The Science of Language

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.

Skip ahead to this year, and a 1/5/09 posting on my blog (here) about a report from Neal Whitman (on ADS-L) about Bill Walsh's proscribing quotative fronting (without inversion) in combination with subject omission in a following conjunct, in things like

(1) “I’m leaving,” Jones said, and walked out of the room.

Neal Whitman joined in (on his blog, here) with the reason for his query to ADS-L. He had noted that in her children's books, Beverly Cleary was a very heavy (indeed near-categorical) user of the non-repeated subject, as in (1). Neal found the usage unremarkable — until he came across Walsh's proscription, which he found puzzling.

(A digression: in her 1990 Muggie Maggie Cleary repeated the subject in these coordinations, but then seems to have reverted to her non-repetition ways in later books. The Muggie Maggie episode was probably the work of an editor who had been exposed to the "rule" Walsh cites.)

Following up on this, I posted on my own blog (here and here) on quotation fronting and quotative inversion, with links to the 2003-04 postings on Language Log about "awkward sentences that would have been much improved by quotative inversion", despite the New Yorker's aversion to it.

And that brings us up to John McIntyre.

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.

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:

"My goodness. What a coincidence," a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. "I suppose when you do so many vetoes, something like this is bound to happen."

With some back-of-the-envelope calculations of probability, I'm sure we could set about refuting McLear's disingenuous response that the acrostic is merely a "coincidence." Scholars of Shakespeare have argued whether the following acrostic in A Midsummer's Night Dream, in which the character Titania spells out her own name, could have appeared by chance:

Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no,
I am a spirit of no common rate,
The summer till doth tend upon my state;
ANd I do love thee. Therefore go with me.
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee;
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep…

But I think in this case it's pretty clear that we're dealing with intentionally mischievous acrostic-making in the Governor's office. It reads very smoothly, so kudos to the writer of the veto message. Could it have been Ahnold himself? Doubtful, although he might have told someone in his office to construct the acrostic. (I wonder if whoever did it also leaked the story to reveal his or her handiwork.)

Kudos too to Mark Silva of The Swamp, for coming up with a novel taboo avoidance strategy in his headline, "Schwarzenegger to foe: (Veto) 'you'."

A few days ago, Kurt Andersen interviewed the novelist Richard Powers on Studio360. You can listen to the whole nine-minute interview here:

In the middle of the interview, Powers breaks into a sequence of declarative phrases with final rising pitch — what's sometimes called "uptalk". Before and after this sequence, which sets the stage for an account of his decision to become a writer, he consistently uses falling patterns. It seems clear that he means the rising contours to have a rhetorical effect. But it's equally clear that the intended effect is not to signal insecurity or to call into question his commitment to the truth of what he's saying. So as part of my on-going campaign to document uptalk — especially non-stereotypical examples — here's a description.

The preceding passage starts this way, with Powers describing why he left physics:

You- you mentioned the- the- the "two cultures" crisis that uh
that Snow put on everyone's agenda but uh
in fact the crisis really is the "million cultures" crisis and uh
how- however much exhilaration I took out of physics, it w- rapidly became clear to me that uh
even two physicists working in closely related fields couldn't always communicate with each other, and- and for me to make any kind of meaningful contribution
would require
a kind of intense specialization, where year after year I learned more and more about smaller and smaller domains, until I was in-
in danger of knowing everything there was about nothing.

