Subjacency: The judgements

Thank you very much for your responses, everybody! (If you haven't answered yet and want to, please do it before reading the rest of this post.)

Chomsky's intuitions were as follows (* marks ungrammaticality as usual):

1. * That's the boy who they intercepted John's message to.
   
2. * That's the boy who he believed the claim that John tricked.
   
3. * That was a lecture that for him to understand was difficult.
   
4. * Which book did John wonder why Bill had read?
   
5. √ Which book did John think that Bill had read?
   
6. √ What would you approve of John's drinking?
   
7. * What would you approve of John's excessive drinking of?

Mine were that 1, 4, 5, 7, and (only after some thought) 6 were good, while 2 and 3 were wrong - but I exclude those judgements here, since I was reading the book and might have been swayed by my reactions to the arguments. My sister found 1, 2, and 4 wrong, 3 "weird but comprehensible", and 5-7 good - so even within a single family judgements vary significantly. Your 11 collective judgements (plus some friends and family, and excluding non-native speakers) add up as follows (grading "uncertain" as 0.5):


The discrepancy, and the level of individual variation, are striking - not a single reader agrees with all of Chomsky's judgements, and the only consistent judgements are 2 (always wrong) and 5 (always right.) Most of Chomsky's judgements also happen to be predicted by his (and others in the generative tradition's) theories; your judgements therefore often pose problems for those. According to Chomsky, 1 and 2 should both be ungrammatical for the same reason - they involve movement past more than one "barrier" (boundary of a 'noun phrase' (DP) or clause excluding the complementiser (IP)) at a time. Yet more than half the people here (including me) accept 1, while nobody accepts 2; one could argue that 2 should be less acceptable than 1 because it crosses three barriers rather than two, but why should 1 be acceptable at all? 4 should be ungrammatical because "why" is occupying a position that "which book" should have to move through - but about half of you (including me) think it's fine. And most readers of this blog find 7 to be better than 6 - the opposite of Chomsky's judgements and of the predictions of the "A-over-A" principle he was working with then (although the latter is obsolete.)

Chomsky (1963:51) said of sentences like these: "In some unknown way, the speaker of English devises the principles of [wh-movement etc.] on the basis of data available to him; still more mysterious, however, is the fact that he knows under what formal conditions these principles are applicable... The sentences of [1-3] are as 'unfamiliar' as the vast majority of those that we encounter in daily life, yet we know intuitively, without instruction or awareness, how they are to be treated by the system of grammatical rules which we have mastered." This seems to be false; individually we often find it difficult to decide the grammaticality of sentences like these, and collectively we routinely disagree on them. Certainly it cannot be construed as belonging to that part of the "knowledge of language" that is, in the words of Chomsky (1963:64), "independent of intelligence and of wide variations in individual experience".

If it did, then that would be rather interesting: it has been claimed that the principles of Subjacency must be innate, because children aren't exposed to enough evidence to deduce them otherwise. But given the level of variation actually observed, it is tempting to reverse the reasoning: children don't deduce most of the principles of Subjacency, so they must neither be exposed to enough evidence for them nor have innate knowledge of them. Rather than postulating arbitrary rules hard-wired into the brain and specific to the language faculty, a more promising way to explain Subjacency phenomena might be to try to derive them from processing difficulties, as suggested by Sag et al.

Subjacency intuitions

I've been reading an old Chomsky book, Language and Mind, lately. As usual, the moment he starts discussing what would eventually be called subjacency I find my intuitions are systematically different from his, and I'm curious: how common is this? By way of testing, here's a few sentences in English: which ones would you consider ungrammatical/unacceptable as phrased?

1. That's the boy who they intercepted John's message to.
   
2. That's the boy who he believed the claim that John tricked.
   
3. That was a lecture that for him to understand was difficult.
   
4. Which book did John wonder why Bill had read?
   
5. Which book did John think that Bill had read?
   
6. What would you approve of John's drinking?
   
7. What would you approve of John's excessive drinking of?

Chomsky's grammaticality judgements will be provided later - they're on pp. 50-54 of the book.

