
I do not rely on semantics. Neither do any of the proper descriptive field linguists. In fact, it is exactly because they do not that we know that languages vary in these matters, so that there are (for example) languages in which primary family relationship words are verbs, and languages in which number words are verbs, and other languages with only a dozen or so verbs altogether, in which most words corresponding to our verbs semantically are a kind of noun.
I may explain exactly why I said the Kusaal word for “because” can be a verb subject, but I’m currently on a very dodgy internet connexion away from home and laptop. You can find instances in the current version of my Kusaal grammar if you’re interested, though. But obviously this has nothing at all to do with the semantics.
@DE, I generally agree that semantical categories can’t be defined, and that if you want someone need to understand who’re “nouns” you need examples.
But it changes nothing.
You can’t even formulate your syntax until your listener understands who are nouns.
drasvi: fine. But once you start doing things like describing a grammar or comparing it to other grammars, formal definitions are a lot more tractable and precise.
I like the canonical typology approach, which is designed to handle exceptions to formal definitions, like, say, English nouns which accept no articles. It hasn’t gained much ground outside the Surrey group, and Haspelmath doesn’t like it either. I don’t know why.
Actually, the second of the Haspelmath examples you gave looks a lot more sensible, Y. I can see what he’s getting at there. Syntax, he’s OK: semantics, not so much. (But then, who is?) But it’s to do with a much more fine-grained issue than nouns vs verbs, too.
It reminds me that there was a confected row a few years back about linguists’ tendency to use “kill” as a paradigm verb when describing minority languages, on the grounds that it created an unwarranted (sometimes) impression of violent societies. It actually is true that “kill” features disproportionately often, but in truth this is largely because (a) practically every language (alas) has a verb “kill” and (b) the verb has some quite distinctive syntactic behaviour which is often quite similar cross-linguistically. It really is quite useful …
Anticipating drasvi’s triumphant response that this is to admit that semantics has to precede syntactic analysis, I don’t think it really does, even here. It’s not too hard to describe what it is about verbs like “kill” that is distinctive in ways that don’t need to refer to that particular instance, I reckon. There’s been masses of work on this. It’s more that “kill” handily exemplifies the pattern in a lot of unrelated languages.
“But once you start doing things like…”
@Y, I agree, as I said , “…formal definitions come into play later.”
But I don’t think it makes sense to disattach semantics from the form and I don’t think grammar can be treated as an one-sided relationship where the form shapes the meaning but not vice versa.
Yes, we can compose a grammar based on a text in unknown language. I mean, we certainly can say some things about such a text. Some sequences occur more often the other (except that our syntax does not deal with such things as frequencies:)) and then they don’t just “occur” but co-occur with other sequences.
If it is transliterated Semitic (itself a product of analysis), maybe we will even discover consonantal roots without knowing that they are consonantal.
But when we identify them as “roots”, I think we already are making a semantical claim.
Because we have compared them to roots in other languages – and for us a “root” is a semantical category.
And normally that’s not what we do. Normally we either desperately are trying to figure what hoo loo oo means or just ask the speaker to translate it. We name parts of speech when we already know that it means “I love Ssoo” and that hoo is used somewhat similarly to English “I” and Ssoo (or oo in some positions) is how they call a certain woman.
And if someone is going to claim that
(a) he ignores this knowlege when writing grammars of languages he speaks
(b) he is nevertheless unable to write a grammar of a language he does not understand
I will assume he is just too sleepy or something.
On the other hand, drasvi, the last thing I want to do is go full Chomsky and claim that syntax is its own realm quite separate from meaning. I think the whole shebang is there to encode meaning, which is therefore prior to syntax in every way, and that meaning also intimately affects syntax in detail.
If that’s what you meant, we are once again in furious agreement.
(My misgivings about the Way of the Haspelmath are based on the way he brings in semantics, not about thinking that semantics is not of huge significance for grammar. The same goes for the mistaken use of semantic criteria for dividing nouns from verbs in traditional English grammar. Semantics does indeed play a key role in English grammar. But not that role.)
“I notice that in drasvi’s (probably incomplete) snippet on Pullum’s definition of “subject”, he seems to invoke the language-specific fact that English verbs agree in number with their subjects. ”
@DE, there is a paragraph “Subjects”, and I think my snipped of the description within this paragraph is more or less complete. A half of the paragraph is discussion of how definitions in traditional books are useless, then the line I quoted, then ….”… is that it often requires a verb to change its form: you have to say Your parcel has arrived (singular parcel so we need has), but Your parcels have arrived (plural parcels so the verb must be have). That is called agreement of the subject with the verb.”
link
But he easily may have a longer text dedicated to those elsewhere. Please note that his goal – like that of teachers of foreign langauges – is explaining something esle. Not just taxonomy.
He understandably tries not to flood readers with definitions, but he warned that he assumes that readers are not “necessarily acquainted with all the technical terms” and that he will explain the ones he needs “simply, as and when they come up”.
Just wondering:
Am I the only who sees ‘Because (Prep)’ over and over again in the Recent Comments list and can’t help humming the Wizard of Oz tune “Because, because, because, because, because, because of the wonderful things he does”? He being LanguageHat, of course.
A nice example in Kusaal is the presence or absence of tense marking, which is certainly affected by purely structural considerations, but also highly sensitive to meaning: e.g. clauses in narrative are usually tense marked unless they are both (a) introduced by ka (a formal feature) and (b) express an event which happened just after the last event mentioned, not an aside, flashback, description or the like (a semantic feature.)
But really, fancy examples are scarcely needed. Why is that noun plural? Well, it may have something to do with the fact that it is referring to more than one thing … let me consult Syntactic Structures …
A proposed language universal:
In every language, the word class (as defined by language-specific syntactic co-occurrence patterns; and possibly also by morphological behaviour) which includes all or most words for people and objects also includes many words which refer to neither persons nor objects.
(Or: Haspelmath’s characterisation of nouns is universally wrong.)
In a language with accusative alignment, you can define subject and object purely syntactically. In a language with active-stative alignment, you can’t treat the arguments purely abstractly, and you need to bring semantics in.
DE: I would also add to the definition of the noun category something to exclude from it things that aren’t nouns. If a language doesn’t distinguish syntactically between ‘tree’ and ‘kill’. perhaps it doesn’t have such a thing as a noun category.
recents sweep! (of oz)
A proposed language universal:
I don’t think Haspelmath would disagree. The question that he’s worried about (along with Lazard) is: what possible justification can there be for saying a word class identified by formal internal criteria in one language is “the same” word class as one identified in another language on the basks of quite different formal internal criteria in another? How can we justify setting up a cross-linguistic category of “nouns” in the first place? There are a couple of approaches to that, but I doubt it can be using syntax alone.
Lameen: Quite right, but his definition tries to cover everything and fails. I still think that language-internally, a syntactic definition is generally much easier to set up. So if you want a universal definition, perhaps David Eddyshaw’s hybrid approach is best: within each language, start with unambiguous nounish things, like ‘dog’ or ‘chair’, and then generalize to everything that morphologically/syntactically looks like them, including tough ones like ‘fire’, ‘party’, ‘nonexistence’, etc. After all, the things typologists busy themselves with comparing are the morphological and syntactic exponents of meanings, not the meanings themselves.