Powers goes on to explain why graduate school in literature was also too confining, and continues to use phrase-final falls. Then comes the story of how he decided to write a novel — and right up to the crucial moment of decision, he mostly ends his phrases with rises:

Andersen: So when you decided OK, this is I- I- I'm not gonna be
uh a scientist, I'm not going to be uh
a literature
teacher
then you- did you just simply make the decision OK I'm going to write novels and
start writing them? Powers: The books actually started/
on a Saturday morning/ uh in- in uh nineteen eighty one/
I was living in the Fens/ just behind the Fine Arts Museum/
the- the MFA in Boston/
and there was a- a retrospective exhibition
of the German photographer August Sander.
and I had no prior exposure to this work/ Andersen: The early 20th century photographer? Powers: German photographer from the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century um
and uh I remember going into this first American retrospective/
and turning around the corner and/
seeing this magnificent and haunting photograph, of these three young men
in their Sunday best, walking along a muddy road just glancing out over their right shoulder as if
suddenly surprised by the photographer.
Leaning forward, reading the caption on this photo
which read
"three– or three young Westerwald farmers on their way to a dance, nineteen fourteen"
So of course they were not on their way to the dance that they thought they were on their way to/
and just down the road was world war one. Andersen: And so you suddenly
had your mission. Powers: I did, I- I looked at that photograph/
I had an almost intact story in mind/
this was a Saturday/
on Monday I went in to- to my data processing job/
and gave my two weeks notice.

From then on, Powers reverts to falls.

Andersen: It sounds as though you had a mission for a career of fiction writing, not just a book. Powers: ((Well I'm)) I'm not sure it's a mission, I think it's simply
the shape that my own temperament takes.

I'm skeptical that there's any systematic difference between the rises often used with yes/no questions, and the rises used for various other reasons, as in Powers' story.  As an additional andecdotal piece of evidence in this discussion,  here's a comparison (at the scale of  time and pitch display) between the end of Andersen's question and the start of Powers' answer:

Andersen: … did you just simply make the decision OK I'm going to write novels and
start writing them/

Powers: The books actually started/
on a Saturday morning/ uh in- in uh nineteen eighty one/

To really address this question in a responsible way, of course, would require comparing the dynamics of  a large number of examples of both kinds, paying careful attention to the alignment of the pitch contour with the syllable sequence and with the amplitude contour. But these are among the many examples that make me doubt that there's a systematic difference in such cases (as has sometimes been suggested) between rises that start at the bottom of the speaker's range and rises that start higher.

You'd also want to try some perception experiments.

Here's the picture, "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance":

Another version of the story is here, in a 2003 interview published in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER
When did you begin your writing career?

RICHARD POWERS
In the early eighties, I was living in the Fens in Boston right behind the Museum of Fine Arts. If you got there before noon on Saturdays, you could get into the museum for nothing. One weekend, they were having this exhibition of a German photographer I’d never heard of, who was August Sander. It was the first American retrospective of his work. I have a visceral memory of coming in the doorway, banking to the left, turning up, and seeingthe first picture there. It was called Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914. I had this palpable sense of recognition, this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze. I went up to the photograph and read the caption and had this instant realization that not only were they not on the way to the dance, but that somehow I had been reading about this moment for the last year and a half. Everything I read seemed to converge onto this act of looking, this birth of the twentieth century—the age of total war, the age of the apotheosis of the machine, the age of mechanical reproduction. That was a Saturday. On Monday I went in to my job and gave two weeks notice and started working on Three Farmers.

Today I got mail from the Republican National Committee — a survey they want me to fill out and (of course) an attached contribution form.   I don't know why they sent it to me, because in spite of their urging me "and other grassroots Republicans" to respond to their survey, I am not a registered Republican.   Maybe it's because my neighborhood is mostly Republican, though our nearest neighbors are bigwigs in the local Libertarian party.  In any case, many of the survey questions contain presuppositions that make them hard to answer.  They don't ask me if I've stopped beating my wife, er, spouse, but they do want to know if (for instance) I "believe that Barack Obama's nominees for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the U.S. Senate".

