Semantic Compositions

On the plain meaning of rules

This evening, Peter Jackson's film "The Return of the King" won the Oscar for best picture, as had been widely predicted. SC has lost track of the number of articles he has read over the past two years arguing that of course each movie is/would be deserving of serious best picture consideration, but that since it would be unprecedented/unfair to give the prize to one of the earlier films and one of the later films, that Return of the King would win a sort of cumulative-achievement prize.

Nothing in the instructions for voting on the best picture award could really be construed to prohibit voters from taking that approach (the Academy is far more concerned with making sure that they can buy the statues back for a buck).

Contrast this with the vigorous debates in baseball on what the appropriate criteria are for voting for the rookie of the year (here's a good article about the controversy over J-League veterans) or most valuable player (which started out this way, and has also been the subject of a lot of controversy). The MVP award in particular has long been debated on account of whether it means "best overall statistics" or "valuable in the context of a team" (SC's favorite baseball writer had a good column last year on how this debate has kept the execrable but deserving Alex Rodriguez from winning; it was written before Mr. Rodriguez, in fact, won).

Despite all the links to the Internet Movie Database, the home-theater obsession, and the occasional comments about the writing style of Variety, SC is not actually all that tuned-in to what has been written by movie critics about the philosophy of the best picture award. Given that comedies just about never win, the rule seems to be something like "movie which is at least vaguely serious and is a good example of the technical craft of moviemaking, so long as it doesn't feature an embarrassingly bad script or wooden acting although we'll make an exception for those last two as long as it brings in $1 billion".

Now, SC's considered opinion on the subject is that if he could only give the best picture award to one of the three films, it would be Fellowship of the Ring. This year's nominees were perhaps weaker than the competitors of the last two years, but: 1) nobody could have known/thought that at the time, and 2) if the phrase "best picture released during the year of 2003" is to be assumed to refer to that movie which is in fact the movie believed by the voters to be the best movie released in 2003, then implicitly making the vote a referendum on past years dilutes the credibility of the award.

Of course, debating over how seriously to take the Oscars or the baseball MVP awards is something of a frivolity. However, SC thinks that there is something to be said for making the premises of "best X" or "X of the year" clear and open to public scrutiny. Some baseball writers won't vote for pitchers as MVP candidates, on the grounds that they're not everyday players, and to their credit, publicly acknowledge that they are imposing their own rules which are not part of the official definition. Others may do the same thing, but not acknowledge it. Over time, partisans of losing candidates then have recourse to the argument that their guy/movie didn't win, not because someone else was more deserving, but because the rules were really being misinterpreted. How many entertainers and critics are thinking tonight, "Well, I don't think they should have won, but this year's award carries an asterisk?" The critics knew better than to give Godfather III a best-picture nod just because it was sequel to two deserving films (at least they got it right once); why shouldn't the Lord of the Rings movies be paid the same compliment of being taken seriously?

Everyone's a linguist

Today, Rachel posted a story which everyone in linguistics has experienced at some time or other. Perhaps that statement would be better reformulated as, "which everyone in linguistics regularly goes through whenever they discuss grammar with non-linguists". Rachel notes that a friend told her:

Then my partner in crime got up because she had to go to a meeting. Before she left, she whispered in my ear, "Don't get into arguments with people about linguistics. It doesn't accomplish anything." I think she probably learned the hard way and wanted to pass on the lesson.

Oh boy. Isn't that the truth?

SC had a coworker, before his recent transfer, who holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering, and does most of his work in artificial reasoning and formal logics. In other words, a very educated man with exposure to a lot of language issues. Nevertheless, he had a hangup about "-ing". This form is always, according to SC's coworker, a gerund. In other words, a noun made out of a verb (i.e. "Running is good exercise"). Even though he could recognize participles as clearly verbal uses of "-ing" words (i.e. "I am running"), he insisted that this made them "gerundive participles", because he was stuck on the claim that "-ing" words are gerunds. The description may not be wholly inapt, but it certainly isn't the term of art he imagines it to be: Google only has 15 recorded examples, none of which are from actual linguists.