Has anyone tried to define (and separate) nouns, verbs etc. based on morphological states, eg.,
Noun: 1: AGENT, PATIENT, 2: SINGLE, JOINT
Verb: 1: PRESENT , OTHER; 2: TRUE, FALSE; 3: SINGLE, JOINT
Adjective: 1: SINGLE, JOINT, 2: MORE , LESS?
This would be analogous to certain areas of mathematics where the inverse transformation or function is easier to define briefly and clearly.
Lameen, thanks for bringing up Lazard. I’d heard of him but didn’t know much about him. This paper, in particular, tries to untangle the meaning of ‘subject’ (which started this discussion).
In a language with accusative alignment, you can define subject and object purely syntactically. In a language with active-stative alignment, you can’t treat the arguments purely abstractly, and you need to bring semantics in.
Good example. And in general, I think trying to define “subject” cross-linguistically by purely formal universal criteria is a mug’s game. “Subject” is a much more language-individual notion than “noun.” (Even.)
But it’s also completely impossible to give a universal semantic definition of “subject”, of course.
In English, subjects are a real rag-bag of different roles semantically, and the only thing that really unites them is the syntax; other languages allocate those roles to quite different syntactic categories.
However, to conclude from all that “subject” is not a useful notion in typology at all would be extremely counterproductive. Hard cases make bad law, as the lawyers say. (Auden opposes this to “the poet’s riposte”, “who generalises is lost”, but I think the ideas are complementary.)
“we are once again in furious agreement.”
Once again:)
@DE, i was confused by:
“I do not rely on semantics. Neither do any of the proper descriptive field linguists.”
I think we begin from English translations (it can be “Russian” and it can be a language whose speakers don’t have a common language with you) of certain words and utterances and then forming some idea of what are “nouns” , “verbs” and “objects” in this language. Then, when we know this language well, this initial idea can be expanded, refined or in some cases changed. Particularly serious changes happen with subjects: you can discover that voices in the language don’t work exactly as in English and classify your “objects” as “subjects” or the language’s alignment can differ from your expectations (you can even discover “alignment”). If at that stage you believe that your new criteria have nothing to do with semantics – you are mistaken OR you are seriously claiming that you can do PoS classification in a text in a lnaguage you don’t know at all.
“Subject” is a much more language-individual notion than “noun.”
Yes, but I can’t come up with any cross-linguistical formal criterion for nouns and other PoS.
Semantically it is possible to say something.
“… this initial idea can be expanded, refined or in some cases changed.” – as for semantics at this stage, compare the following Russian constructions. Russian has something similar to English it-constructions as in ‘it’s sunny”, but we also use for feelings and with infinitives.
So
to-me [it’s] boring/good/… “I’m bored, I feel good, …”
to-me [it] wants-itself to-sleep…
me nausea-s “I feel nausea”
You have a choice, whether to speak about dative and accusative subjects or treat “me.ACC” as direct object.
______
The traditional approach to PoS in Russian is that ideally a part of speech is a more or less well-defined cloud semantically, morphologically and syntactically.
Premature generalisation is the root of all evil …
Premature generalisation is the root of all evil …
And mature generalisations are the flowers of evil.
In order to avoid both extremes, linguists devote their energies to the investigation of stems.
Moderation alarm for my last comment ! I suspect that the word “m*a*t*u*r*e” triggered a pornography response by Akismet. M*a*t*u*r*e woman seeks toyboy.
It’s rescued, you naughty boy!
Stems are all very well, but life is unfulfilling without opportunities for conjugation. And with only bare stems, you cannot have copulas.
Is this going to be all puns now? *gets up and leaves*
*eats, shoots*
So you’re declining, JF?
(Sounds like he doesn’t want to stay for the termination.)
Should have known that Pullum is perfectly capable of defending himself without any help:
https://www.politybooks.com/blog-detail/stephen-poole-gives-grammar-a-glance-over-breakfast
WP links to a somewhat unenthusiastic review (by Alistair Campbell, no less, who certainly knows whereof he speaks, whatever else) of one of the reviewer’s own works:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/feb/11/highereducation.alistaircampbell
Poole evidently regards himself as an expert on grammar, a view presumably shared by the editor who thought he was a suitable person to review Pullum’s work. In fact, he seems to belong to the political wing of the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves brigade. He may himself have asked to review the work, so that he could do a hatchet job. I note that his quotations are almost all from the introduction and the conclusion of Pulum’s book (not that that is exactly rare among lazy reviewers.)
Sadly, the Amazon preview of Pullum’s book includes only the introduction, but this bit struck me as likely to interest Hat:
Amazon UK currently boasts a single, two-star rating unaccompanied by any actual review, presumably by someone mortally offended by the very concept of the book. Like Poole …
..
A special acknowledgment goes to the copy editor
Very nice! I got an ack like that on one of the books I edited, and it made up for a lot of the low pay and unrewarding work. Good for appreciative authors!
On this side of the Atlantic, I can apparently see more of Pullum’s new book in Amazon’s preview feature than David Eddyshaw can. Inter alia, I can see the glossary, in which Pullum defines “noun” as “word of the class whose members often name types of things or stuff.” Would those who dispute whether fire is a “thing” accept it as a “stuff”?
I imagine that this reflects the sort of hybrid approach identified by Y above: from a language-internal point of view, you can’t define “noun” semantically, but once you have defined the class using formal criteria, it turns out tthat its members often include types of things or stuff. From a cross-linguistic standpoint, this semantic fact (which is a contingent finding, not a tautological matter true by definition} can be used to justify calling such formal classes “noun” (rather than “verb” or “Fred.”)
The interesting thing typologically is then the similarities and differences between the formal criteria that work in each individual language to demarcate this class. Every language appears to have a class of this kind, and as an empirical fact, the formal similarities seem always to outweigh the differences. This is an actual discovery (or hypothesis) about human language: if you attempt to jump the gun by making it (somehow) a consequence of the very definition of “noun”, you will never be able to make the discovery.
Trying (à la Haspelmath) to distill a single definition that can be used for any arbitrary language to identify “nouns” is putting the cart before the horse, and attributing magical properties to generalisations.
I think if we have a reason at all to call nouns in different languages nouns there is nothing wrong with formulating it…
I’ve no objection to generalisations, so long as they don’t start giving themselves airs and thinking that they outrank mere particulars.
Fine is e.g.
‘Most, probably all, languages, have a large open word class, definable by language-specific syntactic and sometimes morphological common features, which contains most or all words referring to people and everyday objects. Where it exists, such a class will be called the “noun” word class.’ (Note the shameless reference to semantics. I’m perfectly fine with that – in this cross-linguistic typological context.)
Not fine is e.g.
”Cross-linguistically a noun can be defined as …’
Neither is the statement ‘it is impossible to define “noun” cross-linguistically’; this reflects just the same misconception about the status of generalisations. They are not exceptionless rules of behaviour, or anything existing in some Platonic realm. They are abstractions away from particulars, which they cannot ever encompass completely.
There are also a host of problems with the apparently harmless “referring to people and everyday objects.” It is unclear on a philosophical level how languages actually “refer” to anything in the real world, but even if one refuses to open that can of worms, there are (for example) languages in which the primary words for family relationships (surely the most prototypical of words referring to people) are verbs: “Luke, I father you.” The idea that semantics can float free as a sort of cross-linguistic metalanguage is naive.
