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onenicebugperday · 4 years ago

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hey sorry, i'm usually 100% all for people reading the articles in posts jdslkd but i don't really want to see pictures of spiders right now, is there a version of the article without pictures, or something similar?

Full “Spiders do not bite” article pasted under the cut without photos of spiders - forgive any formatting issues, I literally just copy-pasted and didn’t fix anything.

Spiders do not bite.

by Chris Buddle

Last week, the arthropod lab was lucky enough to be highlighted on the website “Montreal Openfile”. When discussing our work with spiders as related to McGill’s spider collection, I was asked about the most common misconception about spiders, and I responded quickly with the following:

There are a lot of misconceptions about spiders. The most common is the idea that spiders frequently bite people – they do not. Most so-called spider bites are caused by something else. Spiders generally have no interest in biting us, and would rather feed upon invertebrates. I have been working with spiders for over 15 years, and I have handled many, many kinds of live spiders and I have never been attacked by a spider.

It is really quite astounding – almost anyone you talk to seem to know someone who has been bitten by a spider and/or they themselves have a personal story about a spider that bit them. These stories often include anecdotes like “it really, really hurt“, “the wound swelled up and festered“, “I was bitten over and over again in the middle of the night“, “the spider ran right at me and bit me” etc. Related directly to this are the numerous questions I get about the brown recluse spider, and its occurrence in Quebec. If I believed everything that people told me, I would NOT be an Arachnologist, and I would fear for my life – Venomous spiders everywhere!!!

Time for a reality check – Spider bites are very, very rare and other more likely causal factors should be given priority. Let me go into detail:

1) Misdiagnosis: other animals are more likely to be the cause of so-called “spider bites”. The usual and more likely suspects include things like wasps, ants, bedbugs, black flies, etc. Message: these kinds arthropods are known to sting, bite, or “feed” upon mammals! (…and reactions to some of these can certainly be severe, and serious). How do I know that spiders rarely cause reactions in humans? Two reasons: experience and the scientific literature (i.e., evidence or lack thereof). For example, a few years ago colleagues of mine (Robb Bennett & Rick Vetter) wrote about this in a paper for Canadian physicians:

Approach to spider bites: Erroneous attribution of dermonecrotic lesions to brown recluse or hobo spider bites in Canada

There are two key pieces of information in this article: first, the medical community must recognize the possibilities of other likely causal factors for symptoms sometimes attributed to spider bites. Second, to properly verify a spider bite, the spider needs to be collected and properly identified. This takes me to the next point – the importance of taxonomy.

2) Incorrect identification: Several years ago a woman approached me after a pest-control company sprayed her home – she brought me specimens of the ‘deadly’ spider that they had sprayed for. It was NOT a dangerous spiders – it was a completely harmless wolf spider (Family Lycosidae) from the genus Trochosa. She saw a spider, called in the professionals, and these professionals did not accurately identify the spider (they told her it was a brown recluse). TAXONOMY IS IMPORANT and TAXONOMIC EXPERTISE is essential. It is critical that a careful identification is done (by an expert!) on any spider that supposedly bites someone. In my experience, a casual image search on the Internet will not suffice, and will likely confuse the situation, and perhaps cause undue alarm. [as an aside, this blog post about ‘the taxonomy fail index’ is worth a look]

3) Spider behaviour: Spiders are “scared” of humans. Ok, I recognize this is anthropomorphizing things, but the reality is that if you approach a spider, it usually runs away, or completely ignores us. With the exception of jumping spiders, most spiders have very poor eyesight and respond to other stimuli (e.g., vibrations, light/dark). Humans make a lot of noise, and cause a spider’s entire habitat to shake, rumble and roll. Furthermore, spiders prefer to live in damp, dark places, and when we lift up an old shoe box, or sweep under the fridge, we sometimes disrupt a spider but if you wait a minute, they invariably run back to darkness. Spiders would rather run and hide than hang out with us.