Why are people so prone to Cracker Barrel Philosophy of Language? SC thinks the answer is pretty obvious -- most people think that if they're familiar with something, they are competent to discuss it. Most people wouldn't presume to tell a particle physicist that they think they have a better idea about the number and types of bosons (unless they were also particle physicists). But they won't hesitate to tell a linguist that they know better about the number and types of parts of speech, even though they've never even attempted anything close to a serious study of the facts of their own language, never mind a cross-linguistic study of same. This isn't to say that intuition and experience with usage are valueless and should be ignored, but they're only really applicable to questions about whether a particular string is grammatically valid. It probably doesn't help the cause of linguistics that people are taught some basic facts about parts of speech in elementary school, with no hint at any time that the story may not be the full one. But SC's not sure that they should have to be told -- who really thinks that once they've learned arithmetic, there's nothing else to know about math?

Language death

This weekend, Arts & Letters Daily links to a story on language death in the New York Times Magazine. Couple of interesting points:

1) The writer tries to finesse Geoff Pullum's ongoing lament (see here, here, and here, inter alia) about what he [the Times writer, not Geoff Pullum] calls "the apocryphal story about the Inuit and their 40 words for 'snow'". The point, according to the author, is that regardless of its truth, the story is "a revelation of what we call 'a sense of place'". This sort of thinking strikes SC as weaselly; surely the empirical truth about whether or not different languages are really associated with different mindsets is relevant to the question of whether or not they tell you anything about the thinking of the people who speak them.

2) There is an irritating morality play that the author tries to set up between a group of linguists who allegedly "dismiss salvage efforts...as futile exercises" and linguists who "will tell you that every language has its own unique theology and philosophy buried in its very sinews". Is it really possible that there are no intermediate positions on the merits of preserving small language communities? On the one hand, it's certainly true that constructing your theory of language around just a few languages is going to miss a lot of important facts. Subject-verb-object and subject-object-verb combine to form a large majority of the world's languages' structures, so every time we lose a language of the rarer types, a real opportunity for study is lost. On the other hand, SC has stated before that he "cannot and will not get upset about the idea that other people expect you to be able to share meaning with them in an efficient manner", and that means teaching people who can't communicate with the majority to do so. There is a difference between insisting that people who want to advance economically learn the majority language and pursuing a campaign of actively suppressing minority languages, but the article's author isn't interested in the idea that such positions could be nuanced.

3) According to the article, "[A]mong linguists, the sorrowful story of the 'last speaker' is practically a literary genre". And some of these "last speakers" aren't always really the last, at least in the mind of the author. The article seems to be condemning the man who went by "Red Thunder Cloud" for not really being an Indian; however, if he spoke the language after all of the native speakers died out, and nobody else could do so, then SC can't see what's wrong with identifying him as the last speaker of the language prior to his death. If the author seriously means that only people who are genetically related to the original language group count as "speakers of a language", then it's impossible to distinguish between speech and race. Given that SC has friends of a variety of races whose English is uniformly better than their command of their ancestral languages -- many of which they have only learned in school -- your host thinks that this opinion is ludicrous. Aside from legitimizing crude ethnic slurs (like insinuating that people of Asian ancestry can't keep their "l"s and "r"s straight), this implies that there is something false or inferior about people learning to speak a language that wasn't spoken in their home growing up. SC thinks this is patronizing and bigoted, especially in light of point 2 above.

Analyzing a crazy woman

Yesterday, SC wrote about the frustration of watching someone violate the terms of using an express lane in a particularly egregious manner. This morning, he realized he has a better analysis to offer.

Recalling that the woman said "I only have ten items", when she had more like double that, SC originally wrote "it's difficult for SC to decide if her statements in fact qualified as lies". This was due to the fact that she could have meant "I only have ten items in each order". Your host has changed his mind -- she was a liar.

The basis for deciding this is not mere peevishness ([although you'll have a hard time convincing anyone who knows you, pal -- ed.]). It's the fact that she said "only". Larry Horn provides this definition: "The semantics of only says this: it asserts that no proposition from the set of relevant contrasts C other than the one expressed by its sister sentence [alpha] is true". I'm not sure if he's attributing that formulation to Kai von Fintel based on the way the abstract is posted; if so, consider the credit assigned. Regardless, we can represent her statement as a conjunction of logical statements:

Ex((Rude woman(x) & (Possesses_10_items(x)) & ~(Possesses_11_items(x) & ~(Possesses_12_items(x)...)

SC is sure the speaker who prompted this posting would disagree with the formulation's first term, but SC's not terribly interested in hearing her complaints right now.

Given that her statement was "I only have 10 items", the above formula is only true if there exists a person x who is a rude woman and possesses exactly 10 items. If she possesses 11 items, then the term Possesses_10_items remains true, but now Possesses_11_items(x) is also true, and so its negation -- the actual term in the formula -- is false. Since "and" statements are only true when all of their conjuncts are true, her statement was false, and she was a liar.

