French – Page 11 – Zipf's Law

Light verbs and suicide

If you go to PubMed/MEDLINE, the US National Library of Medicine’s giant repository of (and search engine for) biomedical publications, and look around for papers on language and suicide, you won’t find that much on what you’re probably expecting: research on the language of suicidal people. What you will find is papers on how we talk about suicide.

The major issue has to do with the ways that we refer to the act of suicide. In English, your basic options are:

to commit suicide
to kill oneself
to take one’s own life
to do oneself in
to die by one’s own hand

The problem is that first one: to commit suicide. People who work in the field of suicide in any capacity–prevention, treatment, research, whatever–aren’t very fond of it. The reason: it stigmatizes the act. In English, things that you commit are bad.

Now, you’re thinking: commit isn’t always bad, right? You can commit to doing something, commit to someone, commit something to memory. No question! But, we’re seeing two very different linguistic phenomena here. The bad commit has a very specific kind of structure: it’s what we call a light verb.

Light verbs are a special kind of verb. They don’t have very much meaning by themselves. Rather, they occur with some other verb, and it’s that verb that gives the expression its meaning. For example: in English, the verb to take can be a light verb. (It isn’t always a light verb–but, there are many times when it is.) Here are some English-language expressions in which to take is a light verb:

to take a bath
to take a beating
to take a break

What does to take mean in to take a bath, to take a beating, and to take a break? I suggest to you that it doesn’t mean very much at all. Rather, it’s bath, beating, and break that contain the meanings of those expressions. (I’ve put a technical definition at the end of the page, if you are into that kinda thing.)

Light verb constructions are not a rare phenomenon. Here are a bunch more expressions in English that are what we call light verb constructions (that means the light verb plus whatever it is that it combines with–in English, typically a noun) in which the light verb is take:

to take a breather
to take a bus/taxi/shuttle/plane/train
to take a dump
to take a gander (at)
to take a minute
to take a pee
to take a piss
to take a shit
to take a vacation
to take a walk
to take pity (on)

…and, it’s not like take is the only light verb in English. In fact, we have several. Some examples:

to make a decision, to make an offer, to make haste, to make peepee
to give a shit, to give (someone) a hand, to give a damn, to give a fuck, to give birth (plus some obscene ones that I’m leaving out)
to get dressed, to get ready, to get angry/mad, to get nasty, to get drunk, to get high, to get sober
to do battle, to do business, to do your business (yes, those are different)
to have a ball, to have a blast, to have fun, to have a good time, to have a headache, to have mercy, to have sex, to take a piss
to take action, to take a seat, to take one’s time, to take note, to take notes (yes, those are different), to take a look (at)

With that data in hand, we can see the difference between the commit of to commit suicide and the non-bad senses of commit in to commit to memory, to commit to a person, to commit to a deadline… none of those have that verb + noun structure. They’re all commit + to something.

Some more (or less) useful light verb constructions in French: faire la vaisselle: to do the dishes faire la lessive: to do the laundry faire [+université]: to go to a university (J’ai fait William and Mary, I went to William and Mary) faire du [+musical instrument]: to play an instrument (as in to do so habitually) faire du diabète: to have diabetes

One of the interesting things about light verb constructions is that they don’t show a basic characteristic that we expect to see in language: compositionality. To paraphrase from a previous post:

Compositionality is the process of meaning being produced by something that you could think of as similar to addition (technically, it’s a more general “function,” but “addition” will work for our positions–linguists, no hate mail, please). Take a situation where my dog stole some butter. The semantics are: there’s a dog, it’s my dog, there’s some butter, and the butter was taken, by the dog, without permission. (You can’t believe how horrible the poo that I had to pick up over the course of the next 24 hours was.) My dog’s name is Khani, so I might say something like this: Khani stole some butter. The idea behind compositionality is that the meaning of Khani stole the butter is the adding together of the meanings of Khani, steal, butter, and the meaning of being in the subject position versus the object position of an active, transitive sentence.

So: we have this basic expectation that meaning in language will be compositional, and as linguists, as computer science people who work with human language, and as philosophers, we have a hell of a lot riding on that expectation.

In that context, the cool thing about light verb constructions is this: they’re not compositional. There is pretty much no way to get any systematic interpretation of the combinations of light verbs and their nouns. Pause and ponder:

To make peepee and to take a piss: they mean the same thing (the difference is that one is child language and the other is too impolite to say in front of your grandmother). Peepee and piss mean the same thing–again, one is child language, and the other one is too impolite to say in front of your grandmother. Your assignment: tell me what make and take contribute to the meaning of those expressions–that is, explain to me what their contribution is to the composition of the verb and the noun. My point: peepee and piss mean the same things, and to make peepee and to take a piss mean the same things–how do you explain that, if make and take each contribute something to the meaning of those expressions?
Consider to take a bath and to take a bus. One of those is what you might think of as event–an act of bathing. The other is a big, smelly thing that takes you to work. (See how I slipped another take in there? Different take–nobody said that linguistics was going to be easy.) In take a bath and take a bus, your relationship with the two things is pretty different. In the first case, you’re participating in an event, while in the second case, you’re making use of a mode of transportation. Your assignment: tell me how that difference comes from the verb to take.

The answers:

Trick question: as far as I know, make and take don’t contribute anything to the meanings of those expressions. The meanings of the expressions are not compositional.
Trick question: as far as I know, take doesn’t contribute anything to the meanings of those expressions. The meanings of the expressions are not compositional.

So, back to to commit suicide. As you might have noticed, the relationships between light verbs and their nouns are things that a child learning their native language just has to remember. There’s nothing that the kid learns about their language that would let them infer or guess that they’re making peepee now, but they’ll be taking a piss when they grow up: they have to remember it when they’re exposed to it. (I don’t mean to suggest here that children learn language by remembering stuff to which they’ve been exposed–we’ve talked about how very little of language-learning for children works that way.)

So, the verb + noun combinations in light verb constructions are pretty random. The thing about commit is this: it’s a light verb, too, in constructions like to commit suicide. Its noun is of a very specific kind, though: its verb is something bad. Compare that with the light verb to have. You can have a heart attack, you can have a migraine, or you can have a good time, or have sex. No particular semantic consistency there–could be bad (heart attack, migraine), or it could be good (a good time, sex). Here’s a list of the words that are statistically most closely associated with the verb to commit in the enTenTen corpus (a collection of 19.7 billion words of written English, available on the Search Engine web site; git is a computer science thing. See this post.)

screenshot-2017-01-04-01-26-01 — Top objects and subjects of the verb “commit” in 19.7 billion words of English. From the enTenTen corpus on the Sketch Engine web site.

What kinds of things get commited? Crime, sin, murder, fraud, atrocity. Who commits things? Offender, defendant, criminal. Not good.