4) Home range: Venomous spiders (i.e., to humans!) just don’t live in Canada. Of the almost 40,000 spider species, globally, there are less than a dozen or so that can cause serious health problems to the average, healthy human, and these do not occur naturally in Canada (Australia, however, is a different story!). One of the authors of the paper mentioned above (Rick Vetter) has a terrific website devoted to the “myth” of the brown recluse. Also, his list of publications will take you to some key literature on the broader topic of medically important spiders. Rick has put together a terrific map showing the distribution range of the brown recluse, and I’ve copied it below. As you can see, Canada is not part of the native range of the brown recluse (or its close relatives):

5) Spider food: Spiders prey upon invertebrates and for the vast majority of spider species their venom is suited for invertebrates. Their venom can certainly pack a punch, but it is generally not suited for vertebrates (at least certainly not in northern climes, there are spiders elsewhere who do prey upon birds, for example).

6) Biological constraints: For many species, the “fangs” of spiders (which are located at the end of the Chelicerae) are just too weak and small to be able to break the skin. I have held many spiders and watched as they work away at trying to bite me, but they just can’t pull it off. Our skin is generally too tough for their little, wimpy fangs. Here’s a photo to show this (it’s another wolf spider, trying unsuccessfully to bite me):

[Photo removed]

To summarize this rather lengthy post: in general, and in this part of the world, venomous spiders are rare, and bites from venomous spider bites are exceedingly rare, and I would argue that most suspected spider bites are not actually caused by spiders. The risk of a spider bite is very, very low. If you want to reduce risk, it’s far more dangerous to get in a car than be bitten by a spider.

Writing this post has inspired me to think about other misconceptions about spiders. Stay tuned…there’s a lot more to come!

#Anonymous

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eusjason · 4 years ago

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ʷᵉ ᵃʳᵉ ⁿᵒᵗ ˢᵘʳᵉ ᵒᶠ 𝓼𝓸𝓻𝓻𝓸𝔀, & 𝕛𝕠𝕪 ʷᵃˢ ⁿᵉᵛᵉʳ ˢᵘʳᵉ ;

› 𝟎𝟎𝟏: 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘥, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘵?

in the northern reaches of canada, playful outdoor hockey on frozen lakes known as shinny is as sure of a past time as huddling up by the fireplace. never one to be bothered by the cold, jason spent most of the young childhood skating out on some lake or another, usually with friends or teammates until they eventually called it quits when the sun started to sink lower and the even colder night chill began to roll in. he should’ve left with them, really, his mother was going to worry as she always did — though never as much as the other mothers, not out of any less concern, but perhaps she knew that water would not harm jason. all the times he’d gotten picked out of the frigid saguenay fjord and didn’t get so much as a cold were probably a dead giveaway.

so he’s alone when it happens, probably for the best : it means the mist doesn’t have to work overtime to alter the memories of his friends. winter is just starting to break into the warmer season of spring, the worst time of year if you ask jason. it just signals the end of outdoor hockey, soon to be moved to the confines of a temperature controlled rink. he’s stubborn, intent on getting every hour out of the frozen ice on the lake that he possibly can, even if that means avoiding certain spots of the lake. but he must miscalculate because he hears the telltale cracking of ice beneath his skates — and not the comforting deep cracking sounds that accompanies a freezing lake. this is the bad kind of cracking, the one that proceeds plunging into freezing water and possibly dying of hypothermia. tyler’s mother had showed them all a video of someone falling through thin ice when they were all old enough to want to skate on the lake, probably to shake fear and caution into them ( it’s worked, for the most part ). for the first time out on the lake, jason is terrified.

it’s probably this terror that unlocks what will become his specialty in the years to come. he never plunges into the icy depths of the lake ( even though if he had, he would’ve remained dry and unaffected ), because he freezes the whole thing solid. he then passes out because of it, the volume of water he just changed something he won’t have the stamina to repeat for quite a while. his mother and the father of one of his friends find him on the lake much later, burning up from fever, his eleven year old body trying to cope with the excess energy it just absorbed.

it’s a mystery what happened exactly, to everyone but his mother had known eventually the godly part of his blood would demand to manifest as more than an ease on ice or the way beluga whales always seemed to come to whatever boat he was on. it’s on a boat in the middle of the saint lawrence that she tells him the truth. jason takes it pretty well, for someone just told his father is the lord of the sea. if anything, he knows it to be true the moment his mother tells him, the final piece of a puzzle falling into place.

not long after his twelfth birthday that summer, instead of staying in saguenay, he’s shipped off to camp voreios even further north in canada.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟐: 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦’𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘧𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘥?

leila goldhirsch never had any doubts of the child she carried for nine months and then loved from the moment he was born. she always knew it was a bit of inevitability that his godly side would present itself, much like the ocean never deigns to be ignored. there was always more to that man she had a brief but momentous relationship with, more than just the kinda captain of the ship she used for that whole summer studying beluga whales in the saint lawrence. she didn’t know whether or not to believe him when he said he was the lord of the sea, but like the ocean, the truth is undeniable. and so she did her best to raise jason normally, worried like any good mother though his father had promised to keep him safe.

