Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Neal Whitman writes

1. Everyone can’t fit on the bus.

I was confused. Did she seriously mean to say that not a single one of us could fit on the bus? How was that possible? Oh, wait—she must mean that not everyone could fit on the bus. But even when I’d figured out what she’d really meant, mentally attaching the intended meaning to the actual utterance was like trying to push two magnets together the wrong way.

Neil goes on to analyze this in some detail. I certainly see the ambiguity, but if I were trying to convey Neal’s preferred meaning it would never occur to me to say 1. I’m pretty sure I would always say

No one can fit on the bus.

Via Cronaca: Hominid hearing & speech:

Early humans evolved the anatomy needed to hear each other talk at least 350,000 years ago. This suggests rudimentary form of speech developed early on in our evolution.

Language Log: Recursive titles:

Yesterday I posted something on Joshua Macy’s review of The Language Instinct. Since Macy called his piece “So what’s wrong with The Language Instinct?”, I considered titling mine “So what’s wrong with ‘So what’s wrong with The Language Instinct?’?”, so that he could respond “So what’s wrong with ‘So what’s wrong with “So what’s wrong with The Language Instinct?”?’?”, and so on.

Since I wrote a term paper in college titled “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning’” ¹ I’m sure that I wouldn’t have been able to resist.

1. About Hilary Putnam’s famous paper “The Meaning of Meaning.” As best I recall, I thought the fact that people happily use jade to refer to two distinct substances, jadeite and nephrite, posed a problem for his theory that for us water means H2O even if we’re not aware of the chemical composition.

In Language Log: Criticizing Pinker the right way, Mark Liberman takes me to school over my post on “The Language Instinct”

I’ve not only made an error, but I’ve compounded it by joking about preposition placement. I could comfort myself with the fact that at least he agrees with my overall evaluation, but that would be too easy. At the risk of irritating Liberman¹, whose blog is one those that inspired me to start this one, I’m going to redouble my error in spades. Not because I’m stubborn—well, not just because I’m stubborn—but because I’m confused. One of us must have misunderstood something, and it’s probably me.

I admit that I can’t do elementary syntactic analysis in a coherent way, and it’s a lack (along with my inability to read IPA) that I feel keenly. And I really don’t want to be unfair to Pinker, particularly because my basic gripe with The Language Instinct is this nagging sense that Pinker is not fairly presenting the state of play in linguistics. But…

In the passage that Liberman dissects, I’m not arguing against Pinker’s theory. Level-ordering may be right for all I know. Liberman helpfully points to a paper arguing against it, Haskell, T.R., MacDonald, M.C., & Seidenberg, M.S. “Language learning and innateness: Some implications of compounds research” . Cognitive Psychology, 47, 119-163. (2003) , so you can read it and decide.

My complaint is really a different one, and I should probably have chosen an example from a different section to make that more clear. It’s that Pinker states something categorically that doesn’t seem to be true prima facie. Even if there is an interpretation that makes it true, even trivially true, to anyone skilled in the art (e.g. better at syntactic analysis or familiar with Haj Ross’s “syntactic islands”), as long as it seems odd or wrong to the naive reader then I think my complaint that it’s hard to tell whether Pinker is oversimplifying for pedagogical purposes is still fair.

Specifically, the passage I quoted was this (I’ve included one more sentence, the first one, since it really points up the problem):

The concept of a word that I have used so far in this chapter is a linguistic object that, even if built out of parts by the rules of morphology, behaves as the indivisible, smallest unit with respect to the rules of syntax–a “syntactic atom,” in atom’s original sense of something that cannot be split. The rules of syntax can look inside a sentence or phrase and cut and paste the smaller phrases inside it. For example, the rule for producing questions can look inside the sentence This monster eats mice and move the phrase corresponding to mice to the front, yielding What did this monster eat? But the rules of syntax halt at the boundary between a phrase and a word; even if the word is built out of parts, the rule cannot look “inside” the word and fiddle with those parts. For example, the question rule cannot look inside the word mice-eater in the sentence This monster is a mice-eater and move the morpheme corresponding to mice to the front; the resulting question is virtually unintelligible: What is this monster an -eater?

