Language Log

Thanks to several commenters on our recent most-a-thon ("Most", 7/31/2010; "Most examples", 7/31/2010; "Most and Many", 8/1/2010), I've learned about an interesting literature on the semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics of most, which I think is worth collecting in one place for those unexpectedly unobsessive readers who don't repeatedly scan and cross-classify the comments on this kind of Language Log posting sequence.

These publications provide a variety of (mostly perceptual) evidence for the view that most really does mean "more than half", while offering a greater variety of theories about the strategies that (different sorts of) people use to determine whether this is true in particular cases.

Zach Weiner's most recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reveals an invention that may allow Big Science to complete the transition to assembly-line methods.

But for me, this strip raised an iconographic question: when did white lab coats become the comic-strip uniform of scientists? And when this convention arose, which scientists actually wore white lab coats? Because these days, it's not easy to find an actual scientist (as opposed to one in a comic or an advertisement) who wears (or even owns) one. [OK, I yield to the commenters who observe e.g. that "in … biomedical research, maybe a third of the researchers wear lab coats whenever they're at the bench". Let's just say that a fairly small minority of scientists (and engineers and other inventors) wear white lab coats, and leave it at that.]

Another problem of attributional abduction, this one from Josh Marshall, "So How'd it go?", TPM 7/31/2010:

Our reporting duo gives us the round down of just what happened at today's pro-diversity 'Uni-Tea' Tea Party rally in Philadelphia.

Frank Rich, "Kiss This War Goodbye", NYT 7/31/2010, writing about the Pentagon Papers:

Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. [emphasis added]

It's clear that this is a mistake, with eke out having been substituted for leak out. The question is, what sort of mistake is it?

To continue the mostathon: when I said that most "licenses a default generalization," I meant to suggest that it has a kind of generic quality — you can't account for its use by assigning it a purely quantitative or numerical meaning (i.e., "more than half"). One way to make the point is to borrow Mark's method and look at examples where most would have been licensed but the writer chose instead to go with many. These are actually quite plentiful:

Among people who did seek out help for their depression, many (68.8 percent) saw or talked to a medical doctor or other health professional.

Many parents surveyed — 62 percent — say they've taken away their child's cell phone as punishment.

Once again, many employers (53 percent) are not yet sure which action they will take.

Why didn't these writers use most instead? It isn't always easy to say, but some of the examples are suggestive.

My note this morning on "Most" stirred up some discussion:

Geoff Nunberg: I think 'most' licenses a default generalization, relative to a bunch of pragmatic factors, …
MattF: I think 'most' has a normative or qualitative sense in addition to a quantitative sense.
John Cowan: For me too, "most" has a defeasible implicature of "much more than a majority".

Those rear ends are pretty well covered — "default", "in addition to", "defeasible" — but Nicholas Waller got numerical:

I would be with John Irving – 51% of a population isn't "most" but around 60-75% would be. (90% or more would be "almost all"; well, until it hit "all" at 100%; and 75-90% would be "a very large majority")

From this week's Studio 360, in an interesting interview with John Irving, this interesting evidence about the meaning of most:

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An especially poetical crash blossom, which conjures up a possible surrealist horror movie: "Ghost fishing lobster traps target of study", CBC News, 7/30/2010.

(I mean, of course, the movie about the lobster fishing for ghosts, not the one about the ghost fishing for lobster.)

It's bizarre. Suddenly every piece of linguistic research is spun as a challenge to "universal grammar".  The most recent example involves Ewa Dabrowka's interesting work on the linguistic correlates of large educational differences — Quentin Cooper did a segment on BBC 4, a couple of days ago, about how this challenges the whole idea of  an innate human propensity to learn and use language. (Dr. Dabrowska appears to be somewhat complicit in this spin, but that's another story.)

It's hard for me to explain how silly I think this argument is. It's like showing that there are hematologic effects of athletic training, and arguing that this calls into question the whole idea that blood physiology is an evolved system.

Arijit Guha sent along this remarkable crash blossom from the CNN website (spotted by his wife Heather):

The lead paragraph explains:

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) — A Georgia man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease says he wants to die by having his organs harvested rather than wait for his degenerative nerve ailment to kill him.

Yesterday, on our way to school, my four-year-old commented, "When you love somebody, it can't be unloved. That's 'irreversible change'." I'm not sure which I appreciate more, the sweet sentiment (don't we all wish this were 100% true?), the generalization of a concept he learned on Sid the Science Kid, or the example of unloved in this unconventional usage.

Why do I find this so compelling? On reflection, perhaps it's because instead of the adjectival un- prefix (unhappy, unclear), which is about states, what we have here seems from context to be the verbal un-, which is about reversing actions (unlock, untie). Love as an action, something that effects a change of state, not just a state.

Or maybe I'm just in a sappy mood. :-)

With a hat tip to Bruce Webster, more cartoons for the weekend, this time from Jonathan Rosenberg's Scenes from a Multiverse:

Dance translations for the culturally inexperienced:

Is this a loose translation?