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[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

On the Identity of "Chat"

Like all the linguistics folks on Tumblr, I've been sent the "chat is a fourth person pronoun" post by a bunch of well-meaning people and and I've been thinking waaay too much about it. @hbmmaster made a wonderful post explaining exactly why "chat" ISN'T a fourth person pronoun, and after reading it I wanted to go a little deeper on what it might actually be doing linguistically, because it is a really interesting phenomenon. Here's a little proposal on what might be going on, with the caveat that it's not backed up by a sociolinguistic survey (which would be fun but more than I could throw together this morning).

On Pronouns

Studying linguistics has been really beneficial for me because understanding that language is constantly changing helped me to become comfortable with using they/them pronouns for myself. I've since done a decent amount of work with pronouns, and here are some basic ideas.

A basic substitution test shows that "chat" is not syntactically a pronoun: it can't be replaced with a pronoun in a sentence.

"Chat, what do we think about that?"

"He*, what do we think about that?" (* = ungrammatical, a native speaker of English would think it sounds wrong)

Linguists identify pronouns as bundles of features identifying the speaker, addressee, and/or someone outside the current discourse. So, a first person pronoun refers to the speaker, a second person pronoun refers to the addressee, and a third person pronoun refers to someone who is neither the speaker nor the addressee (but who is still known to the speaker and addressee). This configuration doesn't leave a lot of room for a "fourth" person. But the intuition people have that "chat" refers to something external to the discourse is worth exploring.

Hypothesis 1: Chat is a fourth-person pronoun.

We've knocked this one right out.

Hypothesis 2: Chat is an address term.

So what's an address term? These are words like "dude, bro, girl, sir" that we use to talk to people. In the original context where "chat" appears - streamers addressing their viewers - it is absolutely an address term. We can easily replace "chat" with any of these address terms in the example sentence above. It's clear that the speaker is referring to a specific group (viewers) who are observing and commenting on (but not fully participating in) the discourse of the stream. The distinction between OBSERVATION and PARTICIPATION is a secret tool that will come in handy later.

But when a student in a classroom says "wow chat, I hate this," is that student referring to their peers as a chat? In other words, is the student expecting any sort of participation or observation by the other students of their utterance? Could "chat" be replaced with "guys" in this instance and retain its nuance? My intuition as a zillenial (which could be way off, please drop your intuitions in the comments) is that the relationship between a streamer and chat is not exactly what the speaker in this case expects out of their peers. Which brings me to...

Hypothesis 3: chat is a stylistic index.

What's an index in linguistics? To put it very simply, it's anything that has acquired a social meaning based on the context in which it's said. In its original streaming context, it's an address term. But it can be used in contexts where there is not a chat, or even any group of people that could be abstracted into being a chat. Instead, people use this linguistic structure to explicitly mimic the style which streamers use.

And that much seems obvious, right? Of course people are mimicking streamers. It doesn't take a graduate degree to figure that out. What's interesting to me is why people choose to employ streaming language in certain scenarios. How is it different from the same sentence, minus the streamer style?

This all comes down to the indexicality, or social meaning, of streamer speak. This is where I ask you all to take over: what sorts of attitudes and qualities do you associate with that kind of person and that kind of speech? I think it has to do with (here it comes!) the PARTICIPANT/OBSERVER distinction. By framing speech as having observers, a speaker takes on the persona of someone who is observed - a self-styled celebrity. To use "chat" is to position oneself as a celebrity, and in some cases even to mock the notion of such a position. We can see a logical path from how streamers use "chat" as an address term to how it is co-opted to reference streamer culture and that celebrity/observer relationship in non-streaming mediated discourse. If we think about it that way, then it's easy to see why the "fourth person pronoun" post is so appealing. It highlights a discourse relationship that is being invoked wherein "chat" is not a group but a style.

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

I think that people who say "chat is a pronoun, actually" or say that it's prescriptivist or stifling creativity or language development are fundamentally misunderstanding what parts of speech are and how prescriptivism and descriptivism work. there's a huge difference between saying "you can't use neopronouns" or "you can't end a sentence with a preposition" and "chat is not a pronoun." the former two are prescriptive statements, the latter is literally descriptive.

in the first two cases, you're trying to tell people what they can and cannot do regardless of actual usage. people end sentences with prepositions all the time, and even though it isn't mainstream right now, there are established communities of people who use neopronouns.