But wait! What about the pragmatic claim that she might have actually meant "I only have 10 items in each order"? Let's resolve that by recourse to Grice's maxims. Readers encountering them for the first time may think that Grice was lecturing about how people should speak. In fact, Paul Grice offered these as his formulation of the rules which appear to guide our approach to conversations. They're an approximation of our expectations about how other people communicate with us, as well as how we try to formulate our own statements (although some people disagree vehemently). SC thinks they're a good starting point.

So how might she have violated Grice's maxims? The issue of quantity seems to vindicate her, as Grice's conditions for that could be construed by a malicious speaker as "say no more than the minimum necessary to establish your position". Since she said something which was true under a very strained interpretation, SC will give her a reluctant pass here, even though he thinks she's a weasel. The issue of quality is a toss-up; on the surface, she made a clearly false statement, but we're analyzing the "in each order" interpretation here. She could truthfully claim that she doesn't believe the "in each order" statement to be false, and SC would have to agree (again, while swearing furiously). The evidence is right there in her cart.

As for relevance, well, she was definitely addressing the situation; namely, the question of whether she had too many groceries to be checking out in the express lane. So she's clean. But then we get to manner. Did she avoid obscurity? Absolutely not. Did she avoid ambiguity? Nope -- she only gets a pass on the first two maxims by assuming that she was very ambiguous. Was she brief? Well, yes. Last, but not least, orderly? Hmmm...this would-be parliamentarian rules her..."Out of line!".

So she strikes out on both truth-conditional and pragmatic grounds, and we can now conclude that she's a liar. However, due to the fact that SC has now been obssessing about this for at least 15 hours, he'll conclude with an apocryphal story from which you can draw your own conclusions about his mental health.

Two monks who have sworn never to touch a woman are walking by a river. They come across a woman who is desperate to cross, but cannot swim. One of the monks promptly picks her up on his shoulders, and carries her across. The other monk says nothing. Hours later, though, he can no longer restrain himself, and says, "How could you touch that woman? You've broken your vows!". The monk who carried the woman replies, "I put her down by the side of the river. You've been carrying her ever since."

The customer is willfully wrong

This isn't quite a story about semantics, because the misinterpretation is intentional, and to SC's mind, malicious. But it's certainly an interesting case of language use.

SC was at the local grocery store this afternoon, to buy a few light bulbs. Being comfortably within the 10-item limit indicated at the express lane, he got into line as is normally done. Behind him, another woman lined up with 4 items. So far, so good.

But then, just as SC was paying, another woman got into the line, with a cart stuffed nearly to the top. There was no way that she had less than 17-18 items in there, and the real count is more probably in the mid-20s.

One of SC's frustrations at the grocery store lately is that since the strikes began in Southern California, customers have responded to the reduced number of open cash registers by refusing to honor the signs at express lanes. This time, the cashier said to the customer, "Excuse me, there's a 10-item limit for this lane", something which they have not usually done since the strikes started. The lady with the full cart replied, "I only have 10 items". Since this was plainly false, the cashier repeated his request that she leave the line, and got the same response. He then gave up, and turned his attention back to ringing up SC, who was intently watching the woman at this point.

After placing 10 items on the conveyor belt, she put down one of the bars used to separate orders, and continued unloading her cart.

Clearly, the statement "I only have 10 items" is false. However, one could argue, given her strategy, that she meant "I only have 10 items in each order", which makes her statement bad in a pragmatic way, but true in a truth-theoretic sense. Leaving aside the fact that her behavior was an act of total disrespect to other customers, it's difficult for SC to decide if her statements in fact qualified as lies.

UPDATE: It looks like this story has become common enough:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=509&u=/ap/20040227/ap_on_bi_ge/grocery_strike_1&printer=1

(Edited @ 6:12 pm on 2/26/04 to include updated material)

Some further examples

In other sciences, you go out and find examples; in linguistics, the examples find you (thanks to Language Log for putting Yaakov Smirnov back in SC's head).

When SC got his mail yesterday, it included the latest issue of the AAA magazine for Southern California, Westways. In there was an article on cheap places to eat. It contained the following sentence:

"Thank goodness for downtown's Philippe's (officially Philippe the Original), where you can eat well for less than the cost of parking at the Music Center". (bold in original, or maybe SC should just say "bold's")

It's one thing to stick the possessive case in there out of force of habit; to do it self-consciously...are they trying to get free advertising in Semantic Compositions?

