According to Umberto Eco
I was surprised to hear Umberto Eco, interviewed on
BBC Radio 4 this
morning, using the phrase according to me several times.
He seemed
to think it is synonymous with "in my view", or "the way I tell it".
It is not.
According to X has the peculiar property of only being properly
used by people other than X. We can say, "According to her, the
Jews control world banking", and we mean that this global
banking stranglehold
stuff is her story about the Jews, and we are by no means committed
to it.
The constraint is (somewhat) analogous to a similarly odd fact about
lurk: you only describe other people's actions using it.
If I wait around outside your office trying not to be seen (not that I
would, but I could), someone might say "Geoff Pullum has been lurking
outside your office", which is normal use of the language describing
slightly
nefarious behavior on my part. But if I say "I'm planning to come and
lurk outside your office", that would be deeply weird in a linguistic way, unless it was a joke.
I have only ever heard according to me from foreigners who have
learned English imperfectly. One tends to think of Umberto Eco as a sort
of polymathic cultural and linguistic European academic superstar who
would spot this sort of subtlety. But no, there he was, talking about
what he says in his new book, and saying "according to me". Stop it,
Umberto. Get a clue. This is not an idiom to use about yourself. Use it
when imputing views to others, especially (though not exclusively) when
you are skeptical about those views. Never use it to say that something
is your own view.
There, now I've been prescriptive. See what you made me do? Still,
it's in a good cause. Think of me as a language teacher. An EFL
instructor to a polymathic cultural and linguistic European academic
superstar.
Updates, November 21:
just in case you thought I had
overlooked the following points, let me assure you that I was aware of
them, and you do not need to join the swarms of people who are flooding
the mail servers with messages pointing them out to me.
- The net forum usage — "I usually only lurk
on this forum, but I'd like to make one comment" — is of course
a special one, with jocular origin. Those of you who are writing to me about it,
please don't; it underlines my point rather than refuting it. People are coining
words like "delurk" and "relurk" now, to describe (I assume) coming in out
of the lurker's shadows and retreating back into them. If you were just in
the middle of writing to me about this, please relurk.
- There is a disanalogy between the two expressions I discuss in
that lurking in its original sense
describes nefarious activity or impure motives, so there is a reason for the
normal practice of not using it about ourselves. This aspect is not there with
according to me: being an information source is nothing to be
ashamed of. It's just that English speakers normally use
according to X for attribution to information sources external
to themselves.
- I simplified the constraint to make the point more briefly, but in fact
there is a more general formulation which is more interesting. It is not
just about the speaker, because the same oddness arises in indirect
discourse. That is, it is not just
?According to me, US policy is all wrong that is odd; the same
oddness is there in
?John explained that according to him, US policy was all wrong.
The phenomenon this illustrates is called logophoricity. Some languages
have special logophoric pronouns so that (among other things; see
Christopher Culy, "Logophoric pronouns and point of view"
Linguistics 35
[1997], 845-859)
they can keep grammatical track
of the difference between a pronoun referring back to the person whose
point of view is being taken or whose thoughts or experiences
are being represented and a pronoun referring back to someone else.
(This is not a fully explanation of logophoricity, or a particular good one;
but you see, I started out just trying to write a one-liner about Umberto
Eco not appreciating that according to me is not used in
logophoric contexts in English. But then people started mailing me and
it all got weird. People often ask why Language Log doesn't have open
comments and doesn't publish email addresses all over its pages.
The reason is that there are roughly 8.34926 gzillion things to be said
about almost any piece of language we comment on, roughly
1.02981 gzillion of them being true — though often irrelevant
— and 7.31945 gzillion being false, and we try to protect ourselves
from having more than a few thousand of them being reported to the
mighty Language Log organization on
any given day.)
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at November 20, 2007 04:27 PM