English words for snow
A news bulletin on NPR's
Morning
Edition (3/6/07) about Juneau, Alaska, discussed snow there and
ended with:
Four to six inches were expected before
turning to rain.
I sent this on to the
Fellowship
of the Predicative Adjunct as being perfectly clear, but
nevertheless very troubling, and noted that it was not improved by
supplying an overt antecedent
snow
for the missing subject in
before
turning to rain:
Four to six inches of snow were
expected to fall before turning to rain.
You still keep reading it as saying that the inches of fallen snow
would turn to rain. So something more than simple
modifier-dangling is going on here.
Let me shift to a somewhat simpler example:
(1) Four inches of snow had accumulated
before turning to rain.
Awful. We can fix things by restoring the missing subject:
(2) Four inches of snow had accumulated
before (the) snow turned to rain.
Now notice that the two occurrences of
snow in (2) have somewhat different
senses: the first occurrence refers to snow on the ground, fallen snow,
while the second refers to snow in the air, falling snow. I'll
call these the
APUT sense and the
QANIK
sense, respectively, using the corresponding West Greenlandic Eskimo
roots as labels. (Surely after all those years of our talking
about the Eskimo words for snow here on Language Log, everybody will
recall the two West Greenlandic roots.) The problem with (1) is
that we're trying to use
APUT snow as an antecedent for an
omitted element that must be understood as referring to
QANIK snow.
This problem is parallel to the problem with
(3) The chicken looked delicious in the
stew, despite having been raised in inhumane conditions.
where we have an
occurrence
of
chicken 'chicken meat'
being used to supply the meaning of the missing subject in
despite having been raised in inhumane
conditions, which involves a kind of domestic fowl, rather than the meat of these birds. As Jerry Sadock and I, building on
observations by George Lakoff, noted three decades ago -- the paper is
now available
here
-- both explicit anaphors and omitted elements understood anaphorically
(as in the predicative adjuncts above) can be used to detect
ambiguities in expressions. I conclude from the problematic (3) that
there are (at least) two different, but homophonous, words
chicken; one of them can't stand in
for the other. And from the problematic (1) that there are (at
least) two different, but homophonous, words
snow;
one can't be used to supply the meaning of the other.
In other (looser) words: English, like West Greenlandic, has two basic words
for snow. It just happens that in English the words are
homophones, while in West Greenlandic they're not at all similar
phonologically.
A little complicating twist: using
APUT snow as an antecedent for an
omitted element that must be understood as referring to
QANIK snow gets you in trouble, but the
opposite use isn't nearly so bad:
(4) The snow reduced visibility
to only a few feet, before accumulating to almost three feet in our
driveway.
What's going on here, I think, is that a reference to
QANIK snow permits an inference to
APUT
snow, since falling snow results, very quickly, in fallen snow.
Snow in the air is just a moment away from being snow on the ground.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 8, 2007 01:46 PM