So, what are we to make of to commit suicide? Many people who work in the field (go do your own search on PubMed/MEDLINE if you’re interested, or just see here and here for examples) are of the opinion that use of the expression to commit suicide has the effect of stigmatizing the person who killed themself. Is that a bad thing? They think it is. I think it is, too. Now, does the person who killed themself care how you talk about them? Certainly not–they’re dead. But, that person’s mother, husband, son, daughter, cousin, aunt, uncle, best friend… They do, and they’re not dead. So, many people who work with suicide in some capacity would like to see that expression go away. Here’s a very eloquent expression of the idea, from Doris Sommer-Rotenberg:

The expression “to commit suicide” is morally imprecise. Its connotation of illegality and dishonour intensifies the stigma attached to the one who has died as well as to those who have been traumatized by this loss. It does nothing to convey the fact that suicide is the tragic outcome of severe depressive illness and thus, like any other affliction of the body or mind, has in itself no moral weight. —Doris Sommer-Rotenberg, Suicide and language

Who cares? Sommer-Rotenberg again:

The rejection of the term “commit suicide” will help to replace silence and shame with discussion, interaction, insight and, ultimately, successful preventive research.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking that the language that we use doesn’t affect the way that we think. You know what? I agree with you. However: even if how we talk about suicide doesn’t change the way that we think about it, I suggest to you–as a fellow student said to me in the basement of Oxley Hall one evening in our graduate student days: the fact that the language that we use doesn’t change our reality doesn’t change the fact that you can make someone feel bad with the language that you use, and you wouldn’t want to do that, right? Well, of course not. (I love my job, but my fellow ex-student’s job is definitely cooler–she’s the only speech therapist in New York City whose practice is exclusively concerned with transgendered people.)

There’s also controversy/discussion around the ways that we talk about what happens when people try to kill themselves, but don’t succeed–attempted suicide, unsuccessful attempt, failed attempt, failed suicide, and failed completion, versus completed suicide–the idea is that these expressions model suicide as a desirable act. (If you fail to have a good time, fail to get into medical school, fail to convince someone to marry you, that’s a bad thing.) See here for a fuller discussion.

So, yeah: there’s probably more stuff in the National Library of Medicine’s repository on how we talk about suicide than there is on how people who are suicidal talk. It would be great to change that, because if we knew more about how people who are suicidal use language, then we might be able to do a better job of preventing it. Now, that means that we need language data from people who are or have been suicidal, right? But, we also need data from people who aren’t suicidal–if you want to understand something, you usually need to compare it to something else, and in this case, that means comparing the language of suicidal people to the language of people who aren’t suicidal.

It happens that there’s an enormous amount of real, live language out there in the world on social media platforms. It would be great for suicide researchers to have it, but there are ethical issues involved–just because someone puts their life out there on the web doesn’t give you the right to just grab it and do stuff with it. However: you can donate your social media data to OurDataHelps.org, a group that collects language from all kinds of people for social media research. You can sign up with them here. As the character Père LeFève says in Anne Marsella’s wonderful short story The Mission San Martin:

Best wishes to all of you who are still alive. And if you’re yet alive, please give.

–Anne Marsella, The lost and found and other stories

No English notes as such today. Instead, here’s some extra stuff for those of you who like to dive deeply into the linguistics of things.

One way of defining light verb construction:

screenshot-2017-01-04-17-47-19 — Definition of light verb construction (LVC) from Light verb constructions in Romance: A syntactic analysis, by Josep Alba-Salas.

On the mechanics of how the meaning gets out of the noun and into the verb, so to speak:

Contrary to “prototypical” verbal constructions where the verb is the syntactic and semantic head of the sentence and its syntactic dependents are also its semantic arguments, in LVCs, one of the syntactic dependents of the verb, generally its direct object, functions as the semantic head, projecting its own argument structure, while the verb, which is semantically “light”, bears only inflection and projects no argument structure.

− Given the fact that the verb has no semantic contribution or rather its semantic contribution is quite weak, it cannot be selected lexically, that is on the basis of its semantic contribution. The combination of a particular predicative noun (PN) with a particular light verb (LV) is thus a matter of idiosyncrasy: The noun and the verb form a collocation that must be stored in the lexicon.

Pollet SAMVELIAN, Laurence DANLOS, and Benoît SAGOT, On the predictability of light verbs

https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00617506/document

Why would you need to posit the existence of such a thing? From Samvelian et al.:

l’agression de Luc contre Marie (the attack of Luc against Mary)
Luc a agressé Marie (Luc attacked Mary)
Luc a commis une agression contre Marie (Luc committed an attack against Mary)
l’agression que Luc a commise contre Marie (the attack Luc committed on Mary)

Note: you can also se commettre avec quelqu’un.

Social media, linguistics, suicide, and you

All of that time you spend on Facebook isn’t wasted if you donate your social media data to suicide research.

Until the 1960s or so, there were basically two ways to do linguistic research.

If you were into historical linguistics and/or dead languages, you looked at ancient texts.
If you were into living languages, you went and camped out on a reservation, in a village, or whatever, and you sat with native speakers and your notebook and you collected data. You transcribed things, and then went home and copied out your notes, and then you thought about them a lot.

In either case, the underlying philosophy was that there was some body of data in your hands, and your task as a linguist was to come up with a description/explanation of what was in that body of data. Seems straightforward enough.

In the 1960s or so, the American linguist Noam Chomsky turned the world of linguistics upside down with the idea that what you should be doing is describing/explaining native speakers’ intuitions about their language. Intuition is a technical term here–it refers not to “what Kevin happens to think is the case about his native language,” but to native speaker judgements about questions like Is the sentence “I saw the man on the hill with a telescope” ambiguous? This changed the conception of what constitutes “data” enormously. On this view of linguistics, there’s no need to go freeze on the Siberian tundra to get your data–you can do it in your living room. Les données, c’est moi !

Today linguists are less likely to talk about binary “yes it is/no it isn’t” questions than they are about gradient judgments–“Sentence X is more acceptable than sentence Y”. For a really good discussion about the issues from a perspective I think you’ll like, see the work of John Sprouse under the general heading of “experimental syntax.”

–Philip Resnik

From a philosophical perspective, this was a radical shift–from empiricism (sometimes a very extreme empiricism, as for example in the case of Leonard Bloomfield (leading American linguist of the first half of the 20th century, author of the first article published in the journal Language, and Yale professor who was refused membership in the Faculty Club because they didn’t let Jews join in those days), who was of the opinion that mental states are not observable, and therefore semantics is not a fit topic for science) to rationalism, and a rather extreme rationalism at that. Not everyone was happy about this, and in fact most older linguists weren’t–from a methodological point of view, it’s hard to see how you could falsify a hypothesis when the evidence that’s being presented is some version of yes it IS ambiguous–but Chomsky took the grad students by storm, and linguistics underwent a radical change. It swept the world of academia in a way that it never had before, too. (Check out Randy Allen Harris’s The linguistics wars for details.)

Meanwhile, Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis were thinking about the potential for computerized analysis of language, and in 1967 they published Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English, based on the study of a bit over one million words of American English that they had had typed up by keypunch operators. They were at Brown, and called their data set, which they made available to the public–now you could check someone else’s data–as the Brown Corpus. As far as I’m aware, that data itself didn’t lead to any earthshaking discoveries, but it did make people’s ears perk up: it was clear that there were possibilities for doing defensible studies of language when you could search a large body of text with a few keystrokes that just weren’t there if your data were whatever you happened to need to intuit that morning. Or whatever your grad student happened to need to intuit that morning. Or, in a pinch, whatever you happened to need to intuit in the heat of your dissertation defense.

There were some issues with the Brown Corpus, or at any rate, with trying to make similar corpora (the plural of corpus) on your own. One was copyrights. The Brown Corpus was what is called a stratified sample: it deliberately tried to structure its contents. Those contents included fiction, non-fiction, personal correspondence, books, newspaper articles–all sorts of stuff, much of which required getting permission from someone or other. Then there was the matter of those keypunch machines–all 1,014,312 words had to be entered by hand. People continued to pursue the construction of corpora, and cool things came out of that work, both in terms of linguistic theory and in terms of designing computer programs that could do things with language. But, it was slow going–people realized that bigger and bigger corpora would let them do cooler and cooler things, but typing is neither fast, nor inexpensive.

