vocabulary – Page 19

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):

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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.

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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.

de Beauvoir’s critique of ontology, and French numbers

I can talk about ontology in French, but I can’t tell the difference between “two euros” and “twelve euros.” You, neither? Here’s help.

french-numbers-itchy-feet-u0alyrr — Picture source: https://goo.gl/XHKpu8

The Internet is full of web pages, blog posts, and out-and-out screeds on the subject of How you can tell that you’ve become French/Parisian/Provençal/name-your-region-of-choice. One of the common themes: you no longer struggle with numbers.

I find that French speakers often have trouble buying this, but it’s true (to buy in this weird sense explained in the English notes below): I can have a conversation in French about Marx’s critique of ontology versus Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of the same and why the latter is relevant to computational bioscience but the former isn’t–but, I can’t even begin to understand French numbers. (Marx: what you should be doing is trying to change reality, not trying to understand it, and besides, it’s completely determined by economics, so what’s the question? Not relevant to computational bioscience. Simone de Beauvoir: ontology is inherently essentialist, but being a woman is a matter of contingency, not essence; ontology gets misused to relegate women to a secondary status. Relevant to computational bioscience, which takes gender as essential (and binary, but we can get into that another time). My interpretation–your mileage may vary.)

This difficulty with French numbers has real consequences for my life. For example: at work, we use quantitative measures of system performance. Someone will be discussing their approach, and they’ll give a number for the results of their most recent experiment, and by the time I figure out whether it’s a big number or a little number, 15 seconds have gone by and I’ve lost the thread of the conversation.

The comic that you see above captures the feelings of much of the anglophone population of France, as far as I can tell from reading countless memoirs of the expat experience in this amazing country. History? Forget it–by the time I figure out whether we’re talking about the 1800s or the 1900s, the last two numbers have long gone by. This evening I was listening to a podcast of La méthode scientifique on the question of the origins of life, and they were tossing around times on the scales of billions of years, and it was practically impossible. (As far as I could tell, milliard is used both for “thousands” and “billion.” They’re not: as Laura Lawless explained it to me, Nope. You’re mixing up “milliards” (billions) and “milliers” (thousands).) Honestly, I could go on and on (and on and on) about this, but I think you get the point.

What to do? I suggest the sound files on the Lawless French web site. Scroll down towards the bottom of this page and you’ll find links to a number of sets of random numbers, including some that are all years, all prices (if I had a nickle for every time I’ve confused deux euros and douze euros…), etc. In a kind world, YouTube would be filled with videos of smiling native speakers reading random numbers and then holding up signs with the answer, but until that happy day arrives, Laura Lawless is your savior in this matter.

Want to read more about Anglophone struggles with French numbers? Check out the next post.

English notes

to buy: besides the basic meaning, this can also mean to believe or to accept a claim. Some examples from Twitter:

I don’t buy the idea that people are walking around saying things they don’t mean. At some point, after repeated repetition, they mean them. (What the writer doesn’t believe: the claim that “people are walking around saying things (that) they don’t mean.”)
I really agree with this. I keep seeing her described as a weak candidate and I don’t buy it. (What the writer doesn’t believe: the claim that an unspecified female is a weak candidate.)
@anonymized that’s what I tried to tell him. He didn’t buy it. (What “he” didn’t believe: whatever @anonymized had claimed, which the writer of this tweet also claimed, in a conversation with “him.” OK: you’re on your own for the rest, but feel free to ask questions in the Comments section.)
One of the panelists said she doesn’t buy that the ad agency is dead or on its way there.
my mom’s just jealous cause her sister had blonde hair & not her. She doesn’t buy that God made a mistake w me 😦
My wife is so beautiful that when I saw her comin up 2 the N tower (Livingston) I had 2look away. She doesn’t buy that story.
Oh God just had a flashback to being in a seminar and a woman saying she doesn’t “buy” that there are other genders in other cultures o m g
didn’t give me permission to get into school because I was really late to school. I was sick for fck’s sake but he didn’t buy my excuse
I just tackled a guy in a football jersey but the police didn’t buy my excuse of “Look at how he was dressed, he was asking for it.”

How it was used in the post: I find that French speakers often have trouble buying this, but it’s true: I can have a conversation in French about Marx’s critique of ontology versus Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of the same and why the latter is relevant to computational bioscience but the former isn’t–but, I can’t even begin to understand numbers.

Some periphrasis allowed

If people are rolling on the floor laughing while I talk, that’s a GOOD thing, right??

One of the things that I love about France is the frequency with which I hear people casually throwing around technical terminology about language. From my perspective, awareness of language and how it is structured is just more common here than it is in the US, and for someone like me who really likes to talk about language, that’s a big plus. (Plus as a noun and other American English oddities explained below in the English notes.) I’ve run into the term lexical field (in French, quite detailed: here) over drinks and on a web site for kids preparing for the bac, or high school exit exam; corpus came up in a cafe across the street from the Philharmonic; a recent discussion of labor unrest on the radio devolved into talk of ontologies.

periphrastic-do-7mipz — Historical change in the periphrastic use of “do” in English. Picture source: https://goo.gl/f0ztf7

Still, I had to laugh when the directions for the test of oral production that I took the other day mentioned periphrasis. Periphrasis is the use of longer, multi-word ways of saying something when there’s a shorter, typically single-word alternative. (Don’t bother looking it up on Wikipedia–the entry is incomprehensible.) For example, in English you can say smarter, or more smart; the more smart option is an example of periphrasis. More commonly, we would use an adjective and say that it’s periphrastic. French has a periphrastic and a non-periphrastic future tense: ils dégringoleront means they will tumble down, and so does ils vont dégringoler. The first one is not periphrastic; the second one is.