“I’m perfectly fine with that – in this cross-linguistic typological context.”
DE, Russian verbs have a certian analytical form.
When a verb is prefixed, this form usually requires a suffix -iv(a)- (except pokupat’).
Now with semantics:
stem-1s is present for prefixless verbs and future for prefixed verbs.
You don’t need present for prefixed verbs: they are perfective. But prefixes have their own semantics. E.g. perechitat’ “re-read” (one of them (for chitat’ it is pro-) is commonly used and hardly means much apart of the usual resultative semantics of the perfective).
When you need imperfective with this semantics you add -iv(a)-.
PS I mean: I dopn’t understand what is the problem with semantics in grammar of ONE language (wihout cross-linguistical comparison). It is a part of the system – as in the example above.
As I understand, you and Pullum claim that it is not a part of the system of parts of speech (though it is certainly the motivation for them…. in some sense. The process can be bi-directional). I dunno. Maybe. Or maybe PoS are not a “system” on their own, but merely parts of various systems.
But you also claim classifications that take semantics into account are is harmful and I don’t understand why.
They are not very useful anyway, semantics or not. I mean: just “having some labels” is useful (labels have a the communicative function) but I’m not sure if subtle difference between two classification affects anything apart of
(a) how intuitive it for the user / schoolchild
(b) how it works with a given description/theory of grammar (out of many). Yes, when Syntax rules as it does in English linguistics, presumably syntactic definitions will work better. I don’t know what works better for functionalists.
As I said, drasvi, I also have no trouble whatsoever in saying that semantics feeds into syntax and morphology – obviously it does, what with the whole system being there to encode meaning in sound (or whatever relevant medium.)
All that I have been maintaining is that you cannot distinguish between English nouns and verbs as word classes just on the basis of semantic criteria (as traditional English grammar attempts to do.) I don’t actually know of any language in which this can be done, and actually suspect that this is a linguistic universal (though that is an empirical question, and might be refuted by one of the many languages I know nothing about at all,)
On your specific example of Russian aspect: Kusaal, just like Russian, had a pervasive fundamental distinction between perfective and imperfective in the verbal system. There are certainly enough similarities to make it entirely reasonable to use the same labels for both. But there are also many differences in the exact semantics, and any attempt to lump the two systems together on the basis of the similarities does violence to the facts in each language.
@DE, I can’t decipher Pullum’s attacks on “traditional” grammars. He calls things like “doing words” useless… and then offers something very similar, cf. JWB’s quote.
What is the point of calling them useless?
‘… the illusion that it works is generated by the fact that most English nouns occur in the same kind of syntactic relationships as the actual noun “thing” ‘
I think you’re missing something here.
I think functionally they can be robust enough, and a verb simply does not mean same thing as its v.n.
Your hypothesis that all differences are solely due their different syntactic behaviour is a hypothesis. (and an unlikely one I think).
Pullum is specifically objecting to the attempt to define verbs as “doing words.” Verbs, defined properly, often are “doing words”, but that is not the issue.
Your hypothesis that all differences are solely due their different syntactic behaviour is a hypothesis.
I specifically said that I did not entertain this hypothesis. Several times. As I have repeatedly said, I (and Pullum) are merely claiming that some differences cannot be explained by semantics, in the way that traditional English grammar tries to do. This is not a novel point, and does not originate with either me or Pullum. This is mainstream scientific linguistics, and if you don’t understand it you need to read up on it.
there are (for example) languages in which the primary words for family relationships (surely the most prototypical of words referring to people) are verbs: “Luke, I father you.”
So in a language like that, how do you say “My father is left-handed”? Might there be a noun, like “The man who fathers me left-hands”? Might it just be verbs, like “Fathers-me left-hahds”?
Missed this: there are (for example) languages in which the primary words for family relationships (surely the most prototypical of words referring to people) are verbs: “Luke, I father you.”
Like English, though the relational verb to fath has fallen out of fashion — as have to moth, to broth, to sist, and to daught.
“I specifically said that I did not entertain this hypothesis.”
“This is mainstream scientific linguistics, and if you don’t understand it you need to read up on it.”
DE: could you please read your own answer to JWB here:
https://languagehat.com/because-prep/#comment-4612305
(and no, such hypotheses about contents of human brains, like “some nouns are semantically inditinguishable from verbs in our heads” – are only part of mainstream science in that Chomsky is mainstream. Language faculty and so on. Of course there is psycholinguistics etc. but first WE are poorly acquinted with such literature and second it is impossible to test a hypothesis that two things are “indistinguishable”).
Yes, I understand that you mean that there are some unambigous nouns – that is, nouns that can’t be meaningfully classified otherwise – whose nounhood can only be determined by syntax and not semantics.
And I call this a “hypothesis”.
Also you what you wrote is a stronger claim.
.So in a language like that, how do you say “My father is left-handed”?
“He who fathers me is left-handed” (or, if the language doesn’t do relative clauses, just “He fathers me, and he is left-handed.)
The Australian language Bininj Gun-wok doesn’t do this, but has an even better trivalent system in which the word you use depends not only on who you are and who the relative is, but also on your relationship to the person you’re talking to.
Me: Like English, though the relational verb to fath has fallen out of fashion
It’s much the same in German, with an interesting exception. The meaning of the verb zu schweigen has developed, but the semantic connection to the surviving derivatives of its agent noun is still transparent.
“Pullum is specifically objecting to the attempt to define verbs as “doing words.””
Of course not. If Pullum calls it “definition” it does not make it a definition.
“Doing words” is not a definition. lughat aḍ-ḍād is not a definition either.
There is a simple pedagogical concern: you need children to understand wtf you’re speaking about and attach the new word to something. Perhaps school teachers ALSO offer a definition, but what Pullum attacked is exactly “doing words”.
Similarly his description of subject is not a definition either even if words “how it should be defined” refer to this paragraph.
Similarly you did not object to JWB’s ‘Pullum defines “noun” as “word of the class whose members often name types of things or stuff.”‘ even though it is not a definition.
Kusaal (alas) doesn’t do this thing with family relationship words either, but it does have, for example, beside kpɛɛm “elder” the relational verb kpɛɛm “be older than”, as in e.g. M kpɛɛmʋf “I’m older than you.”
I’m not sure whether the noun is derived from the verb or vice versa; possibly the question itself is misconceived.. The language has a whole series of verb/nominal pairs like this, but the nominal in such cases is usually an adjective. They probably reflect a proto-Oti-Volta system in which there actually were no true adjectives, only stative verbs expressing qualities.
Anyway: whatever Pullum meant I think I’m not the only reader who after reading his attack on “doing words” and then his own similar description or definition is perplexed and can’t understand why when others do it it is “worthless” and when the author does the same it is worth publication.
@Trond:
(Tee hee!)
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schwiegen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech
(See “Australia.”)
DE, also I think you simply didn’t understand me.
And that’s unsurprising because “semantics” and its role is absolutely confusing matter.
No need to yell. Misunderstandings are expected.
