Language Log

According to a recent press release ("Scientists Have Established a Key Biological Difference Between Psychopaths and Normal People"),

Neuroscientists using MRI scans discovered that psychopathic people have a 10% larger striatum, a cluster of neurons in the subcortical basal ganglia of the forebrain, than regular people. This represents a clear biological distinction between psychopaths and non-psychopathic people.

The journal article (Choy et al., "Larger striatal volume is associated with increased adult psychopathy”) tells us that "Psychopathy was assessed using the PCL-R, which consists of 20 items rated by interviewers on a 3-point scale". (Wikipedia on PCL-R here). And from MRI scans, "segmentation of the caudate, putamen, nucleus accumbens, and globus pallidus was conducted together with the thalamus and cerebellum using standard FreeSurfer parcellation. Total striatal volumes were defined as the sum of the volumes of the four striatal subregions".

The generic plural "psychopaths" suggests a natural kind. And the phrase "a clear biological distinction" suggests well-defined and well-separated clusters of values on both neuro-anatomical and social-psychological dimensions. But what the researchers found was two weakly-correlated variables, each an amalgam of several measurements or evaluations, without any strong indication of clustering. Their Figure 3 (n=108):

Anne Cutler, our beloved colleague, recently became ill with an opportunistic lung infection shortly after traveling to London for her official induction as a 2020 Fellow of the British Academy. From there she traveled to Nijmegen, where on May 31st she received medical treatment that revealed an underlying leukemia. After just one week in the hospital, with her husband, Bill Sloman, by her side, she died on June 7th. We thank Bill for keeping us apprised of Anne’s condition.

So many of us have vivid and delightful memories of Anne. They are welcome in the comments below, or will be included in posts to follow.

Here is a link to an obituary on the website of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where Anne was director from 1993 to 2013.

Update 6/12/2022 —

• An obituary at Western Sydney University, home of the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, where Anne was Distinguished Professor.
• Anne in a group picture of the Arc Centre of Excellence for The Dynamics of Language (CoEDL), a project she conceived in collaboration with Jane Simpson and Jill Wigglesworth in 2013.
• A 2018 interview with Anne on the CoEDL website.
• A remembrance, with a photo of younger Anne, by the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the UK Medical Research Council, Cambridge, England.

Condolences may be sent to Anne’s husband, Bill Sloman: Anthony William Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>.

Update — "In Memoriam Anne Cutler" ISCApad 8/6/2022.

Update — "Spoken language expert's exuberant life of science" Sydney Morning Herald 9/23/22

Update — "A Remembrance of Anne Cutler", 7/13/2022.

This article, about the grave (and life) of Powell Crosley Jr., reminded me of my graduate school colleague Crosley Shelvador, M.D.

OK, the "M.D." part is fictional, and the "colleague" part might be considered as a misleading way to refer to an elderly but functional refrigerator. For some of the facts, see "Dr. Alfred Crockus and Crosley Shelvador, M.D.", 9/19/2007; "Crosley Shelvador comes in from the cold", 9/20/2007; "Stronzo Bestiale, Galadriel Mirkwood, Crosley Shelvador, …", 10/10/2014.

An anonymous contributor was curious what the real and would-be copy-editors who hang around LL might make of the below — which may serve to represent for those unfamiliar what is actually going on within the so-called "Language & Writing" portion of our now-acclaimed, now-derided "Scholastic Aptitude [no wait Assessment] Test".

The anonymous contributor can give the correct answer later if it is not obvious; it was not to him.

SAT question

Called Duānwǔ jié 端午節 / 端午节 in Chinese, this year (2022) it occurred on Friday, June 3.

Below, I will discuss in detail the names, origins, and customs surrounding this widely and exuberantly celebrated festival.  Unfortunately, recently there has been some controversy over how to greet people on this day.  There seems to be a lot of online discussion as to whether

Duānwǔ jié kuàilè
端午節快樂
"Happy Duanwu Festival!"

or

Duānwǔ jié ānkāng
端午節安康
"[May your] Duanwu Festival [be filled with] well-being"

is the appropriate greeting for the festival, including debate about the more recent use in China (less so in Taiwan) of the latter.

This report can be relatively perfunctory, because the results are almost always a foregone conclusion.  After a hiatus because of the pandemic lockdowns and then an incredible shocker last year (see "Selected readings" below), there are basically no surprises… though the format has evolved.

