mike ([info]wordzguy) wrote,
@ 2005-04-07 15:10:00
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Migratory grammar
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I am connected in the second degree with a guy at work (Richard) who has done work with the Microsoft Word grammar checker. He forwarded me an email whose subject was "strange grammar complaint from Word." Someone had run the grammar checker over this sentence:

   How do we migrate the current mess to something new?

and reported "The word 'migrate' is underlined and the error message is 'verb confusion'."

When Richard sent me the email, he asked: "How many speakers of English do you suppose there are who use 'migrate' as a transitive verb? Are there any outside of the technology industry?"

This usage is so common in my field that I think I would not have blinked. We constantly talk about "migrating applications," meaning converting applications, with the specific meaning of moving either from one version to another or from one platform to another.

(Computer people - or hell, maybe English speakers at large -- like to transitize verbs all the time anyway. Another common one I see about 12 times a day is "to persist," in the sense of "to store": "The data is persisted to disk," for example.)

But I pondered Richard's question and did some looking about. Lo and behold, this usage is interesting enough that the good folks at MacMillan are tracking it and featured it once upon a time as their Word of the Week:
Like its predecessor relating to birds and people, common collocates of the new sense of migrate are the prepositions from and to, so we talk about migrating from one format or system to another. Unlike its predecessor, the new migrate has a transitive realisation, for example Consumers are migrating their CD collections to computer music files. In Internet and computing domains, migrate is also used with a direct object to refer, for example, to the transfer of data from one database to another, or the movement of a website from one server to another. This process can be referred to by the derived noun migration, and the noun migrator is often used to refer to software that manages or facilitates the transfer process.
(I particularly like "a transitive realisation.")

The nice twist is that this supposed new transitive usage is, whaddya know, a throwback:
Although the transitive use of migrate seems to be a new invention restricted largely to technical and computing domains, the adoption of the verb as a synonym for move or transfer is in fact just a return to the verb’s original meaning.
Yay.



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More on Word's grammar checker
(Anonymous)
2006-04-09 11:16 pm UTC (link)
The following sentence appears in a student's paper: "Africa is one of the regions in the world most devastated by HIV/AIDS and, while its suffering has been widely publicized,..." Word underlines the word "its" in green. When the tip pops up, Word's suggestion is "it's." How are students going to learn correct English grammar if the Word grammar checker does not know the difference between the possessive "its" and the contraction "it's?" The advice that it gives is exactly wrong.

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Re: More on Word's grammar checker
(Anonymous)
2006-04-09 11:58 pm UTC (link)
Couple of comments. First, what version of the grammar checker (of Word) is involved? It is improved with each version, so if this is an old version (Word 98, Word 2000, etc.) then the first suggestion would be to upgrade.

In more general terms, grammar checking (and spell checking) is a tool. The grammar checker does not purport to be a usage dictionary or a grammar book; it does not claim that its suggestions -- and that's what they're called -- are supposed to supplant the writer's judgement. Grammar checking is what's called in computer terms a "hard problem"; it it were easy to parse the incredible complexity and diversity of English syntax, we'd have computers generating our sentences for us in the first place.

What an excellent lesson this is for learning and teaching, namely that no matter how sophisticated the tools, it is finally up to the writer to know and apply the rules. Should the student not know the difference between "its" and "it's"? If not, will this make a memorable lesson? Have the student diagram the sentence as an illustration of why this might be difficult for a machine to parse.

More of my views here:

http://mikepope.com/blog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=1116

(Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: More on Word's grammar checker
(Anonymous)
2008-07-30 06:41 am UTC (link)
It does know the difference! It thinks the sentence is supposed to read "....while it is suffering.....". If you replace the word suffering with the word pain then you won't get the suggestion.

I agree that in the context of the whole sentence, the contraction doesn't make sense, however I think that you should always bear in mind that your dealing with a computer application trying to understand English!

(Reply to this) (Parent)


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