People that need people I: a history of that/who

The thing about people is that we are very proud of being better than non-people.  Perhaps the best example of this was the famous line from The Elephant Man, where the physically deformed but mentally capable elephant man has been corned by an angry mob and cries out: “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” While his first statement is not technically true, as humans are in fact animals, the key point remains — we think of ourselves as more than mere animals, and by gum, we’re proud of that.  This belief in human exceptionalism is commonly used as evidence against evolution (“I am not a monkey!”), and it also leads to a common grammar complaint:

“People who (not that) use that incorrectly drive me batty.”

See, there are three different relative pronouns you can use to introduce a relative clause:

(1a) The house that I grew up in
(1b) The pinecone which fell from the tree onto my head
(1c) The calligrapher who ruined my last birthday

At issue here is whether that would be acceptable as the relative pronoun in (1c).

Why wouldn’t that be okay?  Well, the relative clause is modifying calligrapher, which is (almost certainly) a human.  The problem is that people don’t take kindly to being referred to as thats.  Think of the indignation with which Obama supporters met McCain’s “that one” remark and you get the idea of how much people don’t like to be thats.  (Inanimate objects do not exhibit the same ire at being referred to as whos, though that may be because no one would use who as a relative pronoun for an inanimate object.)  So here’s the question: is that an acceptable HRRP (human-referring relative pronoun)?

Unlike the anti-evolution argument, which relatively few people find compelling, a wide range of people believe that it’s wrong to use that as a HRRP. And not just fringe people, either. For instance, you’ll note that Alfred Hitchcock called his movie The Man Who Knew Too Much, and that Oliver Sacks titled his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Yet there remain those who freely use that as a HRRP. I’m thinking here of The People That Time Forgot, a largely forgotten sci-fi movie, and All The Man That I Need, a largely forgotten Whitney Houston song. (It is worth noting here that the who-titled objects listed here have been more successful than the that-titled ones, so if you are naming an artistic enterprise, it appears you would be well-served to follow the prescriptivists’ advice and use who with humans.)

But what of the grammar? Is it fair to be driven batty by the title of All the Man That I Need, rather than by the triteness of the lyrics? The answer, as it turns out, is complicated.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate; the answer is simple: probably not.  But the evidence for this is a bit more complex.  I’ll address the issue in three separate posts.  The current post looks at the history of the that/who battle, the next will look at situations where one or the other is preferred in modern usage, and the last will investigate the thorny issue of non-human animates.

So let’s start in on the historical evidence. According to the MWDEU, that was the first relative pronoun on the scene, existing at least since Middle English. Which came next, followed by who(m); both already existed in the language, but only began to be used as relative pronouns in the 14th and 15th centuries. The three relative pronouns were more or less interchangeable in the early days. Then, in the 17th century, that fell into disrepute and was ousted from literary usage.  That returned from its exile eventually, but things were never the same between the three.  The biggest change from our perspective is that the usurpers who and whom claimed they were the rightful HRRPs, that humans no longer were within that’s domain. These pretenders to the throne were supported by many 18th century grammarians, who sought to return that to ignominy.

Against the grammarians, that fought valiantly and eventually returned triumphantly to its place as the default relative pronoun and once again became an acceptable HRRP.  However, remnants of the grammarians’ crusade ripple through to the present day.  MWDEU cites carryover from this period as a possible source of the “apparently common, yet unfounded, notion” that that is not an acceptable HRRP.

This history tells us a few things.  The first is that relative pronouns have been in flux throughout Modern English, and so we can’t look too far back in history for evidence of standard usage for relative pronouns.  The second is that you can’t say that logic dictates that who must be the HRRP, since who wasn’t even an option till the 15th century, didn’t rise to prominence until the 17th, and hasn’t managed to fully supplant that.  Humans don’t historically require who, that much is clear.  But given the incessant changes in relative pronoun behavior over the years, could it be that nowadays humans do require who?

As it turns out, the modern truth about HRRPs is somewhat more subtle that one might expect, and just might illustrate an interesting psycholinguistic point.  I’ll address this issue in the next post.

Summary: Historically, there’s no problem with using that in a relative clause modifying a person.

A Nebraskan anti-prescriptivist operative?