( he still doesn’t know this — but one of those fisherman who picked him out of the fjord had been him ).

— and she worried after the attack, wanting to protect her son but having no way of protecting him from the monsters that were inside his head. she’ll always worry, probably, though she’s happy that he seems to have found himself again at eonia.

jason’s stepfather is a whole other story, just for the simple fact that he doesn’t know about poseidon, still believing jason’s biological father was simply the boat captain of a ship many, many years ago. jason and his mother never figured out a way to too tell him and well... it feels a little too late for that now.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟑: 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘨𝘰𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵?

he’s just arrived at camp voreios, age twelve and fitting in even more easily than most despite his young age — sparking the rumor that he must be a son of hermes. he’d been aware of his godly parentage even for a few months now in an unofficial sense, though still officially “unclaimed,” not that it made a whole lot of difference at camp voreios who roomed attendees by age instead of godly parentage. he remains quiet to the fact though, appreciating the suspense of it all even at a young age.

it’s a few days later after the first campwide game that things get official. jason’s fresh off scoring a game-winning goal when the glowing sea-green trident appears over his head effectively hushing the previously rowdy arena.

camp voreios had never had a child of poseidon before : he was the first.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟒: 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘱?

camp voreios, the northern camp ( grammatically i think it should actually be voreios camp but to stick with pjo naming conventions... ), sits in some of the most remote reaches of quebec, far by pretty much all terms, and it is here that some of the most elite demigods are trained. obscured from mortal eyes as a longterm and extremely competitive program for only the most elite youth hockey players, there’s a bit of truth to that. most who attend that camp are between the ages of twelve and eighteen, the graduates commonly accepted into colleges with impressive hockey programs and a very select few like jason into the canadian hockey league. though almost all in attendance could easily fit in talentwise in the chl, most opt to not go through the additional testing and training into order to determine if they’re fit to go the professional route. their “recruitment” is a smattering of satyr scouts and coaches who scour youth hockey programs for demigods.

the camp sits on the edge of a lake, something jason found incredibly satisfying and it was on this lake this he truly honed his abilities of phase manipulation of water and water sensitivity. he did dabble in the other aspects of hydrokinesis ( specifically, the manipulation of actual water ) at least enough to be respectable at it, but he found it more dull and less useful, preferring to explore control of water in its ice state. you’d never see him try to create a tsunami wave or something.

a hockey centric demigod camp was as exciting as it came. though they would play against mortal teams to learn to exercise control over their abilities in the heat of a game ( and as a result, learn to control themselves in high emotion situations ), there were plenty of demigod hockey games that were almost a free for all. the only thing they didn’t allow jason to do was manipulate the actual ice of the rink, citing that was a bit of an unfair advantage even for them. camp voreios was also the home to the art of swordplay on ice, more for pure fun than any true necessity — though it was argued that the heightened speed of a fight on ice was good for developing reflexes and training the mind to analyze an opponent more quickly. there’s probably some truth to that.

camp voreios, unlike many demigod camps, was not a summer camp. instead it ran around the hockey season, meaning it took students for the duration of the school year and released them to do as they pleased in the summer though many stayed the duration. occupants are schooled with a mixture of online and at local schools. jason was in attendance at camp voreios from ages twelve to sixteen almost year round, save for the month of july when he returned home to saguenay. the intent of camp voreios was to rigorously train their attendees for the real world — practically the epitome of tough love.

at sixteen, jason knew he wanted to try to peruse hockey professionally if he could, the fourth of camp voreios attendees who expressed this intention. the camp only allowed the most elite on the ice and more apt at protecting themselves to enter professional leagues where there was a much higher profile and higher risk. jason passed their aptitude tests and so at sixteen, he was drafted to the rouyn-noranda huskies and left camp voreios, though he’d return in the summer occasionally as well as encounter and maybe help a little bit some on their yearly scavenger hunt.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟓: 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘴?

