Get someone to open… what?

Just before Christmas, I played a game with a group of friends that consists of secret missions that you have to complete without the other players realising. They’re written on little cards which fold in half and are kept in a wallet. One of them read ‘Put this card in a jar and get someone to open it.’ My friend tried complete this mission by putting the card in a jar of sweets, which she then later on took the lid off and held out to someone. We pointed out that she had not got the other person to open the jar, and had therefore failed the mission. It then transpired that there is ambiguity in the wording! She interpreted ‘it’ as referring to the card (which, remember, folded in half, so it could be opened up). We had all interpreted it as referring to the jar. 

Strictly speaking, either interpretation is possible. A pronoun refers back to something else in the sentence, and provided certain structural constraints are met, it might refer to more than one thing. Take an example like ‘I saw Lina arguing with Mira. She looked pretty embarrassed.’ Here, ‘she’ could be Lina or Mira - it’s equally possible that either of the women was embarrassed, and structurally speaking one is the subject (so the topic), and therefore likely to be referred to, and the other is closer to the pronoun, so likely to be the intended referent. We can’t tell and in this case you’d probably have to ask ‘Lina or Mira?’, unless you had some prior knowledge that made it clear. 

In the case of the jar and the card, are both equally likely to be ‘it’? Well, because of the specific nature of this card, yes, both are things that can be opened, so the meaning of ‘open it’ is at least possible for both. Jars are probably more canonically ‘things that are opened’ (think Family Fortunes, ‘name something you open’) so that might push you towards the jar option. The jar is closer to the pronoun, and this is another thing that influences the interpretation, but not by much, so this might also slightly affect the preference for the jar. (See Mira Ariel’s work over the last several years for much more on this!) 

What interested me, though, was the fact that another friend said ‘it literally says “get someone to open the jar” on the card’. It didn’t - it said ‘get someone to open it’. But her interpretation of the referent of ‘it’ as being ‘the jar’ was strong enough that she considered it to have literally said ‘the jar’. 

Anyway, we decided it definitely meant the jar and she was considered to have failed the mission. 

Having yourself painted and cutting men's heads off

On last week's episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, they said that women at *some point in history that I've forgotten - Tudor England?* enjoyed "having themselves painted as a biblical character in the middle of cutting a man's head off".

Ah, ambiguities. Have a think and see if you're as much of an idiot as me.

First, I recognised and chuckled at the obvious one: [in the middle of cutting a man's head off] can describe the time of the action of the painting - they were in the middle of this action when they stopped and had themselves painted. Clearly this is silly. It describes what the biblical character (Judith, obviously) was doing. She was [a biblical character in the middle of cutting a man's head off], and that's what they had themselves painted as. I'm an intelligent person, see, and I spotted this potential pitfall and navigated it proficiently.

Which makes my next misunderstanding all the more ridiculous. Now, as I'm sure you realised, these women were having their portraits painted, in the guise of Judith cutting off Holofernes' head. But as well as having their portrait painted, 'having themselves painted' could mean that someone was applying paint to them: compare 'having themselves painted blue'. And yes, dear reader, that is the meaning I leapt to, and retained until about halfway through the item when I realised the more sensible interpretation. Honestly, I despair of myself sometimes.

It ain't nothin'

I've talked about 'double negation' before, by which I really mean negative concord: using two negative elements in one clause to give a single negative meaning. I've pointed out how it makes no sense to argue against it on the grounds of it being illogical (it isn't), and I usually say that in context, you can always understand what the speaker means. That's more or less true in speech, when you have intonation to help you out. But in writing, without that clue, sometimes the context isn't quite enough. I found this example in a friend's facebook post:

15 days in jail, which ain't nothin'. 

The context really didn't tell me if 15 days was a lot or not much for the crime in question, and so without the intonational cues (in my crude non-expert terms, whether you'd give stress to both ain't and nothin' or just to nothin') I couldn't tell if he meant that 15 days was a significant time, or that 15 days was nothing at all.

Picking up your litter is dangerous

Right, here's the other post I promised yesterday. The other litter-related sign I saw said this:

Picking up your litter puts road workers' lives at risk. 

This time, it's not ellipsis that causes the ambiguity, as it was in my previous post. Rather, it's a choice between two people who are doing the picking up:

You picking up your litter puts road workers' lives at risk.
Them [road workers] picking up your litter puts road workers' lives at risk.

