Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.

Is that a valid English sentence? Can you parse it if you haven’t had it explained to you before? (if you haven’t, try it with some extra words to help indicate the clauses: Buffalo buffalo that other Buffalo buffalo buffalo themselves buffalo other Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo. It also helps to know the transitive verb buffalo: to intimidate; to deceive or hoodwink; to confuse.)

There’s something that strikes me as fishy about sentences that are theoretically well-formed according to an analysis of the grammar, but no competent speaker could ever actually produce or parse without aid (such as pencil and paper or a computer program). The Buffalo sentence can actually probably be understood if spoken aloud by someone who understands it and punches it up with strategic pauses and stress. But it’s easy to imagine sentences where that’s impossible.

For instance, it seems to be relatively common to say something like:

Or, if you suffer from sesquipedaliaphobia, you can think of your great-grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, your great-great-great-grandmother, and so on, limited only in practice by the number of generations since Eve. - Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, p. 123

In theory it may be limited only be the number of generations since Eve, but in actual practice I bet it’s limited to no more than will fit comfortably in iconic memory, and more than three is probably somebody deliberately being funny.

A Google search, restricted to English pages, gives:

||”great-(great)+ grand”| 209,000|
||”great-(great)+ grand”| 25,600|
||”great-great-(great)+ grand”| 5,740|
||”great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 933|
||”great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 389|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 269|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 196|
||”great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(great)+ grand”| 131|

Beyond that Google drops terms, because the search string is limited to 10

But do people even read these many iterations of “great”? Can they? Again, my guess is that after a small number that they’re able to visually recognize, they either switch to counting (until they tire of that) or just give up, look for the next non-great and continue reading the sentence happily unconcerned with how many generations they’ve skipped. All competent speakers understand the rule that’s being used to generate these sequences, but I think they also all recognize that there comes a point where the speaker is using the rule correctly but breaking a meta-rule that the sentence be intended to be understandable.

Jesse Sheidlower, in Slate, writes:

John Leland kicks off his entertaining new book, Hip: The History, with a seductive little linguistic anecdote. The word hip, he says, derives from the West African language Wolof, and was “cultivated by slaves” from West Africa. Leland goes on to use the etymology of the word as a framing device for part of his argument: Hip—the word and the concept—”was one of the tools Africans developed to negotiate an alien landscape, and one of the legacies they contributed to it.” Sounds fascinating, right?

There’s just one problem: The etymology is wrong.

Mighty weathervanes grow. Naked Translations, in discussing how to translate flip-flop into French has a really neat discussion of the evolution of the French term for weathervane: girouette. A crucial step appears like it might have been an eggcorn. Wirewite became gyrouette, probably because the folk-etymology of gire (turn) + rouette (little wheel) seemed more compelling than the real ancestral Anglo-Norman borrowing of Norse veðrviti (weather + indicator).

From the same post:

Finally, this morning on Radio 4, I heard two men bicker over whether English spelling should be simplified or not. The one against it argued that a word’s spelling gives us a good idea of its etymology and origin, the other argued that a word’s spelling is actually often misleading (see girouette!). However, I think that if you simplify English, then you’ll lose any chance at all of knowing where a word comes from and what its relationship to other words is.

For what it’s worth, I agree. As a word nerd the advantages of simplified spelling often seem to me to be overstated.

Tip of the hat to It’s Ablaut Time for pointing out the amusingly-named MorBo bibliography of morphology literature at the University of Bologna.

Old English in the OED - June 2002 Newsletter - Oxford English Dictionary

The revision of Old English material in the Third Edition will be thoroughgoing. Every single Old English quotation, whether already in OED or newly added, is being checked against the most recent reliable edition of the text, with new bibliographical details and additional context being given where appropriate. Dating of quotations has been radically revised, with NED’s assumed composition dates replaced by a simple threefold division of all pre-1150 quotations into ‘early OE’ (up to 950), ‘OE’ (950-1100), and ‘late OE’ (1100-1150), based firmly on manuscript dates as agreed by the most recent scholarship.

I’m thinking of ponying up for an individual subscription to the online edition as my holiday present to me this year. It’s spendy ($295), but oh-so-tempting.

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.

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?

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.