Language Log

Also the funniest:

Just to clear things up, @RepMTG

Gazpacho: a vegetable-based Spanish cold soup
Gestapo: Nazi Germany's secret police pic.twitter.com/T9q76r706G

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) February 9, 2022

A striking example of the post-modifier attachment ambiguity: "Police officer jailed for attacking members of the public found dead", The Guardian 12/29/2021.

Bob Ladd, who sent in the link, spent "quite a few hundred milliseconds" puzzling about why the police officer had attacked dead people.

This NYT link text needed a second reading for me to break the initial prepositional phrase after "Bruce Springsteen", and start the main-clause subject conjunction with "Bob Dylan":

Like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices.

Helen Barrett, "‘Ça plane pour moi’ was a burst of Belgian punk with a dark twin", Financial Times 6/1/2020 [emphasis added]:

Meanwhile, the perennially lucrative “Ça plane pour moi” may not be all that it seems. Bertrand mimed it in TV studios, but whose is the bratty voice on the record?

It is a question that has been the subject of several court cases. Bertrand initially insisted it was him, then changed his story, telling a newspaper in 2010 that he did not sing on the track, despite being credited. During a court case that same year over royalties, a Belgian judge commissioned a linguistician to examine the original. Expert evidence suggested the true vocalist was of northern French origin. Deprijck, who has claimed to be the real vocalist, is from northern France.

Julia Preseau wrote to ask about a phrase in Caitlyn Jenner's (5/5/2021) interview with Sean Hannity, where Jenner seems to say "I love this country, I'm a patriarch":

Jeré Longman, "An N.H.L. Prospect Is the First Such Player to Announce He’s Gay", New York Times 7/19/2021:

Luke Prokop, 19, a prospect with the Nashville Predators, on Monday became the first player with an N.H.L. contract to publicly announce that he is gay.

Prokop, who is from Edmonton, Alberta, made his announcement in an Instagram post, writing, “From a young age I have dreamed of being an N.H.L. player, and I believe that living my authentic life will allow me to bring my whole self to the rink and improve my chances of fulfilling my dreams.”

A third-round selection by the Predators in the 2020 N.H.L. draft, Prokop wrote: “While the past year and a half has been crazy, it has also given me the chance to find my true self. I am no longer scared to hide who I am. Today I am proud to publicly tell everyone that I am gay.”

Since unidentified aerial phenomena (=UFOs) have been in the news recently, so has the "Fermi Paradox". And the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox has an interesting linguistic resonance, aside from all the speculation about what communication with aliens might be like. Here's Wikipedia on the original Los Alamos conversation:

In the summer of 1950 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Fermi and co-workers Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York had one or several casual lunchtime conversation(s).

Herb York does not remember a previous conversation, although he says it makes sense given how all three later reacted to Fermi's outburst. Teller remembers seven or eight of them at the table, so he may well be remembering a different previous conversation.

In one version, the three men discussed a spate of recent UFO reports while walking to lunch. Konopinski remembered mentioning a magazine cartoon which showed aliens stealing New York City trash cans, and as he wrote years later, "More amusing was Fermi's comment, that it was a very reasonable theory since it accounted for two separate phenomena."

Teller remembered Fermi asking him, "Edward, what do you think? How probable is it that within the next ten years we shall have clear evidence of a material object moving faster than light?". Teller said, "10^–6" (one in a million). Fermi said, "This is much too low. The probability is more like ten percent" (which Teller wrote in 1984 was "the well known figure for a Fermi miracle").

At lunch, Fermi suddenly exclaimed, "Where are they?" (Teller's remembrance), or "Don't you ever wonder where everybody is?" (York's remembrance), or "But where is everybody?" (Konopinski's remembrance).

Jessica Seigel, "The truth about lying", Knowable Magazine 3/25/2021

You can’t spot a liar just by looking — but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work

The featured research is a review by Aldert Vrij, Maria Hartwig, and Pär Anders Granhag, "Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception", Annual Review of Psychology 2019:

The relationship between nonverbal communication and deception continues to attract much interest, but there are many misconceptions about it. In this review, we present a scientific view on this relationship. We describe theories explaining why liars would behave differently from truth tellers, followed by research on how liars actually behave and individuals’ ability to detect lies. We show that the nonverbal cues to deceit discovered to date are faint and unreliable and that people are mediocre lie catchers when they pay attention to behavior. We also discuss why individuals hold misbeliefs about the relationship between nonverbal behavior and deception—beliefs that appear very hard to debunk. We further discuss the ways in which researchers could improve the state of affairs by examining nonverbal behaviors in different ways and in different settings than they currently do.

That review focuses on why peoples' ideas about clues to deception are mostly wrong, and why nobody is very good at detecting deception from behavioral cues.

Tom Ace writes:

(Possibly) an Escher sentence:

"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so."

It appears on page 65 of this document.

Today's shocking news story: "‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor", WaPo 12/3/2020. The full audio and transcript of the call is here.

But since this is Language Log, and not Political Chicanery Log, my take on the event is to observe a striking change in Donald Trump's speaking style.

"We're working on mass distribution of the virus." — Treasury Sec. Steve Mnuchin, who we hope is working on mass distribution of the ~vaccine~ and not the virus. pic.twitter.com/DqaTC1ZTmD

— The Recount (@therecount) November 20, 2020

Lacey Wade, a postdoc in the Penn Linguistics Department, is featured in the most recent episode of Big Ideas for Strange Times:

This semester, John Trueswell has been teaching a seminar focused on Lila Gleitman's recently-published collected works,  Sentence First, Arguments Afterward: Essays in Language and Learning. Last week, the paper under discussion was Cynthia Fisher, Henry Gleitman, & Lila Gleitman,  "On the semantic content of subcategorization frames", Cognitive Psychology, 1991. The start of its abstract:

This paper investigates relations between the meanings of verbs and the syntactic structures in which they appear. This investigation is motivated by the enigmas as to how children discover verb meanings. Well-known problems with unconstrained induction of word meanings from observation of world circumstances suggest that additional constraints or sources of information are required. If there exist strong and reliable parallels between the structural and semantic properties of verbs, then an additional source of information about verb meanings is reliably present in each verb’s linguistic context.