The new thing this time was a "spell-off" that kicked in if no winner came out after a certain number of rounds. It was hard to bring the previous bees to a conclusive end because the participants were so consummately well prepared — there was an 8-way tie in 2019.  I like the new format because, not only does it eliminate overly long proceedings and multiple ties, it also adds an element of extra drama and speed to the finale.  The unsurprising thing this year was that 11 out of 13 finalists looked to be of Indian origin. (source)

Recently I've been learning a lot of new letterisms — which I propose as a useful term covering both acronyms and initialisms, as well as some other cases within the general category of abbreviations. Sure, ACLU is pronounced as a sequence of four letter names, while NATO is pronounced as two syllables with no letter names involved. But there's variation: the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn is SAS, sometimes called "S A S" and sometimes "sass"; the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is sometimes "S E A S" and sometimes "sees". And there are mixed cases. In Penn's residential system, for example, HMOD is a designated role, standing for "Housing Manager On Duty",  and pronounced /ˈeʧˌmɐd/, i.e. the letter "H" followed by the syllable "mod".

And for examples learned though reading, it can be unclear what the pronunciation should be. I know that ACLU is not "a clue" because I've heard it pronounced many times — but what about SLIFE = "Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education", a letterism that I learned a few days ago? (It's new enough that the Acronym Finder page doesn't know about it yet…) Is SLIFE a single syllable rhyming with knife? or is it the letter S followed by "life"? or is it the sequence of five letter names "S L I F E"? I'm guessing that it's one of the first two, but I could be wrong.

This sounds like it should be a technical term in one discipline or another.  I did a Google search for "negative ambiguity" and received 42,800 hits, a negligible number of them false because of punctuation issues.  They occur in contexts that fall under psychology, economics, sociology, language and linguistics (grammar, syntax, scope, attachment, translation, etc.), sexuality, business and administration (leadership), investment, finance, tourism, education, biology, military science, politics, race studies (identity), etc.

One of the most prolific sources for the use of "negative ambiguity" is in this low key but still extraordinary paper by WANG Bo¹, XIE Junwei¹, ZHANG Jing², and SUN Bosen³   in Journal of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics ›› 2020, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (1): 122-132. doi: 10.13700/j.bh.1001-5965.2019.0133, "Negative ambiguity function characteristics simulation of FDA", where it occurs frequently. 

1. Air and Missile Defense College, Air Force Engineering University, Xi'an 710051, China
2. Shaanxi College of Communication Technology, Xi'an 710018, China
3. School of Information, Xi'an University of Finance and Economics, Xi'an 710100, China

Tension over the prolonged pandemic lockdowns in Chinese cities is growing.  Thus violence has erupted even in Beijing, where we get scenes like this in the suburb of Yanjiao, 21 miles east of Tiananmen, where workers are demonstrating for the right to travel to their jobs in the city, with continuous cries of "jǐngchá dǎ rén 警察打人" ("the police are beating people").  But it is Shanghai where the citizens have suffered most grievously and for the longest period of time.  Although the government has announced the lifting of the lockdowns, many of the most obnoxious mandates (e.g., repeated, frequent nucleic acid testing) are still being enforced.  All of this has led to extreme cynicism and a greater willingness to confront the authorities.  Some of these sentiments are conveyed on this card where, naturally in the land of the most severe censorship in the world, they must employ clever indirection, which I shall try to explain below:

For cognoscenti.

Directions

Here's an amazing little game that was played by two of the brightest Sinology PhD candidates I've ever met.  It is a conversation between X and Y.  Y initiated the conversation by typing to X, without telling X the secret of the game.  When X received Y's first message, she immediately got what Y meant.  She understood as soon as she received his e-mail, then replied to him (by typing) in the same manner that he wrote to her.  And so off they went on their merry way in Lexiland!

Here I copy-paste this little hànzì yóuxì 汉字游戏 for Language Log readers who are well-versed in Sinographs and want to give it a try.  Even those who do not know any Chinese characters might still be able to gain a sense of how the game proceeds and what it signifies.

The "answer sheet” is at the bottom of this post. Please scroll down to the very, very end to see the answers. However, don’t look at the dá'àn 答案 ("solution") before trying really hard by yourself!

Warning!

This game is devilishly difficult.

The ambiguity of how to pronounce 咀 (jǔ, zuǐ) in toponyms (see this recent post) is mirrored by the situation regarding 堡.  Is it bǎo, bǔ, or pù?

bǎo

• small camp; small mud fortification
• fort; fortress
• Short for 漢堡／汉堡 (hànbǎo, “hamburger”)

bǔ

1. (often in placenames) town or village with walls

   吳堡 / 吴堡  ―  Wúbǔ  ―  Wubu (county of Yulin, Shaanxi, China)

pù

Used in place names, as a variant of 鋪／铺／舖 (pù, “courier station"

• Middle Sinitic: /pɑu^X/

(Zhengzhang): /*puːʔ/

(source)

In the aftermath of Uvalde and other recent mass shootings, there's been renewed discussion of the 2nd amendment. So I'm listing relevant past LLOG posts, culminating with Neal Goldfarb's series of 16 in 2018-19.