Mr. Languagefile: FALSE.  Next question, please.

Professor Philosoda:  Actually, what Mr. L means is that truth value can only be assigned in a context.  Since "language" in the abstract has no context, it cannot be considered, outside some context of use, as TRUE. Anything which is "not true" can be naively considered "false."  It's probably more correct however, to consider language outside a context of use as neither true or false.   Language statements which are neither true or false can be labeled  as "fiction," for example "All unicorns are white."  There is no physical, factual context in which we can either verify or falsify that statement.

Mr. Languagefile:  Somebody once said though, that all truth is conceived in fiction.*
(*A.D. Manning, in his novel "Supposition Error")

Wanda Know:   Mr. Languagefile, why are you a man? Why do we not have gender balance at this Web site when answering linguistic questions.  I am not a feminist; I just wanna know.

Mr. Languagefile:  The rule I learned in high school says that when you're not sure of the gender when referring to someone, you pick the generic masculine.  Example: "Every author should have his dictionary handy." I'm not sure of MY gender, so I picked the masculine for myself.

Undergrad:  Hey, wait a minute!  Just last year I heard MY high school English teacher said THAT rule was old fashioned and sexist.  You're supposed to say "Every author should have his or her dictionary handy."

Mr. or Ms. Languagefile:  I don't think this will work.

Wanda Know: How about "Authors should have THEIR dictionaries handy?"

Their Languagefiles:  That's even worse.

Wanda Know:  But who says you have to be a generic male?  Why should the masculine be the generic anyway?  That makes this a semantic question.  By the way, why does "semantic" only have MAN in it?   Is that generic?  I won't even ask about roMANtic.  I'm not a feminst.  I just wanna know.

Undergrad:  Hey, wait a minute!  Most of the question-answer people in the media ARE women:  Dear Abby, Ann Landers, Miss Manners, Ask Helouise, etc. Like Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Languagefile IS the equal time; he IS the gender balance here.

Mr. Languagefile:  Thanks Undergrad.  You're humble and lovable.  I feel much better now.

Wanda Know:  I am confused about other things too.   I am not having a baby, but I wanna know more about a spectrogram, a sonogram, and an ultra-sound.  What is the difference?

Mr. Languagefile:  Cost, for one thing. What do you say, Professor Philosoda?

Prof. Philosoda:  Dr. Willis Fails uses a spectrograph to make spectrograms in his phonetics class at BYU.  Medical doctors use ultra-sound generators called "sonographs" to make sonograms.  The message is very different in each case.  It's one thing to discover that a consonant is devoiced, quite another matter to discover that you're having twins.

Wanda Know:  I know about voiceless consonants.  What would voiceless vowels be like?  I'm not a dissident.  I just wanna know.

Mr. Languagefile:  [whispers] <<Do you speak ASL?>>

Undergrad: [makes hand signs] <<Yes. I do>>

Wanda Know:  Speak up, you two.  I can't hear you.

Undergrad: Mr. Languagefile, in the movie, "The Princess Bride", the priest says the word "marriage" in that weird accent.  Is the first vowel a dipthong?  How do you transcribe it?

Mr. Languagefile: [draws a heart shape in the air]  Like that maybe?

Professor Philosoda:  Actually, it's a geminate vowel, transcribed [aa]. It's like a dipthong; both have two vowels occupying the same syllable.  A dipthong is two different vowels while a geminate is two of the same vowel in one syllable.

Wanda Know:  Not to change the subject or anything, but the courts have ruled that the store MacFrugal's can keep its name, even though McDonald's sued them to change it.  It seems there's a semantic difference between the "Mac-" and "Mc-" morphemes.  If that's true, why doesn't McDonalds call their Big Mac the Big Mc?

Mr. Languagefile:  Because "Big Mc" would have a voiceless vowel in it.

Undergrad:  Mr. Languagefile, please settle this once and for all.   Some say the word  "tomato" as [tometo] and some say [tomato]; which is the original American pronunciation?