Then a miracle happened: the Internet. All of a sudden random people around the world were vomiting forth massive quantities of linguistic data, and it was mostly copyright-free, and they were typing that shit themselves. Nectar! Now you can get access to billions of words of text in an amazing variety of language. Is it necessarily clean, pretty, or legible? No. Is it real? Yes, and that’s what matters, at least to linguists. My colleague Graciela Gonzalez at Penn has done amazing things with social media data, ranging from monitoring medications for previously unknown adverse effects to monitoring prescription medication abuse.

Until recently, there was remarkably little data available on the language of suicidal people, or even on the language of people with psychiatric disorders in general. This is surprising, because with so many mental illnesses, the symptoms are, for the most part, expressed via language. As Philip Resnik, Rebecca Resnik, and Margaret Mitchell put it in the introduction to the proceedings of the first Association for Computational Linguistics workshop on computational linguistics and clinical psychology in 2014,

For clinical psychologists, language plays a central role in diagnosis. Indeed, many clinical instruments fundamentally rely on what is, in effect, manual annotation of patient language. Applying language technology in this domain, e.g. in language-based assessment, could potentially have an enormous impact, because many individuals are motivated to underreport psychiatric symptoms (consider active duty soldiers, for example) or lack the self-awareness to report accurately (consider individuals involved in substance abuse who do not recognize their own addiction), and because many people — e.g. those without adequate insurance or in rural areas — cannot even obtain access to a clinician who is qualified to perform a psychological evaluation.

Suppose you’re interested in the language of suicidal people. Until recently, if you wanted to get your hands on actual data, you could get your hands on a set of suicide notes collected and annotated by my colleague John Pestian at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (and me and a bunch of other people). That data has been revealing, and we’ve learnt things about suicide from that data that we didn’t know. But, that data was hard to come by. Putting that data set together took years (if you can read French, you can find a paper here on some of the issues), and if you want to get your hands on it, you need to go through some hoops to demonstrate that you have a legitimate research interest, that you will not be posting people’s suicide notes on Facebook or Pinterest, and so on.

Social media has changed all of that. In fact, the past couple years have seen an explosion of work on the linguistic characteristics of mental states associated with mental illness, including suicidality. Much of it has appeared in the proceedings of CLPsych, the above-mentioned Association for Computational Linguistics workshop. To give you some examples:

Glen Coppersmith and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins worked with tweets from people with post-traumatic stress disorder, seasonal affective disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, and psychiatricaly healthy controls. They found that based on the contents of the tweets, they could do a pretty good job of classifying which of those categories the poster belonged to. They tried various methods of representing the contents of the tweets, and found that they got the best results with what are called statistical language models. In a later paper, they looked at six more conditions, and added exploratory analysis on the distributional characteristics of emotionally relevant language.
Margaret Mitchell of Microsoft and her colleagues worked with tweets from schizophrenics and healthy controls, and found some unexpected signals in the language of the schizophrenics. For example, the schizophrenic social media users were statistically more likely to use what linguists call hedging expressions like think, I believe, or I guess.
In one of my favorite papers of this ilk, Munmun De Choudhury and their colleagues looked at the language of people who moved from a Reddit for people with mental health related diagnoses to a suicide watch Reddit. They found a number of differences in the language of those Reddit users who moved to the suicide watch group and those who didn’t, including differences in what is called accommodation: the ways that we (can) adjust our language to that of the people with whom we’re communicating. (A post on the subject is in the works.)

Now, there’s an issue here: just because people post their lives on social media doesn’t mean that it’s OK for you to use that stuff for your own purposes. Ethical questions abound, and that’s just as true for the tweets, posts, or whatever of the psychiatrically healthy controls as it is for those with mental illness, suicidal behavior, or whatever. And that’s where you come in.

OurDataHelps.org is a group that collects social media data, particularly linguistic data, for use in doing research like the stuff that I’ve described here with the goal of suicide prevention. They want your data if you have ever flirted with suicide, but they want your data if you haven’t, too–you always need something to compare to, and people like me need data from non-suicidal people to compare to the data from suicidal people. That could be you! Check it out: OurDataHelps.org.

Work in this space is definitely emotionally taxing. I find myself with a rule similar to John’s “no more than 10 a day” rule — enough to constantly remind me of the importance of this work, without becoming emotionally oppressive. The emotional response to spot-checking the data is qualitatively different and far more visceral than something like sentiment analysis of beer reviews.

–Glen Coppersmith

One day I needed to read through some suicide notes. I set an afternoon aside to do it. I made it through about 150–an hour, maybe–before I read one that was like being punched in the stomach. I went out and bought a pack of cigarettes, and I didn’t even smoke (at the time!). I spent a lot of time over the course of the next couple weeks trying to forget it. I mentioned it to John. All afternoon? Man, you can’t do that–10 a day, max. He was, of course, right. In this kind of work, ethical issues come up with the researchers, too. We now provide free therapy for the people who transcribe data for us on suicide-related projects, our researchers who work directly with the data are required to visit a therapist or a clergyman once a month, and we rotate research assistants off of the project every quarter. Moral of the story: I don’t recommend that you go digging around in this data out of curiosity. But, you can be the data–suicidal or not, why not donate your social media data to OurDataHelps.org and maybe keep someone else from writing one of those notes?

Thanks to John Pestian, Philip Resnik, and Glen Coppersmith for their comments and contributions. French notes follow.

French notes

le suicide: suicide

le/la suicidé(e): person who kills themself

suicider: to drive someone to suicide; to make someone’s death look like suicide

se suicider: to kill yourself

se donner la mort: to kill yourself

la tentative de suicide: suicide attempt

maquiller un meurtre en suicide: to make a murder look like a suicide

l’attentat-suicide: suicide attack

la mission suicide: suicide mission

la lettre d’adieu: suicide note

Derivational morphology, pragmatics, and the Great Parisian Rat Crisis

Here in France, our major worries are that we’ll do the same idiotic thing in our next election that America just did in hers. Meanwhile, all the anglophone press can find to talk about is our little rat problem, while ignoring everything linguistically interesting about it.

The French 2017 presidential race is quickly coming down to a match between the far-ish right and the extreme right, it’s not clear how much longer Europe as we know it will continue to exist, and Marine Le Pen was just voted the most admired politician in France, but the main story about France in the anglophone press right now is… an explosion of the Parisian rat population.

3201193267_1_2_1xvwye8b — Picture source: https://goo.gl/Vi12De

That store window in Ratatouille: it’s for real. (There’s a cool bar nearby, Le baiser salé (“The Salty Kiss”), that I stop into once in a while. I’m sparing you a photograph of the real rat window because it really is quite disgusting, and I say that as someone who once posted a picture of a grilled guinea pig here.) Friends tell me that the story has it that there is one rat for every person in Paris, but current estimates are quite a bit higher.

How would you know the size of the rat population, one way or the other? There’s a specific sampling technique that’s used to estimate the size of a population that can’t be directly observed–think about fish in a pond, or arctic ground squirrels in their little burrows, or–rats. Charming video involving goldfish crackers to be seen here.