Then, a friend who has read about the totemic power of names e-mailed the following, which can't be the fault of any company policy:

I was shopping around for a hands-free set for my new cellphone at Target, so when I asked for one the clerk asked me: "Do you mean the hands-free head set?"

The editor hereby opens the First Occasional Write-Like-SC contest. Readers should feel free to post comments filling in the following blank "No, Einstein, _____".

Can a stock bid for a company?

Like most people, your host spends a lot of time worrying about a fellow named Mort. Mort Gage. Mr. Gage discovered SC's checking account some time ago, and removes a large part of it with disturbing regularity. Judging by the number of people who appear to be similarly afflicted, Mr. Gage must be a very wealthy man by now, and so SC wishes he'd decide he's satisfied and just go away.

Since, however, the shadowy Mr. Gage has not indicated plans to do so anytime soon, SC finds that he spends a lot of time attempting to compensate for the ravages of Mr. Gage's attentions. As a consequence of this, your host is well acquainted with the writings of various members of the financial and business press, including the Wall Street Journal and TheStreet.com.

This morning, writing for TheStreet.com in regard to Comcast's abortive attempt to buy Disney, hedge fund manager Doug Kass commented that:

Unlike my view, with Microsoft playing an integral role, Reif reminds us that CMCSK can call upon investments in Time Warner, Liberty Media, Time Warner Cable and multiple cable partnerships in order to raise the cash component.

Over a number of years, SC has noticed that people working in finance will frequently refer to companies by their stock symbols. This is not an unreasonable shorthand, so long as it's unambiguous. But in Comcast's case, CMCSK is not identical with stock representing ownership of the entire company! In fact, there are two different stocks held by different owners of Comcast, as well as a third stock representing additional assets owned by Comcast as a parent company. And there are other companies where the ownership is even more fine-grained, like General Motors, which has no less than 12 distinct stocks representing ownership of different parts of the company, or different classes of shareholder rights for the same part of the company.

So when Mr. Kass says that CMCSK is pursuing ownership of Disney, a reader with SC's general disposition might conclude that in fact the decision is not unanimous among all owners of Comcast, and that holders of CMCSA disagree. Of course, such a reading is not the intent of Mr. Kass, nor of anyone else SC can recall writing this way. If the sentence actually was meant to be read as referring exclusively to only some portion of the company, it would become practically impossible to read financial writing -- does part of Comcast intend to acquire all of Disney? Or does part of Comcast intend to acquire one (or more) of the 7 publicly traded parts of Disney? For any company of significant size, the number of potential interpretations of the sentence would become proportional to the number of stocks representing interest in the company.

Of course, given the substantial amounts to be made in merger-and-acquisition banking, to say nothing of the legal fees, some enterprising banker or lawyer might come across this discussion of agonizing hairsplitting and say, "What a great idea!". Rather than disabuse them of the notion, SC will simply point out that valid contact information is available on this website in order to discuss SC's cut of the resulting deals.

Standards of proof

Recently, SC alluded to a sequence of events which had the possibility of convincing him that the Gnostic Demiurge exists. Now it can be revealed: SC has been offered, and has accepted, a transfer to another position within his company...as a marketer! Only an evil being with a perverse sense of humor could have designed a universe where one can declare "Beware of Marketing" day and then move into a job doing it full-time. (Note: It's not a promotion, so congratulations are not in order.)

In fact, your host is not sincerely convinced of the Demiurge's literal existence. However, this offers an excuse to repeat an anecdote told by the vastly underappreciated Bertrand Russell, from whose writings SC has learned a little about semantics, and a lot about narcissism. The background: Russell, a militant atheist, had been contemplating St. Anselm's ontological proof of the existence of a certain higher power who would presumably be quite displeased with Russell:

I remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking along Trinity Lane, when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the ontological argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco; on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air, and exclaimed as I caught it: 'Great Scott, the ontological argument is sound.'

Not long after, Russell decided that he had been wrong. But for the few days when he accepted an argument for the existence of G-d (SC is Jewish, and will not write that out; no comments, please), it would not have been accurate to say that Russell was suddenly a theist. Similarly, SC's present feeling that the present turn of events is a splendid argument for the Demiurge does not translate into an actual commitment to Gnosticism.