How does that come up in a test of oral production? It has to do with vocabulary, and how you deal with needing a word that you don’t know. Here is a description of the C1 level of the CEFR, the Common European Framework of Reference for defining language skill levels:

Le niveau C1 est intitulé niveau autonome. Ce niveau semble être caractérisé par le bon accès à une large gamme de discours qui permet une communication aisée et spontanée comme on le verra dans les exemples suivants : peut s’exprimer avec aisance et spontanéité presque sans effort. A une bonne maîtrise d’un répertoire lexical large dont les lacunes sont facilement comblées par des périphrases. Il y a peu de recherche notable de certaines expressions ou de stratégies d’évitement ; seul un sujet conceptuellement difficile peut empêcher que le discours ne se déroule naturellement.

The bolded sentence: Strong command of a broad lexical repertoire whose gaps are easily filled by periphrasis. If I recall the scoring criteria, the way that it’s phrased is that you’re allowed to use some periphrasis to fill in for words that you don’t know. Not too much–just some. How would that work? Well, I often fail hilariously when trying to make deadjectival nouns. For example, instead of happiness, I might say something like happitude or happiment. (In French, that is–I speak English just fine.) In my daily life, I just go for it, and if people start rolling on the floor laughing while I’m talking, that’s a good thing, right? On the other hand, during a formal exam, you might want to use a periphrastic construction and say something like the feeling of being happy rather than risking inadvertently coming out with happitude. In his fascinating book Babel no more, Michael Erard argues that one of the important indicators of skill in a language is the ability to work one’s way around problems in expression–an interesting insight, and one that runs counter how we usually think of what it means to have skill in a language, which is to not have problems in the first place. Using periphrasis in this way would be an example of working one’s way around a problem in expression.

How did the exam go? I don’t know! I’ll find out around Thanksgiving time (a tough time for American expats in France–there are no cranberries in Paris). I’m super-pessimistic about this kind of thing. However, I can say this: I felt really good about it afterwards. Excerpt from a letter to a friend:

The test itself plays to my strong points in that 50% of the oral production test is pronunciation/grammar/vocabulary, but the other 50% is about your ability to put together and present an argument that involves a compare-and-contrast plus your own take, and that’s what I do for a living all day. And, my pronunciation and vocabulary aren’t bad, I wouldn’t say. Grammar is another question altogether. But, still: I think it went really well. I walked out of the room on a huge high.

The format of the test is that you’re given two sets of two printed documents. You get to pick the set of documents that you want. I chose the documents about la philosophie grand public–you could translate it as something like “pop philosophy,” although that has somewhat more negative connotations in this context than are deserved–because part of the presentation requires giving your own personal perspective on the issue, and I do have a perspective on this issue, as I like to go to cafés philo. (I can barely tell you what the other topic was about–something related to the value of the individual versus the community–there isn’t enough time to go through both sets of documents, so as soon as I realized that I could handle the philosophie grand public one, I dove into it. Note that once the tests are given, the topics are no longer secret–you can download the exams.)

You get an hour to read the documents and put together your presentation. You’re allowed to take notes on the documents, but you cannot just read those notes. For the presentation, you have a jury–in this case, two people. You talk for 10-15 minutes, and then have a débat with the jury–they question your evidence, conclusions, whatever.

kano_jigoro — Jigoro Kano, the Japanese educator who invented judo. Picture source: https://goo.gl/UtD9ny

I had structured my presentation along the lines of a French thesis/antithesis/synthesis essay, and in my synthesis, I proposed that each of the two opposing articles made some untested assumptions, but that actually, each article provided the justification of the assumptions for the other. So, in the débat portion of the test, the jury questioned my assumptions. I love that kind of shit, so I have to admit: as perverse as this sounds, I enjoyed the oral production test. If I failed the C1 exams… it’s like Jigoro Kano, the inventor of judo, said about the mutually beneficial (自他共栄) aspects of competitions: the guy who wins gets positive feedback on his hard work, and the guy who loses gets valuable feedback about what he needs to work on more. I’ll have useful feedback to use in preparing to take it again, and I do appreciate useful feedback. Good thing, since my judo win-loss record is 4-54!

English notes

plus as a noun: Merriam-Webster defines it as something that is useful or helpful; a positive factor or quality. How it appears in the post: …for someone like me who really likes to talk about language, that’s a big plus.

don’t bother (to…): The Urban Dictionary describes it as used when telling a person to stop trying something that you know won’t work. It comes from this meaning of the verb to bother: to take the time to do something : to make an effort to do something (from Merriam-Webster). Note that it’s intransitive: this is different from the meaning of bother in don’t bother me or don’t bother the cat. Typically you would tell the person what to not bother doing, as I did in the post: Don’t bother looking it up on Wikipedia–the entry is incomprehensible. However, you can also use it without that–in this case, it can sound insulting or very angry, so be careful. In this case, it would be used when someone has offered to do something; you’re saying that there’s no reason to do it, whether because it wouldn’t improve the situation, or because you don’t need it, generally because you took care of the problem yourself, or are capable of doing so without the other person’s help. Scroll down for a few examples.

220px-dont_bother_to_knock — You can have a present participle, as in “don’t bother knocking,” or an infinitive, as in the title of this movie. The meaning is the same, either way. Picture source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Bother_to_Knock

don-t-bother-i-won-t-die-of-deception — This is the angry use. The speaker is refusing something that the listener has offered to do. Picture source: https://www.boldomatic.com/view/post/aLsbAw

dont-talk-to-idiots-dont-bother-images — This is what I’ve called the “angry” version. The implication: don’t bother talking to me, because you’re an idiot, so I won’t respond. Picture source: https://boldomatic.com/view/post/l4kCfQ

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