Language Log

Mitt Romney sometimes exhibits a rapid repetition of phrase-initial function words, often intermixed with um and uh. This behavior was especially frequent in  the third presidential debate (10/22/2012). Here's an example from the beginning of his first response:

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um uh this is obviously an area of great concern to the entire world
and to America in particular,
which is to see
uh a- a complete change in the- the- the- the structure and the- um the environment in the Middle East.

Just the last phrase:

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uh a- a complete change in the- the- the- the structure and the- um the environment in the Middle East.

Brian Mahoney, "NBA Sets Flopping Penalties; Players May Be Fined", AP 10/3/1012:

Stop the flop.

The NBA will penalize floppers this season, fining players for repeated violations of an act a league official said Wednesday has "no place in our game."

Those exaggerated falls to the floor may fool the referees and fans during the game, but officials at league headquarters plan to take a look for themselves afterward.

RK sent in a link to a recent NYT sports story containing the sentence "Three batters later, the bases were loaded for Derek Jeter, but he flew out harmlessly to right field", and commented:

I watched the game on tv and I can tell you that Derek's feet stayed firmly rooted on the ground.  I thought Steve Pinker said this didn't happen.

Indeed, Steve has asserted in several refereed publications, and at least one book, that "verbs intuitively perceived as derived from nouns or adjectives are always regular, even if similar or identical to, an irregular verb. Thus one says […] flied out in baseball [from a fly (ball)], not flew out […]". And he famously co-authored a 1991 paper in Cognitive Science with the audacious title  "Why no mere mortal has ever flown out to center field".

Breffni O'Rourke writes:

Here's one for the 'cannot underestimate' files. The publicity material for the recently published Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (which may coincide with the printed blurb or the preface; I haven't been able to check) starts off with (variants of) this:

The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish history, with implications that cannot be underestimated.

Doonesbury for Sept. 12:

I'm probably the only Doonesbury reader who saw this strip in terms of variation in future time reference.

Reader MP writes:

A question came up at work about the syntax of something that struck some of us as odd.

The context is fairly technical – it’s one of a series of captions for a diagram. The full set of captions is (approximately) this:

1. System admin creates role
2. System admin sets role permissions
3. Developer requests to assume role
4. [ProductX] returns role session credentials
5. Developer updates folder using role credentials

W. Tecumseh Fitch, Angela D. Friederici and Peter Hagoort, Eds., "Pattern perception and computational complexity",  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, July 2012:

Humans around the world are fascinated by visual and auditory patterns, and the perception of complex iterative, hierarchical and recursive patterns, by humans and animals, has become an important research focus. Current hypotheses highlight key cognitive mechanisms that may underlie unusual human abilities such as language, music, and the visual arts. Research addressing this overarching theme has been hindered by the variety of disciplines involved, and a diversity of theoretical frameworks. Recently, an overarching framework has been sought in formal language theory, a component of the mathematical theory of computation which focuses on abstract patterns of varying complexity, and the computational algorithms that generate or process them. Formal language theory provides a comprehensive and explicit system for describing patterns, and combined with artificial grammar learning, has fueled an explosion of work on the biology and neuroscience of pattern perception in both language and other domains. This special issue combines comprehensive reviews, tutorials and opinion papers with new research on humans and animals, providing a summary of the current state of the art. With a focus on neuroscientific and comparative animal work, it provides a unique overview of this new and exciting area of cognitive science, and a glimpse of things to come.

Matthew Dowd on ABC News This Week for 9/2/2012:

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The truth is a casualty in this. It's as if we're going to make any argument possible that's going to advantageous our side, in order to overcome the other side. The Republicans do it, the Democrats do it.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann, "Beyond the Brain", Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2012, writing about a new approach to treating schizophrenia:

In Europe, the Hearing Voices network teaches people who hear distressing voices to negotiate with them. They are taught to treat the voices as if they were people–to talk with them, and make deals with them, as if the voices had the ability to act and decide on their own. This runs completely counter to the simple biomedical model of psychiatric illness, which presumes that voices are meaningless symptoms, ephemeral sequelae of lesions in the brain. Standard psychiatric practice has been to discount the voices, or to ignore them, on the grounds that doing so reminds patients that they are not real and that their commands should not be followed. One might think of the standard approach as calling a spade a spade. When voices are imagined as agents, however, they are imagined as having the ability to choose to stop talking. Members of the Hearing Voices movement report that this is what they do. In 2009, at a gathering in the Dutch city of Maastricht, person after person diagnosed with schizophrenia stood up to tell the story of learning to talk with the voices–and how the voices had then agreed to stop.

Dilbert from yesterday:

And today:

Following up on "Versing" (6/19/2012)  and "Vers(e|u)s" (6/20/2012), here are the perception-test results from the 56 people who sent me their answers before I posted the answer key.

Some overall statistics follow.

Preet Bharara, "Asleep at the Laptop", NYT 6/3/2012:

THE alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime — and they’re not understating the threat.

Boaz Keysar, Sayuri Hayakawa and Sun Gyu An published an intriguing paper last month in Psychological Science in which they found that several different groups of bilinguals were more immune to common cognitive biases when making decisions in their second languages than in their native tongues. The paper has received a fair bit of attention in blogs and the media. I've added my own commentary in this post over at Discover Magazine, expanding on two plausible explanations for the effect that are alluded to in the original paper. Feel free to toss your comments in the hat over there, but I'll keep the comments open here as well for those who are in the mood for a more Language Loggy discussion.