Verbal adjectives in English

It may seem pretty exotic to English-speakers that in some languages adjectives behave almost exactly like verbs, but this strategy is not as un-English as it looks. Consider the following colloquial American English sentences, with more formal approximate "translations":

This rocks! - This is good. (and not *This is rocking!)
That would rock! - That would be good.
That rocked! - That was good.
That was a rockin' day. - That was a good day.

This sucks! - This is bad. (and not *This is sucking!
That would suck! - That would be bad.
That sucked! - That was bad.
That was a sucky day. - That was a bad day.

In these, a property usually expressed with an adjective ("good", "bad") is being expressed using a stative verb, but only in predicative constructions (that is, to form a sentence.) In attributive function (that is, modifying a noun) an adjective derived from this verb is used. Like other stative verbs ("know", "be") but unlike non-stative verbs, it uses the simple present form to express a current situation, not the present continuous.

Within English, this pattern may seem pretty odd. But it corresponds rather well to how adjectives are expressed in Songhay languages, eg Koyra Chiini (Heath 1999:73). There, properties are expressed in predicative contexts just like verbs, with the same mood/aspect/negation particles, and in attributive contexts usually take a suffix:

ni beer - you are big (like ni koy - you went)
hal a ma beer - until it gets big (like a ma koy - he will go)
har beer - a big man

ni futu - you are bad
har futu-nte - a bad man

In Songhay the perfect aspect is used with stative verbs to express a current situation; but, like the English simple present tense, this is the simplest indicative verb form. The chief difference is that in Songhay the predicative verbs are used for inchoative senses too, as if "That rocks!" could mean "That is becoming good" as well as "That is good".

Typologically, I find it kind of interesting that what looks like a couple of verbal adjectives should be lurking in the recesses of the English lexicon. But it also has practical applications: if I were trying to teach Songhay or a typologically similar language to Americans, I would certainly start by discussing the example of these two English words.

Adjectives - who needs 'em?

Most languages have a class of words that express properties and behave differently from other words. These are called adjectives. In English, for example, words like "red" or "old" or "tall" behave differently from nouns or verbs. For example, you add -s to verbs in the present tense if their subject is 3rd person singular, like "he sings" or "she eats"; but you can't add -s to an adjective, so you say "he is red" rather than *"he reds". You can put "very" before an adjective ("very red"), but not usually before a noun (you can't say *"very food".) Verbs can't be placed between "the" and the noun (unless you add an ending like -ing or -ed), but adjectives can (you can say "the red car", but not "the move car").

It turns out, according to Dixon 2004, that practically every language - perhaps every language - has at least one separate class of words, definable purely on the grounds of their (morphosyntactic) behaviour rather than their meaning, that refer to properties. This class typically includes words expressing size, age, value, and colour, and sometimes more.

But often, a concept expressed using an adjective in one language is expressed only by a verb or a noun in another. For example, in Kwarandzyəy adjectives come between the noun and the plural marker:

ạdṛạ kədda yu
mountain small PL
"little mountains" (hills)

But there is no adjective "happy" in Kwarandzyəy; instead, you use a verb, yəfṛəħ "be happy, rejoice". And to say "the happy people", you say "the people who are happy/have rejoiced":

bạ γ i-ba-yəfṛəħ
person who they-PF-happy

Moreover, though they may always be distinguishable by some test, they usually tend to behave very much like another word class. In fact, Stassen 1997:30 (link goes to 2003) postulates that in every languages adjectives handle predication (saying "X is red", for example) in the same way as either verbs, nouns, or locations. For example, in English or Arabic, adjectives handle predication like nouns (you say "He is tall", just like "He is a footballer"); in Korean or Tamasheq, they do it like verbs; and some languages, like Japanese, have both verb-like and noun-like adjectives.

So clearly people can do without some adjectives, and clearly the behaviour of adjectives tends to be very similar to the behaviour of some other word class. Why not do without them altogether? It would be easy enough to construct a language where no morphological or syntactic tests could distinguish adjectives from verbs, or from nouns. So if practically every language does take the trouble to distinguish them, there must be some pretty powerful cognitive motivation for it - and some pretty powerful historical tendencies acting to separate adjectives from verbs and/or nouns. The question isn't directly relevant to my current work, but it's worth thinking about.

