Language Log

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?

A nice little example of "variety individuation" (see here), in which a mass noun N (like wine) has corresponding count uses meaning 'variety of N' (as in three fine wines), from a piece by Andrew Pollack ("The Promise and Power of RNA"), in the 11 November Science Times section of the NYT. It's all about RNA.

RNA is clearly a mass noun for a long part of the article. But then we get to the hard fact that there are lots of different types of RNA, and count uses (referring to varieties of RNA) blossom, often alternating with mass uses.

People have had a lot of fun with FCC chairman Kevin Martin's claim that "the F-word "inherently has a sexual connotation" whenever it's used. Daniel Drezner asked, "If I say 'F#$% Kevin Martin and the horse he rode in on,' am I obviously encouraging rape and bestiality?" And as Chris Potts makes clear, if you measure a word's connotations by the items it co-occurs with, fucking doesn't seem to keep particularly salacious company. So it's simply wrong to claim that these emphatic, expletive, and figurative uses of the word (e.g., as in fuck up etc.) fall afoul of the FCC's rules, which define indecency as language that  “depicts or describes… sexual or excretory activities or organs.” 

But hang on. Emphatic fucking may not depict or refer to sex, and may not even bring it explicitly to mind. But the link is still there. Why would these uses of the word be considered "dirty"  if they weren't polluted by its primary literal use? And what could be the original source of that taint if not the word's literal denotation (or at least, of its denotation relative to the attitudes that obscene words presuppose about sex and the body)? In fact if fuck and fucking weren't connected to sex in all their secondary uses, they would serve no purpose at all. 

As recently noted, people often get confused about English phrases involving negatives combined with other negatives, modals, or scalar predicates, and there's a series of Language Log posts that collectively offer several (non-exclusive) hypotheses for why this confusion is so easy to fail to miss:

1. Our poor monkey brains just can't deal with complex combinations of certain logical operators;
2. The connection between English and modal logic may involve some unexpected ambiguities;
3. Negative concord is alive and well in English (or in UG);
4. Odd things become idioms or at least verbal habits ("could care less"; "fail to miss"; "still unpacked").

Yesterday's post specifically involved expressions like "cannot underestimate X" or "X cannot be underestimated", as a way of saying that "X is very large or important"; and I followed Lila Gleitman and many others in assuming that these phrases are examples of the class of common logical errors involving negation, modality, and scalar predication. We seem to be saying that X is so large that it's impossible for us to underestimate it — that is, our estimate of X will always be greater than X, no matter how large our estimate is. And this will be true if X is rather small, which is not what we're trying to say.

This post from Amy Hamblin's Community Blog was on the front page of the Obama-Biden web site for a while last night:

We're still awaiting the final results tonight, but one thing is clear — this grassroots movement can never be underestimated. Thank you to everyone who helped us make an astounding 1,053,791 calls today! I know it wasn't easy and many of you kept calling long after you were tired and your voice had grown hoarse, but your calls to get our supporters out the polls helped tip the scales in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. [emphasis added]

We've discussed the general phenomenon of overnegation — semantic problems typically arising from the combination of modals, negatives, and scalar predicates —  many times in the past. The particular case of cannot/must not underestimate/overestimate is discussed here, here, and here.

Gene Buckley wrote a little while back about the wording of of the proposed amendment in California's Proposition 8:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Gene pointed out that there are two possible scopings for only in this sentence: over marriage between a man and a woman ("wide" scope) — 'the only thing (specifically, institution) that is valid or recognized in California is marriage between a man and a woman' — or just over marriage ("narrow scope") — 'the only marriage that is valid or recognized in California is marriage between a man and a woman'. The intended scoping is the narrow one, and everyone recognizes that (because the wide-scope reading is ridiculous in the real world), but Gene had to go through a very brief process of rejecting the wide-scope reading, which is the one he entertained first.

And he notes that in other cases the wide-scope reading is almost surely the intended one.

My posting a while back on countification (M(ass)>C(ount) conversion of nouns, with accompanying individuating semantics) elicited e-mail and blogging about other cases of zero relationships in English (of which there are a lot, though all  pretty much irrelevant to my topic in that posting), and now Bill Poser's posting on moose has set off a comments thread on zero plurals (moose being an example of a noun with a zero plural).

There's an important point here: formal relationships — like phonological identity ("zero relationship"), suffixation by /z/, and systematic vowel alternations, are "just stuff". They have no intrinsic meaning on their own, but are available to serve all sorts of grammatical ends.