Language Log

March approaches, and just before the Ides of March (on the 13th and 14th, specifically) comes the Stanford Semantics Festival. This is the 10th; a program, with abstracts, will soon be up on the Stanford Linguistics site.  As usual, I'm giving a paper (I'm not actually a semanticist, but I play one annually at SemFest), this year on verbs taking either direct or oblique objects — with extensive references to postings on Language Log and ADS-L. The paper is a follow-up to my paper from last year's SemFest, on "diathesis alternations".

The abstract is below. (Remember that this is just an abstract, not the whole paper. It's much compressed and also lacks most of the references.)

MSNBC headline: "Songbirds migrate faster than thought".

In case some alert editor modifies it:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

The Newsweek story begins:

How's this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809.

(Similar stories can be found all over the place.) And that day is tomorrow, Thursday 12 February.

But wait! It already is Thursday 12 February some places — much of Australia, for instance. "Same day" here means 'same date, as determined locally'. Dates and times are reckoned locally; they are relative to a location and depend on conventions for labeling spans of time (via time zones and the like). These conventions allow us to say that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, 12 February, meaning that it was 12 February in Shropshire when Darwin was born there and 12 February in Kentucky when Lincoln was born there.

And now it's Thursday 12 February throughout Australia, though it wasn't when I started writing this posting. But it won't be Darwin/Lincoln Day here in California until tomorrow.

This morning's NY Times science section is devoted to memorializing Charles Darwin, and the title of one of the featured articles is: "He was prescient in 1859, and is still ahead of his time." My first reaction to this headline was an unreflecting interpretation of it as simply meaning, 'Darwin was ahead of his time and his ideas are still on the cutting edge.'

But my second reaction was quite conscious: Wait a minute; this is an error — perhaps akin to those frequently noted confusions like "falling between the cracks" or "No brain damage is too minor to be ignored."  (If indeed they are properly considered confusions, see below.)

Those seriously interested in the meaning and the politics of racial epithets (as some of the commenters on Pakigate, Sootygate, Gollygate seem to be) should take a look at a paper called "The semantics of racial epithets", published by Christopher Hom in The Journal of Philosophy CV [= 105], no. 8 (August 2008), pp. 416-440. This is a technical paper in philosophical semantics (it's philosophy, not linguistics; and let me say that I do not necessarily endorse the view that it defends). Hom outlines its aim on his website thus:

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism (CE). CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the institution, the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection.

Thus Hom is offering a reasoned case that it is best to see the denigratory character of racial epithets as built into their actual conventional meanings, and not just as a possible concomitant of some of their occasional uses. (Many of commenters seem to align with this view, though they tend to just assert it and call any other views absurd, rather than present arguments.)

I've been reading Stanley Fish's 1989 collection of essays, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. It's not yet clear to me what he's for, exactly — I'm reminded of the old joke about the post-modern gang leader who makes you an offer that you can't understand — but it's clear what he's against, namely the idea that texts have meanings:

The objective facts and rules of calculation that are to ground interpretation and render it principled are themselves interpretive products: they are, therefore, always and already contaminated by the interested judgments they claim to transcend. [Consequences]

This is not a small point, in his view:

It might seem that the thesis that there is no such thing as literal meaning is a limited one, of interest mainly to linguists and philosophers of language; but in fact it is thesis whose implications are almost boundless, for they extend to the very underpinnings of the universe as it is understood by persons of a certain cast of mind. [Introduction: Going Down The Anti-Formalist Road]

The "cast of mind" in question is, roughly, science and the idea that rational inquiry can lead towards truth — the whole Enlightenment project. But in the passage just quoted, he's discussing a much more specific argument, made by Ruth Kempson in her 1975 book Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics.

Fish uses an argument from this book as the rhetorical backbone of his 33-page lead-off essay "Introduction: Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road". And it's therefore embarrassing (for him) that he's misunderstood the context (and thus the content) of her work, in a way that makes her argument at best irrelevant to the point that he wants to use it to make.

