Interesting Misreadings
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.
Wednesday, June 9th, 2004