Zipf’s Law being what it is, this brings up a linguistic oddity that I find interesting. It has to do with what’s called derivational morphology: the things that we can add to words that change their meaning or their part of speech, like the un in unlock or the ic in anemic.

French has a prefix, dé, that you can add to verbs to make them mean something like a reversal of the normal action of the verb. Alain Bentolila, in his La langue française pour les nuls (don’t mock it–it may be the best book on the linguistics of any single language that I’ve ever read) defines it and its close relatives, dés- and dis-, as contributing a meaning something like séparé de, qui a cessé de, différent. Some examples:

visser	to screw	dévisser	to unscrew
voiler	to veil	dévoiler	to unveil
vérouiller	to bolt; to lock; to close (a brèche, in a military context)	déverrouiller	to unbolt; to unlock (a phone, a keyboard, the caps lock)
valoriser	to add value to, to increase the value of	dévaloriser	to devalue
vêtir	to dress (transitive)	dévêtir	to undress (transitive)

This is relevant to current events because there is a set of words that have to do with removing things–mostly pestilential things, except for the last one–that have an interesting pattern with respect to this derivational prefix. To wit, I give you these examples from Bernard Fradin’s Nouvelles approches en morphologie (definitions in French when necessary, because these don’t typically show up in bilingual dictionaries)

dératiser	to exterminate the rats in [something] (WordReference)
désinsectiser	to spray [something] with insecticide (WordReference)	(I will mention here that some of the definitions of désinsectiser that I’ve come across have specified that this means to get rid of insects by using gas. I can’t find any at the moment, though.)
décafardiser	(not in WordReference)	détruire les cafards dans un lieu, spécialement par fumigation. (Cordial)
dénicotiniser	to remove the nicotine from [something] (WordReference)
désodoriser	to deodorize (WordReference)
dévirginiser	to deflower (WordReference)

What’s interesting about this–a lot, actually. To wit:

There are no corresponding forms without dé. Unlike visser/dévisser vêtir/dévêtir, we have no form of dératiser/désinsectiser/décafardiser without dé.
These verbs seem to have both a prefix (dé) and a suffix–where does the -is- come from?
As we will see, this gets us to an interaction that is not supposed to happen in language: between pragmatics, and morphology.

Fradin explains the pattern like this (scroll down for the translation):

2016-11-29-16-52-20

The second case to consider is that of the verbs like dératiser (décafardiser, désinsectiser, dénicotiniser, désodoriser, dévirginiser) which display at the same time a derivational prefix and a derivational suffix….[T]he only analysis worth considering for these verbs is to say that here dé is affixed to a verb that is not present in the language, but is possible. The solution appealing to an unattested verb is especially plausible since we can show that the verb is missing due to reasons of pragmatics.

Fradin goes on to make the case that what we have here is a set of verbs that describe the reversal of a state that you do not create. You don’t infest something with rats, or insects, or nicotine. (Note that Molière’s Sganarelle would disagree with the notion that nicotine is something that one is infested with.) His story is that we see this bizarre combination of patterns:

No corresponding version of the verb without dé
There’s an -is- that doesn’t seem to have anything obvious to do with the meaning of dé

…just in the case of these verbs, in which you didn’t create the initial state of infestation.

As one of my coworkers pointed out over lunch one day: that’s not to say that you couldn’t create the initial state of infestation. He’s right: you certainly could put rats in something, or insects, or a cockroach. (In fact, that’s a famous scam, right?) It’s a nice point, because it doesn’t change the essentially pragmatic nature of the explanation for this bizarre little grouping of verbs–in fact, it highlights the involvement of pragmatics, because it argues against the possibility of an ontological explanation for this. On an ontologically-based approach, you have to have a model of reality in which it simply isn’t possible to cause something to have rats, or cockroaches, or insects, and that clearly is not the case. Rather, this is more about what’s plausible than about what’s possible. It’s not about what “is” (i.e., ontology)–it’s about what people expect to be the case. (This is a big deal (to me) because you run into people who think that the answer to every question in the world is an ontology. That doesn’t seem to be the case here. It’s also a big deal (again, to me) because the dominant school of thought in 20th-century linguistics was heavily into denying the effects of pragmatics on language. However, pragmatics appears to have a role here, if we buy Fradin’s story.)

My coworker also raised a counterargument. It’s a kind of counterargument that we really like in my line of work: positing that there is a simpler explanation for the phenomenon in question. His suggestion was that the -is- thing comes from what we call denominalization, or turning nouns into something else–in this case, a verb. (You can find a discussion of nominalization–turning a verb into a noun–here.) I don’t buy the adequacy of this hypothesis, because we can find so many French verbs that are pretty clearly denominalized–that is, derived from a noun–but don’t have the -is-. Some examples:

dérater	Débarrasser une personne ou un animal de l’organe appelé Rate. Il se disait des Chiens à qui l’on faisait cette opération pour les rendre, croyait-on, plus agiles à la course. (L’appli Larousse Dict-français-français)	“To remove from a person or an animal the organ called Rate (spleen). It was said of Dogs to whom this operation was done in order to make them, it was thought, faster at racing.”
dévisser	to unscrew	..from visser, to screw, from la vis (screw, and you pronounce the s)
déclouer	Détacher, défaire ce qui est fixé par des clous. (L’appli Trouve-mot)	..from clouer, to nail, from le clou, nail

I especially like the contrast between dérater and dératiser. The semantics of both of them involves changing the state of something (linguists are heavily into the changing of states), and they both involve changing a state that you didn’t create. So, why no -is- in dérater? If we asked Fradin, he would be likely to point out that the verbs that he mentions–that is, the ones with dé and -is–all make reference to changing a state that is in some sense noxious. In contrast, having a spleen is not something that you would think of as noxious, and so dérater–the removal of the spleen–doesn’t get the -is- part. (The technical term is morpheme.)

Now, I’ve been sorta defending Fradin here, but: I hate this kind of argument in linguistics, where you’re basically arguing on the basis of examples and counterexamples. I’m aware of the venerable history of this form of rhetoric in theoretical linguistics, but I also am more and more aware–as is much of the field–that science in general, and linguistics in particular, is less often about always and never than it is about tendencies in populations. If you look at tendencies in the population of French verbs about changing states, you can notice a group of verbs that shares a particular “behavior” (mucking about with both dé and -is-) and a particular meaning (changing a noxious state that you didn’t create). But, there are other verbs that have the dé-is- pattern that involve a change of state, but don’t involve a noxious condition–Friden himself gave us the example of dévirginiser, which I passed on to you in the second table above–and as far as I know, there’s nothing noxious about virginity in the Francophone world. Furthermore, there are:

…verbs that have to do with changing a noxious state that you didn’t create, but have a different morphological structure that doesn’t involve dé or -is-: to delouse, which is épouiller, and likewise for to de-flea: épucer or, again, épouiller.
…verbs with pretty much the same semantics that do take dé, but don’t take -is-. In particular, dévirginiser has another form, dépuceller, which led to a very embarrassing moment for me over lunch one day, but that’s a story for another time…

…and beyond that: who says that there are no corresponding verbs without dé, which you will recall is crucial to his pragmatically-based analysis? There are hundreds of millions of easily searchable words of naturally-occurring French-language data on the web, and I would like to see a solid effort to find those words before I bought the idea that they don’t occur in the language.