I think you accept that the referent of “cup” is nominoid or onomoid or whatever we call it. And you assume that once there is a syntactic class of “nouns” with defined formal traits, it sucks in certain things that are not anyhow nominoid. Because syntax.
This is how I understand your repeated assurance of importance of semantics… with that comment to JWB (unless you simply disagree with wrote in that comment).
And I’m not confident that you are right in that particular comment. Even though you recognise importance of semantics.
@drasvi: I don’t know what definitions they teach in Russian grammar classes, but in German grammar classes, in my times, we were taught definitions like “nouns are things and verbs are actions”. There even is a native terminology for elementary school where “noun” is Dingwort / Sachwort “thing-word” and “verb” is Tuwort “do-word”. And most people, who don’t study linguistics, go to their graves not knowing that these are, at best, approximate heuristics and not sufficient as definitions. I haven’t read the Pullum book, but based on the quotes that idea, that this traditional semantic school grammar definition is a sufficient definition, is what Pulluum denies, and instead he explains that you can sufficiently define parts of speech only by their syntactic roles.
@DE: Thanks for answering my question on the verb “father”.
@TE 🙂
@Hans, thank you.
Do you mean that the problem is NOT “doing words” but that teachers do not give any definition?
The problem is that the teachers treat “verbs are doing words” as a sufficient definition. I understand that going into all details and problems would probably be too much for elementary school kids, but at least in my experience, language instruction at school never moves beyond that first definition of “nouns describe things, verbs describe actions”, even in the higher grades. So while Pullum uses a similar heuristic as a first step (i guess also because he knows that this is something lay readers are familiar with from school), he also needs to make it clear that this is neither a rigorous nor sufficient definition.
Yes: Pullum is not talking about teaching the rudiments of grammar to elementary students. He’s trying to explain English grammar properly to adults who have never even been taught the basics correctly.
Moreover, even in the elementary school context, starting by teaching falsehoods is not exactly brilliant paedagogy anyhow.
Even a bright elementary school student will notice that the verbs in e.g.
“She seems sad.”
“i feel anxious.”
“He’s caught a cold.”
have nothing to do with “doing” anything at all. They are liable (if they care at all} to conclude that this whole business of “grammar” is mere flimflam, with no real connexion to speech or writing at all, and they will in later life have no defence against the rubbish which purports to give grammatical advice to adults, itself based on total ignorance of how language really functions.
Generations of teaching this sort of thing in school have led to a lay public who are not just ignorant of how language works, but have been actively immunised against real understanding. It’s as if elementary schools were still teaching about phlogiston, and books about oxygen received hostile ad hominem reviews in the Guardian, with approving mention of the comforting and familiar phlogistonic classics.
‘The problem is that the teachers treat “verbs are doing words” as a sufficient definition.‘
@Hans, it would be helpful to be specific as to whether the problem is
(a) – school does not offer children a definition
(b) – school offers children the label “doing words”.
Theoretically (c) is also possible:
(c) – school offers children the label “doing words” and then treats this label as a definition. Not only it offers nothing else (which is our version (a)!!!) but it insists on applying it formally.
But (c) is difficult to imagine.
I’m not sure for example, if I understand you correctly. I asked you if (a) is the case but you repeated a formulation close to (c) (treat as …).
But the label “doing words” is markedly infomal!! It can’t even be “applied”, formally or not, it has the form of a name or label – even if telling one.
But perhpas what you mean is still either (a), namely they
(1) offer the lable “doing words” – which is per se might not be bad.
(2) offer nothign better – which is what we want to change
(3) as result children develop misconceptions.
or you may mean both (a) and (b), namely they
(1) offer the label “doing words” – which is per se misleading, which is what we want to change and replace with somethign less misleading.
(2) offer nothing better – which is also what we want to change.
Without this analysis (when everyting is mixed up in a claim a single “teachers treat it as”) it is very difficult to understand what exactly is the problem and everything sounds more like we are unsatisfied with the result of school education, but have no idea what actions of teachers cause it.
P.S. I refuse to take “doing words” as a definition, I beleive this markedly informal label makes it entirely clear that it is NOT a definition. Just as “SUV” does NOT imply and is NOT understood by anyone as “not to be driven in a city or countryside”. But SUV is not informal and in principle could mean something like that. “Doing words” is informal.
P.P.S. back to Pullum, what he said reads as neither a, nor as b nor c.
You said you analysed his opinion based on quotes, but the only words quoted from his rant were “doing words” and “worthless”.
“Worthless” means that “doing words” simply gives nothing to children and should not be uttered not because it is harmful but beacase to the same effect teachers could abstain from explanations. Which is perplexing because Pullum offers same description of nouns and verbs
If the idea is that it is insufficient (a), and the problem is not as much this label but contents of the course as a whole, his idea would be must clearer if he
– avoided the word “worthless” and said “insufficient”
– criticised not the label but the fact that nothing else is offered.
P.P.P.S. sorry for such a long comment about this detail (which perhaps is not really worthy of it):/
As I said, school offers the definition “nouns are things* and verbs are actions”. This is mentally supported by them being called “Thing words” and “Do words” in elementary school instruction. Based on that, teachers then set tasks like “underline nouns blue and verbs green in this text”. So I guess that would be d), school offers a label and a definition, both based on semantics, and never move beyond that.
(*or Gegenstände “objects” in higher grades)
“Worthless” means that “doing words” simply gives nothing to children and should not be uttered not because it is harmful but beacase to the same effect teachers could abstain from explanations. Which is perplexing because Pullum offers same description of nouns and verbs
I suspect that you take him too literally here – my hunch is that he just uses strong language to drive home the point to lay readers that the semantic definition they remember from school is not up to the task of sufficiently and rigorously determining whether a specific word is a noun or a verb. But I haven’t read the book, and I don’t think I’ll have tome to read it in the foreseeable future.
@Hans, thanks.
I think “doing words” is totally good. And I think, like Pullum’s descrpition, it does proclaim its own imprecision loudly enough.
I don’t know whether it is good or bad if they don’t tell more.
But of course if school also pretends that “nouns are things” is a scientific definition, that is wrong. Elementary school teachers do this: they often simply lie to children (because of some pedagogical myths).
___
However:
It should be understood that a child will learn who are nouns from exmaples (creating a definition of her own). Some heuristics can be added on top of that. Their role is going to be supportive and offering children an exhaustive definition is hardly an option (irrespectively of whether it is semantical, morphological or syntactical).
Accrodingly the part about green and blue per se is NOT an attempt to force students to apply any definition.
They are liable (if they care at all} to conclude that this whole business of “grammar” is mere flimflam, with no real connexion to speech or writing at all, and they will in later life have no defence against the rubbish which purports to give grammatical advice to adults, itself based on total ignorance of how language really functions.
However, many of them do get pretty good at identifying nouns in English. On the other hand, some may take “Faith is a verb” (mentioned above) literally. By the way, did that trope start with Buckminster Fuller’s “God is a verb”?
Generations of teaching this sort of thing in school have led to a lay public who are not just ignorant of how language works, but have been actively immunised against real understanding. It’s as if elementary schools were still teaching about phlogiston, and books about oxygen received hostile ad hominem reviews in the Guardian, with approving mention of the comforting and familiar phlogistonic classics.