Now, the immediate reaction that I had was that noun-noun compounds of the form X-Yer can be looked inside of and fiddled with according to a rule (and once having done so, you can apply the question rule). In fact it seems that there’s a reversible rule for combining and splitting: a snee-snicker is a snicker of snee, a wugger of ugs is an ug-wugger. Time-waster, soul-stealer, death-defier, clothes-drier. Liberman seem to think that I’ve missed the crucial fact that this makes the noun-noun compound into a noun connected to a prepositional noun-phrase. I understand what he’s saying, but does that make it not a syntactic rule as linguists understand syntax? Is the issue that this isn’t a good argument against level ordering (fair enough, it isn’t intended to be any sort of argument against level ordering), or am I wrong and misleading in counting this sort of transformation as a rule that looks inside the compound? ‘Cause if it’s not, I really could use some guidance on what constitutes a rule.

I’m not sure I understand exactly why Liberman thinks that I’m being unfair to Pinker. When Pinker says that “monster-eater” cannot be split he doesn’t seem to literally mean that it cannot be split, or when he says a syntactic rule cannot look inside the parts of a compound and fiddle with those parts Pinker doesn’t mean no syntactic rule and no kind of fiddling. If ug-wugger -> wugger of ugs isn’t looking inside the compound and fiddling with it syntactically then Pinker must mean something different by either rules of syntax or fiddling than I would have supposed. This is entirely possible, but is exactly the kind of thing that leaves me scratching my head as I read. (Contrast monster-eater compounds with ones like show-down or cock-up, which appear to be genuinely unsplittable without losing the sense, even if you freely add prepositions. I believe that there are compound nouns that behave as indivisible smallest units with respect to the rules of syntax; I just have trouble seeing why monster-eater is such a compound.) Maybe the unfairness is that a linguist would never have supposed Pinker to be saying what I suppose he’s saying, and I ought to be more charitable and read atomic as atomic only with respect to the aspect of syntax relevant to the case for level ordering, implicitly understanding that it’s not quite the same sense of atomic as when describing the unsplittability of locomotive or adverbially. IOW, maybe all Pinker meant by this whole discussion of indivisibility is sticky enough to generally be treated as a unit.

If I’ve gone on at length about this, it’s because I genuinely don’t want to go about criticizing anyone “the wrong way”, and I do want to be fair, but I don’t know whether I understand Liberman’s criticism well enough to avoid it in the future.

1. Is it just me, or does referring to people by last name sound almost unbearably formal in a blog post?

Looking at the MLA Interactive Language Map is fascinating. What a neat toy.

Just for yucks, I decided to look up Yiddish, and found some surprising concentrations. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the country that reports > 99 Yiddish speakers (or maybe 199, the colors being very similar) until you drill down for a closer look. There you can see a few pockets of the up to 19,999. For instance Philadelphia has 2,922 Yiddish speakers.

One surprise was the entire top of Maine was colored in. Changing the view to By Zip instead of By County and the top of Maine shrunk to a tiny dot. I’m picturing this one old Jew living on the rocky shore, contributing his Yiddish to the county score. Conclusion: Aroostook is one big-ass county, particularly for a New England state. Ayuh.

Thanks to Language Hat for the link

I just realized that in the previous post I mis-attributed my misheard Flip, Flop, Fly to the songwriters of the original. Obviously they didn’t actually write what I thought I heard, but does that mean my mondegreen ought to be attributed to me? In terms of copyright it’s a derivative work, so I couldn’t actually claim sole ownership of the rights to the “new” version, though it’s not clear to me off the top of my head whether the current owners of the copyright to the song would be able to claim ownership either. The legal situation is made more complicated by the system of compulsory licensing that’s in place for songs: in the US you cannot legally prevent someone from performing a cover version of your song as long as they pay you royalties (except that you do have the “right of first recording”) and do not “substantially alter” your song. What happens if someone did substantially alter the song? I don’t know. What, you expect me to do some real research? I suspect that the compulsory license provisions wouldn’t apply, and you might have to do some genuine negotiation if you could track down the copyright owners; not necessarily an easy task, particularly when the original creator(s) are dead. Oh, and then there’s parody and the First Amendment.

