Tag: morphosyntax

Like I always say: it’s the little things that get you.  One of the things that I love about France is that people feel totally free to correct each other’s language, and they certainly feel free to correct mine.  (Truly, I love this–it’s such a help in trying to learn the language.)  I gave a talk in French the other day.  Descriptivism versus prescriptivism, duality of patterning, how even very small choices in building computer programs for processing human languages can imply stances on very contentious issues in linguistics–all that kind of good stuff.  I had memorized the relevant French vocabulary–la référentialité (referentiality), l’épistémologie (epistemology), inné (innate).  I was about as ready as I could be.

Not ready enough, it turns out.  One of the folks in the audience came up to me afterwards to explain a not-very-subtle word choice error that I had blown.  My mistake: I said “phrase” wrong. I was talking about groups of words smaller than a sentence, and used the French word la phrase.  Not okay!  La phrase means “sentence.”  If you want to talk about phrases, you need another word.  What that word is–that’s not so clear.

Why would one want to talk about phrases, anyway?  One of Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics that didn’t suck was demonstrating that syntax isn’t about relationships between words–rather, it’s about relationships between groups of words.  Matt Willsey gives a nice example that illustrates how this works.  In English, one could say:

• If x, then y. 
• Either x, or y.

You can embed these:

• If (either x or y), then (either x or y).

You can embed things in those, too:

• If either (a or b or c or d), then either (e and f or g and h) or (i and j but k and l).

The point: you get nowhere trying to explain this kind of hierarchical structure by means of the behavior of words.  On the other hand, you can get very far by discussing this kind of hierarchical structure in terms of groups of words.

In linguistics, we tend to refer to these groups of words as phrases.  English has noun phrases, verb phrases, and prepositional phrases–maybe more, but at least these.  (At some level, a sentence is just another kind of phrase, but we do tend to maintain some notion of “sentence.”)

Phrases are typically thought of as having something called a head.  From a syntactic point of view, you could think of the head of the phrase as the thing that determines whether the phrase behaves as a noun, a verb, or whatever.  In the following phrases, I’ve bolded the head:

• those bananas from the corner store
• this banana that I got from my cousins

To see why I say that the head determines how the phrase behaves, consider these sentences:

• Those bananas from the corner store are almost rotten.
• This banana that I got from my neighbors is just about ready for the trash can.

Prior to Chomsky, the most fully elaborated theory of how syntax works is that it was about connections between sequences of words.  What you can’t explain with that kind of model is how you can have sequences like the corner store are or my neighbors is.  To account for sequences like that, you have to have some notion of structure that can let you represent the fact that it’s the head of a group of words that controls whether the verb is singular (is) or plural (are). 

So, how do you talk about “phrases” in French?  That’s where my problem came up, and how I ended up sounding stupid.  One of my ways of trying to find acceptable technical terminology is to look things up on Wikipedia in English, and then follow the link to the corresponding French-language page.  No love: there’s an English-language page for noun phrase, but no corresponding French page.  Around the lab, some of the students call them phrases–phrase nominale, phrase verbale, etc.  The issue: la phrase is typically used to refer to a sentence.  When I gave my talk, I used the word la phrase to mean “phrase,” as some folks do around the lab.  It didn’t go over well.

So, what do you call a phrase in French?  Here are some options that I’ve found.  The one that has the most support in terms of the number of places where I found it used is one that I have never actually heard!

• le groupe nominal/les groupes nominaux (Linguee.fr)
• la locution nominale (Linguee.fr)
• le syntagme nominal (Linguee.fr; Denis Roycourt’s Noam Chomsky: une théorie générative du langage, in Le langage: nature, histoire et usage, edited by Jean-François Dortier; Maurice Pergnier’s Le mot)

I even came across this, in Maurice Pergnier’s Le mot:

C’est également avec ce sens qu’on rencontre le terme [syntagme] dans les traductions françaises des ouvrages de Chomsky, pour traduire le mot anglais “phrase” (Noun-Phrase; Verb-Phrase = syntagme nominal; syntagme verbal). 

