Cheese or font? The sequel

In the first installment on this topic, I looked at pasttimes presenting players with a disjunctive questions: Is this thing an X or a Y? These questions are framed so that they’ll be taken as involving exclusive disjunction; the answer “both” isn’t offered.

Sometimes this seems reasonable. For X-Face or O-Face?, it’s unlikely (though not impossible) for a guitarist, say, to be expressing great emotional involvement with the music and experiencing sexual climax at the very same moment, so that the answer “both” would very rarely be appropriate. Things are different for Gay or Eurotrash?, and different in another way for Cheese or Font?

It is certainly possible for someone to be both gay and Eurotrash, and in such cases the answer “both” to the question “Is Gilles gay or Eurotrash?”, conveying ‘Gilles is gay and Gilles is Eurotrash’, would be accurate.

(In fact, Gay or Eurotrash? usually doesn’t come with real-world answers, but is played as a game of opinion. For each photograph, a program tots up the judgments given by a number of players and then reports the group opinion. Gay or Metrosexual? is usually played the same way.)

However, for Cheese or Font?, the answer “both” is the right answer in some cases, but that answer doesn’t mean that there is some referent that is both a cheese and a font (hard to imagine what such a thing would be like). Instead, it means that there’s a cheese with some name and there’s also a font with this name; strictly speaking, we’re dealing with homophonous names here.

Romano is a cheese, and Romano is a font — meaning that Romano is the name of a type of cheese and Romano is the name of a type of font. Saying that Romano is both a cheese and a font exploits the very frequent metonymy of name and thing.

Similarly, if there’s a disease and a plant with the same name. (There probably are, but I haven’t yet found them.) A game of Disease or Plant? would then have to admit the answer “both” in this case.

Slifted allegations

In the letters section of the New York Times on October 25 (in the Week in Review section), readers commented on conflicts between the public’s right to know and the rights of those involved in legal proceeedings. The last letter accused the Times (and other news media) of subverting the presumption of innocence, via the syntax of the sentences the paper uses to report charges (involving a construction known in the syntactic literature as Slifting).

Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the Times, then explained why journalists sometimes chose Slifting, but conceded that the letter-writer had a point.

Neg-quant scope

From a rodeo queen competitor interviewed on KQED’s “California Report”, October 23:

(1) It’s sort of depressing when you haven’t won many times, again, again.

The intended reading of “you haven’t won many times” is not one in which negation has scope over the quantifier many –

(1a) ‘it’s not the case that you have won many times’

(a reading that mirrors the ordering of the negator and the quantifier in (1) — but one with the quantifier scoping over negation:

(1b) ‘there are many times when you haven’t won’

In fact, (1) might be understood as implicating something stronger than (1b), namely that there aren’t any times when you have won, an understanding that’s encouraged by “again, again”: you keep on failing to win, time after time.

Here’s a case that follows Kilpatrick’s Rule (KR), which prescribes the scoping of a quantifier over negation. KR is so called from James J. Kilpatrick’s insistence that the headline

(2) Mass Transit Not an Option for All Drivers

must mean that mass transit is an option for no drivers (‘for all drivers, mass transit is not an option’), though this is clearly not what the headline writer intended.

Mark Liberman mused on KR on Language Log (here, here, and here), disputing Kilpatrick’s claim, as did Neal Whitman and Jan Freeman. All three writers maintained that wide-scope negation was by far the most natural reading for examples like (2), and Mark provided a pile of examples, from a variety of respected writers over the centuries, in which negation scopes over the quantifier all, and he hadn’t found any examples with the other scoping.

In fact, it’s not hard to find examples with wide-scope negation where the quantifier all precedes (rather than follows) a negative element, as this case from Nicholas Kristof (“More Troops Are A Bad Bet”, NYT op-ed piece of 9/22/09):

… there are some first-rate commanders on the ground who cooperate well with local Pashtun leaders. That creates genuine stability. But all commanders cannot be above average, and a heavier military footprint almost always leads to more casualties, irritation and recruitment for the Taliban.