And also unlike yesterday, it's clear which one is meant here. There's not any obvious way that you picking up your own litter puts anyone else's life at risk; it's a good thing and you should do it. On the other hand, a road worker having to dash out into the traffic to pick up your crisp packet is a danger to that person.

This is another example of ambiguity in the reference of a pronoun, just like yesterday. But in this case, it's the invisible pronoun that linguists call 'PRO' (pronounced 'big pro', to distinguish it from 'little pro', which is a similar but different invisible pronoun). It's the subject of the clause picking up your litter, which has a gerund form of the verb in it (the -ing form). When you have that, you can have a subject which isn't pronounced (PRO) and gets its meaning (reference) from something else in the surrounding discourse context.

If something is the topic of the sentence, that's likely to be what's assumed to be the meaning of PRO, but other things are also relevant, like where the other possible referents are in the sentence, and what kinds of things they are (e.g. litter is not a likely candidate to be picking itself up here, for many reasons!). Shameless plug: you can read some actual research by me and my colleague Vikki (mostly her) here, on a related subject, and we cite a load of previous research that you can look up if you like.

In my sign, the road workers are the topic (well, their lives are, but you also need to be an animate creature to pick up litter). 'You', the reader, are also an option, because your litter is in there too. It's also closer in the sentence to the PRO that needs a meaning, which counts for something, but a strong combination of the road workers being both the topic and the more sensible meaning ensures that no one would read it and think that PRO meant you. Except me. I thought that. That's why I wrote this whole blog post about it.

Take your litter home with them

I was driven across the country on Saturday, all the way from Sidmouth in Devon to Margate in Kent. On the way I noticed two signs about litter on the roads, both of which are pleasingly ambiguous. I couldn't take a photo as I whizzed by, but the first one said this:

Take your litter home with you.
Others do. 

The ambiguity is between what linguists call a 'strict identity' and a 'sloppy identity' reading of the missing bit of the second sentence. Others do stands for either Other people take your litter home with them or Other people take their litter home with them. The first one is the strict reading because it strictly preserves the part of the original sentence that is elided, and the reference is the sloppy one because it allows the reference to shift from your litter to theirs, along with the subject.

[Aside: note that the fact that the second pronoun must be them in either case, namely the sloppy reading. I'm not sure why; something about the semantics of take and home and you, probably. But it seems to be an exception to the generalisation discussed here by Neal Whitman, referring to work by Johnson and Dahl, that you can have all the possible combinations of strict and sloppy except for the one where the first is strict and the second sloppy. Which is weird.]

Unlike with most ambiguity, where context tells you which meaning is probably meant, I don't think it's so clearcut here. Presumably they are trying to shame you by saying that other people behave properly so you ought to as well (sloppy). But it is possible, I think, that it means that if you don't take your litter home, the litter-pickers will have to pick it up and take it away (presumably not literally to their homes), namely the strict reading. (We'll leave aside the point that if you take it home it's not litter, which is what my aunt Becky always points out.)

Right, I've gone on about this for so long I'm now completely unable to English so I'll do the other sign for a new post tomorrow.

No deal is better than a bad deal

My friend Michelle reminded me that Theresa May said this back in January, and has kept on saying it since then. Most people have been non-pedantic enough to let it go by without comment (after all, there's enough politics happening for us to talk about) but she, I and Chris Maslanka in the Guardian all noticed that it was ambiguous.

Negation, as I've mentioned in previous posts, is usually ambiguous because it takes scope over different bits of the sentence it's in. Here's Chris Maslanka's explanation of the two meanings:

Incidentally, there's a long bit in Alice Through The Looking Glass (or the other one) where a messenger pouts that 'nobody walks faster than I do' and the king says 'he can't, or he'd be here already'. Lewis Carroll was keen on logic and semantics jokes.

After some back and forth with my colleague (& friend) Christina, we think we've translated the two meanings into what looks like gibberish to non-linguists, but is actually a formal representation of the meaning. The notation explains how the bits of the sentence interact to give two different meanings from the same set of words in the same order. I've translated them underneath into increasingly more idiomatic English.

The meaning Theresa means, presumably, is this:

∀x∀y.[NO.DEAL(x) & BAD.DEAL(y) -> x > y]

(Roughly,

"For all x and for all y, if x is no deal and y is a bad deal, then x is better than y"
or "If x is no deal and y is a bad deal, then x is better than y"
or "Having no deal at all is better than having a bad deal".)