And they ask, "Should English be the official language of the United States?"  They don't say what this has to do with the President's agenda; it's totally irrelevant to his agenda, as far as I know.  But I don't know all that much: maybe Obama is campaigning to eradicate English from the country and I just haven't noticed?  I do know that I'm proud to belong to an organization, the Linguistic Society of America, that has come out strongly in opposition to the Official English movement.  In 1987 the LSA  membership voted to approve an eloquent Resolution to this effect, proposed by Language Log's  Geoff Nunberg (though he wasn't a Language Logger at the time, because Language Log didn't yet exist).   Read it here:

http://www.lsadc.org/info/lsa-res-english.cfm

Another notice of a recent book, this time Nathan Bierma's Eclectic Encyclopedia of English (William, James & Co.), an assortment of material from five years of his "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune (no longer a regular feature in the paper, alas). It's meant for a general audience; in fact, a number of the entries originated as responses to queries from readers.

Here's his point of view:

I used to be picky–really picky–about English grammar and usage. [illustrations of his earlier pickiness follow] (p. iv)

My new approach to language can be called joyous bewilderment. Rather than fretting about oddities, trends, and variations, I delight in them. The variation and change is exactly what makes language so interesting. I'm a work in progress, but gradually I'm learning to see quirks and changes in English and rather than respond with "How dangerous," to reply instead, "How cool!" or at least, "How interesting!" (p. viii)

I'm not exactly a disinterested party here: I supplied one of the blurbs for the book (Erin McKean and Geoff Nunberg wrote the others), I am thanked in the Introduction, and I'm quoted or cited five times in the book.

My blurb:

Bierma has been exceptionally careful in his research for stories involving language–starting by seeking out scholars who might have the information he's looking for and then actually listening. So his columns are both informed and informative. Oh yes, and entertaining.

What does "Complimentary High-speed Internet access on the lobby level" mean? You can see the phrase on the website of the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport hotel. Did you imagine it meant that if you opened your laptop on the lobby level of the hotel a wireless Internet network would come up and you could connect for free? Oh, you are so naive. You are not a sophisticated jet-setter like Robert Langdon and me.

Actually, until a few minutes ago I was like you. I imagined, trustingly, that after checking out of my room and doing my morning recording session at The Teaching Company, I would be able to sit in the lobby of my hotel and continue to work on academic and administrative tasks until my evening flight out of Dulles, and I would have complimentary high-speed wireless Internet access courtesy of the hotel. But instead the usual "Now agree to a $9.99 charge on your room bill" screen came up as soon as I pointed the browser in the direction of Language Log.

I went and asked at the registration desk. And here is what Hilton Hotels thought "complimentary high-speed Internet access" meant: if you are a guest, and you register for Internet access in your room, and agree to have the $9.99 charged thereto, then after that you can also use your laptop in the lobby for no extra charge. So if you pay $9.99 for the relevant 24 hours it's free.

I think that's a pretty weird interpretation of "complimentary". Suppose (I invited the assistant manager to imagine) they said there were complimentary apples on the lobby level, and when you went to get some they explained that they actually meant that if you went up to your room and paid for an order of room-service apples to be brought up and signed for, you could then bring one down and eat it in the lobby area. Would you not be mildly surprised? Or even modestly irked?

It is only the linguistic point I am concerned with here. I had picked this hotel after reading its Internet access policies; they were important to my plans. I am a native speaker of English, and I felt that I the text they published had genuinely misled me on an important point.

I don't tell this story to criticize Hilton Hotels. The assistant manager immediately saw the force of my logic and the misleading character of the website language. What she did was to reopen my bill, get me registered as agreeing to pay $9.99 for another 24 hourse, and then she used her discretion to take $9.99 off the bill. Net money changing hands: zero dollars, zero cents. Net cost to hotel (where the wireless router is on all the time no matter what), zero. Another satisfied customer, at no expense.

But the composer of the website boilerplate really does need to be taken back to truth-in-advertising school. The notion that "complimentary Internet access" might mean "complimentary Internet access for those guests who have paid for Internet access" is going a semantic bridge too far. Isn't that right? Is it me, or is it them?

One of the key examples in Ruth Millikan's influential 1984 book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories was the "canid play bow". This piece of doggie-language, exemplified in the photo on the right, is "a highly ritualized and stereotyped movement that seems to function to stimulate recipients to engage (or to continue to engage) in social play."