So, from my point of view, I’d want to see quantitative data. Being a minor phenomenon in a language does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that you’re not an interesting phenomenon–but, from my point of view, part of understanding anything linguistic is understanding the distribution of the phenomenon.

The mayor’s office launched a deratization campaign last month, and the story seems to have fallen out of the news. My strolls across the city haven’t run into any of the closed-off parks that you might have read about. I still stick my bread in the microwave before I go to bed at night–but, I always have. I hate rats.

English notes

rats! is a very mild way of expressing unhappy surprise. When I say “very mild,” I mean that you could say this in front of your grandmother.

“Oh, rats!” I couldn’t find it. I had copies of other stories and poems that I’d written in the past, but couldn’t find this particular one. (Marcus Mebes, Rats! And other frustrations)

rat: an informer. This is slang.

That Richard’s been badmouthing me to the boss behind my back; he’s a rat. Ce Richard dit du mal de moi au patron derrière mon dos ; c’est une ordure. (WordReference.com)
We’ve used the term “rat” to refer to an informer since approximately 1910. (Mentalfloss.com)

to not give a rat’s ass: to not care (about some fact).

I don’t give rats ass, my niece and her boyfriend met in church but she a hoe. (Twitter, in response to a tweet asking Guys!! Can you marry a girl you met at a Club? Not standard English, obviously (I don’t give rats ass, she a hoe).)

dont-give-a-rats-ass-about-the-clueless — Picture source: http://likesuccess.com/topics/1224/ass/8

Fill in the blanks

Zipf’s Law describes one aspect of the distribution of vocabulary items in a language. It often feels random; it is approximately as random as life.

2016-12-19-09-00-53

Given the vocabulary items pictured above, last night I most likely fell asleep listening to the beginning of Céline’s _________________________.
Given the posts that I have been writing lately, I have most recently probably read Queneau’s __________________________________.

French notes

le planton: orderly. In the military sense of the word, not the hospital sense of the word–a hospital orderly is an aide-soignant(e).
l’ambuscade (f.): ambush.
en embuscade: in waiting, in ambush.
le régiment: regiment.
le régiment: military service. (Native speakers: is this specifically obligatory military service?)
l’escadron (m.): squadron.
la vérole: smallpox; (slang) syphilis.
la décrue: decrease in water level, subsiding of floodwaters.
le sapin: pine tree, fir (tree).
estompé: (of memory or color) faded, dimmed, dulled
le mélo: melodrama. (Native speakers: is this pejorative?)
l’accoutrement: clothes that are amusing. Get-up.

Answers

Voyage au bout de la nuit. It starts with Bardamu enlisting in the French army during World War I.
Exercices de style, the same story told 99 times in 99 different ways, which I realized I was doing with this series of posts presented as different kinds of tests.

Matching

Instructions: match the vocabulary word with its description.

Tsipras is pissing off the EU again (don’t pick Athènes, it’s too obvious)
Something you can eat
From an email about my moves on the dance floor
Reminds you of a Queen song

Everything but escarmoucher, guimauve, and épater.
La guimauve (marshmallow)
Épater (haters gonna hate)
Escarmoucher (to spar, physically or verbally)

Haussmannian apartment buildings and the zombie apocalypse

Paris will be a great place to survive the zombie apocalypse. Part of the reason why: those stereotypical Parisian apartment buildings.

A recent study evaluated the survivability of cities during the zombie apocalypse. The approach was rational, modeling a number of factors that contribute to surviving the apocalypse–food supplies, containment, and the like.

Paris was nowhere on the list of best places to be when the mort-vivants come. This illustrates a problem with the study, because Paris is going to be an excellent place to survive the zombie apocalypse. In a recent post, we looked at how the history of Parisian street design will make it easier to defend your little home against the marauding flesh-eaters. However, the next step is important, too–clearing the zombies from the city. In this, Paris has some distinct advantages. They come from the design of the stereotypical Parisian apartment buildings.

haussmann-with-floors-indicated-by-hand-81de56bf1bf1a125a06a1def21481833 — Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/485685141039130992/

Part of everyone’s image of Paris is those stereotypical apartment buildings. They make up about 60% of the city, especially in the older quarters. You know them: seven stories tall (6 as we count them in France, where the ground floor is the rez de chaussée and the first floor is what we would call the second floor in the US). The design goes back to the 3rd quarter of the 19th century–roughly 1850 to 1875. They differ in their details, but the basic design is a 7-story building with horizontal lines of decoration and some kind of additional fancy detail–often a balcony–on the second floor (American 3rd floor, known as the étage noble) and the 6th floor. The exterior embellishments reflect the original intent of the structure of the floors: shops on the ground level, the shopkeepers on the floor above that, richer people on the floors above that, and the servants under the roof (in the chambres de bonnes). The picture to the left gives the idea, with more details to be found in the picture below, in French–scroll down past it for the rest of the post, and see the French notes below for a couple of the related vocabulary items.

haussmann-with-details-in-french-f5d8b7f457292025a07b4a0283731c5c — Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/484699978619249706/

Second-Empire Paris was a place where there was an enormous amount of money to be made, and an enormous amount of money was made–by people in the “right” social classes. The Haussmannian apartment buildings played a big role in that money-making. As Rupert Christiansen puts it in his magnificent Tales of the new Bablyon: Paris in the mid-19th century,

The money was made out of the apartment blocks, those distinctive…six-storey tapered edifices, which have remained the norm in stretches of central Paris until today. Architectural historians now lovingly catalogue the variations in detail that their iron- and stonework embrace, but the basic construction followed a strict code of regulation: specified height and depth, with an entrance wide enough for carriages and a courtyard for parking, ventilation and fire prevention.

Those apartment blocks are, I think, beautiful–but, their construction (along with that of the wide boulevards that we talked about here) had the effect of displacing an enormous number of people who had previously lived in the old buildings that they replaced. As Christiansen describes it, Haussmann‘s redesign of Paris

…remains the nineteenth century’s most radical experiment in shaping and governing urban society… [The logic of the redesign was to] push industry and the sans-culottiste tendency out of the centre of Paris, replacing its warren of dangerous slums with public monuments and commercial development attractive to a new class of clean-living, high-spending, Empire-supporting bourgeois. In other words, kill off a city built on the virus of poverty and give birth to a financially fecund city resting on clean foundations… [and] keep the construction trade busy and happy, thus preventing a resurgence of the discontents which had led its workers to fan the revolutionary flames in 1848…

You can find more details on what kind of housing the displaced poor ended up in on this web page: Housing the poor of Paris, 1850-1902.

What’s missing from the study mentioned above will be the relative ease (or difficulty) of clearing out the zombies afterwards. The architecture of Paris is made for clearing zombies. In particular, the typically small apartments limit the number of zombies that you could possibly have to deal with at one time in order to clear a building, as well as reducing the number of rooms from which a zombie could mount a surprise attack–the typical ad for an apartment in Paris (I read them obsessively) is for 30 square meters, versus a more typical 90 square meters in the US. The vertical design will play a role in this, too–you can clear the zombies one floor at a time, isolating the apartments pretty easily. A working-class Haussmannian building–if you can find one–is not an imposing edifice (see pictures of mine below, probably built around 1900, a quarter-century after the end of the big Haussmannian boom). Clearing the zombies out of my building is going to be cake–I look forward to a relatively easy time when the zombie apocalypse comes.

The view up the “courtyard” opening in by building.

The view up the “courtyard” in my building–opposite direction.