Whereas the meaning that's much more salient to me, and which made the sentence seem quite bizarre, is this one:

 ~∃x.[DEAL(x) & ∃y.[BAD.DEAL(y) & x > y] ]

(Roughly,

"There is no x such that x is a deal and there is some y such that y is a bad deal and x is better than y"
or "There is no deal which is better than a bad deal"
or "A bad deal is the best deal".)

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that this particular type of negation scope ambiguity is regional - it seems less obvious to US speakers (see this post and the comments). But that's a purely anecdotal observation so do let me know if you have anecdata to add to that.

Full-priced tickets only available on trains

From next Monday, you can't buy discounted tickets once you're on board Southeastern trains, only the full-price ones. This, while a pity, as it was handy to be able just to hop on and buy one on the train, is only what all the companies do, so I suppose it was inevitable. But I'm sure you're eagerly awaiting the linguistic angle, and here it is, with the caveat that I've now stepped WAY outside my comfort zone and may have got this very wrong.

The announcement on the train went like this:

From Monday 20th of February, you will only be able to buy full-price tickets on board our trains. 

Fair enough. That says what they mean. Except it didn't! It said quite another thing, because they got the intonation totally wrong!

Sentences have intonation contours and prosodic units. It's where you put the stress and what bit of the sentence you treat as a phrase. Prosodic units line up with syntactic/semantic units, so the meaning is nice and easy to understand (I note that Wikipedia says they don't, though the examples there do, so I'm not sure what I'm missing).

I'm now going to try to convey the intonation with the use of bold text. The emboldened bits are meant to be given stress, and the bracketed bits are treated as a prosodic unit (the second one actually is a case where the prosodic unit doesn't match up with syntactic units):

You will only be able [to buy full-price tickets] on board our trains.
You will only be able to buy [full-price tickets on board our trains]. 

Try saying them out loud. In the first one, the meaning is that the only kind of ticket you can buy is full priced. Correct. In the second one, though, the meaning is that the only place you can buy full-priced tickets is on the trains, not anywhere else. False! You can buy them at the station or online too! And it's the second one that was in the announcement on the trains. If I were more of a pedant I might test them on this principle. But I'm not.

I'm sure I've got all the technical stuff wrong here, but I tried the two intonations out on my friend Stuart and he had the same interpretation as me, so the point is right, at least.

Was I good?

One of the pubs I go to in Margate has these awful seaside postcard illustrations on the walls of the toilet. These are pretty tame, usually, though some of them make reasonably explicit references. They usually rely on double entendre of some kind for the joke. Here's one where the joke relies on the way that the meaning of adjectives changes in different contexts:

Good is a particularly fuzzy word. What does it mean? All we can really say is that it has some positive meaning (and even 'positive' is a bit vague). The rest, nearly all of the meaning, has to come from context. This is known as being 'underdetermined'.

Doctor Who uses this to good effect in one episode: the Doctor (played by Peter Capaldi, I think, or maybe it was Matt Smith - one of the modern ones, anyway) says early on that there is no such thing as a good dalek, meaning that they're inherently evil beings. At the end of the episode - spoiler alert - the daleks call the Doctor himself a 'good dalek', meaning that he is good at being a dalek. The difference lies in the application of the word good to some aspect of dalekhood, in which case it means 'unfeeling', 'ruthless', efficient', or whatever, or in treating it separately and giving it whatever meaning the word has when applied to animate entities more generally ('kind', 'well-meaning', etc).

The woman in the cartoon says I promised Mummy I'd be good... was I?. It's the same thing as the Doctor Who example, more or less, but good means different things again. What she promised her Mummy was that she'd be good in the sense of the term as applied to the behaviour of daughters on a night out: polite, sober, and most importantly, chaste. What she's asking the man is whether she was good at a particular activity: in other words, did she perform well at it? This conflicts with the crucial parts of how she promised her Mummy she'd behave, but it doesn't mean that good has conflicting meanings. It just has almost no meaning without a knowledge of what it applies to.

How you interpreted the title of this post out of context might give you some idea of how filthy a mind you have.

Don't you not want some points?

On this week's episode of QI (available on the iPlayer for a few days if you're in the UK), Sandi Toksvig asked Alan Davies the following question:

Don't you not want some points or not? 