The local ABC affiliate in Kearney, Nebraska has a news story up with the headline “Kids Texting Their Way to Bad Grammar“. Normal reactionary prescriptivist propaganda, right? Hardly; the article itself is riddled with spelling and word choice errors. There are at least four, which is pretty impressive, given that the article is a mere four sentences long. I can only hope that this high error rate is an intentional act by an anti-prescriptivist guerrilla who is in deep cover posing as a web editor in the prescriptivist stronghold of Kearney.

If so, kudos, my friend. Kudos.

One last GLM complaint

Some dead horses you can’t stop beating.  So it is with me and Global Language Monitor.  Their analysis is terribly crummy and makes me incredibly angry — and yet I just can’t stop reading it.  But, out of concern for both my own sanity and yours, I promise this will be the last time I talk about GLM for a while — not least because my posts about GLM are amongst my worst.  It’s just too hard to write coherently when the whole time your brain is shouting out disparaging comments about the research integrity of the person you’re writing about.

But I digress.  GLM released an analysis of the final presidential debate this morning, and it bears commenting:

“Obama’s significantly higher use of the passive voice combined with his frequent use of the word ‘I’ perhaps indicated an impatience with his opponent last witnessed in his debates with Hillary Clinton.”

I don’t know how I act when I am being impatient. “Impatiently”, I suppose you could say, but I don’t know what the symptoms of that are.  I figured they were things like tapping one’s foot, checking one’s watch, scowling, and the like.  Linguistically, I thought the cues were things like faster pacing, shorter sentences, louder delivery, and phrases like “C’mon”, “Let’s go”, and, if I remember my youth correctly, “Fine, I’m leaving, enjoy your stay in the mall, find your own way home.” But I was clearly mistaken! The real key lies in increased usage of passives and first-person pronouns.  Because nothing says “impatience” like saying “I am being consumed by impatience.”

Global Language Monitor’s debate analysis nonsense (Part 2)

This is a continuation of my last post, about Global Language Monitor’s analysis of the vice-presidential debate, which, as far as I can tell, basically consisted of feeding the debate transcript into Microsoft Word, looking at the numbers, and making up an explanation as to why the results mattered.  I’d stated two complaints with Global Language Monitor’s analysis; the first was that they had assigned readability scores to the debate, and the second was that they’d claimed Sarah Palin was overusing the passive.  I spent the last post long-windedly arguing that readability is bunk when you’re talking about extemporaneous speech, and now it’s time for me to do something I thought I would never do: defend Sarah Palin.

We all know the passive; we’ve all heard of its unsavory practices.  For all the hell it goes through on a daily basis, it’s a wonder that it keeps showing up to work.  The passive gets maligned as too wordy, too evasive, too wimpy.  Strunk & White opposed it, George Orwell opposed it, and Microsoft Word opposes it.  It’s opposed by just about any prescriptivist you can find shouting drivel.  According to the anti-passivists, there’s only one reason to use a passive, and that’s to avoid responsibility.  The problem with the passive, they claim, is that passives don’t tell you who is the “doer of the action” — or as we linguists like to call it, the agent.

The most commonly cited example of the terrible agentless passive is “Mistakes were made”, which is sufficiently reviled to have its own Wikipedia entry. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, passives can have explicit agents, as in this sentence from Kofi Annan:

(1) In both cases, the gravest mistakes were made by Member States [...]

Not only can passives have an agent, but non-passive sentences can be agentless.  Here’s four non-passive agentless restatements of “Mistakes were made”:

(2a) Someone made mistakes.
(2b) There were mistakes.
(2c) Mistakes happened.
(2d) People made mistakes.

So we see that in spite of the conventional wisdom, passives don’t necessarily indicate a desire to evade responsibility, and non-passives don’t indicate forthrightness.  In fairness, the Global Language Monitor analysis does acknowledge this, stating merely that passives can be evasive, but then they follow that up by claiming that Palin used passives specifically to evade responsibility:

“Passive voice can be used to deflect responsibility; Biden used active voice when referring to Cheney and Bush; Palin countered with passive deflections.”

Kudos, GLM, for being honest and stating that passives aren’t by definition bad.  But there’s one minor tripping point to this analysis: Palin didn’t use passives to deflect responsibility when Biden mentioned Bush or Cheney.  OOPS!