Perpignon goes on to add: Il faut noter cependant que, pour cette…école, le syntagme (angl. “phrase”) ne se définit pas seulement comme ensemble d’unités minimales, il se définit surtout comme partie de phrase, puisqu’il est dégagé par découpage de la phrase (“sentence”) selon la structure arborescente. 

So, we have a very explicit contrast between le syntagme (English “phrase”) and la phrase (English “sentence”).

Now that we know how to talk about phrases, in French and otherwise: getting a computer to find the heads of phrases can be a lot harder than it is for humans to do it.  There’s a very cool web site that lets people play a game that’s designed to create data to be used to help computers learn for themselves how to find the heads of phrases in French.  It’s called Zombi Lingo: zombie, ’cause you have to find heads, and zombies like to eat brains.  (Clearly this is a pre-Walking-Dead conception of what it means to be a zombie.)  Check it out at this link–it’s quite fun.

So, yeah–I gave a talk in which I explained duality of patterning, but screwed up the word for “phrase.”  Oh, well–as Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, would have put it: I got valuable insight into what I need to work on.

Incidentally, here are some details on some of the 85 gun deaths in the United States in the past 72 hours:

• 3 people in one incident, Marion County, Oregon (source here)
• 1 church deacon in Shelby County, Tennessee (source here)
• 1 person in Houston, Texas (source here)
• 1 person in San Antonio, Texas (source here)

I really don’t have the stomach to go through all 85 of them–sigh…  72 hours, 85 deaths…

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring,

He went to bed and he bumped his head and he didn’t get up ’til the morning.

–Children’s song

Adam Gopnik once described Paris as “a scowling gray universe, relieved by pastry.”  The “gray” part comes from the observation that it’s very often cloudy here.  Actually, one of the things that I love about Paris is that it rains here.  In the US, I live in a very sunny, dry part of the country–300 days of sunshine a year.  However, I grew up in a very, very wet part of the country, and I miss that.  So, coming to Paris in March and seeing flowers bursting from wet earth on my walk to work through the forest is a real treat.

Being from a very wet place, I have a large vocabulary for talking about rain in English.  Here are some examples of relevant verbs.  These are all impersonal verbs, using what linguists call a pleonastic pronoun, i.e. it’s:

• to rain: the default verb.
• to pour: to rain hard–see the children’s song above.
• to rain cats and dogs: to rain hard.
• to rain/pour buckets: to rain hard.
• to mist: to rain very lightly.
• to drizzle: to rain, especially if it’s cold.  (I’ve seen a couple definitions of this as “to rain lightly.”)
• to sprinkle: to rain, especially for a short period of time.
• to storm: to rain very hard, often with thunder and lightning.

Usage examples:

• If it rains tomorrow, the game will be cancelled.  (http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/if-it-rains-its-raining.1045608/)
• It’s pouring outside.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gsdme47oUw)
• It’s raining cats and dogs.  (http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/14273/the-etymology-of-the-phrase-its-raining-cats-and-dogs)
• After lunching, Caesar went out to post some cards, and as it was raining buckets, he took refuge in the arcades of the Piazza Esedra — Caesar or Nothing by Pio Baroja
• It misted in the morning, but by noon it was clear.  (https://www.google.fr/search?q=%22it+misted%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=xC8fV_nGMMLYgAaktIS4Bg)
• Five activities for Paris when it drizzles (Note: it is NOT Paris that is drizzling!)  (http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/paris-in-the-rain-5-activities-for-paris-when-it-drizzles.html)
• My mom told me it’s sprinkling, not raining.  (Two adorable kids argue about whether it’s raining or sprinkling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sKdDyyanGk)
• It stormed for hours, and when the thunder and lightning finally quit, it just kept on pouring. I got scared.  (Click here–very long URL.)

• pleuvoir: to rain.  Il pleut: it’s raining.  (I always seem to confuse this with il pleure, “he’s crying.”
• Il pleut à verse: it’s pouring.  (Native speakers: can we do the liaison here?, i.e. il pleu tà verse?)
• Il pleut des cordes: it’s raining cats and dogs, it’s pouring rain.
• Il tombe des cordes: same thing.
• Il bruine: it’s misting.
• Il crachine: it’s sprinkling.
• y avoir de l’orage: to storm.
• faire de l’orage: to storm.