Is that a good analogy, or is it more like people who learn arithmetic without ever hearing of Peano’s axioms, or people who learn Newtonian physics but are only vaguely aware of quantum mechanics and relativity?
people who learn arithmetic without ever hearing of Peano’s axioms
Speaking of, I learned two days ago that Peano published some in Italian, but mostly in Latino Sine Flexione, which he co-invented.
@JF:
No, “a verb is a doing word” gives wrong answers even in simple everyday cases, so it is more like teaching children that five times seven is forty. It is only less damaging because no child actually needs formal grammar teaching in order to speak their L1 correctly.
The characterisation of nouns as “thing” words can work, for the reasons we discussed above: although it is wholly misguided to define nouns by the meaning of “thing”, children may in fact learn (no thanks to the teacher) to leverage their own Sprachgefühl and recognise nouns fairly accurately from their syntactic behaviour being like “thing” – appearing in similar constructions. “Thing” can work as a paradigm noun (up to a point), but not for the reason stated.
This won’t work with “do” and verbs, because “do” not only doesn’t have a vague enough meaning to include even common English verbs (like “seem”) but is also very atypical indeed synctactically in English. Agree you not?
If you extend “doing” to states of mind, or to mental representations of “things”, that covers more ground, like “forget”. Then there are stative verbs, which need a special dispensation. “Seem” belongs to both of the above. Also, verbs with baked-in negation, like Russian нет.
Well, if we’re trying to include Russian, cross-linguistically this doesn’t work in the least as a way of characterising verbs. Cf Kusaal gim “be short”, as in O gim. “She is short.” This is an unequivocal verb, taking tense markers and being negated just like any other verb. It’s not even morphologically distinct from dynamic verbs: it belongs to the same conjugation as e,g. zanl “carry in the hands.”
It really doesn’t work even in English. “Undergo” …
Ha! That’s great.
…that’s not a verb…?
@DM, it is not Pullum who invented it, but I don’t like “categories”.
It is a word I frequently use in Russian and English (in the sense just “categories”, as in WP:Grammatical_relations: “…, typified by the traditional categories of subject and object,”).
It will be simply confusing if “categories” (without an attribute) will also refer to parts of speech.
It is especially confusing because some call them “grammatical categories”, cf. WP:Part_of_speech: “In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class[1] or grammatical category[2]) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties.“, while others call so tense aspect mood case gender number etc.
Also I just described parts of speech as “parts of largers systems” without slightest intent to object to Pullum and without realising that I repeat a part of their name.
…that’s not a verb…?
A copula, then? Might it not be a verb, however irregular, by some analysis? Weaselnary calls it “predicative”.
To the above, about “category”:
They occasionaly insert in school curriculum parts of speech named “modal words” and “category of state/words of the category of state”. Simultaneously with that universities decide that they’re unnecessary and exclude them from courses:) Then
they exclude them from school curriculum and simultaneously with that university courses decide that they’re necessary and include them.
So, “[words of the] category of state” were introduced in Russian by a linguist Scherba in 20s, and they’re also called “predicatives”.
But those are different.
Words coiciding in form with short neuter adjectives (and adverbs) which recemble English constructions “it’s sunny” but can be used with something like “to-me” and “by you”.
To-me [it’s] good.
By you [it’s] warm. (~your house/tent/whatever-it-is is warm, I am/feel warm in your house)
To-me [it’s] shameful (~I’m ashamed)
To-me [it’s] shameful such-thing to-do
Also some nouns:
to-me [it’s] sin to….
Also some negative pronouns like некуда and certain modal words (not in the sense of “modal words” mentioned above – another horrible name like “category”) like можно (~you may/can, one may/can)
Never mind about the copulas. Scratch that.
I am thinking of нет as a verb because it syntactically behaves like one: it has an argument, and it encodes temporal information (only the present tense, as it happens).
I have in mind the sense “doesn’t exist”, not “doesn’t have”, so as not to complicate things too much.
Y, (no for нет, a slightly different meaning)
“Under window mattress, beside with it on floor computer, on wall large mirror in all wall.
More in room not-ever-of-what no, even of-curtains on window”
Of course I also can say
“on window no of-curtains”
or
“of-curtains no”
Not sure what encodes present here:) Is zero a “doing word”?
If есть is a verb and нет its antonym, isn’t that a verb also?
I would have analysed nyet in this usage as [NEGATIVE PARTICLE] + [0] + [3RD PERSON PRESENT ENDING], where [0] is the missing verb for “to have”. This would be somewhat parallel to “il n’y a pas” in French.
Is есть still the verb it once was? It no longer inflects for number and is only used for emphasis. Maybe the analogy to нет has turned into some kind of emphatic *handwave* particle.
@DE:
I don’t agree, because I don’t think people have much trouble identifying verbs, including “seem”. I must say I was told verbs were “action words”, not “doing words”, but I don’t see why would it make a difference. Probably immediately after we got that definition, we were given examples of verbs, and that’s where the real learning happened. When people learn that verbs are “doing words”, I doubt they reason from the syntax or morphology of “do”. The ability of “do” to replace a verb might help. “It seems that way.” “Yes, it does.”
I’m sure there have been proposals for when and how to introduce grammar to children in ways that agree with the linguistics of the time. Those might be interesting to see, though not worth anyone taking any trouble on my account.
‘Traditional grammars use the rather strange term “parts of speech,” which I will avoid. They’re not parts of anything, and they have nothing specifically to do with speech; apart from that, it’s a great name.’
“Perfect” has nothing to do with perfection, “tense” has nothing to do with tension, “grammar” isn’t limited to writing. I don’t see that “parts of speech” is any worse.
So: is “is” a verb?
It has nothimg to so with actions, and can’t be replaced by “do” [incidentally. “do” as a proverb, which is what you’re referencing, has quite different syntax from “do” in the sense “perform an action”: the case is not parallel to “thing.”]
I agree that chidren can and do learn despite bad teaching; however, that does not justify bad teaching,
Children have to learn that “be” is exceptional in other ways. (And there are other verbs that can’t be replaced by “do”, namely the auxiliary verbs, or as I was taught, “helping verbs”.)
Again, I doubt very much that the different syntax of “do” as a pro-verb has anything to do with my speculation that its being a pro-verb might make “A verb is a doing word” more effective than it would be otherwise. Few children think like linguists. I imagine you’d like more children to be taught to start thinking like linguists earlier, just as mathematicians want the analogous thing for math, etc., and they all sound good to me, if they can be accomplished.
I’m wondering whether the best way to introduce parts of speech to children is by examples, without definitions.
Is “proverb” like “unionized” in that the way a person pronounces it tells you about their academic background?
Indeed, I should have written “pro-verb.” English is comparatively unusual in having such a thing.
My own academic background is in surgery. We say “abdomen” wrong, too.
Well, Welsh I think makes clear that it is a Strange verb.
I don’t think it makes much sense to discuss what part of speech it is.
Besides their uncommon meaning for “unionized”, chemists have two pronunciations for unrelated words spelled “periodic”. Admittedly, periodic acid comes up in conversation a lot less than the periodic table.
I think there’s a strong prima facie case that “is” is not a member of the same word class as, say, “run”. Different syntax (“he is often in the park” vs. “he often runs in the park”); more complicated morphology (since when do English verbs have a distinct 1sg form?); no theta role assignment… It’s certainly a different subclass from normal verbs, at least.
