Language Log

Before reading further, consider the following newspaper headline, and make a mental note of what you think the article is about:

Josh Marshall, "The Murdoch Primary, Let's Call It", 12/30/2011:

Taken together the Murdoch media is a huge, huge voice in the US political conversation. But it’s an overpowering voice in intra-Republican questions. So who gets the Murdoch, Ailes and company nod, is a big big deal in a GOP primary race. Thus, the Murdoch primary.

So who won? It sort of slipped by in all the Newt craziness. But looking back over the last month we can see pretty clearly what happened. In late November the Fox at folks pretty clearly said WTF in response to the Newt surge, called it for Romney and got to work big time.

A nice example of lapsus calami (though I guess it should really be called lapsus digitorum): two phonologically-similar nouns swapping places.  Unless it's a joke that went over my head.

’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!

Andrew Malcolm, "New gaffe: Obama confuses Jews with janitors", LA Times 9/26/2011:

Here is what the president actually said, catching himself almost in time but not quite:

If asking a billionaire to pay the same tax rate as a Jew, uh, as a janitor makes me a warrior for the working class, I wear that with a badge of honor. I have no problem with that. […]

Maybe in Saturday night's speech Obama was thinking about all those talks on Israel in New York.

This has gotten quite a bit of play in the media as well as in the blogosphere.  The trouble is, I'm not at all sure that Mr. Malcolm's version of the president's speech error is accurate.

That's the title of a recent paper by Caitlin Fausey and Teenie Matlock that appeared in the journal Political Psychology. It's a heartwarming title, one that permits me to dare to dream of that better day when political parties will divert rivers of cash to linguistics departments, when a grad student will be able to defend a thesis on applicative constructions in East Asian languages one day and take up a lucrative job as Washington policy wonk the next, and when volumes by Noam Chomsky and Richard Montague will be pressed into the hands of military personnel charged with the task of winning the hearts and minds of residents in troublesome, volatile nations.

The paper stems from recent interest in the persuasion sciences about the fact that how a message is expressed often has a startling impact on the choices and behaviors of its audience. Most of the attention has been lavished on questions of lexical choice, or on whether a message is framed as involving gains rather than losses. But these are happy days, and persuasion research seems to be taking a more adventurous turn, with investigators beginning to tackle questions involving finer points of semantics and their grammatical correlates.

Spokespersons for the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) often complain that the words or actions of individuals or groups from other nations "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people".  This is true even when those individuals or groups are speaking or acting on behalf of some segment of the Chinese population (e.g., political prisoners, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong adherents, people whose houses have been forcibly demolished, farmers, and so forth).  A typical cause for invoking the "hurt(s) the feelings of the Chinese people" circumlocution would be for the head of state of a country to meet with the Dalai Lama or Rebiya Kadeer.  A good example is Mexican President Calderon's recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, which the PRC government denounced in extremely harsh terms.  The vitriolic rebuke led one commentator to refer to the PRC denunciation of the Mexican President as a kind of "bullying".

Unlike the fly-genetics text for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) and other amusing by-products of algorithmic trading run amok, this amazon.com page features a real price that some people apparently pay for a real product:

The documentary Project Nim, about Herbert S. Terrace's effort to have a chimpanzee reared from birth like a human child and taught sign language, is an excellent piece of film-making, and you should see it. But if you go to it expecting to see something about research and data and results, there's a surprise in store for you. I now think this was not an experiment, there are no results, there is no Project Nim.

Modern mass media expose us to a lot of political speech, and therefore to a lot of journalistic commentary on politicians' individual speaking styles.

Regular readers know that I don't generally have a lot of sympathy for attempts to tag Politician X with his or her allegedly characteristic X-isms, whether it's the collections of Bushisms and Palinisms, or Barack Obama's supposed over-use of first-person singular pronouns. This is partly because the empirical support for these attempts is generally below even the usual punditorial standards, and partly because style ought to be less important than substance.

However, I've already commented on Gov. Rick Perry's fondness for a certain hedge/filler ("If you will", 7/29/2011), and this post will describe (what seems to be) his characteristic mode of disfluency when extemporizing. Hypocrisy? We blog, you decide.

Connoisseurs of misnegation will not be surprised by cases where an author who uses three or four negatives in one proposition finishes up with one too many. Thus Jessica McGregor Johnson, Remembering Perfection – Everyday Inspiration for Living Your Spirituality, 2008:

It is also true that we are afraid of our emotions. Part of us believes that if we allow our sad emotions free reign then maybe we will never stop crying. I have news for you — no-one has never not been able to stop crying.

Ricardo Piglia, "Artificial Respiration", translated by Daniel Balderston:

The facts and evidence were so clear that it seems impossible that nobody has never noticed.

"Sussex or Sussex-Devons?", The Farmer's Magazine, Jan. 1870

I do not say for one moment that no one has not for the sake of an experiment crossed Sussex with Devon ; but that the improvement in the Sussex stock of late years is in consequence of crossing with the Devon, or any other breed, I entirely deny.

There's been a fair amount of media interest in a recent study suggesting that dyslexics are worse than controls at (certain kinds of) speaker recognition. This is an interesting study in itself, which is why it made it into Science. But I'm just as interested in its uptake in the popular press, which mostly ranged from "missing the point" to "catastrophic confusion" (and you may not be surprised to learn where on the spectrum the BBC's coverage landed, alas). I'll discuss the study itself here, and then take up the press coverage in another post.

Reader Sarah C pointed out an interesting turn of phrase in Jordan K. Turgeon, "Myths About Memory", The Huffington Post 8/3/2011:

According to previous research, when defendants wrongly committed of a crime were later exonerated by DNA testing, the primary evidence in the original case often came from an eyewitness. [emphasis added]

(Obligatory screenshot here…)

Most people believe they're better-than-average drivers. They also believe that, while many others are taken in by advertising messages, they themselves remain immune to persuasion unless it's with the full consent of their rational and thoughtful selves. Charming delusions. But surely we're not left defenseless, and awareness of the persuasive intentions of advertising must provide some sort of skeptical buffer against the daily onslaught of commercial messages that don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. Enough so, argued the late free marketeer Jack Calfee, that the myth of the vulnerable consumer is just that, and advertising should be regulated as little as possible in order to allow its salutary effects to permeate the economy. In his book Fear of Persuasion, Calfee wrote:

Advertising seeks to persuade, and everyone knows it. The typical ad tries to induce a customer to do one thing—usually, buy a product —instead of a thousand other things. There is nothing obscure about this purpose or what it means for buyers. Consumers obtain immense amounts of information from a process in which the providers of information are blatantly self-interested and the recipients fundamentally skeptical.

The Federal Trade Commission, which is in the business of regulating advertising, happens to agree with Calfee about the protective effects of identifying persuasion for what it is. Which is one reason why it's recently clarified its guidelines on endorsements to require that bloggers and social media users disclose any pecuniary relationship with the makers of the products they're shilling for—even if free stuff is all they're getting for their efforts.