"chat is not a pronoun," on the other hand, is a statement that describes current actual usage. (rest of the post under the cut: it's very long)

currently, no one is using chat as a pronoun. could someone use it as a pronoun? sure! of course they could! you could theoretically use any combination of sounds to fulfill any function. but that's irrelevant to the debate because "chat is not a pronoun" does not in any way entail the statement "chat can never ever foreseeably be a pronoun." it is just saying that right now, chat is not a pronoun because no one is using it like a pronoun: no more and no less. in none of the examples that I have seen provided has it been used like a pronoun. "chat is not a pronoun" also doesn't negate the possibility that there may be something cool going on socially! it's just not in terms of grammar categories. whatever's going on is a different kind of beast.

another very important thing I feel like a lot of people are misunderstanding is what parts of speech are. their entire purpose is to categorize language and study it, NOT to box it in. we HAVE to name these guys and try to classify them and study how they are alike and different, or we would not be able to talk about language and study it at all. think of it like animal classification: we're trying to sort through a preexisting system of something that exists (language or living organisms) and show how it all fits together. there are infinite complexities to how it all works and it takes an insane amount of study to figure out whether something belongs in one category, another, or needs a new label to accurately categorize it at all. pluto is not a planet and tomatoes are a fruit no matter WHAT kind of ""vibes"" they give off to you because "planet" and "fruit" are terms that scientists need to have precise definitions so they can talk about them. if you expand categories like "noun" or "verb" or "conjunction" to just include whatever, then you've removed your ability to talk about things with precision.

and also, parts of speech are not created by saying, "we should have nouns. okay gang, go out there and put all the words we ought to use as nouns in the noun box. if anyone uses one of those for anything other than a noun, we kill them." no. you look at sentences and the preexisting English language and you say, "boy, it seems like there sure are a lot of words that people use to label people, places, things, and concepts. in terms of syntax, we tend to place them in the subject or object position, and they don't necessarily contain information about the specific properties of how the object, person, or concept looks or moves. they can also be inflected to show that there's more than one, and there seems to be a set amount of endings you can use to do that. you can swap them out for one another and the sentence will stay grammatically correct. let's call these nouns!"

^THIS IS DESCRIPTIVISM. it is the reason why we're constantly updating dictionaries. "Stan" started out as a proper noun: the name of a guy. people started using it like a common noun to describe obsessive fans, and guess what? now it's a common noun! and then a little bit later, it got verbed! people started using it to describe the action or behavior of being an enthusiastic or obsessive fan! and now it's a verb! look it up in Merriam-Webster right now, those definitions are in there. any word can get turned into anything if we start using it that way.

the real issue here is that most people are familiar with nouns and verbs. this is not enough. pronouns have been amassing clout lately, and if you paid attention in English class or were really into Mad Libs as a kid, you might also be familiar with adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and articles. I was both an English and a Mad Libs kid! imagine my shock and horror when I started college and got exposed to the horrors of the intricacies of tense, aspect, and modality in verbs, nominalization, the nightmare of actually trying to pin down what an adverb even is, all the little subcategories like vocatives and demonstratives... and THEN I decided to do a linguistics minor along with my English major and was forced to realize that although there's a lot of shared terminology and overlap between traditional English parts of speech and linguistic lexical/syntactic categories, both fields make these categorizations for slightly different purposes, so sometimes the terminology and categorization is different. AND PEOPLE ARE DISPUTING THINGS. ALL THE TIME.

HOWEVER.

these disputes are so much more infinitely nuanced then you are even capable of realizing if all you know is the basic eight parts of speech or whatever that they teach you in school. OF COURSE if your understanding of grammar only extends to nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns, you're going to say stuff like "chat is a pronoun." it's like trying to diagnose someone with a mental illness when all you know is ADHD and depression. it's like trying to identify fossils when you've never seen an animal with the skin off. it's like that stupid argument about whether a hot dog is a sandwich or a taco or whatever that was about, which is a fun mental exercise, I guess, but the real answer is that yeah I guess you could say anything with some type of flat processed baked grain base is a sandwich, but the real and useful answer is that we make distinctions between hot dogs, tacos, sandwiches, flatbreads, open-face sandwiches, ravioli, burritos, wraps, and so on because WE NEED SPECIFICITY IN ORDER TO TALK ABOUT THINGS IN REAL LIFE.

i'm not an expert. all i have is a bachelor's degree in English, and i took grammar-related classes on purpose. you know what that equipped me to do upon seeing the initial post? it equipped me to go "that doesn't sound right" and then to go look up some expert opinions to explain why I felt that way and whether it was right or wrong.

so if I can beg you all to do one thing: please, please go on Wikipedia and read about the vocative case and the page on the parts of speech (this link will take you to the part where they talk about how linguists have different classification methods because it's very complex). what I want you to take away from this is that a) modern linguists and grammarians are, for the most part, very aware of how messy things can get and willing to make adjustments, and that b) "chat is a pronoun" is not one of those cases because it already falls perfectly into a category.

and I lied, because there is also a second thing I beg you all to do: realize how easy it is to be dogmatic when stuff seems simple. realize that everything is more complicated than it looks. realize nothing is black and white. realize everything is infinitely layered. and remember that although we're all human, there are always people out there who know more than you, and if you shut your eyes and cover your ears you are closing yourself off to ever being able to understand anything just so you can stay in your little paper cutout dimension where things make sense.