I mentioned it in a LL post a few years ago, quoting from Marc Bekoff and Colin Allen, "Intentional Communication and Social Play: How and Why Animals Negotiate and Agree to Play":

From the intentional stance, if a believes that b believes that a desires to play (third-order) it would seem that ideal rationality would also require that a believes that b has a belief (second-order). But from a Millikanian perspective this more general second-order belief, if it requires a to have a general belief detector, may actually be more sophisticated than the third-order belief which supposedly entails it. A general belief detector may be much more difficult to evolve than a specific belief detector, for the detection of specific beliefs may be accomplished by the detection of correspondingly specific cues.

If this is correct, then on Millikan's account Jethro (Marc's dog) may be capable of the third-order belief that (or, at least, a state with the intentional content that) Sukie (Jethro's favorite canid play pal) wants Jethro to believe that her bite was playful not aggressive, even though Jethro is perhaps limited in his ability to represent and hence think about Sukie's second-order desires in general.

And according to Marc Bekoff, "Play signals as punctuation: The structure of social play in canids", Behaviour 132:419-429, 1995, the sequence patterns of bows with other actions, observed in a study of young wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs, suggests that for canids in general,

signals such as the bow can reinforce ongoing social play when it is possible that it could be disrupted due to the aggressive, predatory, or sexual behavior of one of the interacting animals. […] Play in canids (and in other animals) requires a mutual sharing of the play mood by the participants. This sharing can be facilitated by the performance of bows immediately before or immediately after an individual performs actions that can be misinterpreted […]

(I'm adding "sharing of the play mood" to the list of inadequately investigated phenomena headed by "group glee"…  Why, amid all the thousands of flowers in the gardens of academia, are there no departments of Play Mood Studies?)

Bekoff concludes that

In addition to sending the message "I want to play" when they are performed at the beginning of play, bows performed in a different context, namely during social play, might also carry the message "I want to play despite what I am going to do or just did — I still want to play" when there might be a problem in the sharing of this information between the interacting animals.

Bekoff speculates:

How might information between sender and recipient be shared? It is possible that the recipient shares the intentions (beliefs, desires) of the sender based on the recipient's own prior experiences of situations in which she performed bows. In an important paper on human behavior that has yet to find its way into comparative ethological circles, Gopnik (1993, p. 275) has argued that " . . . certain kinds of information that comes, literally, from inside ourselves is coded in the same way as information that comes observing the behavior of others. There is a fundamental cross-modal representational system that connects self and other." Gopnik claims that others' body movements are mapped onto one's own kinesthetic sensations, based on prior experience of the observer, and she supports her claims with discussions of imitation in human newborns.

[The reference is to A Gopnik, "Psychopsychology", Consciousness and Cognition 2(4): 264-280, 1993.]

Against this background, I was interested and slightly puzzled to read this blog post by a dog trainer, Kelley Filson, "The Play-Bow: Not Just A Cute Trick", 7/14/2009:

Many of my clients dogs have a hard time playing with and interacting with other dogs. These dogs often play well with well-known, "buddy-dogs" and demonstrates good play-skills in comfortable situations, but do poorly with new dogs or in new places.

With work the dog can learn to meet and greet the novel dogs without being inappropriate, but there is often no play. In these cases the dog-in-training often starts getting jumped by the other dogs (in a not so friendly way). This happens after the Meet-&-Greet, because the dog-in-training sniffs a hello and then just stands there stiffly. This is awkward and invites aggressiion - a sort of preemptive strike against the dog who is standing stiffly and giving everyone the willies.

In these cases teaching a PLAY-BOW can bridge the gap between meeting and becoming friends. It gives the dog-in-training something to do (besides standing awkwardly). Furthermore, despite its trained-awkwardness it gives the other dogs something to do too - they can respond with more playfulness.

"Teaching a PLAY-BOW"? Why do some dogs need to be trained to produce this instinctual signal?