In Korandje, there are precisely two verbs (?) that stand out as not taking subject agreement markers after a noun phrase subject: bå “exist” and bǝɣ “want”.
I’d say that нет is a form of быть “to be”: negative existential present tense. After all, it’s in a paradigmatic relationship with other forms of быть – its past is не было, its future is не будет.
In Kusaal, aen “be something/somehow” is actually a pretty well-behaved verb, though the standard orthography muddies the waters by writing it solid with the focus particle that usually (though not invariably) follows it in positive indicative use in main clauses, and by actually writing regular sandhi changes (like monophthongisation) which are generally ignored in the standard orthography with other verbs.
It only has an imperfective aspect, but Kusaal actually has about seventy verbs like that. Its object has a predicative sense (which licences things like noun phrases headed by adjectives, not allowed otherwise), but again that can also happen with other verbs.
So you don’t really need a distinct “copula” category in Kusaal, though you do in some of its relatives. (I think. Most of the grammars of Oti-Volta languages don’t go very deeply into things like this,)
Any news on your Korandje grammar, Lameen?
@Hans, Y, yes, it is a part of a paradigm.
What I question is only accuracy of the claim that it expresses present.
If present of “it is big” is “it big”, then maybe simplification of a claim ‘“[noun] will be [adjective]” expresses future when said in such and such context with such intonation‘ to ‘”will be” expresses future” is not entriely correct.
I’m wondering whether the best way to introduce parts of speech to children is by examples, without definitions
It seems to me that it would be simple enough to say to children that a verb is word that can go in the blanks in
“He/she/it wants to/hates to X ..”
and also in
“He/she/it likes/hates Xing …”
(Where the … is whatever object or complement you need to make the whole thing grammatical.)
You can take advantage of the fact that every single English verb forms the gerund/participle in exactly the same way (there is no such handy form for nouns, alas,) And the only verbs which don’t fit in these frames are the modal auxiliaries, which as you rightly say, will need special treatment anyway.
There’s nothing special about these exact frames, and you could encourage the children to invent their own. The essential point you’re trying to convey is that it’s all about how words fit together (or not) in sentences. You could even get the more inquisitive to see what the words that fit in these gaps have in common (or not) when it comes meaning, You know, encourage them to think about grammar …
I’m no schoolteacher (I can’t even write a teaching grammar of Kusaal) but I don’t think proposals along these lines would be unreasonably difficult for a decent teacher. They do much harder stuff than that.
@ de
Intransitive (fish, run) does not need …, so you get two lessons for the price of one.
“I’m wondering whether the best way to introduce parts of speech to children is by examples, without definitions”
@Jerry, DE,
actually I typed “children/we can only learn such things from examples” twice (only to delete it).
These “examples” can take the form of an actual PoS marked text or of grammatical descriptions with variables. DE’s “fill in the blanks” is something in-between (the subject and object are represented by actual words).
Of course actual exmaples are btter than “descriptions”, but “descriptions” are nevertheless the very same examples, just in a form impenetrable for beginners.
Why I deleted it: it has little to do what should also be said when these examples are offered (which is the subject of our holy war).
I rememebered how i learned Metapost.
I read this:
http://zoonek.free.fr/LaTeX/Metapost/metapost.html
Maybe 100 or more examples, not everything. I don’t remember. It took a hour or a half, something like that – actually mostly I did it in a metro train. And wonderfully, after this I actually could do everything contained in these examples.
“…take advantage of the fact that every single English verb forms the gerund/participle in exactly the same way”
Usually referred to as “the gerund” by English speakers and the ING-form in Russian English textbooks.
In Russian they correspond to three forms:
1. v.n. (irregular and treated as a stand-alone word and not part of the paradigm)
2. present active participle (very bookish and the form is Slavonic. The similar Russian form is used in addjectives).
3. деепричастие, variously translated as participial adverb, adverbial participle, transgressive, converb.
Or four if we count the continuous aspect.
Any news on your Korandje grammar, Lameen?
Not coming along nearly as well as your Kusaal grammar, but I just finished a chapter on auxiliary verbs (for a project on complex predicates) that should slot in nicely.
@Y, you wrote about a specific (but not too common…) meaning.
My examples (“under window mattress, on wall large mirror“) are different: whether a fragment of the world, the Topic (here “under window”, “on wall”), includes what is the Comment.
The fragment is not always geometrical:
“by me tomorrow exams”
“by me tomorrow no classes, we can meet!”
Here “have” is employed in English (so that “I” is the Subject… and thus I assume the Topic).
Also you can “have” a shower or meal but in Russian we “accept” showers (English “to take a shower”) and “eat”.
We usually have a zero here unless we mean possession/having at our disposal (in that case it can be zero e.g. in “you came on foot?” “no, by me car”: this means “what I have is a car rather than a bicycle” and not “I have a car rather than not”).
But back to mattresses, there is a construction for this in English as well.
“There is a mattress under the window”
and not
“Under the window is a mattress”
or
“A mattress is under the window”. I suppose “in English” and “under the window” are topics as well.
All of this is somewhat anomalous. In Russian the negative construction is anomalous too. Cf.
“Of-Mary and of-Peter there not was.NEUT” (when listing guests at a party).
I think
“Mary and Peter there not were” is also possible when we are discussing them rather than the list of guests.
So there are two different constructions (one, perhaps, with neuter “it”).
In present only the genetive consturction is possible
“Of-Mary here no”
and the form is synchronously unanalisable.
Also in Russian we do not say “SVO”. We say “Subject сказуемое Object” (сказуемое ~”predicate”) and these roles can be assumed by varfious parts of speech, among them noun and глагол (~”verb”). Perhaps this difference in terminology confuses matters…
“Whatever part of speech it is, it is used predicatively. Let’s speak of its syntax instead”.
But “predicative” as-a-part-of-speech normally refers to a different construction.
What I question is only accuracy of the claim that it expresses present.
If present of “it is big” is “it big”, then maybe simplification of a claim ‘“[noun] will be [adjective]” expresses future when said in such and such context with such intonation‘ to ‘”will be” expresses future” is not entriely correct
Honestly, I don’t understand your objection. For clarification, yes , I assume that the present tense of “to be” is zero, with occasional uses of есть for emphasis (or суть in very bookish language).
Reminds me of the fact that “be” and “want” are the only verbs that retain the passé simple in Bavarian dialects (like mine).
Good point – this is stressed on the first syllable, which is irregular in modern Russian, so it sounds like a single word.
“Want” and “exist” in Kusaal belong with “be something/somehow” in the group of verbs that (a) only have an imperfective aspect and (b) don’t mark it with the otherwise near-universal imperfective flexion -d(a).
This is a fairly substantial “conjugation” in Kusaal, though, with about seventy members. This is a lot more than in other WOV languages, but it seems much more likely that Kusaal has been unusually conservative in retaining so many than that it has secondarily expanded the conjugation. Moreover, most of them are formed in a way which exactly matches the Nawdm “stative” conjugation, which has hundreds of members.
