Language Log

The comments on my recent post, "Making linguistics relevant (for sports blogs)" meandered into a discussion of linguistic example sentences that display morphosyntactic patterning devoid of semantic content. The most famous example is of course Noam Chomsky's Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, though many have argued that it's quite possible to assign meaning to the sentence, given the right context (see Wikipedia for more).

But what about sentences that use pure nonsense in place of "open-class" or "lexical" morphemes, joined together by inflectional morphemes and function words? This characterizes nonsense verse of the "Jabberwocky" variety ('Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe). One commenter recalled a classic of the genre, The ventious crapests pounted raditally, which was introduced by the cognitive scientist Colin Cherry in his 1957 book, On Human Communication: A Review, Survey, and a Criticism.

There's an excellent discussion of some methodological issues behind the Marc Hauser scandal at Neuron Culture, "Updated: This Hauser thing is getting hard to watch". The post points out that the information released so far leaves many questions unanswered about what the lab's official methodology was, and what Hauser and other lab members really did.

Nicholas Wade, "In Harvard Lab Inquiry, a Raid and a 3-Year Wait", NYT 8/13/2010, gives some additional information about the Marc Hauser scandal.  The new information is still basically rumor — the result of interviews with sources both anonymous and not, with the non-anonymous information being largely second hand. But it all suggests that whatever happened is more serious than just a bit of careless record-keeping.

Here's a mystery for you. Last summer, the weekly radio show Studio 360 recorded an episode at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The show, which originally aired on 7/17/2009 and ran again yesterday, included a segment about the list of things that members of They Might be Giants "are not allowed to say within the band".

Thanks to several commenters on our recent most-a-thon ("Most", 7/31/2010; "Most examples", 7/31/2010; "Most and Many", 8/1/2010), I've learned about an interesting literature on the semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics of most, which I think is worth collecting in one place for those unexpectedly unobsessive readers who don't repeatedly scan and cross-classify the comments on this kind of Language Log posting sequence.

These publications provide a variety of (mostly perceptual) evidence for the view that most really does mean "more than half", while offering a greater variety of theories about the strategies that (different sorts of) people use to determine whether this is true in particular cases.

Frank Rich, "Kiss This War Goodbye", NYT 7/31/2010, writing about the Pentagon Papers:

Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. [emphasis added]

It's clear that this is a mistake, with eke out having been substituted for leak out. The question is, what sort of mistake is it?

My note this morning on "Most" stirred up some discussion:

Geoff Nunberg: I think 'most' licenses a default generalization, relative to a bunch of pragmatic factors, …
MattF: I think 'most' has a normative or qualitative sense in addition to a quantitative sense.
John Cowan: For me too, "most" has a defeasible implicature of "much more than a majority".

Those rear ends are pretty well covered — "default", "in addition to", "defeasible" — but Nicholas Waller got numerical:

I would be with John Irving – 51% of a population isn't "most" but around 60-75% would be. (90% or more would be "almost all"; well, until it hit "all" at 100%; and 75-90% would be "a very large majority")

It's bizarre. Suddenly every piece of linguistic research is spun as a challenge to "universal grammar".  The most recent example involves Ewa Dabrowka's interesting work on the linguistic correlates of large educational differences — Quentin Cooper did a segment on BBC 4, a couple of days ago, about how this challenges the whole idea of  an innate human propensity to learn and use language. (Dr. Dabrowska appears to be somewhat complicit in this spin, but that's another story.)

It's hard for me to explain how silly I think this argument is. It's like showing that there are hematologic effects of athletic training, and arguing that this calls into question the whole idea that blood physiology is an evolved system.

According to Dan O'Brien, these are "Six Words That Need To Be Banned from the English Language": moist, jowls, bulbous, yolk, slurp, pulp. (Sorry, Dan.)

This post follows up on two earlier posts ("'Unable to understand basic sentences?'", 7/9/2010; "More on basic sentence interpretation", 7/12/2010), which discussed some experiments by Dabrowska and Street showing that "a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences".  I mentioned several times that these results, though new in detail, echo in many ways the results of research by Peter Wason that is nearly half a century old. The discussion below is based on some of my lecture notes for an experimental course taught back in 1999.

Copied verbatim from an email flyer (with a bit of anonymization):

Last Friday, I took a quick look at recent work by James Street and Ewa Dabrowska that shows a striking difference between grad students and people of "low academic attainment" ("LAA") on an apparently simple sentence-interpretation task ("'Unable to understand basic sentences?'", 7/9/2010). I had to cut my investigation short in order to take the RER-B to Charles de Gaulle airport for a flight back to Philadelphia, and so I didn't have a chance to take up (what I thought was) the most striking aspect of these experiments: the fact that the LAA subjects did so much better on sentences of the form "Every X is in a Y" than on sentences of the form "Every Y has an X in it".

According to a recent press release, "Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar":

Research into grammar by academics at Northumbria University suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences.

The findings — which undermine the assumption that all speakers have a core ability to use grammatical cues — could have significant implications for education, communication and linguistic theory.