Language Log

Does Paul Grice's "cooperative principle" enjoin politeness? Jessica Wildfire sees it that way ("Maybe you’re not rude after all", Splattered 6/29/2018):

A teacher sent me home for showing my underwear in fifth grade. The same year, I also got in trouble for asking a classmate about their gender identity. Stuff like that was always happening. I always managed to break some invisible rule out of social blindness. […]

I was a real trouble maker. So rude. Why couldn’t I just be polite, like everyone else? […]

And then linguistics happened. Halfway through college, I started taking courses in language theory.

That’s when I started to learn something important. Something that changed my life forever.

Most of our politeness rules are bullshit.

Theresa May's 2/10/2019 letter to Jeremy Corbyn includes a sentence ending in a question mark that caught Graeme Orr's attention:

As I explained when we met, the Political Declaration explicitly provides for the benefits of a customs union – no tariffs, fees, charges or quantitative restrictions across all sectors and no checks on rules of origin (paragraph 23). However, it also recognises the development of the UK's independent trade policy beyond our economic partnership with the EU (paragraph 17). I am not clear why you believe it would be preferable to seek a say in future EU trade deals rather than the ability to strike our own deals? I can reassure you that securing frictionless trade in goods and agri-food products is one of our key negotiating objectives (for precisely the reasons you give – protecting jobs that depend on integrated supply chains and avoiding a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland). The fundamental negotiating challenge here is the EU's position that completely frictionless trade is only possible if the UK stays in the single market. This would mean accepting free movement, which Labour's 2017 General Election manifesto made clear you do not support.

From "How to Complain at a Restaurant? Just Ask Our Critic", NYT 2/5/2019:

In general, the more specific your complaint, the more likely it is to be understood. The worst, most useless and potentially dangerous complaints are broad, sweeping condemnations.

“There is complaining that makes you think about what you’re doing, and there is complaining where everybody thinks they’re entitled to say anything,” said Rita Sodi, the chef and owner of the Tuscan restaurant I Sodi in Manhattan. “Saying, ‘This is terrible’ is not complaining. That is being rude. It’s like, ‘You’re ugly.’ It’s telling me that I’m ugly. It’s personal. It’s my food.”

Even when the person you’re grousing to did not cook your pasta personally, you should proceed gently, in nonconfrontational terms. It may be helpful to imagine that you are speaking with an air traffic controller trying to land 20 jets during a snowstorm; you would try very hard not to add to the overall stress level in the tower, even if your child was on one of those jets.

The subhed of this opinion piece made me do a double take — Bari Weiss, "A Massacre in the Heart of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood: The values that drove Robert Bowers to murder my neighbors are the ones we cherish — and will continue to live by", NYT 10/27/2018.

At least, that's how the piece originally ran:

Mouseover text: "I'm the proud parent of an honor student, and the person driving me is proud, too!"

From Geoffrey Nunberg, "The pragmatics of deferred reference" (in L. Horn and G. Ward, eds., The Handbook of Pragmatics, Blackwell, 2003):

Commenting on the (7/12/2016) headline "US government plans to use drones to fire vaccine-laced M&Ms near endangered ferrets", Joyeuse Noëlle on Tumblr noted that

The best part of this title is that in the second half, each new word is completely unpredictable based on what comes before it.

“US government plans to use drones to fire” okay, I see where this is going

“vaccine-laced” wait

“M&Ms” what

“near” not ‘at’?

“endangered” what

“ferrets” what

Below is a guest post by Josef Fruehwald:

Earlier this week (August 29, 2018, for readers in the future), Ron DeSantis, the Republican candidate for the governor of Florida, said of the victorious candidate of the Democratic Party, Andrew Gillum, that voters shouldn’t “monkey this up” and elect the left leaning Gillum. This has caused some controversy, since Gillum is a black man while DeSantis is white, and the discursive association of Black people with non-human primates is a longstanding racist trope.

A prominent linguist (anonymized here just in case he wouldn’t like his politics publicized like this) expressed a conflicted feelings between his political joy that DeSantis has gotten into hot water, and his knowledge of the non-denotative properties of idioms. That is, “kicking the bucket” and “buying the farm” refer to dying, not to buckets nor farms. Some of the conversation that ensued was about the nuances of idioms, and how prosodically prominent the world “monkey” was in context. This is, in fact, reminiscent of a controversy from last summer surrounding a British MP who used an idiom to refer to “an overlooked problem” that includes an explosive racial epithet that I won’t retype here, for reasons to be clarified below.