The point of QI, if you don't know, is that the questions are all kind of a trick. In this case, the trick is that it's hard to work out what the right answer is, and there's a penalty for a wrong answer.

This question brought about some linguistic chat, all of which ended with Sandi saying that only 'arbitrary pedants' would worry about double negatives, and explaining why the stigma came about in the first place. Gyles Brandreth also took the opportunity to tell us at length how English has half a million words and German only a hundred thousand (I guess it depends how you count them).

But the point here is the difficulty of the piled-up negatives, of course. Let's dispense with the easy one first: the or not at the end caused both Alan Davies and Victoria Coren to claim that it wasn't a yes or no question: it's two questions. WELL. This is technically true, it is two questions, but as I discuss at length in my thesis (and as is generally known; it's not my idea), this is actually one question because yes/no questions are a choice between two alternatives. So that's OK. We can in theory give a yes or no answer to this question. So which is the right one, assuming that you do want points?

WE DON'T KNOW! That's one of the cool things about this question and it's not even because of the double negative! It's because negative questions are inherently ambiguous! Look:

Don't you want some points?
No (I don't want some points)
Yes (??)

We don't always really have a clear sense of what 'yes' means in answer to a negative question. Probably, you feel that it means yes, I do want some points in this case. I do. But it's got to have the right intonation otherwise it doesn't mean anything much, though it can't mean that I don't want points, I don't think.

Do you not want some points?
No (I don't want some points)
Yes (??)

Again, it's not clear, without a sort of contradictory emphasis, what this means. There's tons of research on this which you can read if you're interested. Kramer & Rawlins use examples like the following to show that in fact, the interpretation is likely to be negative in such questions:

Is Alfonso not coming to the party?
No (=he isn't coming)
Yes (=he isn't coming)

So we've already got an issue with this kind of negation. Adding in a double negation, as in the original question, just adds parsing difficulty to the already ambiguous question. It is a real double negative, so it cancels out, as in I don't not like him... or is it double negation as found in many varieties, where one reinforces the other, as in I didn't do nothing or Didn't you not? We just don't know.

What, you thought I was going to answer this one? Nope. Unsolved problem, my friends.

(The 'correct' answer was yes, which is actually not what I'd have gone for: I'd have said it meant something like Isn't it the case that you don't want some points, or is that wrong?, so I'd have answered No, that's not the case. But maybe they went with yes as in Yes, that's true, it isn't the case that....)

Can you not?

I've written before about negation and the difference in meaning when it takes different scope. The other day, a friend in the pub said this, directed at a football 'pundit' on telly:

You're 60, can you not wear a suit and trainers? 

By this, he meant

Because you're 60 [and should know better/are too old], please don't wear a suit and trainers. 

It can have another meaning, though, and one that I think is much more accessible, or perhaps only available, in certain dialects:

You're 60, so is it impossible for you to wear a suit and trainers?

For me, both those readings work fine for the sentence and the intonation is pretty much the same in each case. The difference is once again a matter of how 'high' the negation is in the sentence:

Is it the case that
you can
[not wear a suit and trainers]?

vs

Is it not the case that
you can
[wear a suit and trainers]?

For more on this, a very easy to read article (old now, but still good) is Bob Ladd's 1981 paper.

The ones I could see

I'm reading The City and the City by China Miéville at the moment. I'm only about 60 pages in but I already really like it, partly for its clever ideas which are currently just emerging, but also for its languages. Miéville has a linguistics background and this shows in the plot of some books (Embassytown, for example) and the writing in all of them: he's creative and clever and does really unusual things with words. Not that you need to have a linguistics background to be able to do that, but it seems like he really knows what he's doing with language. I don't know, I know nothing about literature, so I can only waffle in an uninformed way on that point. But his sentence structure is so clever sometimes, and in this book the characters are from somewhere in central Europe, so the names are all made up but completely believable, and things like that. I think there was even some zeugma at one point and I really love zeugma. 

[Very slight spoilers follow, maybe? Not sure, I haven't read enough of it myself to know.] 

One thing that made me stop and admire it today was a clever use of could. There are parts of the city that the main character can't see. The sentence that caught my eye was describing some railway arches. He says (my bolding):

Not all of them were foreign at their bases. The ones I could see contained little shops and squats decorated in art graffiti.

At this point in the story, the reader doesn't know what the concept is here. Is it that he was able to see the arches, or that he was permitted to see them? This latter idea is what other events have hinted towards, but so far it could be either. 

