Language Log

[Marc A. Pelletier wrote to me after reading this post about canine concepts (or the lack of them). He offered a somewhat more pro-canine perspective. What he says is quite reasonable (not that I necessarily agree with all or any of it), and it may mollify a few dog lovers in the Language Log readership who continue to hate me if I present what what he said as a Guest Post. So I herewith do that. And you can comment on it if you wish. —GKP]

Guest post by Marc A. Pelletier

I am wondering why Geoff Pullum seems so insistent that dogs are unable to attach semantic meaning to words uttered by humans beyond the level of conditioned reflexes. Ethology has, in my opinion, contracted the disease of "reverse anthropomorphismitis": the desperate compulsion to avoid ascribing common cognitive mechanisms to animals other than Homo sapiens sapiens, even when doing so requires contriving many additional assumptions and evoking ad hoc hypotheses — I'm surprised that linguists feel the need to do the same (or at least, one linguist does).

Allow me to illustrate my position with an anecdote.

Most of the spam that I receive is in English, but I have also received spam in French and Chinese. A moment ago I received for the first time a spam message in Hungarian (a language that I do not understand). I can't decide whether or not to be pleased.

This speaks for itself, I think — the first referral from the new Cuil search engine that I've noticed in our referrer logs:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

"Heath Ledger Might Be Dead, but the Heath Ledger Scandal Dept. Is Still Taking Calls."

The gossip-sheet author who wrote that headline wasn't trying to cast doubt on the actor's demise. He was just using a common rhetorical device: granting a point with might or may, before stating the counterpoint in the next clause.

It seems to me that might was added to that first clause not because of any question about whether the clause is true, but rather as a way of signaling doubt about its logical connection to the point made in the second clause. In fact, you could eliminate the modal without really changing the force of the argument: "Heath Ledger is dead, but …"

Among the little known stories circulating recently, we learn from The Anchorage Daily News that the California Milk Processor Board, representing eleven dairy processors that market milk, is planning to bring trademark infringement charges against a batik artist in Talkeetna, Alaska. A few years ago, the artist, Barbara Holmes, whose company is Mountntop Designs & Baby Bugs Clothing, produced and advertised the slogan, "Got Breastmilk?" on tee-shirts and one-piece baby clothing called "onesies." CMPB's Sacramento law firm sent her one of those typical cease-and-desist warning letters to Holmes, telling her that her slogan will cause confusion with their own widely publicized and trademarked slogan, "Got Milk?" And she'd better stop doing this now, before they sue her.

Dino Capiello, "Gore: Carbon-free electricity in 10 years doable", AP 7/17/2008:

Gore told the AP he hoped the speech would contribute to "a new political environment in this country that will allow the next president to do what I think the next president is going to think is the right thing to do." He said both fellow Democrat Barrack Abeam and Republican rival John moccasin are "way ahead" of most politicians in the fight against global climate change.

Reading Arnold Zwicky and Mark Liberman talking about when something is a real in-the-dictionary word (see the last two posts here), I was reminded of an occasion one summer a long time ago when I watched a nervous international student giving her first presentation to a graduate phonology class at a Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institute. The student's hesitancy was enhanced by the presence of two extremely famous phonologists, MIT professor Morris Halle and Linguistic Inquiry editor Samuel Jay Keyser. The student was referring to a phonological alternation whereby certain vowels became consonants in certain phonetic environments, and called this consonantalization. She stammered over the word, and asked, uncertain of her command of English, "Is that a word?"

"Yes!" said Keyser very firmly, without a second's hesitation. "It used to be called Istanbul."

I don't know if the resultant gale of laughter relaxed the nervous student a little. I hope so. But I know I still remember the laugh many years later.

Arnold Zwicky complained yesterday about people who take dictionaries as defining rather than documenting the existence of words ("In the dictionary or not", 7/27/2008). But sometimes, people take their own reactions as definitive, even when dictionaries disagree. Writing on Saturday about Lito Sheppard's contract dispute with the Philadelphia Eagles, Les Bowen went with a linguistic lede:

Granted, "disappreciation" might not be an actual word, but it was what Lito Sheppard came up with to characterize the Eagles' handling of him yesterday, and, syntax aside, his point was clear.

Technically, the evaluation of wordhood belongs to lexicography or morphology, not syntax. But in fact, Lito's choice is sanctioned by the OED, on the authority of none other than Noah Webster.

There's a long tradition of popular peeving about dictionaries and what they have entries for: non-standard items, slang, taboo words, slurs, and so on. The complaint is that by listing these items the dictionaries are recognizing them as acceptable in the language, are "condoning" them (even when the items have appropriate usage labels attached to them). The complainers' position is that these items simply are "not words" of the language, an idea I have criticized here once, and plan to do so again.

The underlying idea is that dictionaries should be directive and prescriptive — authorities on how people SHOULD speak and write. Lexicographers do not, of course, think that way, though they are not in general opposed to the offering of advice on language use; it's just not what they do.

The underlying idea surfaces in another way, in criticisms of usages that are perceived to be (and actually may be) innovative on the grounds that they are "not in the dictionary". William Safire took up one of these in his "On Language" column last Sunday (20 June): inartful.

A comment by Frank on my "Correcting misinformation" posting:

Whether or not peanuts are nuts or not, the statement "May contain nuts" on the package cannot be rendered untrue. It could just as easily read "May contain chicken feathers" and still be true. They didn't say it did, just that it "may".

The background… Lloyd & Mitchinson had claimed in The Book of General Ignorance:

Peanuts… are not nuts. So the legendary health warning on a packet of peanuts ("may contain nuts") is, strictly speaking, untrue.

and I noted:

Obviously, peanuts must count as nuts for legal purposes (hence the health warning), so botany is not the only source of technical definitions.

Now Frank has taken us away from the question of what nut means to the question of what may means (or, rather, conveys).

At first, the email seemed like the only literate and competently designed phishing lure that I've ever received.  Most of them are obviously written by people who could never pass a TOEFL exam, and have no idea how a bank or an airline or a shipping company addresses its customers. But this message, which arrived under the Subject line "Beat Obama at NO COST to YOU" seemed pretty professional, and even had some competent graphics:

Still, I saw two clues that persuaded me it was a scam, designed to get me to click through to a site that would harvest my personal information for criminal purposes and turn my computer into a zombie tool of international racketeers.

Something is rotten in Fontainebleau, and it isn't the cheese. There, a business professor and entrepreneur named Philip M. Parker INSEAD Chair Professor of Management Science at INSEAD, is creating a publishing empire of sorts, a very odd publishing empire. He claims to have published over 200,000 titles.

Yesterday's NYT had a piece on Eliot Spitzer's e-mail while governor of New York: "Governor's Angry Moods Pour Forth in E-Mails", by Jeremy W. Peters (p. A17):

On e-mail he was "Laurence," [his middle name] a sloppy typist who often dashed off messages in fits, riddling them with typos, misspellings and terse abbreviations.

A sample of his on-line style, as printed in the Times:

"Why has the state pty not out out a full list if bruno fundraising and 1199 support for him etc as a way to respond to the fundraising bs?"

(The reference was to a Spitzer campaign to tarnish the reputation of Joseph L. Bruno, then the State Senate majority leader, in retaliation for attacks on Spitzer by Bruno.)

A few comments on his e-mail style…