Language Log

Last week, at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court was deciding the syntactic and semantic scope of knowingly in 18 U.S.C. sec. 1028A(a)(1), the English High Court decided, in effect, to insert wide-scope knowingly into a newspaper Op-Ed piece.

The following is a guest post by Jason Merchant.

Thought the LangLog would like to hear this week's update on the the Supreme Court case involving adverbial modification argued in February: all nine justices agree with the linguists! The decision is posted, but briefly, the money quote is:

"In ordinary English, where a transitive verb has an object, listeners in most contexts assume that an adverb (such as knowingly) that modifies the transitive verb tells the listener how the subject performed the entire action, including the object as set forth in the sentence."

It is so ordered…

Fifty years ago, my job was to conduct field interviews of older residents in the rural part of the state of Illinois as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada.  The Atlas was trying to document the words, expressions, and pronunciation patterns of older residents who had lived in the same general area all their lives. This proved to be  a fascinating experience for a young man who had lived in large cities all his life. But it actually made me a good field interviewer because I knew nothing about farming and other aspects of rural life and this ignorance actually legitimized my rather mundane questions about such things as what the farmers called the utensil they use to fry eggs with, the machinery they use  to reap their harvests, and what  they call their animals. I haven’t done linguistic geography since those halcyon days, but this New York Times article about the controversy over FCC’s crackdown (the Bono Rule) on the use of dirty words brought back some fond memories.

A bullshit lie detector company run by a charlatan has managed to semi-successfully censor a peer reviewed academic article. And I don't like it one bit. But first, some background, and then we'll get to the censorship stuff.

Five years ago I wrote a Language Log post entitled "BS conditional semantics and the Pinocchio effect" about the nonsense spouted by a lie detection company, Nemesysco. I was disturbed by the marketing literature of the company, which suggested a 98% success rate in detecting evil intent of airline passengers, and included crap like this:

The LVA uses a patented and unique technology to detect "Brain activity finger prints" using the voice as a "medium" to the brain and analyzes the complete emotional structure of your subject. Using wide range spectrum analysis and micro-changes in the speech waveform itself (not micro tremors!) we can learn about any anomaly in the brain activity, and furthermore, classify it accordingly. Stress ("fight or flight" paradigm) is only a small part of this emotional structure

The 98% figure, as I pointed out, and as Mark Liberman made even clearer in a follow up post, is meaningless. There is no type of lie detector in existence whose performance can reasonably be compared to the performance of finger printing. It is meaningless to talk about someone's "complete emotional structure", and there is no interesting sense in which any current technology can analyze it. It is not the case that looking at speech will provide information about "any anomaly in the brain activity": at most it will tell you about some anomalies. Oh, the delicious irony, a lie detector company that engages in wanton deception.

At first sight the headline suggested a case for the Language Log UK Free Speech Watch Desk and the Abusive Epithets Work Group: Mother fined £250 for 'poof' abuse of gay son. A $370 fine just for using the word 'poof', even within the family? What next? Jail time just for calling one's clumsy husband a stupid bastard? Family life would collapse. Intrafamilial insults are part of a great British tradition.

But no, studying of the fine detail of the article (in the Metro, a free UK newspaper) revealed that it wasn't a matter of word use at all.

Forbes reports that the April 21, 2008 New Yorker article, “Vengeance is Ours,” by Jared Diamond, has recently generated a $10 million dollar lawsuit brought by Daniel Wemp,  a New Guinean who Diamond claimed was pursuing vengeance for his uncle’s death. His efforts are said to have led to six years of warfare that have claimed the lives of 47 people in New Guinea.  Rhonda Roland Shearer’s very long blog at StinkyJournalism.org provides more details. There’s a connection to Language Log because Shearer asked linguist Douglas Biber to assess whether the long, numerous, and allegedly direct quotations in Diamond’s article were actually spoken language or whether they were written language modified to look like direct quotes. Biber is an expert on measuring the differences between written and spoken language, so it was prudent for Shearer to seek his help with corpus linguistics to help resolve the issue.

I happened to be browsing through my copy of Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire and came upon a passage I had forgotten about. The Emperor Justinian is known, if at all, for his legal code. The Justinian code was indeed a great success as a codification. It settled numerous disputed points of law and relieved judges and lawyers of the need to consult a huge range of often contradictory legal sources dating back to the Laws of the Twelve Tables, and in some areas, it was progressive. In areas relating to religion and to sex, however, it was just plain awful, in some ways worse than Shari'a Law.

