"un reality" and unreality

today, the following bit of Italian headlinese came across the tubes to my RSS reader:

Napoli, presentato Vargas: "Mi sembra di essere in un reality"

the post is about a new acquisition of the soccer team in Naples, and his reaction to arriving in the city. the quote in the headline appears to be "I seem to be in a reality." this would be a decidedly odd thing to say in English — some sort of metaphysical claim.

but actually, it's just the result of a creative borrowing from English. if we were talking about reality vs. fantasy, there's no doubt that the headline would have used the word realtà or verità. (note that i have absolutely no idea what Vargas actually said; the quote is given in a different form later in the article, although still including the word reality, and it may be translated from his native Spanish.)

so what is un reality? it's a reality TV show. wordreference.com even has a separate Italian to English entry for reality indicating this. Italian has a propensity for this type of clip-and-borrow process, often taking just the attributive piece of a phrase or compound, and they turn up very frequently in headlinese, where space is at a premium. (another famous example is Italian basket for English basketball, which is more common than the native pallacanestro.)

perhaps more interesting than the morphological process here, though, is the semantic shift. Vargas' use of un reality clearly indicates that the content of un reality is anything but reality! replace reality with sogno 'dream' or fantasia 'fantasy' and the sentence means basically the same thing. of course, the blame for making a compositional phrase that can easily shift to mean the opposite probably falls more on English here, but Italian helps to obfuscate the process. i'm sure if we start using a reality to mean a fantasy in English, peevers will tell us that it's just another sign that 2012 is certainly the end of days. i guess we'll just have to wait and see what the realtà turns out to be.

LL made me do it

look at this here, a new post.  back from the dead.  Eric Bakovic posted a call for comment on a couple sentences over on Language Log, and I couldn't resist putting in a quick two cents.  i'm sure his comments will be more in-depth, but here's a quick shot before i head to bed.

the sentences in question are the following:

I’ll never forget how he must have felt. (overheard)
Aren’t you glad you archived instead of deleted? (over-read)

1. I'll never forget how he must have felt.

yeah, this is definitely semantically odd.  the intent and necessary pragmatic context seems pretty obvious to me, and i doubt that i would do a serious double-take at hearing it.  the oddity lies in the complement of forget, "how he must have felt."  there's no syntactic trouble, since similar constructions like "i'll never forget how that sunset looked" are unproblematic.  there is a semantic disconnect, though.  the predicate forget includes a presupposition, namely that whatever is to be forgotten was at some point known or experienced by the subject.  this is not realized in the complement "how he must have felt," because the experiencer in the complement is not the same as the experiencer of forget (the forgetter, if you will).

nevertheless, i can come up with two scenarios where this sentence could be used felicitously.  the first, and i think more plausible, interpretation is that the sentence means "i will never forget witnessing/experiencing his outward reaction of how he felt."  for example, someone just dropped a full cup of coffee all over himself; he makes an unforgettable yelp and a look of shock comes over his face.  it's an event not to be forgotten, and furthermore the onlooker has a pretty good idea of how a hot cup of coffee in the lap feels.  the second, and a little more strained, interpretation is that the forgetter has had a strikingly parallel experience, and therefore "how he must have felt" actually refers to the forgetter's experience, which is in keeping with the requirements of the predicate.  an example scenario: "his brother died of cancer last month.  i'll never forget how he must have felt (because my brother died of cancer too)."

2. Aren't you glad you archived instead of deleted?

maybe i've just been organizing my email too much recently, but this seems perfectly normal to me.  of course, if i look at it, i can see the object drop that's going on, which is uncommon for english.  ew, i thought simple reconstruction would do the trick, but that just creates more syntactic problems.  taking "your email" as the understood object of each predicate gives

*aren't you glad you archived your email instead of deleted your email/it?

bad, bad, bad.  this is definitely WTF coordination.  the closest grammatical paraphrase with reconstruction would be something like:

aren't you glad you archived your mail instead of deleting it?

the question then is whether this is still perceived as an oddity with truly unaccusative predicates.  are the following weird?

aren't you glad you walked instead of ran?

aren't you glad you whispered instead of shouted?

the walked/ran sentence seems more natural to me; it might have something to do with the fact that the forms are not morphologically parallel.  anyway, there is something about the "instead of..." clause that wants a tenseless verb form.  i'll leave it to Eric to flesh that out further.

more posts to come soon in the future?  maybe.  because i quit blogging when it starts to feel like work.  but when i have papers to write, blogging definitely becomes a preferable form of writing.  (huzzah, procrasti-tasks!)

foreign grass

this past weekend i watched some of the NFL's first regular season game held overseas (yes, when i'm not actively being a linguist i'm frequently watching sports). the game was at the new Wembley Stadium in London. during the pregame, Fox's announcing crew was getting disproportionately excited about the whole event, as i'm sure their producers and the NFL instructed them to do. the strangest part of their reporting came when Tony Siragusa, the sideline reporter, gave an update on the playing conditions.