Translating from linguists' English to normal English

Machine translation between languages is hard, obviously. There are all sorts of reasons why just looking words up and constructing syntactic trees and changing orders appropriately isn't enough to produce a good output - mainly, the fact that to disambiguate ambiguities you often need real world knowledge, and different vocabularies are not always organised in the same way. How much that matters is really emphasised by thinking about a slightly different problem: translation from a technical vocabulary to a non-technical one within the same language.

Take the following sentences, pulled at random from a grammar on my shelf (Stroomer's Grammar of Boraana Oromo):

"Nouns ending in -ni (mostly -aani) have ultimate or penultimate stress in free variation."

"Verbs with the verb extension -ad'd'-, -at- have an AFF.IMPER.sg: -ád'd'i, -ád'd'u and a NEG.IMPER.sg: -atín(n)i, see 10.10." (p. 72)

If you are, say, a foreign worker about to be posted to northern Kenya, or a second-generation emigrant Oromo planning to go back and visit, you may well want to try and learn some Oromo from this book. But the odds are you will not know what either of these English sentences means, and that applies to quite a lot of the book.

How could you translate these sentences into terms a wider audience would understand? If you can assume a certain amount of basic knowledge (traditional parts of speech, consonants and vowels) then that makes things easier:

"Nouns ending in -ni (mostly -aani) get stressed on the last or second-to-last vowel, it doesn't matter which."

"Verbs with -ad'd'-, -at- added at the end have an imperative singular: -ád'd'i, -ád'd'u and a negative imperative singular: -atín(n)i, see 10.10."

Realistically, you can't assume that level of knowledge, certainly not in Britain at any rate (I still can't believe that what little grammar gets taught in schools here only ever seems to get taught in foreign language classes, not in English ones; that no doubt explains part of the country's comparatively low foreign language skills.) So what does that leave you with? Something like:

"When you say a word that refers to a person, place, or thing* and ends in -ni (mostly -aani), you put the emphasis at the end or just before the end, it doesn't matter which."

"If you have a word that means doing something* that has -ad'd'-, -at- added at the end, then to order one person to do that you add -ád'd'i, -ád'd'u, and to order them not to do that you add -atín(n)i, see 10.10."

(*Yes, I know that syntactic tests like whether they can be the object of a preposition yield more accurate definitions, but in practice these are a good first approximation, and the former does work even on gerunds: "Killing is a bad thing", so "killing" is a noun, but *"Kill is a bad thing", so "kill" isn't.)

Could this be done algorithmically? A simple substitution table would certainly not be enough. Just try it with any set of definitions you can think of:

"Words referring to a person, place, or thing ending in -ni (mostly -aani) have final or pre-final emphasis such that it doesn't matter which."

"Words that mean doing something with the words that mean doing something extension -ad'd'-, -at- have an agreeing order-giving one-entity: -ád'd'i, -ád'd'u and a denying order-giving one-entity: -atín(n)i, see 10.10." (p. 72)

Not terribly helpful, I think you'll agree... To come up with something a little more helpful (and I'm sure my renditions could be improved on) we had to change the whole structure of the sentence. Even then, at some point it's probably going to be more effective to just teach the person the grammatical notions and let them go forward from there than to keep giving brief explanations of the same notion over and over again.

The problem is certainly not unique to linguistics. Medicine, law, ecology - most fields have technical vocabularies that pose an obstacle to non-specialists, who will often have good reason to be interested in trying to make sense of them. Is there any role for algorithms in this (apart from obvious things like hyperlinking technical terms to dictionary entries)? It's well outside my usual field, but it would be interesting to hear of any attempts.

Overheard from the code-switching department...

...from an Algerian here in London:

kanu	supplying-lna
they.were	supplying-to.us

You have a non-finite English form ("supplying") in a past continuous form, in accordance with the English construction but contrary to the Algerian Arabic one, which would require a finite form ("they supply"). You have an Algerian Arabic clitic pronoun - a form that can't stand on its own, but has to be attached to the end of something else - being stuck onto a totally unadapted verb in another language; code-switching in the middle of a phonological word! The facility with which some Algerian long-term residents of the UK combine their two languages is really rather remarkable, and would merit further study.