The most likely explanation, I guess, is that they know how to perform it, but not when to perform it. In particular, initiating or maintaining play with unfamiliar adults is perhaps not a natural reaction, except for animals in whom the behavioral effects of neoteny are especially strong.  Or maybe animals that are mostly "only dogs", raised without much conspecific company, are inadequately drilled in the "fundamental cross-modal representational system that connects self and other"?

In any case, dogs are not the only ones who sometimes need help with this sort of thing.  Unfortunately, not all forms of communicative training are equally effective: see, for example,  M.E. Herron et al., "Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors", Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117:47-54, 2009.

Language Log readers may recall the link I gave to the Vulture Reading Room discussion of The Lost Symbol on the New York Magazine website, where I made some comments on the extraordinarily heavy use Dan Brown's book makes of redundant (either pointless or already implicit) attributive modifiers. I illustrated from an early passage about renowned Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon's arrival at the Washington Dulles Airport: the Falcon 2000EX corporate jet, the soft leather seats in the luxurious interior, the cold January air, the white fog on the misty tarmac, the middle-aged woman with curly blond hair under stylish knit wool hat who babbles boringly to him about his own choice of attire, and then:

Mercifully, a professional-looking man in a dark suit got out of a sleek Lincoln Town Car parked near the terminal and held up his finger.

(No, I don't know which finger.) Well, by a weird coincidence (truth is stranger than even very strange fiction), last night I myself was flown into Dulles Airport at the invitation of people I have not met. And guess what…

I didn't come in on a corporate jet (though I did upgrade my scheduled flight from economy to a sort of extra-legroom enhanced economy, and that helped). And I wasn't actually greeted planeside by a personal greeter in a stylish knit wool hat. But I'm here to do a trial video-recording of a lecture on grammar for The Teaching Company, and (as my Language Log colleague John McWhorter promised) they treat their professors very well. As I emerged from the hell of the Dulles baggage hall (and my god, it was third-world chaos in there), I noticed, mercifully, holding up not a finger but a sign saying "GEOFFREY PULLUM", there was a professional-looking man in a dark suit, and yes, he had a Lincoln Town Car parked near the terminal! Whoa, I'm Professor Robert Langdon, arriving at the nation's capital in a professionally-driven limo!

And you know, I couldn't help noticing that it was sleek.

Just like Dan said. That is the problem with his over-use of attributive modifiers, of course. He tells us things we knew. Lincoln Town Cars are always sleek. That's the whole point of them. Sleek things to park near terminals so that professional-looking men in dark suits can collect professors and senators in them. That's what they are. There aren't any chunky, boxy little Lincoln Town Cars, like glassed-in 1948 Studebaker pickup trucks. Sleekness is of the very essence, and we all know that. The modifier served no purpose at all.

I should add that my visit is so far going much better than Robert Langdon's visit to Washington in The Lost Symbol. He is whisked to the Capitol to give a lecture, but it is a total bust (there is nobody there; it was a trick to get him to come to Washington), and almost immediately he encounters the severed hand of a beloved friend and mentor in the middle of the floor of the Capitol rotunda.

I have been much luckier. No mutilated mentor. And I am quite sure that there is no modifier-bestrewed, hideously tattooed, multi-disguised, Arabic-named, masonically-inducted, revenge-driven, symbolic clue-dropping, sadistic torturer tracking my every move in or under the city… Wait a minute, there's someone at the door.

In the days following my accidental Annie Lennox sighting in Edinburgh, a gorgeous picture of the honoree in her doctoral robes was published, and I have added it here; don't miss it. And (returning to phonology) Julian Bradfield (who normally studies things like fixpoint logic and concurrent programming, and teaches operating systems and programming, in Edinburgh's School of Informatics) gave a talk on the phonology and phonetics of the utterly spectacular Khoisan language sometimes known as "Taa" but more usually referred to (at least by those who can pronounce the voiceless postalveolar velaric ingressive stop [k!] followed by a high tone [o] and a nasalized [o], which Julian can) as !Xóõ (the ASCII spelling is !Xoon).

