Language Log

In the comments section of yesterday's post on "Gov. Cuomo and our poor monkey brains", it was noted that some examples of misnegation translate into Russian, French, and Spanish. This observation deserves a post of its own, since it helps us to distinguish among the possible explanations for the phenomena in question.

Following up on "Is irony universal?", 10/22/2009, Victor Mair points to Eric Abrahamsen's "Irony is Good!" (How Mao killed Chinese humor … and how the Internet is slowly bringing it back again"), Foreign Policy 1/12/2011, and to Xiang Li, "Irony Illustrated: A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Situational Irony in China and the United States", Sino-Platonic Papers 184, 2008:

To analyze a sample Chinese population’s ability to understand and appreciate situational irony and compare its results with a sample U.S. population, surveys consisting of a series of 15 ironic and non-ironic cartoons were distributed electronically to 126 residents in the United States and 212 Chinese residents in mainland China. Respondents were asked to identify their initial reactions as well as rank their understanding and appreciation of each cartoon. Neither the concept of situational irony nor the research purposes of the survey was disclosed to the respondents, assuring that they would respond on the basis of independent judgment and knowledge.

Rush Limbaugh takes up where Rosie O'Donnell left off:

Rick Rubenstein asks

Has there been any research done on the familiar phenomenon wherein a word which is repeated over and over begins to look misspelled, or even like complete gibberish?

Thanks to Sean H, Mike Fourman, Ian Leslie, Eddie, Electric Dragon, Lizzie, Jayarava, KGR, Will Watts, Alex, DW, Sean Case, (and probably many others still typing their comments) who commented on my earlier version of this post, for confirming that around 8 a.m. this morning James Naughtie of the BBC Radio 4 news magazine program "Today" suffered (or very nearly suffered) a catastrophic obscene spoonerism followed by an obliterative ill-muffled giggling fit. What a pity a coughing fit didn't halt the dumb discussion of nouns and verbs elsewhere in the program.

A couple of days ago, the New York Times published another in its Your Brain on Computers series, which "examine(s) how a deluge of data can affect the way people think and behave". The latest installment is Matt Richtel's "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction", 11/21/2010:

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

One of the most interesting papers at an interesting conference was Michael Newman, "Identifying native English speaking Pacific Asian Americans by voice".

From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, a link to a Nova "The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers" piece on Jean Berko Gleason (shown with an enormous wug), here. Very charming.

My grand-daughter (now 6) is a fan of these "Secret Life" pieces (and also some short Discovery Channel programs, especially one on leeches); JBG is one of her favorites. And she learned about the wug test, though at first she thought wug was an error for bug. But then she got into the game, and behaved like a pretty typical kid her age, including imperfect control of the syllabic allomorph of the plural; kids are inclined to give a nonsense word like tass a zero plural (two tass instead of two tasses).

[Update October 21: EDZ provides a factual correction: "The leeches are also NOVA; Neal deGrasse Tyson. The black mambas are Discovery Channel." Ah yes, the black mambas. A kid with interesting tastes.]

[Update October 23: And at breakfast today Opal showed me the Nova program on black widow spider sex-and-death. Gripping.]

Chris at The Lousy Linguist has an excellent post — "the largest whorfian study EVER! (and why it matters", 9/1/2010 — describing and discussing Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Sonja Eisenbeiss, and Bhuvana Narasimhan, "Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events", Essex Research Reports in Linguistics, 2006.

We'll come back to the Bohnemeyer et al. study in discussing the larger issue of neo-Whorfian work on spatial cognition and navigation. But for now, I recommend Chris's summary.

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".