Language Log

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.

Here's something for our "Words for X" file, along with some historical fiction and a bit of relevant psychology.

Jennifer Ouellette, "The Higgs Boson May Have Five Faces", Discovery News, 6/21/2010:

And now the team is back with even more intriguing results to announce from their subsequent analysis, published on arVix.

The link will take you to Dobrescu, Fox, and Martin,  "CP violation in B_s mixing from heavy Higgs exchange", arXiv:1006.4238. And the arXiv, as Wikipedia explains, is "pronounced 'archive', as if the 'X' were the Greek letter Chi, χ", and

was originally developed by Paul Ginsparg and started in 1991 as a repository for preprints in physics and later expanded to include astronomy, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear science, quantitative biology and, most recently, statistics. […]

It was originally hosted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (at xxx.lanl.gov, hence its former name, the LANL preprint archive) and is now hosted and operated by Cornell University, with mirrors around the world. […]

Its existence was one of the precipitating factors that led to the current revolution in scientific publishing, known as the open access movement, with the possibility of the eventual replacement of traditional scientific journals.

In the "halfalogues" research that I've discussed in a couple of posts recently ("Halfalogues", 6/9/2010; "Halfalogues onward", 6/11/2010), one of the experimental manipulations was intended to establish that "it is the unpredictable informational content of halfalogues that result [sic] in distraction", and not (for example) that the distraction is simply caused by an acoustic background that comes and goes at irregular intervals like those of conversational turns.

As I suggested in passing, the method that was used for this experimental control has some intrinsic problems, and the paper doesn't give enough information for us to judge how problematic it was. Today I'm going to explain those remarks in a bit more detail. (Nerd Alert: if you don't care about the methodology of psychophysical experimentation, you may want to turn your attention to some of our other fine posts.)

In response to Wednesday's post on the (media response to the) "halfalogues" research, Lauren Emberson sent me a copy of the as-yet-unpublished paper, and so I can tell you a little more about the work. As Lauren agreed in her note to me, it was bad practice for Cornell University to put out a press release on May 19, well before the paper's publication date.

It's apparently normal for journalists to write science stories purely on the basis of press releases, sometimes eked out with a few quotes from an interview. And when the press releases are misleading, this can lead to a spectacular effervescence of nonsense.

However, I'm happy to say that in this case, the press release is an accurate (though brief) description of the research, and as a result, the media coverage is also generally accurate if incomplete. (The earlier post links to a generous sample of it.)