Kumari Devarajan, "Ready For A Linguistic Controversy? Say 'Mmhmm'", NPR 8/17/20018:

Once upon a time, English speakers didn't say "mmhmm." But Africans did, according to Robert Thompson, an art history professor at Yale University who studies Africa's influence on the Americas.

In a 2008 documentary, Thompson said the word spread from enslaved Africans into Southern black vernacular and from there into Southern white vernacular. He says white Americans used to say "yay" and "yes." […]

Ugo Nwojeki, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, says he "always assumed" that the word was African. Lev Michael, a linguist at the same school, says that "doesn't seem very plausible." Roslyn Burns, a linguist at UCLA, says "it's hard to say."

A small recent experience with herb-related synchronicity reminded me of some very interesting phonetics research.

This all began a couple of weeks ago, when Larry Hyman and I were discussing what seasonings to use on meat to be grilled for dinner. I suggested thyme, and Larry reminded me of Suzanne Gahl's 2008 paper "Time and Thyme Are not Homophones: The Effect of Lemma Frequency on Word Durations in Spontaneous Speech":

Frequent words tend to shorten. But do homophone pairs, such as time and thyme, shorten equally if one member of the pair is frequent? This study reports an analysis of roughly 90,000 tokens of homophones in the Switchboard corpus of American English telephone conversations, in which it was found that high-frequency words like time are significantly shorter than their low-frequency homophones like thyme. The effect of lemma frequency persisted when local speaking rate, predictability from neighboring words, position relative to pauses, syntactic category, and orthographic regularity were brought under statistical control. These findings have theoretical implications for the locus of frequency information in linguistic competence and in models of language production, and for the role of articulatory routinization in shortening.

In late June Lila Gleitman noticed a case of "A is pessimistic that S" meaning that A considers it likely that S will happen/turn out to be the case, and A considers S to be an unwanted outcome. Her example was "I am more pessimistic than I was two weeks ago about the trade war spinning out of control."

We agreed that we would both find it impossible to say "I’m pessimistic that the trade war will spin out of control", but differed on "pessimistic about": in my dialect, but not Lila’s, "A is pessimistic about a Republican victory in the fall" is OK, meaning that A fears that the outcome will be the one she doesn’t want — that there will be or that there won’t be, depending on her point of view.

Lila, by the way, said she could use “pessimistic that” in the case of losing hope in a good outcome: “I am more  pessimistic than I was two weeks ago that the prices of stocks will rise.” But I don't think I could use "pessimistic that" there either. (So the original speaker and Lila and I seem to have three different patterns of judgments about "pessimistic that".)

In Sunday's post "Ask Language Log: Prosodic hyphens and italics", I noted  that one of the features that Grant Allen's 1899 novel identifies as typically American — or at least typical of the one American who is caricatured in chapter 3 — is the socially inappropriate use of "miss" as a term of address:

'Good morning, miss,' he began–he called me 'Miss' every time he addressed me, as though he took me for a barmaid.

At first I found this as weird as the observation about the same American individual that "Like all his countrymen, he laid most stress on unaccented syllables."

But a little research and introspection have supported some aspects of Grant Allen's sociolinguistic intuitions, while leaving some other questions open.

Alan Levinovitz, "Trump’s bizarre understanding of Capitalization is surprisingly Strategic", Washington Post 5/23/2018:

On Monday, President Trump let loose a string of triumphant tweets about China that featured one of his strangest linguistic quirks:

“On China, Barriers and Tariffs to come down for first time.”

“China must continue to be strong & tight on the Border of North Korea until a deal is made.”

“Under our potential deal with China they will purchase from our Great American Farmers practically as much as our Farmers can produce.”

Rule-bound English speakers only capitalize titles, proper nouns, and a few other exceptional words. But for Trump, Farmers, Barriers and Borders are standard fare. In fact, when it comes to abusing letter case, the China tweets look positively restrained compared to this classic from April: “Despite the Democrat inspired laws on Sanctuary Cities and the Border being so bad and one sided, I have instructed the Secretary of Homeland Security not to let these large Caravans of people into our Country. It is a disgrace. We are the only Country in the World so naive! WALL”

As I was browsing some search results in Google Scholar, I came across a listing for a paper titled, "Communication and Community: The Pragmatics of ESP."

After reading the title, I asked myself, If you have ESP, why would you need pragmatics?