Language Log

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.)

On a Chinese site selling paint, pharmaceutical products, paper industry additives and so forth, we find the colorful Chinglish phrase "fuck the empress."  Although the "f" word occurs fairly frequently on this site, the exact citation for the sensational "fuck the empress" is the 14th bulleted item about three quarters of the way down on this page:  "Spray to inunction the partition slightly treat to fuck the empress to with the Beat to whet."

A truly strange piece of euphemism came up in a UK newspaper interview with Justin Halpern, the creator of the hit Twitter page Shit My Dad Says:

One day we took the dog for a walk. My dad said: "Look at the dog's asshole — you can tell from the dilation that the dog is about to shit" and the dog went to the bathroom. He was incredibly impressed by his prediction.

The dog went to the bathroom? Not exactly a case of like father like son, linguistically.

For those of us in the unpleasant position of policing student essays for plagiarism, there's a familiar odor wafting off of the unfolding scandal involving Scott McGinnis, a former congressman and current candidate for governor in Colorado ("McInnis’ water writings mirror works published years ago by Justice Hobbs", Denver Post 7/12/2010):

Portions of essays on water submitted for publication by gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis are identical or nearly identical to work published years earlier by now-State Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs. […]

In a memo accompanying the work when it was turned in to the Hasan Foundation for publication, McInnis wrote that it was all original work and in its final form.

McInnis refused to comment for this story. His campaign’s spokesman, Sean Duffy, acknowledged the similarities between the work of Hobbs and McInnis, and blamed a researcher who worked with McInnis on the articles.

Rolly Fischer, an engineer who worked at the Colorado River Water Conservation District, Duffy said, was the one who handled the portions that used Hobbs’ work without attribution.

“It should’ve been attributed properly and it was not,” Duffy said. “(McInnis) relied on the research and expertise” of Fischer.

Fischer did not immediately return a message for comment. His name appears nowhere on the work McInnis submitted as his own for publication by the Hasan Foundation.

Last Friday, I took a quick look at recent work by James Street and Ewa Dabrowska that shows a striking difference between grad students and people of "low academic attainment" ("LAA") on an apparently simple sentence-interpretation task ("'Unable to understand basic sentences?'", 7/9/2010). I had to cut my investigation short in order to take the RER-B to Charles de Gaulle airport for a flight back to Philadelphia, and so I didn't have a chance to take up (what I thought was) the most striking aspect of these experiments: the fact that the LAA subjects did so much better on sentences of the form "Every X is in a Y" than on sentences of the form "Every Y has an X in it".

Latest xkcd:

Shorter Louann Brizendine, from today's Non Sequitur:

In an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times published on May 14 ("Search Engine of the Song Dynasty"), Ruiyan Xu laments that Baidu (Roman letter name of the popular Chinese search engine ["the Chinese Google"]) is not as meaningful as 百度 ("hundred times," pronounced Bǎidù), which was taken from a poem written more than eight centuries ago about persistent searching amidst chaos ("Search Engine of the Song Dynasty", 5/14/2010):

BAIDU.COM, the popular search engine often called the Chinese Google, got its name from a poem written during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival, about the search for clarity amid chaos. Together, the Chinese characters băi and dù mean “hundreds of ways,” and come out of the last lines of the poem: “Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.”

Baidu, rendered in Chinese, is rich with linguistic, aesthetic and historical meaning. But written phonetically in Latin letters (as I must do here because of the constraints of the newspaper medium and so that more American readers can understand), it is barely anchored to the two original characters; along the way, it has lost its precision and its poetry.