The Google
In my seminar yesterday, I spent a little time reviewing the facts
about (an)arthrousness in English proper names (recently discussed on
Language Log
here
and
here,
with more to come), and the students brought up George W. Bush's
reference to "the Google" last year, which was widely mocked, but not
commented on here.
The event was a CNBC interview by Maria Bartiromo on October 23.
This
site has a video clip, with the transcription:
HOST: I'm curious, have you ever
googled anybody? Do you use Google?
BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I've used on the Google is to
pull up maps. It's very interesting to see -- I've forgot the name of
the program -- but you get the satellite, and you can -- like, I kinda
like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.
The
WSJ version quotes "CNBC's
unofficial transcript", which differs from the ThinkProgress
transcription above in several respects: it gives Bush's "kinda" and
"wanna" the standard spellings "kind of" and "want to"; it has "I
forgot" instead of the non-standard "I've forgot" (I can't be entirely
sure after many listenings to the passage, but I'm inclined to go with
the ThinkProgress version); and it corrects "it remind me" (which seems
entirely clear to me in the video) to "it reminds me". But
everybody has "the Google" (as well as the odd syntax surrounding it: "One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps").
The class consensus was that Bush was analogizing to "the Internet" and
"the (World Wide) Web", without realizing that
Google doesn't take a
determiner.
[Added later in the day: I've removed a brief attempt at an explanation for the arthrousness in "the Internet" and "the Web", since all that's important here is that they
ARE arthrous. Eric Christopherson asks about the history of arthrousness in "the Internet"; he notes that other computer networks and online services that were around in the early days of the Internet had/have anarthrous names: EFnet, DALnet, Fidonet, Usenet, AOL, Compuserve. So he wonders if
Internet once was anarthrous too. An interesting question, which I hope someone will investigate. And Alexis Grant reports another twist: 'my mom used to
say 'on the email', as in, 'I sent you something on the email'" (so treating
email like
phone or
fax).]
[Added 11/13/07: Mail on "the Internet" is pouring in; I will eventually post a summary. Meanwhile, David O'Callaghan has pointed me to an
Onion article "Google Launches 'The Google' For Older Adults".]
The main point I'd been making in class was that we need to distinguish
several senses of
DEFINITE, that is, several distinct
properties that expressions can have. In particular, we need to
distinguish (as I did in the first of my recent postings) between NPs
that are semantically (or pragmatically) definite (conveying uniqueness
or givenness or both) from those that have the definite article in
them. There's clearly a connection -- it's not an accident that
there's a custom of using the label
definite
in both cases -- but they are not coextensive.
First, there are NPs in English that are semanically definite, but
don't have
the as their
determiner. Several kinds of them: personal names, like
Arnold Zwicky; other proper names,
like, yes,
Google, and
Lake Worth,
MIT,
NATO, and several other types; NPs
with possessive determiners, like
Mary's
father, and with demonstrative determiners, like
this dog; and a number of others.
Second, there are English NPs with
the
as their determiner that aren't semantically definite. Again,
there are several types; here are two in which the NP is understood as
referring to a type rather than an individual:
(1) the
hospital in "She's in the hospital". This is the American
version; the British version uses a bare (anarthrous) NP -- "She's in
hospital" -- to convey something like 'She's been hospitalized'.
The facts about these type-denoting location nouns, of both the
arthrous and the anarthrous varieties, are quite complex, but the point
here is only that there are some arthrous examples.
(2) the bus in "I came on the
bus" 'I came by bus'. Note the anarthrous variant with by rather than on. Again, the facts about
these conveyance-denoting nouns, of both the arthrous and anarthrous
varities, are quite complex, but the point here is only that there are
some arthrous examples.
Further wrinkle: there is some question about whether there is a
specifically syntactic (rather than semantic) property of
"definiteness" for NPs in English (and indeed in many other
languages). At issue is whether there is a class of NPs in
English that plays some role in generalizations about the syntax of the
language and is not simply identical to the class of semantically
definite NPs. But in any case, we do need to distinguish NPs with
a semantic property I'll label D and NPs with the syntactic property
I'll label ArtDef; ArtDef NPs are those with
the as their determiner.
Most, but not all, ArtDef NPs are D NPs, and ArtDef NPs are in some
sense the canonical examples of D NPs.
I've chosen somewhat artibtrary labels for these classes of expressions
to discourage people from reasoning about them on the basis of the
meanings and uses of the English words
definite and
definiteness;
labels
are not definitions. It's sometimes been suggested to me that
anarthrousness in proper names can be predicted, at least in part, from
the extent to which the referent is a definite, or defined, entity, in
the sense that it has clear boundaries. I'll take up this idea in
a later posting, but for the moment I'll just note that connecting
ArtDef to this sense of
definite
looks like reasoning from the customary label.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 8, 2007 02:31 PM