This language, Julian quietly remarked, "knocks Dinka into a cocked hat" — by which he meant that the Nilotic languages of the Dinka group, such as Thok Reel, have less complex systems of vowel contrasts (despite the 3-way length contrasts of Dinka et al.). Vowels in !Xóõ can be plain, murmured, pharyngealized, epiglottalized, or nasalized, and some of the vowels can combine some of these effects. There seem to be at least 31 vowel phonemes in the East !Xóõ dialect. Plus !Xóõ has a consonant system so world-famously complex that its very existence suggests there is something wrong with our phonological theories. And Julian suggested a way to reduce the apparent complexity very dramatically. It was exciting.

Meanwhile, the Linguistics and English Language program of which I am the head advertised what we believe may be the first job in the history of the world to be explicitly advertised as Lecturer in Language Evolution. Yet more excitement.

It was all so exciting that I was almost reluctant to throw my things into a suitcase and rush to the airport on a trip to Washington DC, where I am now. About 17 hours from Edinburgh (one on the plane to Heathrow; many hours of waiting around in Heathrow's Terminal 5 sneaking laptop power from unobserved electrical outlets near gates with no current flight departure; seven hours on the plane to Dulles Airport; much waiting in chaotic baggage area) was decidedly dull compared to being back at work. Though when I got out of customs and immigration at Dulles, there was one thing that happened that was sort of exciting, in fact almost sort of creepy… I wish I had time to tell you about it. Maybe later on, OK?

Geoff out.

Before there was yaourter, there was Prisencolinensinainciusol, an amazing 1972 double-talk proto-rap by Adriano Celentano, channeling the Elvis of some parallel universe:

Here's the earlier (?) black-and-white sound-stage version, with a nice harmonica solo at the end:

And a more recent TV version, in which Celentano's hair has considerably receded, and there is some discussion (in Italian) afterwards:

Sasha Frere-Jones ("Stop making sense", The New Yorker, 4/29/2008) suggests: "[M]ore classroom settings for pop stars to parse their own material, please. An hour a month would be enough."

[via MetaFilter]

Yesterday, most of the comments on The communicative properties of footwear dealt with the gender associations of the word cute. This linguistic stereotype is often used as the basis of comic-strip humor, frequently in the context of shopping, as in this Foxtrot strip from a few years ago:

And (with a twist) in this Preteena from 6/24/2009:

But in fact, the word cute really is used much more often by women than by men, in modern American culture.

In a study based on a sample taken in 2004 (and described in "What men and women blog about", 7/8/2007), cute was the tenth most feminine word (as quantified by information gain), after hubby, husband,  adorable, skirt, boyfriend, mommy, yummy, kisses, and gosh. But male bloggers in that sample still used cute with a frequency of 83 per million words — it's just that the female bloggers used it with a frequency of 232 per million words — about 2.8 times more often.

In a large corpus of American English telephone conversations, the apparent femininity of cute was somewhat greater, at least as measured by the ratio of female use to male use — it was used 974 times in 15,685 female conversational sides, and only 214 times in 12,589 male conversational sides, for a ratio (corrected to account for the different numbers of conversational participants) of about 3.65. In comparison, the corrected ratio for shopping was only 3.01, and pink was only 2.12. (These transcribed conversations were mostly collected in 2003, but a significant minority were collected in 1990-91.)

In fact, cute was the most female-associated adjective among several candidates that I tried:

Female Male Ratio Corrected ratio cute 974 214 4.55 3.65 adorable 57 13 4.38 3.52 gorgeous 241 76 3.17 2.55 lovely 168 57 2.94 2.37 pink 74 28 2.74 2.12 beautiful 1378 865 1.59 1.28 little 21017 15490 1.36 1.09 strange 1176 921 1.28 1.02 big 11500 9761 1.18 0.95 weird 1451 1731 0.84 0.67 cool 4951 6207 0.80 0.64 tough 1307 1765 0.74 0.59 lame 40 67 0.60 0.48

(The raw ratios of counts are multiplied by 12589/15685 in the column labelled "corrected ratio", in order to get the ratio of rates per conversation. The average number of words per conversational side was nearly the same for the sexes, with men being about 6% talkier, so to get per-word ratios, another small correction would be needed, which would raise the corrected ratio for cute to about 3.87.)