The reading here is ‘it’s not the case that all commanders can be above average; not all commanders can be above average’, not ‘for all commanders, they cannot be above average; no commanders can be above average’.

But (1) has the quantifier many, not all, and the two quantifiers work somewhat differently. Indeed, the difference between the readings (1a) and (1b) is subtle — even more so for (2′) (cf. (2)):

(2′) Mass Transit Not an Option for Many Drivers

‘not many drivers have mass transit as an option’ or ‘for many drivers, mass transit is not an option’.

Ellipsis on an island

Malcolm Gladwell, “Offensive Play”, New Yorker 10/19/09, p. 52, quoting a football player:

(1) “They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting.”

“I probably shouldn’t have ___” contains an instance of Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE); the underlines mark the location of the elliptical material. VPE is a type of anaphora, zero anaphora in particular, so we need to find a referent for the missing VP.

The way VPE normally works is that the referent is supplied by an overt VP in the linguistic context that serves as an antecedent for the anaphor, as in this real-life example, where the antecedent is bold-faced.

I lost weight with Jenny Craig, and you can ___ too.

(that is, you can lose weight with Jenny Craig too.)

But sometimes the referent has to be dug out from non-VP material. Some people find such examples unacceptable — they are often at least hard to process — and there’s a considerable literature about some of them, under the heading “anaphoric islands”; see the Language Log discussion here.

(1) is such a case, where the elliptical material is something like “practiced” or “gone to practice” and the referent has to be dug out “from within” the noun practice, which is derived from the verb practice.

Some further examples (some of them intentionally jokey) from my collection:

(2) Many cases go unrecorded, and those that are ___ rarely make it to court. [referent from within the adjective unrecorded]

(3) Me: That’s a gift.
Wife: And he is ___. He’s very gifted. [referent from within the noun gift; note wife's repair.]

(4) Constants aren’t ___ and variables don’t ___. [referents from within the nouns constants and variables]

(5) Friendly fire isn’t ___. [referent from within the NP friendly fire]

(6) one of those see-through blouses you don’t even want to ___! [referent from within the adjective see-through]

(7) A Writer Who Doesn’t ___ [referent from within the noun writer]

Food and drink as events

In my little posting on visitors coming by with pizza, after which a movie was watched, I observed that this description probably should be taken as conveying three events rather than two: the arrival of the pizza-bearers, the eating of the pizza, and the watching of the movie.

This isn’t guaranteed: maybe the visitors brought the pizza because they were going to take it on to some later event, or dispose of it in a garbage dump, or display it as found art, or whatever (no necessary pizza-eating); maybe, as a commenter on that posting said, the pizza was indeed consumed, but during, rather than before, the movie-watching; or maybe the pizza was consumed, but after the movie-watching; or maybe the movie-watching took place after the arrival and the pizza-eating, but long after them (like, say, a week later); and so on. All the original sentence said is that there were two events, the arrival with pizza and the movie-watching, occurring in that order. All the rest is everyday reasoning and implicature.

Consider, for example, how pizza-eating gets involved in the story. Why do people bring pizza on a visit? (Note that we assume that it’s hot, just-baked pizza, not a frozen pizza or left-over cold pizza, although that’s not stipulated in the sentence.) Customarily, people bring food on visits so that it can be eaten, and in fact eaten communally. That’s a fact about social customs. In addition, the writer of the original sentence (who turns out to have been me) did mention pizza prominently, so we reason that it’s relevant. That’s an implicature. Put these two things together, and we conclude that everyone (or at least everyone who wanted some) ate pizza.

Now I turn to another factor that contributed to my understanding that the pizza-eating preceded the movie-watching: the wording “… bearing pizza, after which we watched …”

A fact about the semantics of English nouns is relevant here: names of food and drink can be used, metonymically, to refer to events in which these substances are consumed.

Before/During/After pizza, we watched a movie.
Before/During/After salad, we can talk about business.
Before/During/After martinis, we can talk about business.

can convey ‘before/during/after eating/drinking …’ (There are a number of possible variants here: “after a/the/our pizza(s)” and the like.)

