Language Log

By Mitchell and Webb:

[Hat tip to Steve Fitzpatrick]

A recent post on Arnold Zwicky's blog features Kevin Fowler's Pound Sign, which brings cartoon cussing to the medium of music for the first time (?):

Just in case there might be little ears around,
I won’t say it, I’ll just spell it out –
I feel like pound-sign, question mark, star, exclamation point,
Don’t give a blank, and a whole lot of other choice words I can’t say –
Today I feel like pound-sign, question mark, star, exclamation point.

The documentary film The Linguists has just received an Emmy® nomination for "Outstanding Science and Technology Programming". The press release can be found ; for those of you who would like a downloadable keepsake, the relevant nomination can be found on p. 25 of the PDF and Word versions of the press release.

In related (and even more awesome) news, the stars of The Linguists — K. David Harrison and Greg Anderson — are also featured members of the Nat Geo E-Team on the National Geographic Kids website. You can spot their cartoon likenesses in the full image fairly quickly: they're the only ones who are talking. But there they are on the right for those who just want a quick peek.

While we're on the subject of grammatically ambiguous oil spill headlines, Larry Horn sends along a nice crash blossom (via the American Dialect Society mailing list). This morning's USA Today contains the headline:

BP caps ruptured well, but more hurdles remain

Larry writes:

My first thought was that I had watched the news last night and I don't remember seeing anything about the caps rupturing. Then I realized "BP caps" wasn't the subject, "ruptured" wasn't the main verb, and "well" wasn't an adverb. (I suppose if I had thought about it, it would have also occurred to me that it would be harder for a cap to rupture well than for a knee, say, to break cleanly.

We can put "BP caps" in the same file as "SNP signals debate legal threat" and "Google fans phone expectations by scheduling Android event," wherein a noun-verb sequence is easily misparsed as a noun-noun compound ("SNP signals," "Google fans").

A most perfect garden path headline. It’s interesting that this one depends on our automatic processing of headlines with their own syntax.

The classic garden path sentence, “The horse raced past the barn fell”, is a full sentence and not a headline, and in that one the garden path is created by our preference for initially interpreting “raced” as a main verb; only when we hit “fell” do we backtrack and reprocess “raced” as a passive participle and “raced past the barn” as a modifier of “horse”.

In the sea turtles headline (Yahoo Science News, July 16, 2010), “rescued” is a passive participle in both the initial and final parsings – we don’t mistakenly interpret “rescued” as a main verb in the past tense, because we are not inclined to think that the sea turtles rescued anything, and the “from” phrase further makes it clear that the turtles were the rescued ones, not the rescuers. So what’s the garden path about?

An eggcorn that hasn't yet been catalogued: "par none" for "bar none". I've mislaid the link where I first saw this, but there are plenty of examples on the web, from the realtor who advertises herself as providing "Service par none" to the hotel review titled "Excellence par none".

The June 28, 2010 issue of the ACA Compliance Group newsletter, called ACA Insight ("The weekly news source for investment management legal and compliance professionals"), has at the top of its title page the following two sentence quotation:  "There is no word in Japanese for compliance.  That's a problem."  On the following page, there is a brief article entitled "A Few Thoughts on Foreign Offices," the third section of which reads as follows:

Third, local custom can also present barriers to compliance.  "There is no word in Japanese for compliance," said the CCO [VHM:  Chief Compliance Officer], '[t]hat's [VHM:  sic] a problem."  It is very difficult, for example, to get office staff to submit statements for personal trading reviews, and when you do finally get them, they're not in English.  Hire a native speaker for the home office to assist with translations and communication, the CCO advised.  It is absolutely necessary for a good compliance program.

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.

Yesterday, commenting on "Theory of mind in the comics", tablogloid wrote:

I was raised in a very strict Catholic family in the 1950s. I also read a lot of comic books. As a result, every Sunday as I sat through Mass, I was so sure that the priest could read my thought captions that I used to brush my hand over the top of my head to try and pop the bubble and erase the copy.

This morning's Tank McNamara strip illustrates the effect:

It was December 2009 when the intrepid syntactic explorer Andrew Dowd, hacking his way through virgin grammatical jungle, came upon this astonishing specimen:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

And now, after a further half a year out in the field, he has found another one on this website:

there were more artists breaking on their own, with no technology, than they are now, with technology

Another spectacular case of an utterance that we understand without any real trouble, despite a dawning realization, if we ever look back at it, that it couldn't possibly be claimed to have the right syntax to say what we (wrongly) thought it said.

File under "We are all post-racial now"; from a CNN report, "NAACP passes resolution blasting Tea Party 'racism'":

"Tea Party leaders reacted to the NAACP action with swift and angry derision.

"I am disinclined to take lectures on racial sensitivity from a group that insists on calling black people, 'Colored,' " Mark Williams, national spokesman of the Tea Party Express, told CNN. "The Tea Party [movement] is about the constitution of this country…[and] ensuring equality for each and every individual human being."

Copied verbatim from an email flyer (with a bit of anonymization):

Tank McNamara has been exploring the psychological implications of thought balloons. Here's yesterday's strip, which illustrates the point that despite the crucial role of "theory of mind" in human evolution and child development, the ability to attribute beliefs, knowledge and emotions to others is not always a good thing.

(As usual, click to embiggen.)