This is because can and could (present and past tense respectively) can mean two different things. The first meaning, where he was able to see the arches, illustrates logical modality, or the possibility of him seeing them. The second, where he was permitted to see them, illustrates deontic modality: what is possible within the rules. This is an absolutely lovely use of this ambiguity which allows him not to reveal too much of this conceptual device this early in the story. I'm pretty sure he knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote it that way. 

This ambiguity is also, by the way, why you get smartarses responding to a question like 'Can I go to the toilet?' with 'I don't know, can you?'. 

Building sites is dangerous

There is a building site at my work (show me a university that doesn't have at least one building site on campus at any given moment) and it has this sign:

'Building sites are dangerous; Keep out'

Every time I walk past it (a couple of times a day at least) I think to myself 'Building sites is dangerous'. This is a sort of in-joke that me and approximately one other person in the world will find amusing, and he probably doesn't read my blog, so I'm going to explain it to you all instead and tell you about the moment I decided to become a syntactician.

It wasn't exactly the moment I decided to do it as my job, but it was the point of no return. It was in my very first syntax lecture, in September 2004, when aged 21 I had decided to go to university to do Linguistics. Why linguistics? Not sure. I don't think I was specially bothered about English Language in 6th form, but I did do three languages and enjoyed the grammar. (That's why I signed up to do Latin as my optional outside subject, and it's why I'm currently learning German.)

Anyway, back to the syntax lecture. The lecturer was Noel Burton-Roberts. I can't remember what else he said in that lecture (I've got the notes so I can look it up) but he used an example to show that syntax is a thing, and that words aren't just strung together in order.

Flying planes are dangerous (=planes that are flying are dangerous)
Flying planes is dangerous (=the activity, flying planes, is dangerous)

The verb has to agree in number (be singular or plural) with the subject of the sentence, and specifically the head of the subject. The subject of that sentence is flying planes both times, but in the first instance flying describes planes, so planes (plural) is the head and we have are, while in the second example it's flying that's the head, and planes could be left out (flying is dangerous), and flying is singular so we get is.

Such as simple example, but upon seeing this something just clicked in my mind. It's a cliché, but it's true. It was as if I had suddenly discovered this whole secret world, where the language we speak every day had proper structure and rules and could be explained. Everything from that point on just made sense.

I suppose that makes me a bit weird. But it's why I'm a syntactician now.

Why did the dinosaurs die out?

The other day (cannot now remember where but I suspect QI), I heard someone ask this question:

Why did the man who invented the weather forecast think that the dinosaurs died out?

My suggested answer was:

Because they did?

In fact, the answer was supposed to be:

Because they were too big to fit on the ark. 

You see the problem here. I have (some might suspect wilfully) misinterpreted the scope of why. I understood it as referring to the verb phrase think that the dinosaurs died out, and so asking why he thought that. It in fact referred to the verb phrase died out, and was asking why they died. The why-question could be asking about either of these things, as in both cases the corresponding because-clause would be at the end of the sentence:

The man who invented the weather forecast thought that the dinosaurs died out because they did (in fact) die out.
The man who invented the weather forecast thought that the dinosaurs died out because they were too big for the ark. 

The difference in meaning comes about because of a difference in the syntactic structure. We can't see or hear this, but it's there. I've colour-coded the clauses here to make it clearer what belongs to what:

[The man who invented the weather forecast thought [that the dinosaurs died out] because they did (in fact) die out]

[The man who invented the weather forecast thought [that the dinosaurs died out because they were too big for the ark]]

In both cases, the man who invented the weather forecast thought something. In the first example, he thought that the dinosaurs died out, and we also get to hear the reason why he thought that. In the second example, he thought that the dinosaurs died out because they were too big for the ark (and all of that is one single thought).

I think that I was led towards the interpretation I chose because of the presence of that, which is optional here. When it's present, because it doesn't have to be there, my little brain wanted to assign it some job, and that job was to kind of turn the clause it introduced into a finished-off unit (that is a declarative clause introducer). So my little brain said 'it is a fact that the dinosaurs died out. Why did this man think that this thing happened?'.

Overly specific signage

It's been a while since I mocked some signage. Let's do that today. Sorry about the poor quality photo:

'Please do not store items under these stairs for fire safety reasons'

You can store items under these stairs for other reasons though.

