Language Log

Doreen Carvajal, "Gems From 2008 Paris Theft Found in Drainpipe", NYT 3/9/2011:

More than two years after men dressed in wigs and scarves struck the Harry Winston jewelry store in Paris’s golden triangle of upscale shops, the police this week discovered a cache of sparkling diamonds from the theft in a far less glamorous place: a drainpipe in the northern suburbs of the city.

Two aspects of this story caught my eye — one a small inadvertent movie echo, and the other a more linguistically consequential question of accent identification.

The most recent xkcd:

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

Dinosaur Comics for 3/9/2011:

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

Among the more than 150 interesting symposia at AAAS 2011, Section Z (Linguistics) sponsored five. I posted earlier about the symposium on "What Bilinguals Tell Us About Mind and Brain". I'm adding a link today to another one, "From Freud to fMRI: Untangling the Mystery of Stuttering". Its abstract:

This symposium will track current developments in the study of stuttering, the fruit of recent collaborations among researchers in the fields of genetics, speech motor control, and language processing. Until the past decade, much of the research into this common yet poorly understood communication disorder tended to be narrowly focused on accounts within a single discipline, from psychoanalysis to learning theory to articulatory control to hemispheric asymmetry. In this symposium, we will provide examples of the cross-disciplinary research that is changing consensus on the probable basis for stuttering. Recent advances in genetics, brain imaging, and speech motor control will be discussed in terms of their ramifications for better understanding this elusive disorder as well as treating it more effectively.

And I'll assert again that the AAAS would do itself and (more important) its mission a service by putting slides and videos or audios of these symposia on the web, for free public access. I was happy to learn from Stephen Anderson that steps of this kind are now under consideration.

A couple of days ago, following up on Sunday's post about literally, Michael Ramscar sent me this fascinating graph:

What this shows us is a remarkably lawful relationship between the frequency of a verb and the probability of its being modified by literally, as revealed by counts from the 410-million-word COCA corpus. (The R² value means that a verb's frequency accounts for 88% of the variance in  its chances of being modified by literally.)

Christopher Hitchens, "American Inaction Favors Qaddafi", Slate 3/7/2011:

Our common speech contains numberless verbs with which to describe the infliction of violence or cruelty or brutality on others. It only really contains one common verb that describes the effect of violence or cruelty or brutality on those who, rather than suffering from it, inflict it. That verb is the verb to brutalize. A slaveholder visits servitude on his slaves, lashes them, degrades them, exploits them, and maltreats them. In the process, he himself becomes brutalized. This is a simple distinction to understand and an easy one to observe. In the recent past, idle usage has threatened to erode it. Last week was an especially bad one for those who think the difference worth preserving.

Those who hate text message abbreviations will be dismayed to learn of how far they have spread. Here is the sign at the gas station on the Gitksan reservation in Hazelton, British Columbia.

Following up on the recent discussion of legal automation, I note that Paul Krugman has added a blog post ("Falling Demand for Brains?", 3/5/2011) and an Op-Ed column ("Degrees and Dollars", 3/6/2011), pushing an idea that he first suggested in a 1996 NYT Magazine piece ("White Collars Turn Blue", 9/29/1996), where he wrote as if from the perspective of 2096:

When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important. Late-20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers. Late-21st-century America is supremely efficient at processing routine information; that is why traditional white-collar workers have virtually disappeared.

In this morning's post, I noted an early example of metaphorical literally in William Robertson's History of America (Volume I), 1777:

The Andes may literally be said to hide their heads in the clouds; the storms often roll, and the thunder bursts below their summits, which, though exposed to the rays of the sun in the centre of the torrid zone, are covered with everlasting snows.

This struck me as a perfect example of the case noted by Henry Bradley in the 1903 edition of the OED, where literally is "used to indicate that some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense". A quick Google Books search showed that Robertson was by no means alone: in the last half of the 18th century, the phrase "may literally be said" was a fairly reliable indicator of metaphor or hyperbole.

In reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, I noticed that  Prof. Dawkins is rather fond of the word literally, using it 38 times in the roughly 130,000 words of the cited work, for a rate of about 292 per million words. This is more than eight times greater than the overall rate of about 35 per million words in the COCA corpus, and 15 times greater than the rate of 15 per million words in the British National Corpus.

Most of Prof. Dawkins' uses of literally do not mean "word for word" or "in a literal as opposed to figurative way", but instead are a sort of intensifier. This is not at all surprising, since the emphasizing sense has been the commonest meaning of literally for a century or more, and Richard Dawkins is a very emphatic person. But all the same, I doubt that the legions of peevers who believe that literal should only be used to mean "not figurative" will even notice Prof. Dawkins' usage, much less work themselves into a froth over it. That's because his usage occupies a sort of middle ground, whose inconsistency with the "word for word" and "not figurative" meanings is subtle rather than blatant.

From The Onion News Network:

Over the past few days, we've discussed the possible relevance of corpus evidence in legal evaluations of ordinary-language meaning. Another (and socio-economically more important) legal application of computational linguistics is featured today in John Markoff's article, "Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software", NYT 3/4/2011:

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in FCC v. AT&T that corporations are not entitled to a right of "personal privacy," even if corporations can be construed as "persons." To reach this decision, they were aided by an amicus brief by Neal Goldfarb that presented corpus evidence on the types of nouns that the adjective "personal" typically modifies. Here on Language Log, Mark Liberman posted about the case on the day the decision was released, and now I have a piece for The Atlantic discussing the use of corpus analysis in the courtroom.