Some surprising language links

Sorry about the infrequent posting, everyone - I've been burying myself in transcribing a few of my field recordings. There's plenty of interesting stuff on them: what to sing to encourage locusts to go away, how to make tea the proper Saharan way, tickling rhymes for kids... So naturally today I'll post a potentially linguistically interesting audio link: Library of Congress: American Memory Sound Recordings. This has a bunch of interviews with ex-slaves from the 1930s, which I understand from reading John McWhorter's Defining Creole have revolutionised Creolists' ideas about the history of African-American English. A popular theory had argued that during the era of slavery African-Americans spoke a creole English much like the ones in the Caribbean; these recordings, which show a speech not too different from today, turned out to pose a severe challenge to this view. It also has an Omaha pow-wow and late 1930's Californian folk music in a surprising number of languages, including Armenian, Finnish, and Gaelic. Look around.

This Post is a Sin to Read

I imagine pretty much all English speakers agree on the grammaticality of the following sentence:
* It is a sin to eat pork.

But looking around online recently, I was struck by the following construction:
* Pork is a sin to eat
* Soon it will say in the bible that Speghetti is a sin to eat.
* I don` t think any kind of food is a sin to eat

To me, this construction seems rather odd, and the extreme rarity of such constructions on Google suggests that I'm with the majority of English speakers on this point. Do people who do find this normal allow it with other verbs, I wonder? Can they say "This post is a sin to read?" or "Wine is a sin to drink?" Or, indeed, "Tea is a pleasure to drink?" Has anyone else heard constructions along these lines? Presumably, these speakers were influenced by the analogy of sentences like "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" or "Tea is a good thing to drink"; but if I ever figure out why the former seem so weird and the latter are perfectly grammatical, I'll make sure to tell you...

African influence on native Nicaraguan languages!

...and I bet that got your attention, if you're the sort of person who reads this blog.

Ulwa is a language native to the eastern highlands of central Nicaragua, and now spoken mainly in Karawala on the Atlantic coast. It belongs to the small Misumalpan language family, along with Miskito; an interesting characteristic of this family is the position of nominal possessive affixes, which may be suffixed or infixed depending on the word's syllable structure. The Miskito kingdom had a longstanding relationship with the British, as a result of which English Creole is widely spoken on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast; both Miskito and English have influenced Ulwa, as has Spanish of course. You can find a nice dictionary and a brief grammar at the Ulwa Language Home Page.

Anyway, the Ulwa word for "east" turns out to be mâsara. I'm sure some readers will already be thinking of Maghrebi Arabic/Berber mâṣəṛ (from Arabic مِصْر), with reflexes in a variety of West African languages along the lines of masara - meaning Egypt! Unfortunately, a second glance reveals that "west" is mâ âwai, suggesting that maybe mâsara is some kind of compound with mâ. mâ, sure enough, turns out to mean "sun", while sara means "origin". So much for that idea; but what a good example of how a coincidental lookalike can emerge. I can't find any similar way to explain the word for "God", though - which is Alah...

So what about that African loanword I promised? There really is at least one, but it is somewhat less exciting. "Peanut", in Ulwa, is pinda. This word, referring to a post by Polyglot Vegetarian, appears to derive from Kikongo m-pinda, and was borrowed into English as pindar (various spellings) before being ousted by peanut. So this word may have been mediated by English, but is of clear Kikongo origin - sensibly enough, given that peanuts themselves come from Africa. If you want more African loanwords into Caribbean Native American languages, try Garifuna - where the word for "man" is a Bantu loanword.

Language endangerment in Yorkshire

Several members of the British Parliament took a few minutes out from worrying about issues like Iraq, the housing shortage, and global warming to put together an Early Day Motion expressing their concern about the fate of the Yorkshire dialect:

That this House is concerned at the recently published research indicating that words are disappearing from the Yorkshire dialect because of the influence of the internet, social mobility and globalisation; and furthermore supports the work of the Yorkshire Dialect Society in continuing to promote what is, after all, the best English regional accent in the world.

