Language Log

From Lauri Karttunen (via Arnold Zwicky):

I have come to realize that there are a lot of examples on the web of the type "not want to not X" that seem to say the opposite of what they mean. Here are a few:

She failed to give the patient CPR and turned an ambulance away in the mistaken belief that the elderly woman’s had said she did not want not to be resuscitated. (Cambridge, UK, newspaper article)

If a guest does not want not to be disturbed they need only to place the 'Do Not Disturb" sign on the door and their wishes will be respected. (Florida motel)

In the first case, the mistaken belief was that the elderly woman did not want to be resuscitated. In the second case it should say "If a guest does not want to be disturbed …"

Bob Ladd asked:

Is there any discussion anywhere of the multiple tense-marking (if that's what it is) in constructions like "We would have liked to have stayed longer" (as opposed to just "We would have liked to stay longer")?  And is it just my impression, or has this become more common?

For what it's worth, there's a very clear discussion of what the difference theoretically could be here.

Web search turns  up the original lyrics to Elton John and Bernie Taupin's song Candle in the Wind, which includes the line "I would have liked to have known you". You would think some Telegraph reader might have made the connection between the song's popularity and the decline of the English language, but if that happened I can't find any evidence of it.

From Larry Horn, an example of triple negation found in Chad Harbach's 2011 novel, The Art of Fielding. As discussed in "Newt's not not engaging", 12/11/2011, Larry has previously argued that in some cases "double negatives may fail to completely cancel out, instead amounting to a weaker positive than their target would have provided". In his latest find, the triple negative analogously amount to a weakened negative.

Context: Pella Affenlight is sharing an uncomfortable maybe-goodbye dinner at an over-the-hill French restaurant in Westish, Wisconsin with her obnoxious estranged architect husband David, who is trying to remind her about their having made love the previous Christmas when he gave her a pair of sapphire and platinum earrings he now produces at the table. Pella doesn't remember either the sex or the earrings, but the latter do look somewhat familiar to her as well as "gorgeous", and she muses to herself:

She'd have to be crazy not to remember those earrings, and she was clearly not crazy. Opaquely not crazy. Not not not crazy.

Joe Nocera, "A Revolutionary Idea", NYT 2/24/2012:

Puritans fled to America in the 1600s because they were being persecuted in England for their hard-edged, Calvinist beliefs, and their rejection of the Anglican Church. Having one’s ears cut off for having deviationist religious beliefs was one of the lesser punishments Puritans suffered; being locked up in the Tower of London, where death was a near certainty, was not uncommon.

Yet Winthrop and the other Puritans did not arrive on the shores of Massachusetts hungering for religious freedom. Rather, Winthrop’s “city on a hill” was meant to be, in Barry’s words, “an authoritative and theocentric state,” no less tolerant of any deviation of Puritan theology than England had been toward the Puritans.

In the Hotel Ciutat de Tarragona, the beautiful modern hotel in Tarragona where I am currently staying, I ate breakfast in the 1st-floor restaurant (Americans: that would be the 2nd floor), and then came out to take the elevator back up to my 5th-floor room (Americans: 6 floors up). But I was baffled: there was no button to call the elevator for upward journeys. There was just a button labeled with the Down-Arrow symbol for calling the elevator to go back down to the lobby on level 0. Some sort of security, I assumed, to ensure that random restaurant patrons don't go up in the elevator to wander up and down the halls looking for unlocked doors or stealable items. But then how was I to get back up to my room? I'm ashamed to report just how long it took me to resolve the conundrum here. Perhaps you would like to solve it for yourself before you read on.

John Parkinson, "Boehner on Keystone Pipeline: ‘President is Selling Out American Jobs for Politics’", ABC News, 118/2012:

“President Obama is destroying tens of thousands of American jobs and shipping American energy security to the Chinese.  There’s really just no other way to put it,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said. “The president was given the authority to block this project only and only if he believes it’s not in the national interest of the United States. Is it not in the national interest to create tens of thousands of jobs here in America with private investment?  Is it not in the national interest to get energy resources from an ally like Canada, as opposed to some countries in the Middle East?”