SC does not have the Russell quote memorized, and found some interesting things while looking for it with Google. For one, a page of philosophical quotes, held to be humorous by its author even though the original sources might not agree. The author, a Professor Norman Swartz, definitely shares SC's sense of humor. As for the philosophical issue, Stanford's online encyclopedia of philosophy has a good discussion of ontological arguments

The OED -- don't leave home without it

If blogging was old enough to have given rise to proverbs, one of them would probably be "He who posts last, posts best". Yesterday, SC discussed the fact that William Safire missed out on a fairly widespread usage of "pole" in ranting about "polar".

Today, Mark Liberman has given a much more in-depth, OED-informed treatment of the same topic. Your host is beginning to conclude that while free is good, comprehensive is better. However, at $295/year for individuals, and with no institutional subscription to make use of, your host will be sticking with Webster's.

Despite SC's engineering background, though, he can't understand the admittedly obscure joke at the end of this passage:

But maybe it's just as well. There are already lots of bad electrical-engineering puns about flights from Warsaw with Poles in the right half-plane, and a smaller number of references to "bipolar bears" in the mental health area. If resonance frequencies could be polar, then some really vile (if mercifully obscure) jokes about instabilities of arbitrage schemes would be inevitable.

The instability part makes sense if you know about Laplace transforms (the right half-plane joke). But the financial application (SC assumes that's the "arbitrage scheme" being referred to) eludes your host, and the reason why it would be particularly vile has got SC totally confused.

On another type of polarity

Languagehat takes another swipe at the piñata of bloviation that is Bill Safire's "On Language" column. While the 'hat's concern is with the nonsensical phrase "common elitist usage", this ex-engineer wishes to pick at another comment of Safire's, "That explains the rise of unipolar, a pole with only one end, as impossible in logic as multipolar." (italics in original)

Safire starts off sensibly enough, noting that:

A pole, from the Greek polos, ''axis,'' is ''one of two ends of an axis going through a sphere.''

So we're working from the notion that poles come in pairs, and represent dichotomies when used metaphorically. SC can follow him this far. Your host can even follow him as far as his complaint that the word is abused by politicians because of an analogy with "lateral", where "bilateral" is a neutral term, "unilateral" is bad, and "multilateral" is good; hence, "bipolar" is neutral, "unipolar" bad, and "multipolar" good.

But since Safire's the one complaining that these usages "departed from the word's metaphoric base" (italics mine), and that he doesn't want to be bound by "strict etymologists", then he has to be called to the carpet for claiming that "multipolar" is a logical impossibility. If "bipolar" is supposed to be a metaphor for two-valued logic, and so poles = logical values, then there's nothing wrong with calling the work of this guy "multipolar logic". Judging by Google's results (just 14 hits for that phrase, all irrelevant), nobody actually does, but perhaps only because the term "many-valued logic" was coined before "multipolar" came into fashionable use.

There's another usage of multipolar that Safire's reasoning requires him to consider an abuse, though, and this one is a lot more common, at least among the people who keep your local power grid running. The relevant definition can be found here, and refers to the number of magnetic poles in a motor. There are 4-pole motors, 12-pole motors, 24-pole motors...so much for poles being binary opposites. Admittedly, in this usage, the poles always come in pairs, but the poles are generated by currents which aren't in phase with each other, so any two positive poles aren't identical.

Another use of poles/polar from engineering where the number of poles isn't limited to two comes from the notion of "transfer functions". Briefly, a transfer function describes the output of a system for a given input, and is written as the ratio of two equations whose meanings aren't terribly relevant here. The solutions to the equations have special properties, though, and are known as "zeros" (where the transfer function's magnitude is zero) and "poles" (where the magnitude is infinite). A transfer function can theoretically have an infinite number of poles, and if you're really dying to know more, go here.

SC wouldn't normally pick at this, since Safire is basically correct about the use of "polar" being derived from the Greek for "axis", and that its original intent was to represent opposites. However, it's not fair to both object that insistence on "strict etymology" is wrong and should be trumped by real usage, and then also complain that some usages don't rigorously follow the original etymology. Again in fairness to Safire, this isn't something the people at Merriam-Webster have picked up on, either: the only definition they give hinting at the possibilities of poles not just being binary opposites is part 3b of entry #3: "one of two or more regions in a magnetized body at which the magnetic flux density is concentrated" (note: SC only checks the free version, not the pay-for-service unabridged one). But linguistic creativity is about taking old, familiar words and constructions, and expanding them to handle new meanings. Clearly, "pole" has been reanalyzed to refer to a single extremity, or one half of a non-unique pair, and is used as such in the engineering lingo. One might expect that he'd check this out before...ahem...unilaterally declaring the logical impossibility of more than two poles.