camp voreios didn’t get sent on an awful lot of quests compared to much bigger camps, though the directors of the camp often sent campers out on their own in an unofficial capacity in order to gain “real world experience” tussling with real monsters and getting a taste of real danger — call it that tough love. most common was a massive scavenger hunt that took up nearly three weeks every spring after hockey season ended where the entire camp was split into groups of two or three and sent out across north america to retrieve increasingly rare items.

however, jason was sent on one official god-sanctioned quest at the tender age of thirteen. he’d been at camp for about a year and a half at that point and participated in one scavenger hunt and thus deemed ready. gotta start them young, right ?? besides, it was a quest for one of the missing prongs on the trident of poseidon, and as the only child of poseidon at camp voreios who else was supposed to go ?? he was dispatched with a daughter of aphrodite ( 15 ) and son of hermes ( 16 ), though jason’s leadership skills soon became evident even as young as he was. the quest took them two weeks to complete, and took them everywhere from the stiffling grand canyon ( not jason’s favorite place ) to niagara falls ( marginally better ), culminating with them on the coast of nova scotia, the first time jason had seen the real ocean. he’ll claim he jumped, witnesses claim he fell, but either way, he ended up deep in the atlantic ocean where he finally met his godly father for the first time.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟔: 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘨𝘰𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵?

jason met poseidon when he was thirteen and he was nothing like he expected. he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but much like the sea he supposes it depends. poseidon has never felt different than the sea on a calm day. he’d say his relationship with him is more the positive side of neutral then negative, despite the fact they’ve only spoken face to face a handful of times.

jason never was someone who needed words to know he was cared for and he recognizes the ways poseidon cares for him as his son in ways other than words : in the safe passages he grants him every fall and spring as he sails over the atlantic, the way he feels at home in the ocean, and the way he’d been soothed and in some ways healed by the ocean after the attack. he just takes their contact it as it is, seeing no reason to wish for things to be different than they are.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟕: 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦’𝘴 𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘥?

the day jason learned about his water sensitivity was one of the best in his life. though it’s hardly as flashy as his hydrokinesis, the additional perspective is one his cherishes quite closely. there’s something to be said for feeling like you connect to the world, even in the oddest of ways. he can’t deny he loves freezing water though — there’s nothing like skating under and open sky and with a bit of work, his hydrokinesis ability made that possible.

there is, of course, his prowess on the ice, though he’s not sure if he wants to contribute that to being a demigod. he’d like to believe that even without godly blood in his veins that he still would’ve been good enough to be drafted into the chl.

› 𝟎𝟎𝟖: 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦’𝘴 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘥?

power comes with a cost, and sometimes jason thinks that price is too high. as much as he knows he can’t wring the godly blood out of him, there are days he wishes he could is only to save what he’d been building in rouyn-noranda. evan had been young, beautiful, talented, and very much mortal. there’s no reason he or any of the others of his team should have had to die because a pack of monsters were intent on slaying the son of poseidon. it’s an endless battle in jason’s head between what he knows to be true and the endless guilt he still feels constricted around his heart. because what’s the point of having power if it still wasn’t enough to protect the people he cared about ??

› 𝟎𝟎𝟗: 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘦’𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘱𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺?

it’s rare to see jason without osisko, his celestial bronze sword that also takes the convenient forms of a hockey stick or a bronze bracelet on his left wrist. it was a gift to him when he was drafted into the chl at sixteen ( visuals and more detailed information on osisko HERE ). it is without a doubt his main weapon, and the one he’s most trained at, though if he had to he could fight with a trident pretty well ( thanks dad ). given osisko’s ability to return to him even if lost in battle, he rarely has to default to other weapons, though at even closer hand-to-hand combat with daggers or knives, he’s proficient as well since the concept is quite similar. where he severely lacks is in any long range weapons like archery or spears — sadly his accuracy with a puck does not seem to translate to arrows or anything of the type.

jason isn’t absolute top tier elite at swordplay, though he holds his own quite respectively and probably comes in the top ten percent, aided in part by his sheer athleticism due to the strong, active life he’s lived since he was quite young, training both to be a demigod and a good hockey player. factor in his hydrokinesis when available, and you can probably get him to the top five percent. he can get quite competitive in matchups, which also informs his ability to hold his own out of sheer will. there’s also something to be said that he attended a demigod camp practically year round for four years, allowing him a much longer length of training in his formative years than just the typical three month summer camp.