The amendments proposed are also worth a look, featuring such phrases as "a slow national convergence towards the monochrome mush of effete estuarial English". For what it's worth, I am rather inclined to agree that Yorkshire may have "the best English regional accent in the world" - although two MPs proposed to amend this to "after the Lancashire accent" - and I'm glad to see a bit of appreciation for dialectologists, but I find it difficult to be all that concerned about the loss of a few well-documented local words (supposedly due to people watching national media and getting out more) in a fairly widely spoken dialect of one of the world's most flourishing languages, when whole languages are disappearing virtually undocumented every month due to factors like kidnapping children or beating them when they speak their language.

Brothers in Law

Reading a Language Log post I just noticed a rather laughable argument apparently being used in the Jose Padilla trial (according to AP):

FBI wiretaps played in court for jurors contain frequent references to "brothers," which prosecutors say means mujahedeen fighters looking for a battle. Defense lawyers contend the term is a common expression among male Muslims.

If the AP article has correctly represented the prosecution argument, they must be either absolutely desperate or thoroughly unqualified. As the defense correctly states, "brother" is fairly commonly used between male Muslims, in accordance with a hadith saying that "A Muslim is the brother of a Muslim"; it carries absolutely no implication of being a fighter. Google will turn up numerous examples; for an illustrative sample, consider this slightly frivolous MPAC forum discussion about finding motivational speakers, where other Muslims are called by the terms "brs", "bros", "akhee" (Arabic for "my brother"), and "Brother".

However, in fairness, other reports indicate that the prosecution claims that the defendants used some kind of system of codewords: they claim innocuous words like "picnics", "football", and "marriage" were used with much more sinister intended meanings. If their claim is that "brother" meant "fighter looking for battle" in this alleged code, as opposed to in normal usage, then that might not be completely absurd; I haven't found any transcripts, so I can't attempt to evaluate the plausibility of such a claim.

The usual arguments about the correct translation of "jihad" and "Allah" apparently came up as well - I don't think I'll bother adding to the thousands of web pages discussing that issue.

Agflation

I'm a bit busy getting my core chapter ready to hand in, so just a quick post on an English word I spotted lately: agflation. The term confirms the ever-increasing productivity of "-flation" as a suffix; the phenomenon is rather alarming.

Of truth and Scotsmen

A few commentators on my previous post invoked the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. This term refers to a rhetorical move whereby one makes a sweeping generalisation about some class (say, Scotsmen), and, when presented with a counterexample to the generalisation, retorts that this counterexample is not a true example of the class ("no true Scotsman"). While not strictly speaking fallacious, this move is of course misleading, in that it suggests that the empirically testable generalisation first proposed still stands, when actually it has been replaced with an unfalsifiable tautology applying to a much narrower class. I didn't in fact use any such argument in my last post, but I smelled something fishy about this "fallacy", and decided to examine it further.

The "true X" construction is semantically productive in a wide variety of contexts (a true friend, a true patriot, a true gentleman, a true villain, a true genius, a true cat...) In each case, it presupposes that some things that would normally be termed members of the class are not true ones (that not all of those who are normally labelled friends are true friends, for example). At least for animate nouns, it seems to distinguish between a broader use of a term based on appearance or convention, and a less inclusive one referring to a sort of ideal that members of the broader class may or may not live up to. Thus a true cat is one that exhibits, in exaggerated form, all the characteristics that we associate (accurately or not) with stereotypical cats; a true friend is one who exhibits the characteristics of friendship in circumstances where others would fail to exhibit them. Anyone can be a Scotsman merely by being born in Scotland, but to be a true Scotsman, you probably have to wear a kilt all the time, love haggis, roll your r's, etc.

Obviously, this feature of English is not inherently fallacious or misleading; using the phrase "true X" simply saves us the trouble of saying "an X that more than satisfies our expectations of Xs". Now that more people actually know foreigners personally rather than by report, it's become painfully obvious how far from reality most national stereotypes are, so this construction sounds rather silly when applied to Scotsmen; but even there it nonetheless conveys a fairly clear meaning to anyone familiar with English culture.