The view down to the “courtyard” of my building–just enough room for the truck belonging to the plumbing company on the rez de chaussée (ground floor).

French notes

la mansarde: attic room. In a Haussmannian apartment building, these are the chambres de bonne–the rooms for the servants. In theory it’s not legal to rent them out, but of course everyone does, and at the moment there’s a legislative move afoot to legalize those rentals while stiffening the requirements for the modifications that have to be made to them in order to make them moderately habitable.

la lucarne: skylight, dormer. Look for them in the pictures above.

English notes

to be cake: être fastoche. This is a shortened form of to be a piece of cake, which means to be fastoche, to be very easy. How it was used in the post: Clearing the zombies out of my building is going to be cake. This could also have been put as Clearing the zombies out of my building is going to be a piece of cake.

mansard roof: An English-language technical term for the type of roof that you see on Second-Empire-style buildings in France and in the US. As Wikipedia defines the term: A mansard or mansard roof (also called a French roof or curb roof) is a four-sided gambrel-style hip roof characterized by two slopes on each of its sides with the lower slope, punctured by dormer windows, at a steeper angle than the upper.^[1]^[2]^[3] I didn’t use it in the post–its presence here is inspired by the definition of the French term la mansarde just above.

dormer: those things with a little roof of their own and a window that you commonly see sticking through the roof of older American houses. I love them because there is an entire vocabulary for describing them–you can find it, along with plenty of pictures, on this Wikipedia page.

Tea, panda cookies, and the Bibliothèque Nationale

My family is weird, and I love it, and most of what you’ve heard about French bureaucrats is false.

When I show up at my father’s house for a visit, it’s a quick kiss, an exchange of pleasantries, and before I have a chance to poke my head into the fridge, he has his coat on and he’s ready to be chauffeured about town on our bookstore rounds. It’s one of the great things about being with my family–with anyone else, I’m hesitant to ask to, say, go on a tour of the local libraries, but with my family, it’s not a problem. C’est normal, as we say in French–a very short expression that means something like that’s the wOn a recent visit to my baby brother, I knew that (a) he wouldn’t think that it was weird that I wanted to spend my free day in Shanghai visiting bookstores, and (b) he would be happy to get lost in a series of bookstores and would enjoy practicing his Mandarin while asking for books for me–and that’s exactly what we did.

The Bibliothèque Nationale, or National Library. Picture source: me.

I felt the need to get away from Internet access today so that I could focus on setting up an experiment (yes, linguists do experiments), and I needed a specific book to look something up, so I headed to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, never having been inside and feeling that that was something that was missing from my life. A pet project of the former Socialist president François Mitterrand, it’s a huge multi-building complex on the east side of town. The picture to the left shows one of the towers–the windows are beautiful, but apparently no one thought in advance about the fact that sunlight would damage the priceless book collection, and they had to be retrofitted with something to block said light at some outrageous expense. (See Adam Gopnik’s wonderful description of expat life in Paris, From Paris to the moon, for details.)

The nice ladies who I approached to ask how to navigate the aforementioned complex pointedly ignored me until they heard the word book come out of my mouth, at which point I got friendly smiles and careful directions to the right building and the correct entrance. (On the down side, I realized that I really must do something about my trousseau–it’s incidents like this that remind me that I look way too much like an SDF (sans domicile fixe, or homeless person). On the up side, apparently it’s the case that for very short conversations I can pass for a French SDF. We second-language speakers have to take our little linguistic triumphs where we can find them.)

The box of tea that I brought back from China for a visit did not survive its visit to the BNF. Picture source: me.

Security is tight at the BNF–like, the security guard made me rip open a box of tea that I had in my bag to give to a friend this evening. (He was otherwise very nice–he also made me open a metal box of cookies that I had brought back from China for said friend, and we had a fun conversation about the pandas that they’re shaped as.)

Having put away my poor, bedraggled box of tea and resisted the urge to eat one of the cookies, I cooled my heels for a bit while waiting for what turned out to be an appointment to get a library pass. No problem–I got to find out what accréditation means (see pictures).

The nice guy who I finally got to talk to asked what book I wanted, kindly offered to speak English when I told him that it was Laurence Horn’s The natural history of negation, and then kindly continued speaking French when I told him that French would be great. Then he gave me some options:

My number for an appointment with the guy who finds books for you and sells you a pass to the research library. Why it’s upside-down: I don’t know. Picture source: me.

Pay for a pass to use the library–getting into the “research library” costs a small fee, which you can pay for one day at a time, or a year at a time.
Walk a few blocks to the Paris-Diderot library, where I could use it for free to my heart’s content.

(2) sounded as much fun as anything else that I could think of at the moment, and when I indicated as much, the guy printed out for me:

The card catalogue information for the book
A map to the Paris-Diderot library
A set of walking directions to same

I was pretty blown away by this wonderful level of service. When I expressed my thanks, he gave me a smile and said c’est mon travail–“it’s my job.”

English notes

Actually, I don’t see anything particularly obscure in this post, as far as the English is concerned. If you have questions about anything, please feel free to put them in the Comments section.

Oh–the Paris-Diderot library turned out to have a fantastic selection of books in the area that I needed to read about, in both English and French. It’s a real find.

You have 15 minutes left!

Discourse connectives and why Sun-Ah barked something at me

I gave my first stand-up-in-front-of-complete-strangers-and-talk-about-your-research sort of talk in the early 1990s. My advisor wasn’t able to come to the Linguistics Society of America meeting with us that year, so she asked Sun-Ah Jun, one of her senior students, to ride herd over us youngsters. (Some years later, I would accidentally almost kill Sun-Ah, but that’s another story.)

ohp-sch — How we gave talks back in the day, before there were laptops and PowerPoint. Picture source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_projector

Back in those days, there were no laptops and there was no PowerPoint. That meant that your talk had to be completely finished and printed out on acetate sheets before you ever got on the plane to go to the conference. I had practiced my talk over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and–you get the point–and I was about as ready as I could get. So, right before my talk, I did a typical sort of thing for an American to do: I sat down in the hotel cafe with a cup of coffee to relax myself for the presentation.

Next thing I knew, Sun-Ah was standing next to me. What are you doing? …she barked. (“To bark” and other English quotatives explained below in the English notes.) Relaxing before my talk? That was the wrong answer. You have 15 minutes! You could be practicing ONE MORE TIME!

She was, of course, right. I did practice one more time, and I was glad that I did, because a large crowd showed up–my talk had a sexy title, and I was almost embarrassed that a bunch of people walked into the room right before my talk started, and then walked right back out again after it was over. That can’t have felt good to the other speakers–yuck. (That’s beurk, in French, if you were wondering.)

Decades later, Sun-Ah’s advice still comes back to me every time I give a talk–or do anything else that requires preparation before doing something that requires a sort of performance. So, in the minutes leading up to my test of oral production for the DALF level C1 last week, I stood outside the Alliance Française building with my little pile of index cards in my hands, memorizing discourse connectives.

Discourse connectives are the words and expressions that you use to link things that you say together into a coherent whole. Consider this set of sentences, adapted from an article by Charlotte Roze, Laurence Danlos, and Philippe Muller about LEXCONN, their dictionary of French discourse connectives:

Pierre m’a aidé à repeindre la chambre…
‘Peter helped me repaint the bedroom…’
Il a beaucoup de boulot en ce moment.
‘He has a lot of work at the moment.’
C’est déjà terminé !
`It is already over!’

