Language Log

By now everyone knows that Mitt Romney has said, “Corporations are people,” and lots of jokes have been made about it: “Let my corporations go!” — Moses, and so on. Paul Krugman gives Romney the benefit of the doubt, giving him credit for meaning, not that corporations are flesh-and-blood folks, but rather that “corporations are organizations that consist of people.” Krugman then takes Romney to task soberly for his ideas about what happens to taxes on corporations, since these are not taxes on the corporate entity per se but only on its profits — the part that workers and suppliers don’t get. But I wonder if even Krugman is cutting Romney too much slack here. Our Supreme Court has held that money is speech in their ruling that restricting the money one can spend on political advertising is an unacceptable restraint of free speech. If a metaphor can be reified by five conservative justices to the point of holding that what is actually money counts in the real world as speech, why isn’t it natural for those of a like turn of mind to feel free to reify the metaphor that corporations are (legal) persons to the idea that they should count in the real world as individuals deserving of all the rights and privileges of actual people.

[Update 8/14/11 I think the bad links are now fixed. Thanks, SSH. Several commentators, and Eugene Volokh in an email, have pointed out that the Supreme Court decision holding that restricting political advertising expenditure is restricting free speech does not represent the unique occasion on which authorities have held that restriction of some non-speech behavior – for example, marching – counts as a restriction on free speech. In other words, the decision was not based on reification of the metaphor “money is speech’; rather the metaphor was a product of the decision. And of course neither I nor anyone else can know what was in Mitt Romney’s mind when he said “Corporations are people.” Points taken. PK]

The best part of Monday's post on the Facebook authorship-authentication controversy ("High-stakes forensic linguistics", 7/25/2011) was the contribution in the comments by  Ron Butters, Larry Solan, and Carole Chaski.  It's interesting to compare the situation they describe — and the frustration that they express about it — with the history of technologies for answering questions about the source of bits of speech rather than bits of text.

Over the past few months, there have been several developments in the legal battle between Paul Ceglia and Mark Zuckerberg over Ceglia's claim to part ownership of Facebook. As Ben Zimmer explains ("Decoding Your E-Mail Personality", NYT Sunday Review, 7/23/2011):

Mr. Ceglia says that a work-for-hire contract he arranged with Mr. Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, entitles him to half of the Facebook fortune. He has backed up his claim with e-mails purported to be from Mr. Zuckerberg, but Facebook’s lawyers argue that the e-mail exchanges are fabrications. […]

The law firm representing Mr. Zuckerberg called upon Gerald McMenamin, emeritus professor of linguistics at California State University, Fresno, to study the alleged Zuckerberg e-mails. (Normally, other data like message headers and server logs could be used to pin down the e-mails’ provenance, but Mr. Ceglia claims to have saved the messages in Microsoft Word files.) Mr. McMenamin determined, in a report filed with the court last month, that “it is probable that Mr. Zuckerberg is not the author of the questioned writings.” Using “forensic stylistics,” he reached his conclusion through a cross-textual comparison of 11 different “style markers,” including variant forms of punctuation, spelling and grammar.

Sean Hoare, a British journalist who blew the whistle on the News International phone hacking scandal, was found dead yesterday. Today, the papers tell us that the police are calling his death "non suspicious". But there's a curious linguistic aspect to the police report:

There is no evidence of third party involvement and the death is non suspicious. Further toxicology results are now awaited and there is an on-going examination of health problems identified at the post mortem.

As reader MM asked me by email, "who's the second party?"

Gordon Smith, "A Landmark Opinion: Corpus Linguistics in the Courts", The Conglomerate 7/19/2011:

Last month I blogged about the "best student comment ever," the first law review article to rely on corpus linguistics as the basis for analysis. As I have worked with corpus linguistics (through the comment's author, Stephen Mouritsen) over the past few months, I have come to conclude that it will revolutionize the study of law, at least insofar as we are attempting to understand word usages.

Today, my former colleage and current Utah Supreme Court Justice Tom Lee used corpus linguistics in a lengthy concurring opinion (the relevant section starts at page 34). In this opinion, Justice Lee is interpreting the word "custody," and he brings corpus linguistics to the fight. […]  Justice Lee's collegues are not enamored with the approach, but you can read the opinions for yourself and see who gets the better of the argument.