’Tis the season to announce seasonal schools. Geoff Pullum announced a short course on grammar for language technologists as part of a winter school in Tarragona next month, and Mark Liberman announced a call for course proposals for the LSA's Linguistic Institute in summer 2013. But what if you can't make it to Tarragona next month, and can't wait a year and a half to get your seasonal school fix? Well, I have just the school for you!

The common view is that the Scottish English adjective wee means little. Doubtless it often does; but as I slowly make a little headway in learning the ways of Standard Scottish English (and its much more inscrutable sister language, Scots [SCO], which in general I cannot even understand), I have been noticing that (in Edinburgh at least) the word wee is more commonly used in a rather different way, one that couldn't possibly be thought to convey anything about diminutive size or cuteness.

Following up on Never fails: semantic over-achievers, Language Log reader John O'Meara told me that he recently received a gift voucher on which one of the legally binding conditions is the following:

6. Cash nor credit will not be issued for balance of gift voucher not redeemed in full.

He has absolutely no clear sense of what this does (or does not) entitle him to. Nor does Language Log. Not. One stares at it, and although one can guess at what was probably supposed to be the policy, one fails to extract a statement of it from the above wording using just the syntax and semantics of one's native language. At least, that's how it is for me (your mileage may differ). In particular, if you make the initial noun phrase grammatical by prefixing neither, you get something that is almost certainly the opposite of what was meant (Neither cash nor credit will not be issued for balance of gift voucher not redeemed in full means that both cash and credit will be issued).

I am quite certain that the reviewer kiwi78 was trying to do good things for the Nahm restaurant in Knightsbridge, a district of south-west London. But the comment left at the Bookatable.com site's page about Nahm actually said that the restaurant "never fails to disappoint."

Think about it for a moment. For the restaurant, that's not good, is it? Disappointing. It couldn't fail to disappoint.

But look at the full context of kiwi78's remarks:

Nahm never fails to disappoint on flavour & service. Dishes are complex yet superbly balanced & always beautifully presented. If you're new or not confident with Thai food the staff are very attentive & knowledgeable.

It's supposed to be a great review. And the restaurant took it for that: the management has started including kiwi78's comment in its advertising material!

Combining two things from recent postings (linguist llama and referent finding):

(via Ellen Seebacher on Google+).

I'm spending three days in Tampa at the kick-off meeting for  DARPA's new BOLT program. Today was Language Sciences Day, and among many other events, there was a "Semantics Panel", in which a half a dozen luminaries discussed ways that the analysis of meaning might play a role again in machine translation. The "again" part comes up because, as Kevin Knight observed in starting the panel off, natural language processing and artificial intelligence went through a bitter divorce 20 years ago. ("And", Gene Charniak added, "I haven't spoken to myself since.")

The various panelists had somewhat different ideas about what to do, and the question period uncovered a substantially larger range of opinions represented in the audience. But it occurred to me that there's a simple and fairly superficial kind of semantic analysis that is not used in any of the MT systems that I'm familiar with, to their considerable detriment — despite the fact that algorithms with decent performance on this task have been around for many years.

Psycholinguist Craig Chambers sent me this photo that he snapped recently inside a large pharmacy chain store (you know the kind, where you can avail yourself of all your better-living-through-chemicals products under one roof, whether it's anti-depressant, cough syrup, your favorite crunchy snack of Olestra and yellow dye #6, jet printer ink, or the entire range of household plastics.)

Along with the photo, Craig wrote:

If you ever find yourself rubbing shoulders with an executive from Shoppers Drug Mart, you might tell them that they could use your expertise in

(a) language for in-store advertising
(b) scalar adjectives
(c) both of the above