Contrast that with this version, taken directly from the paper:

Pierre m’a aidé à repeindre la chambre…
‘Peter helped me repaint the bedroom…’
…bien qu’il ait beaucoup de boulot en ce moment.
‘…even though he has a lot of work at the moment.’
Du coup, c’est déjà terminé !
‘Thus it is already over!’

You probably see the relationships between the three sentences in the second example a lot more clearly than you do in the first one, where it actually might not have been clear that there were any relationship between them at all. The difference: bien que ‘even though,’ and du coup ‘as a result.’ Those are discourse connectives. In this case, they establish very specific kins of relationships between the sentences–what Roze et al. call Concession in the case of bien que, and I think what they call Consequence in the case of du coup. (If you want to know more about their classification system, here’s a link to the article again.)

Once you reach the point of preparing for a C-level test in French, the prep books are not about the language anymore. Rather, they’re about how to structure an argument. So, the section on preparation for the production tests for the DALF C1 starts with a discussion of discourse connectives, including a list of same to help you have some variety in what you’re writing or saying. That turned out to be a good pick for what to spend those last 15 minutes reviewing. I snuck a look at the members of the jury every time I used a good one, and it was pretty clear that they noticed them. (Bien que is a favorite of mine, because it gives me an excuse to use the subjunctive, and finding excuses to use the subjunctive is an excellent strategy for taking French language proficiency exams.)

As it turns out, this ability to structure an argument is crucial at the C1/C2 level of the DALF exams. For example, 50% of the oral production test is pronunciation/grammar/vocabulary (did you catch that? for example is a discourse connective), but the other 50% is about your ability to put together and present an argument (did you catch that? but is a discourse connective).

Sun-Ah went on to get the best job in linguistics, filling the open position that was left at UCLA when Peter Ladefoged, the most famous phonetician of the 20th century, retired. Many years later, she is a full professor and has supervised an astounding number of doctoral dissertations on the subjects of intonation and prosody. I thought about her as I stood outside the Alliance Française preparing to take my test, going through my discourse connective flash cards as I snuck a cigarette.

I picked up my scores this week: réussite. One thing that I can say about preparing for the test: not a single minute of the time that I spent studying French over the course of the past three years was wasted. Not a single flash card. Not a single hour with my tutor. Not a single drive home from work, listening to a France culture podcast. Not a single form that I had to fill out at the lab–but not until after making sure that I understood every single word on it. Not a single email received or written, not a single lunch in the cafeteria with my co-workers, not a single evening at a café philo, or at a Meetup group for software developers, or at a lecture at the Philharmonie de Paris. I drew on every single one of those for every single one of the four parts of the DALF C1 test. In the last 15 minutes before the exam, I also drew on that morning in Boston decades ago when Sun-Ah caught me relaxing with a cup of coffee and chewed me out for wasting an entire quarter of an hour. My thanks to all of you who have corrected my grammar, taught me new vocabulary, and put up with my feeble attempts to learn the language of Molière–your patience and generosity are amazing, and I’m sure that my French relatives appreciate it even more than I do. The story of how I accidentally almost killed Sun-Ah: that’ll have to wait for another time.

French notes

le connecteur de discours: discourse connective. Examples from this article, by Laurence Danlos, Margot Colinet, and Jacques Steinlin:

Cet article présente le repérage des connecteurs de discours dans le corpus « French Treebank » (FTB) déjà annoté pour la morpho-syntaxe. This article presents the recognition of discourse connectives in the “French Treebank” (FTB) corpus, already annotated for morpho-syntax.
Mots clés : annotation discursive de corpus, connecteurs de discours, grammaire et discours Keywords : discourse annotation, discourse connectives, grammar and discourse

English notes

to ride herd over something/someone: to manage, to lead. This can also be to ride herd on something/someone. There’s some implication that the person/people/thing to be managed is sort of large and ungainly, sort of difficult to steer.

To ride herd on someone, to watch over them, comes from the idea of cowboys guarding or controlling a herd of cattle by riding round its edge. Julia Cresswell, Little Oxford dictionary of word origins.
At this writing, the Chinese government struggles for control over independent decisions by local authorities to allow development, and tries to ride herd over the growing strength of the private sector. Hester Eisenstein, How global elites use women’s labor and ideas to exploit the world.
How it was used in the post: My advisor wasn’t able to come to the Linguistics Society of America meeting with us that year, so she asked Sun-Ah, one of her senior students, to ride herd over us youngsters.

to bark: Merriam-Webster defines this sense of the verb as : to speak in a curt loud and usually angry tone. It’s an example of the class of verbs called quotatives, which are used to convey something that someone else said; it’s also an example of something called a manner verb, which means that the meaning of the verb includes how the action was performed. (Contrast that with a result verb, whose meaning includes what the outcome of the action was, such as to break. If you want to know more about quotatives, see this blog post.) When you want to specify what was barked, you can use the preposition out, as in the last three examples below (the bilingual examples are from the Sketch Engine web site, where you can search for linguistic data in an amazing variety of languages):

At one time, under the old command and control type of leadership, the leader simply barked orders to subordinates. Il fut un temps où, dans l’ancien style de leadership, le leader se contentait d’aboyer des ordres à ses subordonnés.
At best, players will comply with orders for as long as they are barked at. Dans l’hypothèse la plus optimiste, les joueurs obéiront aux ordres tant que l’entraîneur aboiera après eux.
… traders in suit jackets barked their orders through a haze of tobacco smoke. …des négociants en veston criant leurs ordres dans un nuage de fumée de tabac.
I asked a young woman to help but, when she reached for the front of the chair, I barked at her. Je demande à une jeune femme de m’aider, mais lorsqu’elle essaie de prendre le devant du fauteuil, je lui lance un cri.
You don’ t recall one point barking out the name Diane Sawyer? Tu ne te rappelles pas avoir hurlé le nom de Diane Sawyer?
LRT I fucking BARKED OUT a high pitched laugh at the end, wtf XDD So great… (Twitter)
@anonymized you mean you barked out a question like the rest of the hoard and he ignored you. (Twitter)

Spanish cow

coq-galois-a2812b8baddd4f2d9f5b642d135612b0 — Le coq galois. Picture source: https://goo.gl/VpFPlD

Ce matin
Une vache espagnole
Me réveilla.
Pendant des années
Elle m’a réveillé
En me parlant anglais.
Ce matin
Elle me réveilla
En me disant << tu causes bien la France >>.
Un de ces quatre
Un coq me réveillera
En me disant << lève-toi con, enfin t’es prêt à débuter >>.

parler français comme une vache espagnole: to speak broken French. Literally: “to speak French like a Spanish cow.”

causer bien la France: “to speak French proper-like.” Sarcastic.

le coq: rooster. The important point: you pronounce the q.