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

Fuck it. Crochet cartilaginous stingray skeleton

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

When people get a little too gung-ho about-

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

That’s…wild. What was I talking about?

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

April 27

Today in Dungeon Meshi: Falin wakes up.

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

everythign Chris Evans has ever done that isn't playing Lucas Lee from Scott Pilgrim has been a waste of time and potential

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

so the (in)famous picture of Chilchuck's wife's face is unconfirmed, but we do canonically see her in the manga, I think.

This is Marcille's imagination with a half-foot version of her standing in for Chilchuck's wife. However, I think this outfit is an actual outfit that Chilchuck's wife owns and wears because of this panel:

This is Chilchuck's family. There's Chilchuck's head on the bottom right. Right to left, we can see Flertom and her little stuffed animal, an older woman (possibly Chilchuck's mom or his mother-in-law?), someone holding an unidentified baby, his wife (wearing a dress made of the same fabric as that skirt!), and Meijack. We know from an extra that Chilchuck has four siblings: the person in the middle with the baby may be one of them, or it could be a relative of his wife's, too, if Flertom's dark-haired genes come from her mom. Who knows. Anyway, I'm convinced his wife is second from the left.

So if we use that reoccurring fabric pattern to conclude that the first outfit is his wife's, then I think it's also possible that the elbow to the right of Laios and Leed is Chilchuck's wife's elbow. That sleeve looks very similar to the one in Marcille's outfit.

So yeah. IMO, we have the canonical elbow, torso, and taste in fashion of Chilchuck's wife, if nothing else.

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

RIP falin’s tits…. u will be missed

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

Dungeon Meshi - Kahka Brud and The Island

Kahka Brud - Town adventurer's go through to arrive at The Island, where the dungeon was discovered.

The Island - Island situated off the coast of Kahka Brud, The Dungeon was discovered conected to the village's graveyard.

Merini (Or Melini) - The Village where the Adventurer's stay and make preparations before adventuring in The Dungeon.

Image Texts under the cut

First Image Showing Kahka Brud

Laios pointing up: Our hometown is farther north across the sea. It's a boring place with nothing but mountains and snow.

Marcille pointing to Kahka Brud: Everyone comes to the island through this neighboring town. It's the biggest one in the area. The Magic School Falin and I went to is there too.

Cythis pointing west talking about the canaries: We came from a city on the continent that lies northwest of here. Of the human races there 80% are elves. 20% are "other."

Kabru pointing east (tiny Kuro with Mickbell on his shoulders besides him): Utaya is… was far to the east of here. Humans and Demihumans are still fighting over the territory. Kuro came from that area as well.

Shuro point downwards east: The Eastern Islands are scattered to the southeast of here. There aren't many longlived races, and there's constant internal strife and wars between islands.

Tiny Izutsumi and Rin: We all have roots on different islands.

Dungeons:

Budou Pit

Dwarf-Style Dungeon

Collapsed

Brud Dungeon Cluster

Dwarf-Style Dungeons

Captured

Currently part of the town, and only traces remain

Tower of Night Cries

Gnome-Style Dungeon

Captured and being sealed

Currently administered by the Gnomes

The Island

Compound-type Dungeon

Discovered in 507

Second Image showing details of The Island

"The Island"

Over the years, it's been given many different names by it's various owners: Dwarfs, Elves, and tall-men. By now, most of these have faded away and it's just called "The Island."

Merini Village

Once a small fishing village, the discovery of The Dungeon has brought about drastic changes

[On the north-most part of the village]

Island Lord's Mansion

[Middle of the village, near the shore]

High Street

All the necessary tools and food can be bought here.

[Deeper to the southeast of The Island]

Dungeon Entrance

Connects to the Village graveyard, which is no longer used for burials.

[End of Descriptions]

Here's the world map in case you want to check it along with the descriptions from the characters, I'll make a dedicated post for it later on.

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

i've only been on this blog for a few months, but i've had a lot of people anxious about starting college as a linguistics major. i want to reassure all of you that you don't have to be ahead of the curve going in. i started with zero actual knowledge about linguistics, just the sense that language was cool and i wanted to know more about how it worked. my plans for study changed like four different times between first year and applying for grad school as i learned about the field.

basically: take a deep breath. the degree is meant to train you, not to catch you unprepared.

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

occasional posts from users

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

fma: human transmutation is bad!! There is no equivalent exchange for human life >:(

dungeon meshi: how much meat ya got?

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

No see results option, I'm forcing you to perceive yourself. rb for more results pls