“Stative” in scare quotes, because (like the Kusaal conjugation) it includes words like “carry” which take objects and are not semantically stative (or in Kusaal, at any rate, syntactically stative either.)
There are some common threads of meaning in this Kusaal conjugation, though. Almost half express qualities, like “be strong”; there is a syntactically and morphologically distinctive group of body-position verbs like “be sitting” (which are, however, not syntactically stative in Kusaal), and a group of very common “relational” verbs like “love”, “hate”, “own” and “be something/somehow.”
The relational verbs share the unusual property (for Kusaal) of obligatory transitivity: if no object is explicitly given, there is always an implication of anaphora: M nɔŋ “I love him/her/them” (just mentioned.) The only other verbs that do this are causatives and causative-alikes like “kill.” (To say “thou shalt not kill”, you have to say Da kʋ sɔba “Don’t kill anybody”; Da kʋʋ can only mean “Don’t kill him/her/it/them.”)
This naturally applies to “be something” as well:
Manɛ an du’ata, ka fʋ pʋ aenya.
I.LINKER be doctor and you NEGATIVE be.NEGATIVE
“I’m a doctor, and you’re not.”
@Hans, when you have already included a form in a paradigm you can say that within it it is [feminine dual, present continuous, ….].
You can even choose the place in, say, taivan’tsy kitajtsy where you want to place your symbol for zero-a-part-of-the-paradigg.
However it is not true that a zero “contains” information about tense as English speaks “contains” an /-s/
It is also not true that English worse contains any information about the comparative (and people about plurality), and it is also I think not true that /-s/ “contains” anything.
Zero can certainly contain information in a language. A gap in one of a set of mutually exclusive grammatical markers often functions as a marker in its own right.
The absence of -s in an English regular finite present marks a form as first or second person, or as plural. (This is Indo-European, homeland of Gratuitous Polysemy.)
Kiowa has three noun declensions, in which the absence of a suffix means respectively, singular, plural or dual.
Kusaal tense marking is obligatory on finite verbs in main clauses. Zero marking means “present” by default; otherwise the absence of tense marking is subject to definite rules (in narrative clauses introduced by ka, for example., it implies that the action is proceeding in direct chronological sequence, and the clause is not an aside, description or “flasback.”)
There are highly respectable linguists who object to “zero morphemes” because they make them feel ontologically unclean, but such hair-shirtedness just leads to pointlessly complicated descriptions.
(Kusaal has six distinct words which are always or sometimes realised as zero. So sue me …)
@DE “Stative” in scare quotes, because (like the Kusaal conjugation) it includes words like “carry” which take objects …
That’s stative (or rather “Stative”) in the sense ‘burdened (by)’?
Is there a distinction ‘carrying’ child/pregnant vs holding/carrying a child in your arms; vs transporting something bulky to a destination? — where the focus is on change of state/location of the something.
You can indeed paraphrase most of these verbs to give them a nice stative feel, and in my Days of Ignorance I myself did just that, glossing wa’e “walk, travel” as “be en route” for example. However, I eventually realised that I was just telling myself pretty stories to make things seem to fit. There is, for example, no actual difference between the constructions that wa’e is used in from the imperfective form of zɔ “run.” (Well, actually there is, but that is only because zɔ also has a secret identity as an emotion verb.)
Zanl (mentioned above) actually specifically means “carry in the hand”, which naturally leads to a paraphrase like “have in the hand.” However, zi “carry on the head” and bʋk “carry on the shoulder” are both fully paid up regular verbs, with perfectives and everything, and zanl behaves just the same as the imperfective of those verbs. In paricular, it can have a continuous/progressuve reading in the appropriate constructions, unlike the actual “have” verb, mɔr.
It is, I think, possible that this conjugation historically originated as a thoroughly stative one, though if so that presumably antedates even proto-Outer Ot-Volta, because Nawdm also shows this mismach. But that has no bearing on the synchronic situation.
“Carry a child” in the pregnancy sense s expressed quite differently. “She is carrying the child, is pregnant with the child” is
O mɔr biig la pʋʋg.
she have child the belly
O mɔr pʋʋg. just means “She’s pregnant.” (You can also say O zi’en nɛ which is literally “she’s stood still”, where the focus particle nɛ is a kind of tip-off that this is to be taken as an idiom.)
It seems to me that it would be simple enough to say to children that a verb is word that can go in the blanks in
“He/she/it wants to/hates to X ..”
and also in
“He/she/it likes/hates Xing …”
(Where the … is whatever object or complement you need to make the whole thing grammatical.)
You can take advantage of the fact that every single English verb forms the gerund/participle in exactly the same way (there is no such handy form for nouns, alas,) And the only verbs which don’t fit in these frames are the modal auxiliaries, which as you rightly say, will need special treatment anyway.
There’s nothing special about these exact frames, and you could encourage the children to invent their own.
I see how that could work for young children, not that I have any experience teaching them. You would need another frame for verbs such as “rain”, “leak”, “consist”, and for that matter “want” that don’t fit semantically, but adding “He/she/it wants it to X…” and letting “needs” replace “wants” might cover most of those. And maybe “-ing” should be covered just by saying you can add it to the word, or would that lead the kiddies to confuse syntax with morphology?
The term “plain form” as used by Huddleston and Pullum might come in handy here.
Somebody should try it.
@DE, of course.
But if Y meant that a specific sequence of sounds “marks” tense (informs the listeners that it is such and such tense), zero is a counter-example.
It is not the zero that informs listeners that tajvantsy kitajtsy “the Taiwanese people the Chinese people” is the present but the whole (also the context and intonation).
Same, I believe, for everything.
Meanwhile the sequence vyskochili normally means “jumped out-PL” (going to be recognised out of context) and this can make one think that what informs the listener about tense is just this sequence rather than the whole.
Although I’m distrustful of any “underlying” forms that one cannot observe, zero morphemes make sense to me when talking about paradigms – it’s simply a shorthand way of saying that there is no observable phonetic entity in a morpheme slot that is filled by some phonetic entity in other parts of the paradigm.
@drasvi: languages work on contrast and combination. “s” by itself is meaningless, but when speakers of English see “runs” in the sentence “I like my morning runs”, they know that it’s a plural noun because it contains the -s that regularly marks plural. And if they see it in the sentence “Molly runs faster than Jane”, they know that it’s the 3rd singular present of a verb, because it is in the verb slot and has a subject that requires 3rd person singular endings. With irregular or suppletive forms, it’s similar – people know that they have to put “mice” in the plural slot for “mouse”, even though that kind of forming plurals has become limited to two lexemes. And they know that “went” goes into the past tense slot for “go”,, even if similar-looking verb forms (like “dent, rent”) are basic forms.
As a public service to the Hattery, I have just read Pullum’s new book. I think there actually is a problem with the tone of it.