Dictionaries don’t generally list such understandings of such nouns, because the metonymy is systematic and productive.

In any case, the existence of this pattern seems to have biased me towards thinking of the pizza as an event as well as a food.

Just In: NYT Violates PAP!

I haven’t posted for some time on the Possessive Antecedent Proscription (PAP), a fictitious principle of English usage/grammar that bars possessive-marked nouns as antecedents for personal pronouns, as in this NYT front-page headline on October 9:

Astor’s Son Is Convicted of Stealing From Her

Astor’s (referring to Brooke Astor, “the legendary New York society matriarch”) is the possessive-marked noun, and it serves as antecedent for the personal pronoun her (functioning here as the object of the preposition from).

Most readers will fail to see any problem with the NYT headline, but a few will recoil from it. These will be people who have been explicitly taught the PAP, in school or in a usage handbook or style sheet. I have yet to come across anyone who tacitly induced the PAP from their linguistic experience. In fact, in my experience everyone who espouses the PAP violates it (with no apparent awareness of having mis-stepped) on occasion. (I used to track such violations down, but it was a time-consuming and unrewarding occupation, and I’ve given it up.)

[Before I go on, let me say that if you want to cleave to the PAP, that's fine. If you do so, no one will criticize you for your bit of harmless nuttiness (sort of like not stepping on the cracks in sidewalks). Just don't go around slapping people down for not sharing your avoidance of possessive antecedents.]

The PAP seems to be mostly a product of three bad ideas:

(1) the idea that pronouns are simply replacements for repeated nouns (“That’s why they’re called pronouns, dummy!”);

(2) the idea that possessive-marked nouns are adjectives (because they modify — in some sense of modify — nouns), so of course — see (1) — they can’t serve as antecedents for pronouns; and

(3) the idea that if a linguistic element can in some way contribute to difficulty in understanding, ambiguity, unclarity, or awkwardness, then it should always be barred.

Idea (3) is breath-takingly silly, though it’s trotted out again and again as ammunition against some usage or construction a writer doesn’t like; the writer cites some examples, involving the item in question, where one of these defects arises. Taken at face value, (3) would prohibit speech and writing completely.

The other two ideas spring from more technical misapprehensions, both with long histories in the Western intellectual tradition. But in both cases, they are just hypotheses, however venerable, and most modern linguists reject them, for good reason.

For a more extended discussion of the PAP, see the material here (please check this before you comment on this posting), and note these Language Log postings:

GP, 10/5/03: Menand’s acumen deserts him: (link)

AZ, 10/8/03: Louis Menand’s pronouns: (link)

AZ, 10/21/03: Grammaticality, anaphora, and all that: (link)

AZ, 10/23/03: In search of the fimpossant: (link)

AZ, 2/20/06: Collateral damage: (link)

AZ, 5/22/08: More theory trumping practice: (link)

The implicated event of pizza-eating

I have a large and ever-growing collection of notes to myself on linguistic topics. This morning I came across one of these notes, a slip of paper with the following example on it:

(1) They came by bearing pizza, after which we watched The Music Man.

(The note doesn’t identify the source of the sentence or the date when I collected it.)

On the most straightforward reading, this sentence has a summative relative clause, “after which we watched The Music Man“, in which the relativizer which refers to the event of some people’s coming by bearing pizza; that is, (1) asserts describes two events, an arrival-with-pizza event and a movie-watching event, occurring in that order. In still other words, (1) is paraphraseable as

(2) They came by bearing pizza, after which event we watched The Music Man.

(In fact, some usage writers insist that (1) is unacceptable, because which has no noun antecedent in the sentence — so that (1) is “vague” — and that something like the clunky (2) must be used instead. See the summatives posting linked to above.)