Mr. Languagefile:  In America, I believe the original pronunciation of "tomato" was [skoya?]*
(* according to J. Robertson, the word for "tomato" among the Kachikel Indians of Central America).

Undergrad: This is not an intelligent question.  It's a story problem:   If I have a pound of frozen hamburger and want to have a cook-out, I have to unthaw it.   But, if I don't use all the hamburger, can I RETHAW it and to make it frozen again.  Why or why not?

Mr. Languagefile:  Your very THAW-tful question says it all.   Next?

Undergrad:  Mr. Languagefile, can you analyze the sentence "He gone done it" in X-bar syntax WITHOUT invoking the notion of "small clause"?

Mr. Languagefile:  Since I took LING 430 from Dr. Manning, I can't analyze anything without using a small cause somewhere.

Professor Philosoda:  Actually, in some dialects of Appalachain English, you have compound verbs like GO-DO, and also in some dialects the past-participle is used instead of the past to indicate tense, e.g. "We sung it."    So in these dialects, GO-DO is jointly inflected with EN: GO-EN DO-EN, creating the form "gone done."

Undergrad:  Why doesn't Dr. Manning write a textbook for LING 430, the transformational grammar class?  I think it would be cool if he made a video to go with it.

Professor Philosoda:  All previous transformational-grammar textbooks have proven to be unreadable and useless.  We may conclude by induction that it's impossible to write a readable, useful textbook in transformational grammar.  I'm afraid Dr. Manning would be wasting his time.

Mr. Languagefile:  I just got off the phone with Dr. Manning.  He says he has to finish the textbooks he's supposed to write for LING 230 and 330 before he can tackle 430.   The "impossiblity" of the task doesn't scare him, but he is afraid he'd look too fat on  a video.

Wanda Know: They say the camera adds at least ten pounds.

Undergrad: Why do linguists keep talking about Chomsky, even though language evidence keeps proving him wrong?

Professor Philosoda:  Chomsky's only been proven FALSE, but not wrong. There's a difference, you know.  "Wrong" implies some better, "right" choice, and nobody has offered in the published linguistics literature a competitive language theory that's any less false than Chomsky's.   Chomsky always wins by default.  If you don't like this, you have to construct and PUBLISH a better theory.

Undergrad: Why does Chomsky keep changing his mind?

Wanda Know:  Because Chomsky's a NOAMinalist?

Mr. Languagefile:  I will defer in this case to the immortal words of Homer*, "What is mind after all?   What is matter?   It doesn't matter. Never mind."
(*Homer Simpson)

Undergrad:  But then why are the only transformational-grammar theories I can understand also the ones that are obsolete?  I mean, first there was the Aspects model, then Extended Standard Theory, then the Revised, Extended Standard Theory, then Government, Binding and Barriers.  I could barely understand that and now Dr. Manning says that's obsolete too.

Professor Philosoda:  There's a certain amount of security in obscurity. As soon as anyone figures out what Chomsky has said, he or she can quickly falsify his theory with dozens of counterexamples.  Then Chomsky develops a new theory, even more abstract and obscure than the last one.  Each new, more obscure theory makes the last one "obsolete."  But the new theory will last longer if it's more abstract and harder to understand.

Undergrad:  The sentence "I got me some Taco Bell" violates Chomsky's BINDING CONDITION B.  Yet it is acceptable (at least in Utah English), even though "me", a pronoun is co-indexed with "I" in the same governing category.   WHY?

Mr. Languagefile:  Now you see why Chomsky keeps changing his mind.

Professor Philosoda:  Actually Chomsky might rescue his old binding theory in this case by saying that, in some dialects, a small clause like [me [GET-trace] some Taco Bell] may be a governing category, and so the pronoun "me" would technically be free in it.

Mr. Languagefile:  Great explanation.  It's a shame that binding theory is obsolete.