Interestingly, though, the rhetorical move originally criticised is not always misleading either. You can undeniably be a Scotsman (or a cat) without being a true Scotsman (or a true cat), so the suggestion that calling someone not a true Scotsman saves the original sweeping generalisation about Scotsmen is false. But if you're not a true friend (or a true gentleman), you're not really a friend (or a gentleman) at all - just as fool's gold isn't really gold - so calling someone not a true friend, if justifiable, does save your sweeping generalisation about friends, or, more accurately, your statement defining the characteristics of a friend. A poem I studied way back in middle school provides an entertaining example of the non-fallacious use of an (implicit) "No true Scotsman"-type argument:

Ramped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws;
They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws;
With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another,
Till all the pit with sand and mane was in a thunderous smother;
The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air;
Said Francis then, “Faith, gentlemen, we’re better here than there.”

De Lorge’s love o’er heard the King, a beauteous lively dame,
With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the same;
She thought, The Count my lover is brave as brave can be;
He surely would do wondrous things to show his love of me;
King, ladies, lovers, all look on; the occasion is divine;
I’ll drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine.

She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady’s face.
“By Heaven,” said Francis, “rightly done!” and he rose from where he sat;
“No love,” quoth he, “but vanity, sets love a task like that.”

Bloggers who abusively invoke "Islam"

Today, it appears that politics has once more touched the hallowed halls of Language Log Plaza. Unfortunately, while one post was good, the other was devoted to criticising what looks like an eminently sensible - if unlikely to be followed - EU recommendation that, among other things, the term "Islamic terrorism" be replaced in EU discourse by "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam", and the term "jihad" not be used in reference to terrorist acts. This should be an absolute no-brainer. The likes of Al-Qaeda wrongly describe their own terrorist acts as jihad in order to make them appear legitimate to other Muslims; for Western governments to publicly accept this characterisation is about as sensible as it would be for Muslim critics of Bush to start losing no opportunity to call him a true American patriot, or a stalwart defender of democracy and freedom.

Bill Poser seeks to justify the term "Islamic terrorism" by saying that "Dozens of terrorists have explicitly said that they are Muslims and that their motivation was Islam. Moreover, there is clearly widespread support among Muslims for terrorism." He then lists a table of responses across selected Muslim countries to the question of whether "suicide bombings against civilians are sometimes or often justified". Slightly expanding that table might have modified his conclusion. In the US, it turns out, "only 46 percent of Americans think that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "never justified," while 24 percent believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified."". The loonier fringes of the blogosphere are rife with the sorts of idiots who would be happy to describe themselves as patriots motivated by patriotism and who support the mass killing of Muslim civilians. So by Bill Poser's reasoning, Americans' killings of Muslim or Muslim-looking civilians ought to be termed "patriotic terrorism" (626 ghits.) Of course, such a term is extremely unlikely to be used, because, given the sensible general view that such crimes are unpatriotic, the term's only function would be either to attack the whole notion of US patriotism by tarring it with the "terrorism" brush, or to promote the idea of terrorism by wrapping it in the flag. Calling the terrorism of groups like al-Qaeda "Islamic" fulfills precisely the same two functions - and no government should be in the business of promoting either of the resulting noxious ideologies.

Update: Bulbul, whose blog is always worth reading, has put up a good response to this issue.

Frananglais in Cameroon - but what exactly is it?