Mothers, don’t let your sons grow up to be IP lawyers…

update: Ok, just for you I did a little research, at least to the extent of googling up this.

Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocket ship
Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocket ship
When the blues overtake me gonna rocket right away from here

Flip, Flop, Fly - Calhoun/ Big Joe Turner

I’m embarrassed to admit how many years it was before I realized that this was a mondegreen.
(Mondegreen is a name for the kind of global mishearing of the Scuse me while I kiss this guy sort, coined by Sylvia Wright, who misheard They had slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green as They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen)

The actual lyrics are

Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocking chair
Now when I get the blues I’m gonna get me a rocking chair
When the blues overtake me gonna rock it right away from here

Personally, I think mine make more sense, but I admit that’s an unusual case. I don’t know whether I’m particularly prone to mondegreens, but I’ve certainly come up with some doozies.
For instance, it was only a few months ago that I realized that the Allman Brothers song did not go Lord, I was born and raised in Maine . I see by Google that at least some other people hear it as Lord, I was born in Rambling Maine, so I’m not a complete loon. And I thought that Chaka Khan was being a bit ambitious when she wanted to Climb Every Woman (It turns out that she was actually stating the claim I’m Every Woman. But so is Whitney Houston. Does that mean that Chaka and Whitney are the same person?)

Possibly my favorite that I didn’t hear myself is “I see a Renoir and I want to paint it black”.

What are your favorite mondegreens?

It’s entertaining, it’s informative, it’s even funny sometimes, so what more could you want of a popular science/language arts book? My problem is that Pinker comes across, as the song goes, just an inch too sure of himself for me. The Language Instinct gives the strong impression that there are no rival theories worth mentioning, or at least it never bothers to mention any except when relating how Chomsky destroyed this or that primitive misunderstanding. (Given how primitive Pinker makes the pre-Chomsky theories out to be, it wouldn’t actually have been that much of an accomplishment.) Add to that a somewhat loosey-goosey attitude towards what’s an established fact, or what’s logically entailed by certain observations, and it’s hard for me to tell whether certain points are being simplified for pedagogical reasons, set up as straw-men, or simply are the received wisdom of linguistics experts everywhere.

Two examples:
Pinker describes an experiment where children aged 3 to 5 were asked to compound nouns, to see if they would unconsciously follow the rule that words with regular plurals would be compounded in singular form, while ones with irregular plurals would be compounded with the plural form. So a monster that eats mice would be a “mice-eater”, but a monster that eats rats would be a “rat-eater” not a “rats-eater.” The children “obey this restriction fastidiously,” even children who “made the error mouses in their spontaneous speech never called the puppet a mouses-eater.” Personally, I find that curious: if, according to the theory, the word is misfiled in their mental dictionaries, why wouldn’t that show up in all the forms?

But the most interesting discovery came when Gordon examined how the children might have acquired this constraint. Perhaps, he reasoned, they learned it from their parents by listening for whether the plurals that occur inside the parents’ compounds are irregular, regular, or both, and then duplicate whatever kinds of compounds they hear. This would be impossible, he discovered. Motherese just doesn’t have any compounds containing plurals…Gordon’s mice-eater experiment shows that in morphology children automatically distinguish between roots stored in the mental dictionary and inflected words created by a rule.

Impossible is a pretty strong word to use here, considering that children don’t grow up only hearing motherese. In fact, in the first chapter, when it suited the rhetorical point that Pinker was making there, he pointed out that children learn to speak perfectly well in cultures where Motherese doesn’t exist and (according to him) adults regard it as a waste of time talking to children before they’ve learned to speak. Gordon’s experiment certainly shows something about what rules the children have acquired, but unless there are lot of other details that Pinker didn’t recount, it doesn’t show anything about how they acquired them, and it does show one detail that needs some further investigation if the morphological rules are really biologically hard-wired. I.e., if it’s automatic, how is it that a child can say mouses at one point, inflecting the word by rule, and mice-eater at another, using the root from the mental dictionary?

