Language Log

Dilbert continues to make progress in learning about conversational implicature and what you can do with it:

[Tap tap. Is this thing on?

I guess as a freshly minted Language Logger, I should introduce myself: I am a professor of linguistics at MIT. I work on meaning: semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and the intersections thereof. I am also a part-time denizen of the academic Dark Side, as Associate Dean of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. I blog on academic, geeky, abstruse, and personal aspects of my life on my personal blog "semantics etc.". Together with fellow LanguageLogger David Beaver, I co-edit the new kid on the block journal Semantics and Pragmatics, for which we maintain an editors' blog as well. So what's one more gig, right?

In this post, I partially recycle some notes that appeared on my blog in 2005. But there is a new angle.]

I'm used to arguments that this or that word is actually "not a word". But I was surprised to see an analogous complaint about numbers that are allegedly not numbers, in Nadia Damouni, "Google bid 'pi' for Nortel patents and lost", Reuters 7/1/2011:

At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.

Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun's constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday.

"Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers," one of the sources said.

Today's "Candorville," by Darrin Bell:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

I've blogged about this before, most recently in "Pragmatics as comedy", 1/28/2010 — I cited four examples, and commenters noted eight or ten others.

What is "this"? Well, that's exactly my question.

Today's Zits:

In this week's online BBC News magazine, Alan Metcalf reprises his recent book OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word. I haven't read the book, but Prof. Metcalf is an established scholar as well as a successful popularist, and I have every reason to think that the book is well worth reading. Still, I have a little semantic problem with the article.

The article mostly discusses the history of OK, saying that its widespread circulation probably dates back to an unfunny joke in an 1839 article in the Boston Morning Post. Fair enough: he and the OED agree on this point. Then he goes on:

But what makes OK so useful that we incorporate it into so many conversations?

For those who think that irony "is almost always indicated by tone of voice", a little quiz:

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Which of these are literal (positive evaluation of something) and which are ironic (negative evaluation of something)?

At the end of his abbreviated trip to Indonesia (cut short because of the volcanic eruptions of Mt. Merapi), President Obama gave a half-hour address at the University of Indonesia that finally showed off his skills in the Indonesian language, a subject we've been examining. Granted, it was a prepared speech, but Obama went out of his way to include Indonesian phrases and sentences that would resonate with the crowd (mostly composed of students and staff at UI), and he even worked in at least one ad-lib.

From the official transcript, here are the relevant Indonesian passages from the speech, accompanied by my quick analysis. (Video of the speech is available on C-SPAN here and on the White House site here.)

In January 2009, soon after President Obama was sworn in, we had our first video evidence of his conversational skills in Indonesian, based on an exchange he had with a State Department staffer. (See "Obama's Indonesian pleasantries: the video.") As I said at the time, his experience of living in Indonesia from age six to ten had left him "if not bilingual, at least bi-courteous." Now Obama is on his long-delayed state visit to Indonesia, and he's been breaking out some more Indonesian pleasantries and showing off basic food-related etiquette.

David Craig asked whether Anand Giridharadas is suffering from the Recency Illusion in his small piece on "so" (Follow My Logic? A Connective Word Takes the Lead, NYT 5/21/2010), which observes that

“So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight. […]

When Paul Grice drafted his maxims for cooperative conversation, he didn't have in mind that we should get upset when people violate them. On the contrary, the whole idea was to use apparent violations as the basis for reasoning about conversational implicatures, the things that people obviously mean but don't literally say.

Still, people do get upset about all aspects of other people's language use, and it's common to object to redundancy, as in "ATM machine" — though members of what William Safire used to call the Squad Squad rarely get as upset as the anonymous "pilotless drone" man did ("Is it sinking into your thick skull, you high school drop-out?", 2/7/2007).

It's even rarer for usage disputes to escalate to the point where police intervention is required. But I've now gotten a dozen emails drawing my attention to a recent linguistic fracas where the cops were asked to rule on a matter involving conversational implicature.

Consider this passage from Kate Lahey, "DJs case will be a watershed", The Age, 8/4/2010, sent in by an alert reader:

Margaret Thornton, a law professor at the Australian National University specialises in discrimination law and policy.

She says the high profile of this {sexual harassment] case would undoubtedly encourage other women to speak out. […]

The $37 million message is also likely to resonate with employers, Thornton says.

"A huge percentage of women, if not most, have actually been subjected to some form of sexual harassment in the workplace … this is going to have an enormous ramification."