The BBC has recently reported that "Teachers in Cameroon are concerned that the new language frananglais - a mixture of French, English and Creole - is affecting the way students speak and write the country's two official languages." An interesting language contact story, in a remarkably multilingual country none of whose own languages are used for official purposes; shame you can read straight through the article without being any the clearer on whether Frananglais is a system in its own right or just what they choose to call the local brand of code-switching between the two. Many of their examples suggest a French syntactic frame with English vocabulary inserted ("Tu as go au school", "Tu play le damba tous les jours?") - raising the possibility that certain English words consistently replace their French counterparts, while others remain in French - but other examples suggest plain old code-switching, ie shifting from one language to another in mid-sentence ("Tout le monde hate me, wey I no know", "je ne suis pas sure about this"). The one other example of frananglais I could find online is very much in line with it having a French frame with English words (and at least one Italian one) inserted, but there simply isn't enough data to see whether the replacement is systematic or ad hoc. I wonder if anyone can tell me :)

Quand je tellais aux djo de came put leur hand dans la marmite ici ,les djo me tellait que je ne suis pas reglo,que sam est un reglo,l'autre que france foot ne prenait pas en consideration de tels votes,et l'autre que je devais plutot appuyer ma petite au lieu de stay ici un saturday afternoon a game come les muna.(au fait moi je l'ai appuyé hier).Je remercie tous les toileurs qui ont sensibilisé le peuple et qui continue a do leur work reglo.Un seul mot....................jusqu'à ce que notre muna soit en haut sur tous les yahoo de ce web.Je vous en prie camez ici sur yahoo italie,la situation se fait inquietante,que les djo des state là quando tout le monde ici en europe nang deja began a do ce qu'ils Know.C'est notre arme segrete,la force du muna c'est le jour,et nous les grands continuons a work meme la nuit grace aux djo des state.J'ai began a speach avec notre frananglais parceque les djo tell qu'ils y'a des Mazembe ici qui boblé nos tactiques et vont les appliquer pour eux memes.Alors il faut qu'on leur show qu'on peut speach sans qu'il ne yah rien..... - Saittout, le 26/10/2006 à 15:33, Lions Indomptables

UPDATE: Language Log has a helpful post on this, citing some literature. See comments also - apparently it is very much a system rather than code-switching.

-n't infixation in English

Consider the following word:

Finally one said "It's astonishing. Frankly astonishing. The man has actually got charisn'tma."
"Your meaning?"
"I mean he's so dreadful he fascinates people. Like those stories he was telling... Did you notice how people kept encouraging him because they couldn't actually believe anyone would tell jokes like that in mixed company?" - Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay, 1996, p. 289

This word may not be original to Terry Pratchett, incidentally - this document suggests it appeared in a show called My Word! back in 1976. It gets 90 ghits, (including one in Polish), concentrated disproportionately in reviews:
* "...cardboardy Paul Walker, whose lack of presence ('charisn'tma'?) sucked much of the life out of..."
* "Collectively, they exude charisn'tma, and one or two even possess what Ken Campbell once described as "the legendary Minus Quality" whereby when they exit, the stage somehow seems fuller."
* "Hard-edged r&b from the band with a front man who exudes charisma. Me? I exude charisn'tma."

In this structure, a common word's meaning is "inverted" for comic effect by adding -n't to a portion of it which resembles a common auxiliary verb. I can think of at least one other such case:

"I even attempted a beehive do, but I ran out of hairspray. So it kind of turned into a don't." - Douglas Coupland, Generation X, p. 82

Believe it or not, this one gets some ghits as well, though it's obviously hard to determine how many:
* "Scarlett's Hair-Don't"
* "Hair-Bow is a Hair-Don't"
* "Is it a hair DO or hair DON'T???"
and an entry in the Urban Dictionary.

And at the even less lexicalised end of the spectrum, we find stuff like this:
* "Another Republican’t paragon of virtue"
* "As it happens, my friend Tom Schaller noticed that many of you liked “Republican’ts” — and he suggests that we all start using it, at least as often as the GOP throws around “Democrat Party.”"
* "You’ve seen me in action. You know I’ll get you out. I’m a Mexican, not a Mexican’t!”"
* "did you hear about the lazy, unambitious bird? It was a whippoorwon't. (Yuck, I hate puns.)"

Your question for 10 points: do portmanteau words like this need to be accounted for by a full theory of morphology, or are they monstrosities that should be swept under the rug into psychologists' labs? These words' two components seem to both contribute to their meaning, but not exhaustively, in much the same way as the meaning of "catty" is partly but not completely predictable from "cat" and "-y"; how should that relation be characterised?

