ARCHIVE - Being Human aggregator

ARCHIVE - Language Log: Quotative inversion again

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:42:57 -0700

Over on his You Don't Say blog, John McIntyre notes a spectacularly awkward sentence from the New Yorker and asks, "Is this a new tic of New Yorker style, or have I just begun noticing it?" The offending sentence:

“Horton, you’re one of the few people New York seems to agree with,” Tennessee Williams, another regional Young Turk who dreamed of changing the shape of commercial theatre, said.

John explains that he knows "there is a longstanding journalistic resistance to inverting subject and verb in attribution" and understands why some writers might be averse to the construction, but objects to a blanket prohibition against this inversion (known in the syntax trade as "quotative inversion"), especially when it leads to tin-eared sentences like one reporting the Tennessee Williams quotation.

It turns out that here at Language Log Plaza we've been alert to the New Yorker's anti-quotative inversion quirk from the earliest days of the blog.

Here's the history, with some digression to other blogging on the syntax of quotations.

Chris Potts was in first, with a 9/22/03 posting "A ban on quotative inversion?" (here) and a follow-up the next day, "More on the quotative inversion conjecture" (here). Then on 10/6/03 Mark Liberman chimed in (here) with a comparison of the New Yorker's awkward verb-last sentences to the verb-last sentences of German that Mark Twain complained about in his comic essay "The Awful German Language". And the next year (12/19/04, in "Diagram this", here) Geoff Pullum added a more complex example from the New Yorker. So ended the Early Years of quotative inversion in these parts.

ARCHIVE - Language Log: Ask LL: parents' beliefs or infants' abilities?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:22:41 -0700

Andrew Clegg asks "Is this true?"

I'm more familiar with a different just-so story intended to explain the same alleged generalization: infants' phonetic abilities are initially limited, and this creates pressure to develop variants of words for caregivers (and other things infants are likely to want to name) that suit their preferences.

I don't know of any non-anecdotal studies of the generalization, much less of the relative strength of parental egoism and infant incapacity in explaining it; and I don't have time this morning to search. But maybe a reader can help Andrew out.

ARCHIVE - Dev. Psychology: Children Succeed Welcomes New Research and Development Consultant for Autism Games - 24-7PressRelease.com (press release)

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:05:48 -0700

Children Succeed Welcomes New Research and Development Consultant for Autism Games
24-7PressRelease.com (press release)
She holds a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University, where her research concentrated on the typical and atypical neurological ...

ARCHIVE - Soc. Psychology: Kellogg study: outsiders effective leaders - Daily Northwestern

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:27:48 -0700

Kellogg study: outsiders effective leaders
Daily Northwestern
... entrapment: Your sunk costs, my escalation of commitment” will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. ...

ARCHIVE - Soc. Psychology: Social Studies - Globe and Mail

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:06:35 -0700

Social Studies
Globe and Mail
A paper published last year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin revealed that people are more critical and judgmental about certain moral ...

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ARCHIVE - Mind Hacks: Social networks of murder

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:00:00 -0700

I'm just reading a long but gripping study that used social network analysis to look at murder as a social interaction between gangs in Chicago to understand how stable networks of retaliation are sustained over time.

However, I was struck by this bit in the introduction, which really highlights the social nature of murder:

But we know that murder is not in fact such a random matter. It is first and foremost an interaction between two people who more often than not know each other: approximately 75% of all homicides in the United States from 1995 to 2002 occurred between people who knew each other prior to the murder (Federal Bureau of Investigation, selected years).

We also know that the victim and offender tend to resemble each other socially and demographically (e.g., Wolfgang 1958; Luckenbill 1977). Young people kill other young people, poor people kill other poor people, gang members kill other gang members, and so on. Thus, contrary to stratification theories, a particular murder is not so much the outcome of the differential distribution of attributes as it is an interaction governed by patterns of social relations between people similar in stature and status.

It's an amazing paper which combines a social network analysis drawn from police murder records with field work that involved talking to gang members to understand their perception and use of violence.

Link to PubMed entry for 'Murder by structure'.
Link to DOI entry for same.

ARCHIVE - Soc. Psychology: For Left and Right, the answer is in our heads - Times Online

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:08:17 -0700

For Left and Right, the answer is in our heads
Times Online
Three decades of research in neuroscience, behavioural economics and social psychology not only suggest new ways to solve social problems but could also ...

ARCHIVE - Language Log: The Gubernator's acrostic mischief

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:43:08 -0700

Via The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, comes news of an awesome (if spiteful) bit of gubernatorial wordplay from the office of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano had sponsored a bill which passed unanimously granting the Port of San Francisco financial power to redevelop a former shipyard for a new neighborhood known as Pier 70.

Ammiano also had made something of a scene at a Democratic Party fundraiser early this month in San Francisco at which Schwarzenegger, a Republican, had been invited by former San Francisco mayor and Assembly speaker Willie Brown, a Democrat. This surprised many, in light of the heated budget wars between the governor and legislature.

Ammiano could be heard invoking the cry of Republican South Carolina's Rep. Joe Wilson at President Barack Obama's address to a joint session of Congress - "You lie" - as others heckled Schwarzenegger's brief speech. After the governor left, Ammiano took the stage with a rambling criticism of Schwarzenegger for a variety of offenses — among them the governor's vetoes of bills that would have legalized gay marriage.

When the governor's office delivered a veto-message for Ammiano's own port bill a few days later, on Oct. 12, there appeared to be an unmistakable hidden message within: Reading the first letter of each line of the letter's two main paragraphs:

ARCHIVE - Soc. Psychology: Pain Of Torture Can Make Innocent Seem Guilty - Prison Planet.com

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:29:55 -0700

Pain Of Torture Can Make Innocent Seem Guilty
Prison Planet.com
The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, was conducted by Kurt Gray, graduate student in psychology, and Daniel M. Wegner, ...

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ARCHIVE - Soc. Psychology: Loud Political Extremists May Mistakenly Believe Everyone Agrees, Research Shows - ABC News

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:16:58 -0700

ABC News

Loud Political Extremists May Mistakenly Believe Everyone Agrees, Research Shows
ABC News
The research, conducted over several years at Stanford University and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, suggests that the ...

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