A second example, from the same section on inflection and compounding, he writes

The rules of syntax can look inside a sentence or phrase and cut and paste the smaller phrases inside it. For example, the rule for producing questions can look inside the sentence This monster eats mice and move the phrase corresponding to mice to the front, yielding What did this monster eat? But the rules of syntax halt at the boundary between a phrase and a word; even if the word is built out of parts, the rule cannot look “inside” the word and fiddle with those parts. For example, the question rule cannot look inside the word mice-eater in the sentence This monster is a mice-eater and move the morpheme corresponding to mice to the front; the resulting question is virtually unintelligible: What is this monster an -eater?

Nonsense. What is this monster an eater of? is perfectly intelligible. (As is Of what is this monster an eater? for you anti-Churchillian prescriptivists, which puts it in a form closer to that of Pinker’s question rule.) Compound words of this sort are not indivisible “syntactic atoms” even if the syntactic rule for splitting and rearranging them is more complex than the one that Pinker proposed.

In general I have this problem throughout the book. Pinker is so eager to make his case as strongly as possible that he overlooks or ignores obvious counter-examples and skips lightly over potential difficulties, which actually undermines his position with me. Much of it is quite interesting and exciting to me, but when I’m recounting some of the details to my friends I find myself inserting caveats (e.g., Pinker says that they’ve found that children who are raised speaking a pidgen with no grammar spontaneously develop it into a grammatical creole, but…) It may be that he’s basically right, but I don’t place much confidence in it. I might be being too hard on a popularization, but there are other writers (Antonio Damasio, of Descartes’ Error comes to mind) who are much more scrupulous about pointing out difficulties with their pet theories and cautioning the reader that just because a particular experiment really seems to point toward the correctness of the theory there are other possible interpretations.

So, worth reading? Yes. Worth relying on? I wouldn’t unless I could back it up from other sources. It’s tasty, but ultimately unfilling.

In John & Belle Have A Blog: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Adaptation For Life I read a passage which I thought went

Show a cobbler a cow. Note his trade union obtuseness in relation to all kine! He simply cannot see how fine they are! ‘Ah yes,’ he will say, ‘there’s many a fine pair of shoes in that animal.’ Show this or that parrot an equestrian statue and he will say ‘Hah! Pretty big job that….

Which I thought was pretty funny, in an almost Pratchett-esque way. When it continued “That’d take the 24-foot ladder and a double-handled gauge-4 saw.” I realized that I must have made an error, and backtracked, to find that it was “this or that patriot” not “parrot.”

Misreading is interesting, not only in that it often produces funny sentences, but the way it points up facts about how we read. I mentioned that I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (and becoming more dissatisfied as I go, but that’s a different post), and I think that misreading presents a problem for the way that he describes our internal mental grammars as operating. Now, I’ve got no training in formal linguistics—I just picked it up the way all the kids did, in the street—so maybe I’m talking through my hat. In fact, I probably am, but I might as well toss this out there.

The whole surface-structure is consumed and then transformed to deep-structure where it can be mentally aprehended thing seems like it needs to be a linear process, where the entire sentence needs to be consumed before its transformed, unless we’re wildly trying to transform each substring so far into every possible d-structure that could have yielded it. One problem with the consume and then transform model is that we seem to be able to notice misreadings that make no semantic sense before we’ve read enough to tell whether the sentence as a whole makes grammatic sense, but if I understand Pinker it’s the d-structure not the s-structure that determines whether something is grammatical and what its semantic sense is.

