{"id":893,"date":"2016-10-03T14:55:30","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T18:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grieve-smith.com\/blog1\/?p=893"},"modified":"2016-10-02T14:56:39","modified_gmt":"2016-10-02T18:56:39","slug":"said-for-2016-word-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/said-for-2016-word-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Said&#8221; for 2016 Word of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just got back from <a href=\"https:\/\/apling.engl.iastate.edu\/conferences\/aacl2016\/\" target=\"_blank\">the American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference<\/a> in Ames, Iowa, and I?m calling the Word of the Year: for 2016 it will be <strong>said<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">hoseok literally did a one handed backflip and all people are talking about is the flash of his abs at the end of said backflip i&#39;m tired<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; ? (@hoseokdetails) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hoseokdetails\/status\/780094919792857088\">September 25, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>You may think you know <strong>said<\/strong>.  It?s the past participle of <strong>say<\/strong>. You?ve said it yourself many times. What?s so special about it?<\/p>\n<p>What?s special was revealed by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/tjordans\" target=\"_blank\">Jordan Smith<\/a>, a graduate student at Iowa State, in his presentation on Saturday afternoon.  <strong>said<\/strong> is becoming a determiner.  It is grammaticizing.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to its participial use (?once the words were said?) you?ve probably seen <strong>said<\/strong> used as an attributive adjective (?the said property?).  It indicates that the noun it modifies refers to a person, place or thing that has been mentioned recently, with the same noun, and that the speaker\/writer expects it to be active in the hearer\/reader?s memory.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">on the said Property on the understanding that they (the Southern Baptist Convention) will pay the sum of One Shilling annually as rent. \/8<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Mpa Ugoeze (@Uzochi_O) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Uzochi_O\/status\/747381810032676864\">June 27, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Attributive <strong>said<\/strong> is strongly associated with legal documents, as in its first recorded use in the English Parliament in 1327.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oed.com\/view\/Entry\/169800\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Oxford English Dictionary<\/em><\/a> reports that <strong>said<\/strong> was used outside of legal contexts as early as 1973, in the English sitcom Steptoe and Son.  In this context it was clearly a joke: a word that evoked law courts used in a lower-class colloquial context.<\/p>\n<p>Jordan Smith examined uses of <strong>said<\/strong> in <a href=\"http:\/\/corpus.byu.edu\/coca\/\" target=\"_blank\">the Corpus of Contemporary American English<\/a> (COCA) and found that attributive <strong>said<\/strong> has increasingly been used without <strong>the<\/strong> for several years now, and outside the legal domain.  He observes that syntactic changes and increased frequency have been named by linguists like Joan Bybee as harbingers of grammaticization.<\/p>\n<p>Grammaticization (also known as grammaticalization; search for both) is when an ordinary lexical item (like a noun, verb or adjective, or even a phrase) becomes a grammatical item (like a pronoun, preposition or auxiliary verb).  For example, <strong>while<\/strong> is a noun meaning a period of time, but it was grammaticized to a conjunction indicating simultaneity.  <strong>Used<\/strong> is an adjective meaning accustomed, as in ?I was used to being lonely,? but has also become part of an auxiliary indicating habitual aspect as in ?I used to be lonely.?<\/p>\n<p>Jordan is suggesting that <strong>said<\/strong> is no longer just a verb or even an adjective, it?s our newest determiner in English.  Determiners are an exclusive club of short words that modify nouns.  They include articles like <strong>an<\/strong> and <strong>the<\/strong>, but also demonstratives like <strong>these<\/strong> and quantifiers like <strong>several<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Noun phrases without a determiner tend to refer to generic categories, as I have been doing with phrases like <strong>legal documents<\/strong> and <strong>grammaticization<\/strong>.  That is clearly not what is going on with <strong>said girlfriend<\/strong>.  Noun phrases with <strong>said<\/strong> refer to a specific item or group of items, in some sense even more so than noun phrases with <strong>the<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to the wireless Internet at the AACL, I began searching for <strong>of said<\/strong> on Twitter, and found a ton of examples.  There are plenty for <strong>in said<\/strong> examples as well.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">i saw my future husband in a halloween store yesterday but then i lost him in said halloween store :(<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; tra$hpanda (@rinicolex) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/rinicolex\/status\/782549010158587905\">October 2, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>It?s not just happening in English.  The analogous French <strong>ledit<\/strong> is also used outside the legal domain.  Its reanalysis is a bit different, since it incorporates the article rather than replacing it.  Like most noun modifiers in French it is inflected for gender and number.  I haven?t found anything similar for Spanish.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"fr\" dir=\"ltr\">Donc apr\u00e8s nous avoir fait changer de voie pour le train suivant, la sncf fait en sorte que ledit train soit en retard.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Ang\u00e9lique ? (@xTruelove_way) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/xTruelove_way\/status\/779008045925986304\">September 22, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>In 2013 the American Dialect Society chose <strong>because<\/strong> as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americandialect.org\/because-is-the-2013-word-of-the-year\" target=\"_blank\">its Word of the Year<\/a>.  <strong>Because<\/strong> is already a conjunction, having grammaticized from the noun <strong>cause<\/strong>, but it has been reanalyzed again into a preposition, as in <strong>because science<\/strong>.  Some theorists consider this to be a further step in grammaticization.  And here is a twenty-first century prepositional phrase for you, folks: <strong>because<\/strong> (P) <strong>said<\/strong> (Det) <strong>relationship<\/strong> (N).<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">I let myself develop bad habits because said relationship. Now I just have to have some serious discipline to get back to where I want to be<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; ?? (@fagmiester) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/fagmiester\/status\/776569280674476032\">September 15, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>After Jordan?s presentation it struck me that <strong>said<\/strong> is an excellent candidate for the 2016 Word of the year.  And if the ADS isn?t interested, maybe another organization like the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, can sponsor a Grammaticization of the Year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just got back from the American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference in Ames, Iowa, and I?m calling the Word of the Year: for 2016 it will be said. hoseok literally did a one handed backflip and all people are talking about is the flash of his abs at the end of said backflip i&#39;m &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/said-for-2016-word-of-the-year\/\" class=\"excerpt-link\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,15,9,8,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-french","category-language-change","category-syntax","category-variation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":897,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions\/897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grieve-smith.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}