I’m a bit handicapped by clearly not being in the target audience, so I’ve had to imagine myself into their shoes, and I may not have done so properly. But doing my best …
The book seems to have an essentially therapeutic purpose, as a sort of antidote to Strunk-and-Whitery and associated stuff. (I get the impression that Americans are often much more vulnerable to this sort of thing than Brits, so again I am not in the intended target group. Howsomever …)
Anyhow, the trouble (I think) is that P has not taken enough notice of Cicero’s excellent advice that you really need to be able to put yourself in your readers’/audience’s shoes to persuade effectively. Everything he says is fine and true in itself, but in aiming at a readership that has grown up revering bad grammar books it’s going to be needlessly alienating to describe traditional definitions of “noun” (say) as “worthless.” This may get a cheer from linguists who already know this, but a better approach to the uninitiated would be to point out gently that the traditional definitions don’t actually work, immediately illustrating the fact with examples of why and how they don’t work. To be fair, P does do this to some extent, but not enough: he ends up coming across as just making dogmatic assertions, because he doesn’t show his work enough.
It’s rather like, as a proper doctor, having to persuade a firm believer in “complementary” medicine that, Yes, they really do need to take the nasty medicine if they want to get better. In that scenario, you really do not want to be leaping into calling their beloved nostrums “worthless” – even though they are.
Lin ka Kʋsaas ye:
Bi’el bi’el ka ba gban’ad nwaaŋ zʋʋr.
“Little by little the monkey’s tail is caught.”
[Or, as the Mossi say: Yẽbd pãng yẽb a yẽb-tɛkem-tɛkem.]
That sounds like Pullum, I’m afraid. “Guns blazing” is his only mode.
“I think there actually is a problem with the tone of it.”
@DE, I’m glad that we agree again.
Though honestly I didn’t want to attack Pullum. I just don’t like attacks on the “ignorant” journalist. The idea that Pullum’s target readers (and the journalist knows more about English grammar than the target reader) should not share their opinions on the book and that instead linguists who – as LH put it – already “respect” Pullum for his other works should do that is strange.
“would be to point out gently”
Ability to do it gently is a virtue, but I would be less critical if he just pointed it out, gently or not.
I can sometimes enjoy a harsh tone even when I don’t agree with the content, though sometimes some of that enjoyment is ironic. But after reading some of Pullum’s pieces on grammar and some parts of the CGEL, I think he needs to remember that an argument that his method is valid, or that it’s more conceptually attractive than some other methods, or that it’s more convenient for an analysis of all of English grammar, does not prove that he’s right and everyone who disagrees with him is wrong. (I have other criticisms too.). I haven’t read his new book, so I hope he does remember such things there.
As a public service to the Hattery, I have just read Pullum’s new book.
Thank you, sir.
I get the impression that Americans are often much more vulnerable to this sort of thing than Brits, …
As a Brit, I never suffered S&W, but I did suffer at length from a pompous arsehole of an English master[**], and more insidiously from a Latin master who opined frequently that English was merely debased Latin, and the appalling split infinitive was alone evidence enough.
“Guns blazing” is his only mode.
I would dearly love to encounter Mr. Francis with such ammunition to hand. Pullum can blaze all he wants.
[**] I’m pretty sure few of my peers opened a novel after escaping his bombast.
as a proper doctor, having to persuade a firm believer in “complementary” medicine that, Yes, they really do need to take the nasty medicine if they want to get better.
Hmm, now that’s an interesting way to pitch it. What does “get better” mean here? People learn to use language just fine without formal instruction. Pullum is needed to _undo_ the effects of (bad) formal instruction/nervous cluelessness.
(Your analogy has a lot of force for me, not that I’m a proper doctor or anything. I failed abysmally to persuade someone to take the nasty medicine over their getting drawn deeper and deeper into “complementary”. Years on, they’re still no better; I’ve just had to withdraw to protect myself.)
@DE, about Kaye who we were discussing elsewhere. I found a book that he describes as “absolutely first rate”. Pronouncing Arabic. vol. 2 is “even better”. link 1, link 2
This Pronouncing Arabic. Supposedly on p. 44 there is a description of clicks in Arabic dialect of al-Karnak, but I’m presently a bit lazy to “log in to borrow”.
Er. all right. He just says that ṭāʾin the al-Karnak dialect is a click.:/
Well, ṭāʾ indeed can, in theory. become one:/ I mean, it is not too difficult.
VPN is getting less usable:( A pop-up spam window just complained that “anonymous proxy detected” and refused to offer me its advice on beard curlifying or whatever.
@DE, the article about the journalist’s book by a politician that you linked is depressive. In many ways.
“But there is a process, and the road map is a way of signalling that. ”
There is no process in the ME, only despair. There was one before 2000 (Oslo), since then only hawks (the war in Gaza is one of fruits of the process that replaced it).
Which is not to say that it could result in anything.
And when Bush, as a part of his advertising campaign for the war in Iraq, pretends he has a “road map” for Jews and Arabs – it does not even destroy your mood.
And Kosovo.
All I can say: most people (here too) don’t check if what politicians say is true, whether their plans can work and whether what they do is moral.
They just need someone to trust.
The man said white is black. I’m not telling that NATO/KFOR could made it better. I’m not telling that it would not be worse (and I know too little about the conflict and not interested in it).
But it is not what he says, he just says that white is black. Kosovo-2006 is a place where “where there are Albanians, there are no Serbs, churches/monasteries demolished, where there are Serbs, there are no Albanians, mosques are demolished”.
Like Bosnia, like India and Pakistan, to a lesser extent like Palestine.
Why I’m writing this: DE once discussed harch criticism of everything by Alan Kaye. I got curious.
I read a couple of places from Pronouncing Arabic and understand why with this book it is different. One of Kaye’s complaints is that empahtics are not pharyngealised but are called so and that the fact that the tongue is widened during the articulation is conversely ignored. One of the places I read is about emphatics. If I were a beginner I would have thought I understand the explanation, which is unusual (after having asked my freinds to articulate this and that I understand nothing, of course).
The pronunciation in the book is that of al-Azhar (imitated by Russian Muslim sheikhs, something I don’t want to imitate because it is not pretty). So emphatics: the shape of the tongue is as for an open back vowel and the tongue is wide and relaxed. They aren’t pharyngealised and almost not velarised.
Of course it is several pages about emphatics in general and several more about the phonemes, I shortened it.
In the other place he says that unstable Arabic sounds (j, q, ḏ̣) don’t have pairs in voicedness č and their regional variants often couple with other such unpaired consonants (š, k, ṣ).
j > ž/g – q > g/… – ḏ̣ > zˤ/…
Yes, of course if they behaved otherwise, there would be mergers (like {ʔ, q} > ʔ) or new articulations. But normally I don’t think of it this way.
I guess I’ll keep reading.
_____
“The lateral expansion of the tongue along its length is of such a kind as to protrude the tongue between the upper and lower teeth, including the molars. The air between teeth and cheeks may in these circumstances be put under pressure and the cheeks puffed out, …”
I think the mechanism of cheek puffing is a bit different (and not in that ‘it is al-Azhar!’). It is just the stream of air blowing to the sides when the contact with the molars is already relaxed but the tip is still touching the alveolae.
“the flattening of the tongue on the floor of the mouth as for an open back vowel, with perhaps minimal raising of the back, and with a corresponding reduction of the pharyngal cavity…
…
Emphatic articulation has nothing to do with the raising, of the back of the tongue towards the velum (velarization) and still less with the type of constriction associated with ħ and 9 and properly labelled pharyngal.”
This is the source of the confusion. But I don’t understand what is pharyngealisation.
“ħ and 9” are ḥ and ʕ (I wonder why 9 and not usual 3 for ع).