I’ve focussed entirely on verbs here.  For lots of nouns and adjectives related to rain in English, see this great post from the EngVid.com web site.

One evening I was riding the metro home when a guy got into the car with some used books to sell.  A man sitting across the aisle from me asked to see them.  He flipped through one of them, then took a pen out of his jacket pocket and began circling words–in this book that the other guy was trying to sell.  Are you going to buy that?, the would-be bookseller asked the guy with the pen.  They exchanged words–the bookseller was not happy about having his books marked up.  The bookseller said something that Mr. Pen apparently thought was obvious or stupid.  Il est fort, lui, he snorted–he’s a sharp one. 

The central meaning of fort/forte is “strong,” but it can also be used adverbially.  You hear it a lot that way, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly when you can use it in that way–it’s often the case that there are word combinations that are possible in a language, but that don’t sound right.  Rather, there are particular words that are conventionally used in very specific combinations.  Violeta Seretan of the University of Geneva gives some examples of English words that are used to describe the magnitude of various nouns.  The semantics of each of these is the same, but the words that are typically used are quite different.  We talk about big problems, heavy rain…  How about injury?  (Answer below.)  It would certainly be possible to say large problem, but it’s nowhere near as likely, and it sounds odd, as a native speaker.  For example, you could say large problem, but it seems odd.  I wanted to be able to demonstrate that this corresponds to some actual statistical tendency, not just my intuitions, so  I searched the enTenTen corpus, a collection of almost 20 billion words of written English, looking for big problem and large problem.  Here are the frequencies:

• big problem: occurs 6 times per million words.
• large problem: occurs 0.5 times per million words.

Big problem occurs twelve times more often than large problem–the latter is possible, but it’s not really what you would expect to hear from a native speaker.  We call these things like big problem “collocations”–combinations of words that occur statistically more often than you would expect by chance.

You can find collocation dictionaries for English, and they’re quite useful for second-language learners.  I don’t know of any for French, though, or at least not where to find them in the US, which is where I am at the moment.  (I’ve seen similar things in Canada.)  I additionally want to know how these adverbial uses of fort should be translated into English, so I need a way to figure this kind of thing out for myself.

First step: find a whole lot of French text in some easily searchable form.  I started with the French section of EUROPARL–a collection of documents from the European Parliament, translated to/from a wide variety of languages.  The French section of EUROPARL contains about 59 million words–so, a whole lot–and you can access it through the Sketch Engine web site–so, easily searchable.  A quick search showed me that fort is quite common in that data set:

Once I know that, I know that there will be enough data to calculate the collocations–recall that this is a statistical thing, so you need plenty of data.  The Sketch Engine interface gives me a number of options for how to do the calculations (scroll down to get past the screen shot):

…which I show you just so that you’ll see that there are a lot of approaches to doing this. I just went with the defaults.

The calculations yielded quite a few possibilities.  Here are some of them:

If you’re a stickler for data, you might have noticed that the collocations are ordered by the log of the Dice coefficient, which you could think of as a measure of the statistical effect, I guess.  I am really looking for the most common collocations involving fort, though, so I’ll reorder by the cooccurrence count, i.e. the raw count of how often the collocations occurred:

Crap–that basically tells me nothing.  Why not?  Zipf’s Law.  Remember that Zipf’s Law tells us not only that most words are pretty rare, but also that some words are really, really common, and in French, that certainly includes de (“of”), et (“and”), une (“a”), and the rest of what we’re seeing here.  (Moral of the story: don’t expect the most frequent things in a language to necessarily be the most revealing things in a language.)  If I scroll down a bit, though, I see bien on the list.  683 examples of this–a frequency of 10.25 per million words.  Bien is often an adjective, which would presumably make fort adverbial in these cases, so we’re on to something now.  Let’s check out some of those examples:

So, now I have some cases where it would make sense to use fort, but I want to know how they would correspond to English, too.  This requires that I have access to the corresponding English text.  No problem–recall that the EUROPARL corpus is multilingual.  In particular, it is what is known as a parallel corpus, which means that it contains the same contents in multiple languages, not just similar contents (although that kind of corpus can be useful, too).  I searched for the phrase fort bien.  Here’s an example of the output:

So, now I have some French/English equivalents for fort bien:

• Étant donné les prévisions de la politique structurelle ­ que je connais fort bien … With these forecasts of the structural policy – which I know very well…
• …ce que Jean-Pierre Chevènement a fort bien nommé récemment…  …referred to recently, and very aptly, by Jean-Pierre Chevènement…
• C’est pourquoi, comme l’a déjà fort bien expliqué M. Kalas…  Hence, as Mr Karas has stated to his credit…
• …je comprends fort bien la préoccupation…  … I have a great deal of sympathy for the unease…
• Vous savez fort bien que…  You know very well that…
• …non seulement parce que le président le connaît fort bien…  …not only because the President is very familiar with it…
• Il est fort bien d’ organiser des réunions, mais ce sont les résultats qui comptent.  Meetings are all very well, but it is the result that counts.
• …ils se tirent fort bien d’affaire.  …they are managing really rather well.
• …et je les comprends fort bien.   …which I fully understand.
• Ils les connaissent fort bien et un par un.  They recognise each and every one of them very well.

I’m feeling good about how to use fort bien now, but I want to know about other ways that fort could be used with an adjective.  So, I’ll do another search of the parallel corpus (i.e. the matched French and English texts), but this time I’ll just search for fort, and I’ll specify that I want it to be an adverb.  Here are some of the results:

Now I have some general examples of how to use fort:

• Nous estimons fort positif que…  We see it as a very positive sign that…
• Le rapporteur constate également fort justement que… The rapporteur has also quite rightly stated that…
• Ce que nous faisons maintenant est probablement fort important…  What is being done may well be very important…
• …l’ Union européenne a fort justement octroyé…  …the European Union was right to support…
• …nous entretenons des relations bilatérales fort satisfaisantes avec…  …We have very satisfactory bilateral relations with…

I don’t know every adjective with which it would be OK to use fort, but I know one more than I did when I got out of bed this morning, and I’m cool with that–one less time when I’ll have to use très, which is all that they teach us in school.

A colleague had some observations on this:

On top of being used in collocations, it also marks a style / genre which is somewhat formal or elevated (“soutenu”). This might explain why it remains frequent mostly in collocations and is less frequent (or more marked) in freer combinations. This gives the expression a literary turn or a pretense to a higher register.  Both in speech and in writing, it is “soutenu.”

Another native speaker had this to say about it:

“Fort” is used as a synonym of “très”, before adjectives or adverbs . You can use it in about any case, it’s just more elegant than “très”, but not really literary .

The Mr. Pen guy on the subway turned out to be pretty crazy, as far as I could tell.  At one point he snapped at my adorable cousin, who happened to be visiting, and I told him to cut it out.  This was followed by an initially amusing conversation between him and me that at some point degenerated into a loud tirade on his part.  I kept telling him that my French wasn’t that good and I couldn’t understand him, but he just kept going and going.  Eventually French people around us began telling him to stop being an asshole and words to that effect, so I assume that it wasn’t very nice, but honestly, I couldn’t tell you.  At some point a large and very drunk French guy got on the subway car, and started seriously getting in Mr. Pen’s face–it was clear that this was going to turn violent.  Mr. Pen was a very diminutive Haitian man, and I wasn’t going to watch him get the shit beaten out of himself no matter how bizarre he was being, so I got involved.  The train stopped, Mr. Pen jumped out, and Mr. Drunk Guy launched into an animated discussion with me about American heavy metal, punctuated by snatches of Metallica songs.  All in all, an unusual evening on the metro, but not an unpleasant one by any means–just part of life in The Big City, as we say in English.

Oh: it’s serious injury.