Language Log

Keith Ellis got into an argument with a friend about the meaning of the number one, and asked us for help:

In a discussion I had today with someone about the probability puzzle of "one of my two children is a boy, what is the probability that my other child is a girl?" we got hung up on her (very strong) inference of "only one of my two children is a boy" from "one of my children is a boy". […]

She insisted that if one "takes the statement literally" that the statement necessarily has this ["one is" == "only one is"] meaning.

The big deal in a new paper "Motivating voter turnout by invoking the self" (see also the official PNAS site, or e.g. this Discover magazine article "The power of nouns….") is that people can be manipulated into voting simply by clever use of nouns instead of verbs in a questionnaire. In each of several studies, potential voters were split into two groups and given (amongst other questions which didn't vary by group) one of two questions to answer:

Group 1 question: How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?

Group 2 question: How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?

Turned out that Group 1 turned out. Really. In one of the studies an amazing 95.5% of them actually turned out to vote, whereas only 81.8% of Group 2 voted. That's obviously a huge effect on voting behavior. And it appears to be caused by the use of a construction with the nominal "voter" instead of the verb "vote".

It's not easy to boast, when you're a politician. Take for example Bill Clinton, who'd had a pretty good first term. But when it came time to campaign for his second term on the strength of his record, assertions about his accomplishments didn't get much traction. According to his advisor Dick Morris,

Clinton's achievements were a problem. In strategy meetings, he often complained that he had created seven million jobs and cut the deficit but no one seemed to notice. In speeches, he referred to the achievements awkwardly. Our polls showed audiences already knew about them or didn't believe they were true.

The solution, apparently, was a re-jiggering of language. Morris relates that communications strategist Bob Squier had the following bright idea:

The key…was to cite the achievement while talking about something he was going to do. For example: "The hundred thousand extra police we put on the street can't solve the crime problem by themselves; we need to keep anti-drug funding in the budget and stop Republicans from cutting it." Or: "The seven million jobs we've created won't be much use if we can't find education people to fill them. That's why I want a tax deduction for college tuition to help kids go on to college to take those jobs."

Have you ever wondered why "tasty" means that something tastes good while "smelly" means that it doesn't smell so good? What's up with that?

Manfred Krifka, eminent semanticist in Berlin, Germany, has a solution, explained in his article "A Note on an Asymmetry in the Hedonic Implicatures of Olfactory and Gustatory Terms" (2010. In Susanne Fuchs, Philip Hoole, Christine Mooshammer & Marzena Zygis (eds.), Between the regular and the particular in speech and language, 235–245. Frankfurt: Peter Lang), an impressive sounding title for a delightful little paper. It was published last year but Manfred just made it available on his website, hence this post now. Do give his paper a read!

Krifka starts his paper with a famous anecdote about Samuel Johnson:

As Samuel Johnson paused to rest on a London park bench one hot summer's day, his profusely sweating bulk caused a young woman sitting next to him to accuse him of smelling. “No, Madam,” he replied. “You smell, I stink.”

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.)