So since we’re apprehending the semantics before we’ve finished with the s-structure, it would seem either that our semantic apprehension is operating directly on the s-structure, or it is operating on partial, multiple, d-structures without our noticing the multiples that we’re subconsciously considering as we read. A problem with the latter is that we do notice it if a clause has two possible d-structures in other cases, as in Pinker’s example “discuss sex with Dick Cavett.” We’ve read “discuss sex” and as soon as we read “with” our partial d-structure calves, becoming (at least) two partial d-structures both of which are under consideration from that point out, and both of which are the products of transformation rules applied to tree structures that are still missing nodes. Maybe Pinker would regard it as perfectly obvious that’s what happens, but if that’s the case, it’s hard for me to see probabilistic super-rules operating on partial input being much more elegant or powerful an explanation than the “word-chain” explanations that Pinker derides.

And yet, if that’s not the case, if we can figure out the semantics on the s-structure as we go, what do we need the d-structure to explain? Am I completely missing the boat on what role Pinker thinks the d-structure plays?

Another aspect of misreading is how it demonstrates that reading is an active process, not a passive reception of input. (Not news in a lot of ways, but it seems curiously missing from Pinker’s account of Chomsky’s theory, where the transformation from s to d seems to take place in a completely abstract mathematical space) Consider the old phrase

Paris in the
the spring

Many people, particularly when first encountering it, don’t notice the extra “the” which makes it ill-formed. I think it’s generally accepted that it gets skipped because our minds are actively anticipating, based on what has come so far, what parts of speech are likely to come next. It seems to me, though, that’s a curious fact from the point of view of d-structure. Maybe it’s blindingly obvious to the language module that given the d-structure(s) so far from “Paris in the”, there is no transformation rule whatsoever that could make a determiner legal as the result of transformation on the next token. Seems like a lot of processing power to deduce that, but ok. So why doesn’t it get noticed and flagged as odd the way

Paris in the
run spring

does? From the point of view of s-structure, no problem (I think–I could be wrong), it’s just a repeated token. We know we don’t read every word, and that we have to make a special effort to read things as they really are, rather than as we anticipate; moreover it seems obvious that anticipation is, must be, of s-structure. From the point of view of d-structure, with the capacity of transformation rules to rearrange and insert things according to universal grammar, I would think it puzzling that the next thing is a “whatever the token is that results in a determiner of the reference-to-a-unique function type” is more invisible to the reader than any other illegal term, just because the last thing assigned to some part of the tree was the same kind. Again, maybe everybody who knows anything about linguistics knows that this is a non-issue, and there has to be substantial processing of syntax at the s-structure level to explain this sort of thing, but nevertheless there is something real and important going on that can only be explained by d-structure analysis. So far, though, I’m more puzzled than illuminated by this theory.

BTW, on the subject of Tenser, said the Tensor, I’ve never actually found the jingle all that hypnotic.  It comes from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, where the protagonist is trying to get away with murder in a society where telepaths are routinely employed in law-enforcement. He occupies his mind with a compelling jingle to keep them out. The jingle goes, in part: “Tenser said the Tensor, Tenser said the Tensor, Tension, Apprehension, and Dissension have begun.” Tensor has a longer explanation here.

Maybe it’s the lack of music, but while I’ve never had any trouble remembering the jingle, I’ve never really had it stuck in my head annoyingly the way certain songs do (say, Wake Me up Before You Go-Go). But Alfred Bester clearly had a talent for memorable jingles, even if they didn’t reach the level of O God Make it Stop!

My favorite of his is the immortal

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let all who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power,
Green Lantern’s light![1]

If I’m ever charged with forming a group of star-spanning sheriffs, we are so using that oath.

I have a friend who tells me he was once at an SF convention where Bester was a guest. Bester mentioned in passing how he had briefly worked as a writer on Green Lantern, which he didn’t suppose anyone remembered, and my friend stood up and recited the oath. (What, it’s a surprise that my friends are all big geeks too?)
He says Bester seemed both amused and surprised.

1 - this replaced the Golden Age Green Lantern’s Oath, which is so much less compelling that I had to Google it, since I couldn’t recall the exact words.

And I shall shed my light over dark evil,
For the dark things cannot stand the light,
THE LIGHT OF THE GREEN LANTERN!