Here's what I think you should do regarding your desire to immigrate to Scotland so you can study linguistics and English language at the University of Edinbu… oops. I nearly put a foot wrong there. According to a brochure I just received from my daytime employer:

Staff should not give immigration advice to students. To do so represents a high risk and is a criminal offence.

A criminal offence? A conversation in which I supply you with some advice about UK immigration matters could end up with me facing criminal charges? Even for me, well versed in the many ways the UK government is permitted to restrict freedom of speech (look for the phrase "who cannot be named for legal reasons" in UK newspapers, for another example), it is hard to get fully attuned to the necessity to button one's lip. Sorry. No advice from me.

The fine line separating what a jury should know and learn from what it should not know and learn became either finer or blurrier, depending on your perspective, in a recent New Jersey case (here) where a lawyer was empanelled on the jury. I don’t know how common it is for a lawyer to be selected for jury duty, but I’d guess it must be pretty rare. I know that as an expert witness I’ve never made it past the voir dire stage in the many times I’ve been summoned for jury duty. I’ve always been “struck” by the lawyers when they learn that I’ve been an expert witness in scores of trials. They don’t seem to want to let anyone who has professional experience analyzing evidence be a trier of the fact in their cases. And that may be the right way to do it, for all I know. In this case, however, the opposing lawyers actually picked another lawyer to be a juror.

The personal injury case was Barber (a customer) v. Shoprite (a grocery store chain), in which Joyce Barber slipped on the floor and was severely injured. During the usual voir dire of potential jurors, the opposing lawyers decided to include attorney and state senator Robert Martin as one of the six jurors to decide the case. At the end of the trial, this jury awarded the plaintiff $876,000 in damages resulting from her fall in a Shoprite store.

As anyone who blogs knows or soon learns, doing so makes you a whole lot more transparent than you might otherwise wish to be. In fact, writing anything like books, articles, or blogs makes you an attractive target for people who may not appreciate what you say. No clearer example can be found than the vetting process the government inflicts on nominees for high-level appointments, such as the US Supreme Court. It’s unfortunate that the persons who finally survive these processes are often are the ones who have written little or nothing about which they can be criticized.

The problem with putting anything in print is made very clear by Paul Barrett in his Harvard Magazine review of a new book by Lawrence Tribe, The Invisible Constitution. Barrett feels that Tribe’s candid views about the US Constitution automatically eliminate him as a possible nominee to the highest court in the land—primarily because he clearly elaborates his own positions (reasonable, to me anyway) about the hot topic of the originalist theory of interpretation. 

Language Log readers seldom have the opportunity to read The Billlings Gazette. So now’s your big chance. A recent article will tell you the way things are out here in the rugged mountain west. We don’t use weak, wimpy words in this part of the country. No, siree. We drink strong coffee, we drive power vehicles, and we don’t use weak, wimpy language.

Those who remember the fallen Montana war hero, Lt. Col. Gary Derby, recently killed in one of the many wars going on these days, have only good things to say about him, including the fact that he insisted that the troops under his command avoid weak, wimpy words, like “I think,” “I might,” and “maybe.” You have to be strong, firm, and optimistic if you’re going to command your troops. Lt.Col. Derby did this very well. But this got me thinking about what happens when academic linguists testify in lawsuits.

Mark Swofford, Steve Hansen, and Anne Henochowicz have just called my attention to a wonderful post by Joel Martinsen over at Danwei which tells about a man named Zhao C who was informed by the Public Security Bureau of the People's Republic of China that he can no longer call himself "C," something that he has been doing his entire life. Mr. Zhao and his father, a lawyer, brought suit against the Public Security Bureau. Last June, a district court in Yingtan, Jiangxi Province, found in Zhao C's favor, but the Public Security Bureau appealed. As one might have expected, Mr. Zhao was ultimately forced to "voluntarily" change his name.

The following is a guest post by Jason Merchant.

The Supreme Court is scheduled today (25 Feb 2009) to hear arguments (Flores-Figueroa v. U.S., No. 08-108) to decide whether Ignacio Flores-Figueroa should have his conviction for aggravated identity theft reversed. The debate centers on the interpretation of a statute, 18 U.S.C. sec. 1028A(a)(1), which states that:

"Whoever … knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person shall … be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 2 years."