Here’s the data.  I searched through the CNN transcript and noted each time that Biden said “Bush” or “Cheney”.  Each time I found a Bush/Cheney reference, I put the first three (or more, if she stayed on the topic) paragraphs of Palin’s response into a file.  So this file contained all of her direct responses to Biden’s mentions of Bush or Cheney, a set of 75 sentences.  There are (by my count) eight passive clauses in this dataset, occurring in seven sentences, so 9% percent of her sentences have at least one passive clause. But let’s look at representative examples of these passives:

(3a) “And our commanders on the ground will tell us when those conditions have been met.”
(3b) “[...] those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.”
(3c) “No Child Left Behind was implemented.”

None of these use the passive to deflect responsibility.  In fact, in all of these sentences, the agents would probably be proud to be explicitly named.  “Me! It’s me who is not allowing a dangerous regime to obtain nuclear weapons!”, they’d scream.

So why does GLM think that Palin was using passive deflections?  Well, my guess is that it fits with the narrative that all Republicans are constantly trying to distance themselves from President Bush, so GLM assumed that when Palin used the passive, it must have been used evasively.  But to find out if this wasn’t really the case, you just had to spend a couple of minutes READING THE TEXT.  It took me ten minutes to compile the sentences and read them.  It was painful ten minutes, because I so staunchly disagree with almost everything Palin says, but I did it.  GLM, clearly, did not, preferring instead to regurgitate Word’s readability statistics and tack on some bunk commentary.  I know it’s tough checking facts because there’s a chance they won’t support the point you want to make, but you really ought to do it before you send out spurious analysis in a press release.

Summary: Let no one say I’ve never defended Sarah Palin.  Her use of the passive in the VP debate, although more common than Biden’s, was not used to distance herself from Bush and Cheney, but rather was employed as a standard stylistic device.  Mashing together Word’s readability statistics and some made-up rubbish doesn’t make good analysis.  Let’s stop trying to pin so much importance on the delivery of the message and actually pay attention to the message itself.

Global Language Monitor’s debate analysis nonsense (Part 1)

My dear girlfriend, realizing that I had been dangerously calm over the weekend, was kind enough to send me a CNN article that would boil my blood and burn my beans.  This article was basically a regurgitation of a press release, issued by Paul Payack of the Global Language Monitor, that performed some simple and simple-minded statistical analyses on the transcript of last Thursday’s Vice Presidential Debate.  The article/press release make two big claims:

1. Biden spoke at an eighth-grade level while Palin spoke at almost a tenth-grade level.
2. Palin used far more passive sentences than Biden did, betraying a desire to obscure the similarities between her and Bush/Cheney.

In truth, neither of these claims really make any sense, and I’m incredibly agitated that CNN would fall for this specious analysis.  In this post, I’ll discuss the problems with assessing “grade level” using readability tests, and I’ll follow it up shortly with one assaulting the passive issue.

Let me start off by addressing the idea that grade-level in speech, as measured by readability tests, is a meaningful measure of anything: IT’S NOT.  Payack’s analysis assigns grade levels based on a modified version of the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.  George Klare, all the way back in 1963, pointed out that most studies have shown that listener comprehension is not significantly affected by readability values from Flesch-Kincaid and similar tests.  Furthermore, Klare’s lack of effect was based on testing the comprehension of someone listening to a speaker reading pre-prepared text; presumably listener comprehension of an extemporaneous speaker would be even less well-correlated with readability of the transcript.

Why do I say that? Well, one thing about speech, unlike virtually all writing, is that speech does not contain punctuation.  Consider, for example, this response of Sarah Palin’s in the debate:

“I’ve been there. I know what the hurts are. I know what the challenges are. And, thank God, I know what the joys are, too, of living in America. We are so blessed. And I’ve always been proud to be an American. And so has John McCain.” [as punctated by CNN transcribers]

Here we have three sentences beginning with and — or at least that’s the way CNN transcribed it. From my memory of that segment of the debate, Palin did end each of those phrases with a protracted pause that would be best marked with a period in the transcript. But at the same time, I would be reluctant to claim that they were all independent sentences — especially the last one, which is clearly a continuation of the next-to-last sentence.  Now, according to the standard Flesch-Kincaid readability score contained in Google Docs, this segment comes in with a 3.0 grade level.  That doesn’t sound too unreasonable; these are tight little sentences, each containing only a single thought, so we’d expect them to be easy to comprehend — although I would be rather surprised if the average third-grader could summarize this quote effectively.