In the lecture room where I will be giving a talk later today at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the audiovisual equipment is controlled by a small touch-screen unit. Right now, the part of the display that controls the ceiling-mounted projector looks like this:

That is almost exactly what it looks like. Now, you tell me: would that mean that the projector is on, or that it is off? Is the blue button the operative one, showing the name of the current state? Or is it the white button beside it that we should pay attention to? (I should make it clear that the PAUSE across below them is not a button: only the ON and the OFF buttons change color when touched.) And then once we have decided whether we should see this as saying "ON" or as saying "OFF", do you think it means that the pausing function is on, which would mean that the projector is off? Or that the pausing function is off, which would mean that the projector is on?

In their new book Sense and Sensitivity, Brady Clark and LL's own David Beaver identify and discuss a class of intensives. The items they name are (most) importantly, significantly, especially, really, truly, fucking, damn, well, and totally. Here's one of their examples:

MTV like totally gave us TWO episodes back to back. It was like so random. The more the merrier, but it's like waay too much for one recap.

I'm intrigued by the classification and independently interested in some of words and phrases involved, so I went looking in a large weblog corpus I recently collected, to see if I could gain some new insights into where and why people use these things. This post describes a first experiment along these lines.

Mark Halperin, "Biden Pool Report", 12/23/2008; Nia-Malika Henderson, "VP-elect warns against pork-laden stimulus", Politico, 12/23/2008; etc.:

“Economists rarely agree, but on this score, there is overwhelming agreement that we need a robust and sustained economic recovery package,” Biden said. “There’s virtually no disagreement on that point with economists from left to right. The greater threat to the economy lies with doing too little rather than not doing enough.”

One of the segments in CNN's "Planet in Peril: Battle Lines", 12/14/2008, led with this quotation about the market in shark's fins:

PETER KNIGHTS, CO-FOUNDER, WILDAID: The tradition will end. The question is will it end before there's any sharks left?

This seems to be one of those cases where the interaction among multiple negatives and scalar predicates ends up one negative off, plus or minus. At least for me, Mr. Knights' sentence means roughly the opposite of what he intended, if it means anything at all. (I take it that he meant "… before there's no sharks left" or "… before all the sharks are gone".) But apparently CNN's editors didn't have any problem with it — was this a sign of a difference in grammar, or just another indication that mis-negation is hard to fail to miss?

Verb phrase ellipsis in English normally requires an overt linguistic antecedent of approximately the right morphological form. That is, I can't normally begin my conversation with "He did!", but this is perfectly normal after "Sam said he would win, and …". There are exceptions, of course (Geoff Pullum's Hankamer Was! is lively and informative on this topic). Obama's campaign slogans "Yes, we can" and "Together, we can" were prominent exceptions. Lacking antecedents themselves, they invited inferred antecedents or allowed Obama to fill in occasion-appropriate ones. The first time I noticed headline writers playing with the slogan was November 5, 2008:

Using Google News, I gathered a bunch more, based on can, can't, and do.

From President-elect Obama's latest weekly YouTube Address:

I know that passing this plan won't be easy. I will need, and seek, support from Republicans and Democrats; and I'll be welcome to ideas and suggestions from both sides of the aisle.   (emphasis added)

This sounds to me like an amalgam of

1. … ideas and suggestions will be welcome from both sides of the aisle; and
2. … I'll welcome ideas and suggestions from both sides of the aisle; and
3. … I'll be open to ideas and suggestions from both sides of the aisle.

misread from the teleprompter. But maybe not.

A postcard from my friend Chris Ambidge, an ad for the comedy movie Stiff Luv (2008), picturing six cast members, all dressed as women:

Something tells me, Arnold, that not all these women actually are.

(To judge from the cast list at the movie's website, I'd guess that NONE of the women actually are.)

Ok, Chris's note is a joke. The sentence isn't grammatical (though it's entirely comprehensible). But what's wrong with it?