The gender divergence was greater for several nouns, with husband being more than 15 times commoner in the women's speech, and wife about 5 times commoner in men's speech:

Female Male Ratio Corrected ratio husband 9168 484 18.94 15.20 boyfriend 1080 129 8.37 6.72 babies 570 122 4.67 3.75 shopping 1140 304 3.75 3.01 clothes 731 309 2.37 1.90 dinner 1093 507 2.16 1.73 shoes 608 382 1.59 1.28 baseball 1691 1720 0.98 0.79 dollars 6788 7880 0.86 0.69 cars 791 972 0.81 0.65 beer 230 388 0.59 0.48 girlfriend 612 1044 0.59 0.48 man 2889 5204 0.56 0.45 beers 25 75 0.33 0.27 wife 925 3786 0.24 0.20

[Update — Kenny Easwaran asks

[W]as there any interesting difference in use of these words based on the gender of the other conversational participant? It seems plausible that "cute" may be used more often with a female conversational partner than with a male one.

The answer:

female interlocutor male interlocutor female speaker
762 in 10784
(7.06 per 100) 212 in 4901
(4.33 per 100) male speaker 103 in 4901
(2.10 per 100) 111 in 7688
(1.44 per 100)

In other words, when a female speaker had a female conversational partner, there 762 instances of cute in 10,784 conversations, for a rate of 7.06 cutes per 100 conversations. And so on…

So indeed, both women and men tended to use "cute" somewhat more often when talking with a woman than when talking with with a man.]

Two Cathy strips on this topic that I've been saving up:

The last time I posted one of Cathy Guisewite's strips, a reader muttered something about "drivel" and suggested that "for the love of all that is just and holy" we immediately read David Malki's essay on the topic — which struck me as a well-written and carefully-sourced explanation of something that's not exactly a secret, namely that Cathy is mostly about gender stereotypes, and especially stereotypes about consumption.

So to underline the scientific character of my interest in these documents, I'll point interested readers to Andrew's Wilson's home page, which includes this passage:

The Linguistic Construction of Cultural Meanings -
"The Language of Shoes"

In the context of an ongoing research project, known for convenience as "The Language of Shoes", I am attempting to approach the cultural system of footwear fashions from the twin orientations of onomasiology and cultural studies - in other words, I want to find out which terms languages use for footwear styles and what associative meanings these words and objects have within a culture. I see this work as an extension of the Wörter-und-Sachen paradigm pioneered in the early twentieth century, which married onomasiology, etymology, and cultural studies - "from the trivial to the sublime" (Hüllen 1990: 141) - within a strongly object-oriented linguistics. However, my work gives much more emphasis than did the original Wörter-und-Sachen scholars to value judgements and to the constructivist nature of culture.

I'll also link to a few publications from this project: Wilson and Moudraia, "Interactive effects of shoe style and verbal cues on perceptions of female physicians' personal attributes", 2003; "Business organizations' awareness of the communicative properties of footwear: results of a pilot survey on the regulation of footwear with female employee uniforms in a major Polish city", The Language of Shoes Project Working Paper, 2004; "Corporate Values and Cultural Discourses of Footwear : The Case of Female Flight Attendants", Empirical Text and Culture Research, 2009; "British military women in civilian knee-high dress boots : a neglected episode in women's uniform history", Minerva Journal of Women and War, 2009.

However, the key collocation "cute shoes!" doesn't seem to occur in Wilson's oeuvre, so Cathy still has something to contribute to the discussion of onomasiological performativity.