now i don't have an audio or video recording of exactly what it said, so i hope i'm not embellishing too much, but he said something along the lines of:

now this isn't a field, it's what they call a pitch...

something in the way he said it just made it sound like "see this rectangular expanse of grass? well this is no American grass. this is crazy British grass, which is so different that they have to call it something else." to be fair, he did go on and explain the difference in the types of grass seed used and the cut and drainage of the field—and these differences did play a factor, as the Giants and Dolphins churned up the ground into little more than mud during the course of the game. it was just the way that a simple lexical choice was preyed upon to create such drama, throwing arbitrariness of the sign out the window. i could imagine him standing next to the back end of a car in London reporting "now this car doesn't have a trunk, it's got what they call a boot! what will they think of next?"

in any event, it bugged me. i'm sure most American viewers barely noticed, and i'm not even sure if the game was broadcast in England. if it was, they were all probably watching Liverpool - Arsenal anyway.

my morphosemantically creative fridge

one of my recent move-in tasks was stocking my kitchen. as i loaded up my freezer after my initial grocery run, i noticed the temperature control knob. it was, rather prudently i thought, turned to the position marked "Recommended setting." what baffled me were the two ends of the spectrum:


i'm certainly glad that the warmest option is cold, but the coldest option is not coldest, but colder. yet there sits the knob, somewhere between the two. how is that even possible?

disclaimer: i am not a semanticist. nevertheless, i thought as a native speaker i understood something about the degrees of adjectives in English and their corresponding meanings. to be sure, adjectives like cold can indicate a reference point at various places along the absolute scale of temperature. for example:

1. it gets cold in February. (0-30 degrees F)
2. it was cold yesterday [in August]. (50-65 degrees F)
3. red dwarfs are cold stars. (3500 degrees F)

i have some idea where on that scale the cold setting on my freezer should be: probably something like 20 degrees F. here's where things get tricky. slave to scalar implicatures that i am, if you ask me what colder means in this context, it means "anything on the absolute scale of temperature below the point marked 20 degrees F." members of the set include 0 degrees F, 10 degrees K, -10 degrees F, and 19.8 degrees F, just to give a few examples. members not within the set include 50 degrees F, 0 degrees C, 21 degrees F, and 20 degrees F. remember number lines from when you learned inequalities in pre-algebra? this scenario looks like this:


colder is a ray on the number line in this scenario. but by defining the rightmost position that the knob can turn to as colder, suddenly colder must be defined as a point on the number line.


this is productive in some ways. as you can see from the number line, it effectively places a lower bound on the range of temperatures that the freezer can be set to. (the fact that no numerical values are given is another issue, but i think it's safe to use my knowledge of the world to say that 10 degrees K is now outside of this set, whereas 10 degrees F is definitely within the set)

what arises now is the horrible morphological problem that makes my head hurt. we have determined that the possible range of temperatures in my freezer is

{ t : colder < t < cold } , where cold and colder are constants

this is an okay definition except that it flies in the face of morphology. every adjective in English has three degrees: positive, comparative, and superlative. in the morphology they are either represented by bound morphemes (X, X-er, X-est) or by paraphrasis (X, more X, most X). the morphology-semantics interface tells us what these degrees refer to. positive and superlative adjectives denote points, or single-member sets; comparatives denote rays or line segments, sets with multiple members. so for any cold, colder, coldest scheme, the cardinality of the sets should be as follows:

|cold| = 1
|colder| > 1
|coldest| = 1

therefore the problem with our definition of the set t above is the assertion that colder is a constant. this definition entails that |colder| = 1, and therefore clashes with the morphosemantics.

fun thought exercise to leave you with. ask yourself: give a name to what is between cold and colder. try to say it out loud. you'll probably say "cold" and halt, longing for some morpheme to tack onto the end of it that means "between the positive and comparative form of this adjective." what's remarkable about that is the fact that we're willing to admit that this distinction might be possible, so the semantics is not broken here. the morpheme just doesn't exist in the lexicon, so you can't produce it.

oh and a parting shot for real: if whoever made the damn knob just labeled it coldest, you wouldn't even be reading this.

alleged until proven guilty?

there seems to be some new shift in the use of allegedly in journalistic reporting, beyond what has already received attention in the past over at Language Log. apparently now to have "allegedly" done something means that the action in question is still under some sort of investigation, regardless of the provability of whether it occurred. take this quote from a report on the UEFA website about this weekend's Euro 2008 qualifying match between Sweden and Denmark that was abandoned by the referee:

German referee Herbert Fandel abandoned the Group F qualifier in the closing stages with the scores level at 3-3. He had awarded a penalty to Sweden and given a red card to Denmark's Christian Poulsen when a spectator came on to the pitch and allegedly assaulted him.

if you don't regularly follow European football (or if you weren't stuck in an airport watching CNN Headline News, which covered the story three times in an hour), i offer you the following clip. perhaps the matter is still under investigation (both by UEFA and police), but i see no "alleged" assault taking place here. it seems more clear-cut than that.