But what if we join the and sentences with commas, as would be more standard in formal writing? Suddenly, the grade level rises to 5.0, a jump of two grade levels.  Not a huge jump, it seems, but remember that the claimed difference in grade levels between Biden and Palin was slightly less than that.  And boy, it didn’t seem to me that switching out those periods for commas made the Palin quote any less comprehensible.  Similarly, let’s look at a quote attributed to a State Department spokesman:

“I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

That is a hard sentence to understand, not because any of the words are difficult, but rather because the syntax is extremely complex.  This is reflected by its grade level, which according to Google Docs is 9.0.  But if we split the sentence in two by replacing the comma with a period, the grade level plummets to 3.0, because each of these two sentences is short, with short words.  And surely no one would say that this sentence was made at a third-grade level.

The problem is that grade level in the Flesch-Kincaid system is based on two numbers: words per sentence and syllables per word.  But both of these are being used as proxies for what really makes a sentence difficult to read: structural complexity and word familiarity.  But as we see here, creating a compound sentence can inflate the words-per-sentence ratio without increasing the sentence complexity.  Klare makes this point in his article:

“Formulas appear to give score accurate to, or even within, one grade-level.  Yet actually they are seldom this accurate.”

There’s another shortcoming tp blindly applying a readability test to extemporaneous speech, beyond the issue of having to decide for yourself what punctuation goes where.  Unlike writing, speech is full of errors.  Consider one of Gwen Ifill’s (the moderator) statements during the debate.

“The House of Representatives this week passed a bill, a big bailout bill — or didn’t pass it, I should say.”

Clearly this sentence, if written rather than spoken, would have turned out more like

“The House of Representatives didn’t pass a big bailout bill this week.”

The spoken statement has a grade level of 8, according to Google Docs, but that value is inflated by the speech errors. The intended statement, with fewer words, is a full grade level lower.  Again, readability reveals itself to be inappropriate for extemporaneous speech, because it’s unclear how we should account for speech errors.

So we’ve got a double whammy here. Even if readability scores were appropriate for assessing anything about extemporaneous speech, the reported distinction is almost certainly less than the margin of error for the readability test.  No matter how you cut it, the distinction is illusory.  Why, it’s almost as foolish as docking a candidate for using passive sentences… but that’ll have to wait for Part 2.

[Note: the grade level of various politicians' speech is a hotter issue than I'd initially realized.  The National Review's Media Blog had a post the other day assessing Harry Reid's speech to be at a sixth grade level.]

Summary: Readability tests like Flesch-Kincaid are inherently imprecise, even for written text.  When you try applying them to speech, the resulting number is pretty much meaningless.  A precise estimate of the difficulty of a sentence requires psycholinguistic testing, not just pressing F7 in Word. Please don’t attempt to win an argument by citing the grade level of your opponent’s speech.

Is it dumb to say “stupidest”?

Sherry over at Everything Language and Grammar had a post way back in May about some athlete who committed a venial grammar sin.  Specifically, the athlete said that he had made “the stupidest mistake.”  (Having made a number of gallingly stupid mistakes in my life, I can only imagine the depth of idiocy to which the stupidest mistake would descend.)  Sherry claims that the athlete has made a further mistake by describing the mistake as stupidest rather than most stupid.

However, there’s no reason to suspect that stupidest is any less proper of a formation than most stupid.  Personally, I prefer the former.  I did a Google Books search (full view only, so as to eliminate the modern journals that were sneaking into the results) comparing use of the two possibilities before 1900 (at which point the presumed stupiding of the language may have been underway).  463 for most stupid, 407 for stupidest.  Similarly, 820 for more stupid, 674 for stupider.  So if stupidest has ceased to be a word, it must have done so some time in the last century.  And that seems unlikely, given the number of modern people who have no problem with the word.