This seems to be the first judicial opinion anywhere using corpus linguistics, but it will surely not be the last.

Matt Negrin at Politico is teasing Cass Sunstein over his 4/13/2011 memo "Final Guidance on Implementing the Plain Writing Act of 2010" ("Deciphering 'Plain Language' Edict", 4/19/2011):

The White House has a new mission for agencies: Ditch the jargon, and speak “plainly” to the public.

But don’t look to the White House to lead by example.

Cass Sunstein, the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is calling on federal workers to stop using “confusing, technical, and acronym-filled language.” To help them out, he’s issued “final guidance” on how to talk straight and not garbled – in convenient PDF form.

The “official interagency working group” created for this mandate is the Plain Language Action and Information Network. That’s right, “PLAIN.” An acronym.

The Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a very unusual decision today that raises an interesting linguistic issue. The underlying case, Cojocaru (Guardian Ad Litem) v. British Columbia Women’s Hospital, was a medical negligence suit by the parents of a brain-damaged baby against the hospital at which it was born. At trial before the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Justice Joel Groves ruled for the plaintiffs and awarded them $5 million in damages.

According to Ian Sherr, "Apple, Microsoft Hire Linguists to Duel Over App Store Name", WSJ 3/30/2011:

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) have both hired linguists to serve as experts in the tech titan's ongoing battle over whether or not the government can grant a trademark for the term "app store."

Ben Zimmer, "The Great Language Land Grab", NYT 3/27/2011:

When tech companies engage in legal squabbles about who gets to use our everyday words, what are ordinary speakers of the language to make of it all?

Microsoft is suing Apple, and Apple is suing Amazon, all over the right to use a simple two-word phrase: “app store.” […]

It’s not the first time the tech industry has claimed commonplace language as its own.

Facebook has been notorious in this regard, filing trademarks on an array of common four-letter words: “like,” “wall,” “poke” and, naturally, “face” and “book.” […]

Microsoft, of course, has long been playing this game by fiercely upholding prosaic brand names like Windows, Office and Word.

Over the past few days, we've discussed the possible relevance of corpus evidence in legal evaluations of ordinary-language meaning. Another (and socio-economically more important) legal application of computational linguistics is featured today in John Markoff's article, "Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software", NYT 3/4/2011:

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in FCC v. AT&T that corporations are not entitled to a right of "personal privacy," even if corporations can be construed as "persons." To reach this decision, they were aided by an amicus brief by Neal Goldfarb that presented corpus evidence on the types of nouns that the adjective "personal" typically modifies. Here on Language Log, Mark Liberman posted about the case on the day the decision was released, and now I have a piece for The Atlantic discussing the use of corpus analysis in the courtroom.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court issued its (unanimous) decision in FCC v. AT&T. The key issue was whether  corporations are entitled to a right of personal privacy. Specifically, the Freedom of Information Act exempts “law enforcement records the disclosure of which 'could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.'”

CompTel, a trade association, submitted a FOIA request for documents AT&T had provided to the Federal Communications Commission Enforcement Bureau during an investigation of that company. The Bureau found that Exemption 7(C) applied to individuals identified in AT&T’s submissions but not to the company itself, concluding that corporations do not have “personal privacy” interests as required by the exemption. The FCC agreed with the Bureau, but the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit did not. It held that Exemption 7(C) extends to the “personal privacy” of corporations, reasoning that “personal” is the adjective form of the term “person,” which Congress has defined, as applicable here, to include corporations.

For some interesting background and discussion, see Neal Goldfarb's post on the decision at LAWnLinguistics. You should also take a look at his post from January 19, "Personal privacy ≠ corporate privacy", in which he discusses the amicus brief that he filed in the case.

The latest trademark atrocity is due to the Tolkien estate, whose lawyers have written to Zazzle demanding that it cease to advertise and sell buttons reading "While you were reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion", which, they claim, infringes on the trademark owned by the estate. They are almost certainly wrong. The rights granted trademark holders are very limited and have to do with identification of products and services. The Tolkien trademark means that you and I cannot market Tolkien branded items – it most emphatically does not mean that we cannot use the word "Tolkien" in other contexts, such as discussing J. R. Tolkien himself, his work, or Tolkien-branded items. Trademark is not intended to, and does not, give the holder a general power to control the use of words.