English notes

to speak broken [language name]: to not speak [language name] well. Scroll down for examples.

official-misspelt-fm-05_4_2 — The joke here is that this idiot has mis-spelled “official.” America does not have an official language, and I hope we keep it that way–it’s not like we need one. Picture source: https://goo.gl/PEZUHH

o-anonewu-if-you-mock-someones-broken-english-and-you-4130956 — The point: if you’re an American, then the guy speaking broken English probably speaks one language more than you do. Picture: https://goo.gl/9aPwUr

english-are-language — This fool has mis-spelled “our.” Not an example of how to use “to speak broken English”–I just couldn’t pass up a chance to mock the “Official English” folks. Picture source: https://goo.gl/pB1Ew1

better-cherokee-national_language — Sorry–once I start thinking about the “Official English” idiots, I can get a little wound up. If you’re not a North American: Cherokee is one of the big Native American languages. Picture source: https://xkcd.com/84/

I had a dream: vigesimal numbers in French

Vigesimal numbers in French and how they lead to the definition of Kupwarization.

french-funny-german-haha-favim-com-2789995 — How to say 92 in 5 languages, the last one French. Picture source: http://favim.com/image/2789995/

Although I’ve been in China for a week and a half, my body stubbornly refuses to adjust to the time change, and I just took a mid-morning nap. I had the following dream: I’m in a library. I’m trying to find a book that I mislaid. I ask a man for help, and when he hears that the book that I’m looking for is in French, he starts speaking French to me. He goes on, and on, and on, and I can only catch bits and pieces of what he’s saying. “He must be Belgian,” I think to myself. “Oh, well–at least I’ll be able to say septante, and huitante, and nonante…” I woke up to find Les matins de France Culture playing on my iPhone. I guess that explains that.

Even expats whose French is otherwise good struggle with understanding French numbers. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that some of them contain sounds that English doesn’t have. For example, deux (2) and douze (12) sound quite different in isolation–the z at the end of douze makes the contrast clear. However, when followed by a vowel, deux is also pronounced with a z at the end; English doesn’t have the vowel in deux, and it’s very difficult for anglophones to distinguish it from the vowel of douze (or the vowel of du, for that matter), so it can be really hard for us to hear the difference between deux euros (2 euros) and douze euros (12 euros).

In addition to problems with the sounds, the structure of the numbers is also sometimes different. This is particularly true for the numbers from 70 to 99, especially in the range 80-99. The problem is that from 80-99, the numbers are all formed from a base of quatre-vingt–“four twenties”–to which you then add something else. So, 99 is quatre-vingt-dix-neuf–“four twenties ten nine.” See the cartoon above.

There’s actually a whole class of number systems based on 20, known as vigesimal number systems. Many languages have them. Here’s an example of vigesimal numbers from Yoruba, one of the big languages of Nigeria, from Wikipedia. (The tones are only indicated for the first one, sorry.)

Ogún, 20, is the basic numeric block. Ogójì, 40, (Ogún-meji) = 20 multiplied by 2 (èjì). Ogota, 60, (Ogún-mẹ̀ta) = 20 multiplied by 3 (ẹ̀ta). Ogorin, 80, (Ogún-mẹ̀rin) = 20 multiplied by 4 (ẹ̀rin). Ogorun, 100, (Ogún-màrún) = 20 multiplied by 5 (àrún).
16 (Ẹẹ́rìndílógún) = 4 less than 20. 17 (Etadinlogun) = 3 less than 20. 18 (Eejidinlogun) = 2 less than 20. 19 (Okandinlogun) = 1 less than 20. 21 (Okanlelogun) = 1 increment on 20. 22 (Eejilelogun) = 2 increment on 20. 23 (Etalelogun) = 3 increment on 20. 24 (Erinlelogun) = 4 increment on 20. 25 (Aarunlelogun) = 5 increment on 20.

As you can see, the French system isn’t fully vigesimal–it only uses 20 as the base for part of the system. However, vigesimal systems aren’t particularly unusual. Sometimes they are an areal feature–a feature of language that is shared by a number of the languages spoken in a geographic region that are not related to each other. For example, vigesimal number systems are a common feature of Central American languages. In other cases, they’re shared by inheritance in related languages, as in several Celtic languages, including Breton, the Celtic language spoken in northwest France. English has the vestiges of one, as in Four score and seven years ago… (Non-Americans: that’s the beginning of the Gettysburg Address, one of the most famous speeches in American history, delivered by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. I talk about how score is used as a number in American English today in the English notes at the end of the post.)

So: what’s up with the Belgian connection in my dream, and my relief that even if I couldn’t understand the guy, at least the numbers might make sense to me? It’s this: not all French speakers use the vigesimal system. As Wikipedia tells it:

…in the French of Belgium, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, the Aosta Valley, and the Channel Islands, the numbers 70 and 90 generally have the names septante and nonante. Therefore, the year 1996 is “mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-seize” in Parisian French, but it is “mille neuf cent nonante-six” in Belgian French. In Switzerland, “80” can be quatre-vingts (Geneva, Neuchâtel, Jura) or huitante (Vaud, Valais, Fribourg); in the past octante was also in use.

I seem to recall reading that the vigesimal system in French is an innovation, i.e. a later development in the language, and that using the huitante/nonante forms gives you an archaic air. Native speakers, can you verify?

OK: nap done, dream out of my system–time for lunch, and then back to writing up data on coreference relations in biomedical journal articles… Being a computational linguist isn’t all beer and pétanque…

Want to practice vigesimal numbers in French? You’ll find randomized recordings on this page on the Lawless French web site. Want to read more about Anglophone struggles with French numbers? Check out this post.

Miscellaneous additional notes (scroll down for English notes):

There’s a fil rouge (theme) in this post: famous American speeches. The title, I had a dream, comes from The Rev. Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech. I would guess that all Americans can recognize the most famous line from this one: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Dr. King’s speech itself echoes Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and its equally famous Four score and seven years ago with this line: Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Despite my assumption in the dream that an unintelligible-to-me French speaker must be Belgian, Belgian French isn’t actually that hard to understand. For example: I recently saw a Belgian movie, La fille inconnue. Fitting the stereotype of “French” movies, it’s all dialogue–a series of conversations, with no action in the sense that an American movie would have “action.” I could understand all of it except the scene that I can’t understand in any French movie, which is, of course, the crucial one–these are often long, emotional monologues, and I have trouble staying on top of the French in long, emotional monologues.

Want to know more about the phenomenon of unrelated languages within a geographic area sharing features? The Central American situation is pretty representative–7 major language families, plus some smaller ones, adding up to hundreds of different languges–but, with some shared features. Wikipedia has a short description of the shared features here. More generally, this kind of thing is known as a Sprachbund. The phenomenon interacts in interesting ways with multilinguality; the classic example of this Sprachbund/multilingualism interaction is the linguistic situation in the town of Kupwar in the state of Maharashtra, where four separate languages have developed local varieties that share particular features, but I haven’t been able to find a short description of the Kupwar phenomenon on the Interwebs. The original paper is here, and you can find the definition of the deverbal noun Kupwarization here.

English notes

Score is an archaic word meaning twenty. It still shows up with the meaning of a large, but indefinite, number. There are two typical constructions, scores of [nouns] and [nouns] by the score. Examples of both:

Legal highs linked to scores of deaths in British prisons (Mirror)
Does that mean our society, with its scores of fundamentalists and wing-nuts, went wrong somewhere? (The Towleroad blog)
Scores of #Anonymous hacktivists have already been arrested or jailed. They aren’t so anonymous anymore. Remember that. (Twitter)

I had clearly arrived at the mecca of the carbohydrate world (Pancakes by the score, 6 different crepes, Dutch Babies, 7 different waffles & a host of cereals. Oh & a few omelets.) (Carrie Brown)
There was very little profanity and no nudity, but deaths by the score, all of which required suspension of disbelief. (JayFlix)
The Reds weren’t bad. That header from Grujic is absolutely outrageous. Bring on yer Cockney’s by the score.

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