And now for a subtlety. Although (1) describes only two events, most readers will understand (1) as implicating a third event, of pizza-eating, intervening between the other two, and the author of (1) surely intended this implicature. A nice little case of how sentences can end up conveying more than they literally mean. (The sentence is true if no event of pizza-eating occurred on the occasion in question.)

Short shot #15: bodily hygiene

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky writes:

My new employer has a sign in the bathroom exhorting us that for safety reasons we should not use the bathroom for “bodily hygiene”. That’s what the showers in another building are for. Scofflaw that I am, I persist in washing my hands.

It turns out that usage differs on how much bodily hygiene covers. For Elizabeth’s new company, it refers specifically to bathing or showering, that is, to washing the body, and similarly for historian and anthropologist  Alan Macfarlane in an article on bodily hygiene in England:

Buchman writes that ‘probably not until 1850 did regular personal washing become routine in large numbers of middle-class households,’ Plenty of literary and other material can be found to support such a view. For instance, a doctor writing in 1801 remarked that ‘most men resident in London and many ladies though accustomed to wash their hands and faces daily, neglect washing their bodies from year to year.’

On the other hand, there are sites (like this one) that specifically mention “hand hygiene” (washing the hands) as a type of bodily hygiene.

(I’m not sure how washing the hair fits into this picture, but I’ll bet that Elizabeth’s company doesn’t want people washing their hair in the bathrooms.)

Some of the variation in usage no doubt arises from the fact that bodily hygiene and personal hygiene are “semi-technical terms”, not really part of everyday English, which are pressed into service, essentially by stipulation, to refer to categories that have no simple everyday labels.

Choosing words

Jonathan Lundell notes “belittle the offense” in this report on an English court case:

An English judge, Judge Anthony Pitts, has shocked police and prosecutors by expressly permitting prep school music teacher Helen Goddard, 26, to continue her relationship with a 15-year-old student after she is released from prison. [Goddard] received a 15-month sentence for her lesbian affair with the 15-year-old student.

Pitts did not belittle the offense, saying that “[t]his case is so serious an immediate sentence of imprisonment is inevitable.”

Lundell found “belittle the offense” a bit strange (as do I), but you can find some other uses of the phrase in serious discussions of legal cases (putting aside instances of “belittle the offense” in writing about football and the like).

Still, dictionary definitions have a negative tone for belittle that’s not quite appropriate in the Pitts story. OED2 has ‘depreciate, decry the importance of’ for the relevant usage (first cite from 1797, all except one cite for belittling people). NSOED shortens this to ‘depreciate, decry’. NOAD2 adds detail: ‘make (someone or something) seem unimportant’. AHD4 gets more specific still: ‘represent or speak of as contemptibly small or unimportant; disparage’.

This is all on the strong side for the Pitts story, where the intended sense is something more like ‘play down, treat lightly, minimize the gravity of’. So the use of belittle in the Pitts story represents a small amelioration in the meaning of the verb, one that Lundell and I haven’t made and that lexicographers haven’t yet recognized.

I get a lot of mail from people saying things like “that’s not the word I would have used” and hoping to get some authoritative opinion from me as a linguist. Usually the best I can say is that small semantic changes happen all the time, and that personal tastes differ.

A footnote to the belittle story: OED2’s first cite for the verb is from 1782, from none other than Thomas Jefferson — but in the sense ‘diminish in size, make small’.

Lifting shirts

A little while back I made up some notecards using an ad from 10percent.com (reproduced below), adding the caption:

ABS Show
A few of the guys weren’t
Into shirt-lifting.

The ad shows various degrees of lifting shirts in front, to display the male torso, especially the guys’ “six-packs” (the abs, that is, abdominal muscles). It celebrates fitness, and homoeroticism as well.

Linguistic point here: the synthetic compound shirt-lifting, which turns out to have two families of senses, only one of them illustrated  by the ad. There’s also a synthetic compound shirt-lifter, with two families of senses; the guys in the ad are shirt-lifters in one sense, but not (necessarily) in the other.

And then, of course, from shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter, we get a back-formed compound verb to shirt-lift, again with two families of senses.