he has extremely good endurance ( endurance and like... endurance 😉, y’know ?? alsdkfjlsks ) and often fights smarter, not harder, using his opponent’s weaknesses and the environment to his advantage. as a defenseman, he’s quick to analyze offensive players of the fastest paced sport in the world to hinder their plan by the time they get to the blueline — this ability transfers beautifully to battle proficiency and fights. he has to work quite hard to get as good as he has, the observing part he was always quite good at, it was getting his fighting ability up to the level where he could actually do something to hinder the offense he knew was coming. he obviously most easily gains the upper hand when on the beach, a boat, or if someone foolishly decides they do want to face him in one of camp voreios’ created past times : swordplay on ice.

#;; headcanon #euquestionnaire #( ayyy folks #we finally made it alsdkfj )#( there are probably typos in this bc i can't be bothered to read it over )#( questionnaire is such a weird word #why does it have two n's? )

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thelingspace · 6 years ago

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Capturing Swedish Islands (Linguistically)

An interesting question found its way into our inbox recently, asking about relative clauses in Swedish, and wondering whether their unique characteristics might pose a problem for some of the linguistic theories we’ve talked about on our channel. So if you want a discussion of syntax, Swedish, and subjacency (with some eye-tracking thrown in), this is for you!

So yes, there is a hypothesis that Swedish relative clauses break one of the basic principles by which language is thought to work. In particular, it’s been claimed that one of the governing principles of language is Subjacency, which basically says that when words move around in a sentence, like when a statement gets turned into a question, those words can’t move around without limit. Instead, they have to hop around in small skips and jumps to get to their destination. To make this more concrete, consider the sentence in (1).

(1) Where did Nick think Carol was from?

The idea goes that a sentence like this isn’t formed by moving the word “where” directly from the end to the beginning, as in (2). Instead, we suppose that it happens in steps, by moving it to the beginning of the embedded clause first, and then moving it all the way to the front of the sentence as a whole, shown in (3).

(2a) Did Nick think Carol was from where?

(2b) Where did Nick think Carol was from _?

(3a) Did Nick think Carol was from where?

(3b) Did Nick think where Carol was from _?

(3c) Where did Nick think _ Carol was from _?

One of the advantages of supposing that this is how questions are formed is that it’s easy to explain why some questions just don’t work. The question in (4) sounds pretty weird — so weird that it’s hard to know what it’s even supposed to mean. (The asterisk marks it as unacceptable.)

(4) *Where did Nick ask who was from _?

The explanation behind this is that the intermediate step that “where” normally would have made on its way to the front is rendered impossible because the “who” in the middle gets in its way. It’s sitting in exactly the spot inside the structure of the sentence that “where” would have used to make its pit stop.

More generally, Subjacency is used as an explanation for ‘islands,’ which are the parts of sentences where words like “where” and “when” often seem to get stranded. And one of the most robust kinds of island found across the world’s languages is the relative clause, which is why we can’t ever turn (5) into (6).

(5) Nick is friends with a hero who lives on another planet

(6) *Where is Nick friends with a hero who lives _?

Surprisingly, Swedish — alongside other mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian — seems to break this rule into pieces. The sentence in (7) doesn’t have a direct translation into English that sounds very natural.

(7a) Såna blommor såg jag en man som sålde på torget

(7b) Those kinds of flowers saw I a man that sold in square-the (gloss)

(7c) *Those kinds of flowers, I saw a man that sold in the square

So does that mean we have to toss all our progress out the window, and start from scratch? Well, let’s not be too hasty. For one, it’s worth noting that even the English version of the sentence can be ‘rescued’ using what’s called a resumptive pronoun, filling the gap left behind by the fronted noun phrase “those kinds of flowers.”

(8) Those kinds of flowers, I saw a man that sold them in the square

For many speakers, the sentence in (8) actually sounds pretty good, as long as the pronoun “them” is available to plug the leak, so to speak. At the very least, these kinds of sentences do find their way into conversational speech a whole lot. So, whether a supposedly inviolable rule gets broken or not isn’t as black-and-white as it might appear. What’s maybe a more compelling line of thinking is that what look like violations of these rules on the surface can turn out not to be, once we dig a little deeper. For instance, the sentence in (9), found in Quebec French, might seem surprising. It looks like there’s a missing piece after “exploser” (“blow up”), inside of a relative clause, that corresponds directly to “l'édifice” (“the building”) — so, right where a gap shouldn’t be possible.