The grammar of talking to yourself

In the Dark Ages, too, linguists sometimes got a little worked up over theoretical differences (if a work of fiction is to be believed):

"Those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of 'ego' [I], and in the end they attacked each other, with edged weapons." - Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

In a sense, one would expect that "I" should really have a vocative - certainly people talk to themselves sometimes - yet Latin's lack of a vocative "I" is paralleled in English. If John (that old linguists' standby) tells himself "John, get up and do some work", the sentence is not grammatically odd; if he tells himself "*I, get up and do some work" or "*Me, get up and do some work", neither sentence is grammatically possible. Note that no such restriction applies to non-vocative uses; it would be equally grammatical for John to tell himself "I'm in luck!" or "You're in luck!" Even resorting in desperation to the archaic English vocative "O" yields nothing: "O I!" is ridiculous, and "Oh me!" is already in use as a rather silly exclamation. So why should the vocative of "I" be so hard to form?

Update: Thanks to Language Hat, I have learned of an interesting post on the very grammarian of whom Eco is writing.

Hail native Language - clothe my thoughts

I recently came across a forgotten poem by Milton addressing his mother tongue (as you do!), written to open the English section of a day of speeches at College after the Latin one was completed. English then, of course, was far from being the global lingua franca it is now: it hadn't even had a significant literary output for all that long (Shakespeare had only died in Milton's childhood), and the nascent "Anglosphere" was a few scattered coastal settlements here and there. A poem in this vein now would surely be far more boastful, and contain repeated allusions to, come to think of it, Shakespeare and Milton; but the absence of such allusions here lends it a certain universality that a modern version would lack.

Hail native Language, that by sinews weak
Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,
And mad'st imperfect words with childish tripps,
Half unpronounc't, slide through my infant-lipps,
Driving dum silence from the portal dore,
Where he had mutely sate two years before:
...
I have some naked thoughts that rove about
And loudly knock to have their passage out;
And wearie of their place do only stay
Till thou hast deck't them in thy best aray;
That so they may without suspect or fears
Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly's ears...

The metaphor of language as a clothing for thought contrasts interestingly with the well-known "conduit metaphor" (IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, LANGUAGE IS A CONTAINER), even though clothes technically do contain their wearer. A container and its archetypal contents are equally non-sentient, and the container's primary purpose is to allow the transport and storage of its contents; clothes, on the other hand, archetypally adorn and protect a sentient being, who is likely to choose clothes that somehow reflect how they wish to be perceived. On the conduit metaphor, the bare idea is mere substance; on the clothing metaphor, the bare idea is a personality in its own right, a sort of homunculus getting ready to go out and meet the world. On the conduit metaphor, an idea is successfully transmitted if what it provokes in the listener accords with the author's intent; on the clothing metaphor, one can envisage the idea as having a life of its own, perhaps misunderstood by the author as well as the hearer. (And what are the thoughts to the thinker/author in this metaphor - his/her children, or servants, or perhaps even constituents?)

Where have you been? - a semantic change in progress?

Just a random observation...

Good sentences: I've been to Finland, I'll have been to Finland five times, he's never been to Finland...

Terrible sentences: *I am to Finland, *I will be to Finland, *I was to Finland, **he never is to Finland...

It seems that "been", in some cases, can act as an alternative past participle for "go", replacing "gone". A linking environment is provided by sentences with a bare locative adverb: I've been there / I am there / I will be there are all fine. Presumably, since "I've been there" normally implies "I've gone there" (unless you've been locked up there since birth or something), the "been" was reinterpreted as an even more irregular past participle of "go".

"I'll be there" equally implies "I'll go there", so it's odd that this wasn't extended similarly to allow "*I'll be to Finland" - or so I thought, before checking Google. Google does reveal a couple of instances: "I'll be to bed in a minute", "I'll be to work way early, and perhaps most strikingly, "I've been to more than half of the counties, and in the next six weeks, I'll be to the other half of the counties". So it seems we have a change in progress. Does this depend on the region? Will it culminate in a complete merger of "go" and "be"? Are there any parallels to this outside English? What do you think?