(9a) V'là l'édifice qu'y a un gars qui a fait exploser _

(9b) *This is the building that there is a man who blew up

But that embedded clause has some very strange properties that have given linguists reasons to think it’s something more exotic. For one, the sentence in (9) above only functions with what’s known as a stage-level predicate — so, a verb that describes an action that takes place over a relatively short period of time, like an explosion. This is in contrast to an individual-level predicate, which can apply over someone’s whole lifetime. When we replace one kind of predicate with another, what comes out as garbage in English now sounds equally terrible in French.

(10a) *V’là l'édifice qu'y a un employé qui connaît _

(10b) *This is the building that there is an employee who knows

Interestingly, stage-level predicates seem to fundamentally change the underlying structures of these sentences, so that other apparently inviolable rules completely break down. For instance, with a stage-level predicate, we can now fit a proper name in there, which is something that English (and many other languages) simply forbid.

(11a) Y a Jean qui est venu

(11b) *There is John who came (cannot say out-of-the-blue to mean “John came”)

For this reason, along with some other unusual syntactic properties that come hand-in-hand, it’s supposed that these aren’t really relative clauses at all. And not being relative clauses, the “who” in (9) isn’t actually occupying a spot that any other words have to pass through on their way up the tree. That is, movement isn’t blocked like how it normally would be in a genuine relative clause.

Still, Swedish has famously resisted any good analysis. Some researchers have tried to explain the problem away by claiming that what look like relative clauses are actually small clauses — the “Carol a friend” part of the sentence below — since small clauses are happy to have words move out of them.

(12a) Nick considers Carol a friend

(12b) Who does Nick consider _ a friend?

But the structures that words can move out of in Swedish clearly have more in common with noun phrases containing relative clauses, than clauses in and of themselves. In (13), it just doesn’t make sense to think of the verb “träffat” (“meet”) as being followed by a clause, in the same way it did for “consider.”

(13a) Det har jag inte träffat någon som gjort

(13b) that have I not met someone that done

(13c) *That, I haven’t met anyone who has done

So what’s next? Here, it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees. Languages show amazing variation, but given all the ways it could have been, language as a whole also shows incredible uniformity. It’s truly remarkable that almost all the languages we’ve studied carefully so far, regardless of how distant they are from each other in time and space, show similar island effects. Even if Swedish turns out to be a true exception after all is said and done, there’s such an overwhelming tendency in the opposite direction, it begs for some kind of explanation. If our theory is wrong, it means we need to build an even better one, not that we need no theory at all.

And yet the situation isn’t so dire. A recent eye tracking study — the first of its kind to address this specific question — suggests a more nuanced set of facts. Generally, when experimental subjects read through sentences, looking for open spots where a dislocated word might have come from as they process what they’re seeing, they spend relatively less time fixated on the parts of sentences that are syntactic islands, vs. those that aren’t. In other words, by default, readers in these experiments tend to ignore the possibility of finding gaps inside syntactic islands, since our linguistic knowledge rules that out. And in this study, it was found that sentences like the ones in (7) and (13), which seem to show that Swedish can move words out from inside a relative clause, tend to fall somewhere between full-on syntactic islands and structures that typically allow for movement, in terms of where readers look, and for how long. This suggests that Swedish relative clauses are what you might call ‘weak islands,’ letting you move words out of them in some circumstances, but not in others. And this is in line with the fact that not all kinds of constituents (in this case, “why”) can be moved out of these relative clauses, as the unacceptability of the sentence in (14) shows. (In English, the sentence cannot be used to ask why people were late.)

(14a) *Varföri känner du många som blev sena till festeni?

(14b) Why know you many who were late to party-the

(14c) *Why do you know many people who were late to the party?

For reasons we don’t yet fully understand, relative clauses in Swedish don’t obviously pattern with relative clauses in English. At the same time, the variation between them isn’t so deep that we’re forced to throw out everything we know about how language works. The search for understanding is an ongoing process, and sometimes the challenges can seem impossible, but sooner or later we usually find a way to puzzle out the problem. And that can only ever serve to shed more light on what we already know!

#linguistics #tumblinguistics #syntax #subjacency #syntactic movement #swedish #quebec french #relative clauses #syntactic islands #eye tracking

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