The location of 'not'

I overheard an interesting conversation on the train this weekend. One man was telling his friend about 'the most racist moment ever on live television'. It went approximately like this (and I don't know what TV programme it was - he'd seen it on the internet):

On a television programme, some people had to choose who to give the money to out of a couple of women, a black man, and someone else of some ethnic minority (the speaker thought 'maybe Hawaiian'). Someone on this programme apparently said of the black man,

'I don't think he should get the money because he's black'. 

He apparently followed up with some justification about it giving ethnic minorities a bad name, 'always playing the victim'.

This is not great however you spin it, but there are actually (at least) two interpretations, and one is way worse than the other. It has to do with what's called the 'scope' of the negation. In other words, what is it that's negated here?

One meaning is something like this: 'I think that this man should not get the money, and the reason I think that is because he is black and I'm against black people being given money'. On this interpretation, the speaker simply doesn't want the black man to get the money.

The other is something like 'I don't think that this man should get the money simply by virtue of his being black, because racial discrimination is a bad thing even if it's positive discrimination'. On this interpretation, the speaker may decide that the black man should get the money for some other reason, but doesn't think his race should be the criterion for making the decision.

We can see what's going on if I write out those paraphrases using some formal phrasing 'it is the case that', which means something like 'the following is true', and put each part of the sentence on a new line:

It is the case that
I think that
he should not get it because he is black

It is not the case that
I think that
he should get it because he is black

You can see that the not, which I emboldened in the examples above, is in a different place in each one.

In the first one, the negation is part of the 'lowest' level of embedding and only negates the 'getting the money' situation: he should not get the money because he is black. The higher levels tell us that the speaker does indeed believe this (negated) proposition.

In the second one, the negation is 'higher up' - it negates the whole situation of the speaker thinking something. The lowest level is the proposition that he should get the money because he is black, and the not tells us that speaker does not believe this.

Maybe it's hard to follow this if you just read it through, but if you think about the two paraphrases you'll probably find you have these same two interpretations. I leave you with a joke that requires a similar scope-of-negation ambiguity:

A newly-wed couple are leaving for their honeymoon. The man says to the woman, 'Would you have married me if my father hadn't left me a fortune?', to which she replies, 'Darling, I'd have married you no matter who had left you a fortune'. 

Two wrongs don't make a right

I saw this cartoon tweeted recently:

Double negatives in court via @CrimeLineLaw pic.twitter.com/b8xSrlny2V
— Roddy Mansfield (@roddymansfield) January 24, 2015

It's the old chestnut that a double negative actually makes a positive, and if you say the non-standard phrase 'I didn't do nothing' you are in fact saying that you did something. It's used to try to shame or humiliate people into using the Standard English single negative: 'I didn't do anything'.

This is quite silly. Generally, linguists point out that lots and lots of other languages have double negatives as the standard form, and so it's ridiculous to suggest that it's somehow illogical. Italian is yer go-to example here, and for some reason it's always about telephoning: 'non ha telefonato nessuno', or 's/he hasn't telephoned nobody'. Jack Chambers has pointed out that as most non-standard English varieties have double negation (more technically called negative concord), perhaps it is in some way more 'natural' than the artificial standard of single negation that is imposed on us.

But even more than this, it's not even true that a double negative will be interpreted as a positive. It can be, if you give it the right intonation. But it's a very specific intonation with a pretty strong emphasis on the 'nothing'. Without that, there's simply no way that it can possibly mean 'I did something'. Anyone at all would interpret it was meaning what it's meant to mean. They might be a pedant about it and pretend not to understand, but they definitely would. And even in a criminal trial, where testimony has to be unambiguous, I don't think that they would try to hang the crime on the guy for using this syntactic construction.

Dogs shall be carried

I was in London recently, and while I was at King's Cross station I noticed that the escalators, which bear the usual safety warnings, now say among other things that 'Dogs shall be carried'. Maybe they've always said that, but it's more common to see the warning as 'Dogs must be carried'. This has given rise to the well-known joke, also seen in the recent Paddington film, in which a child is late for school and when asked why, he says that the sign said dogs must be carried and it took him ages to find a dog.

So my question is, does using 'shall' instead of 'must' remove this comedy interpretation or improve the sign in any way? No one really uses 'shall' any more, but it indicates future and apparently has some sense of being a command. 'Must' also expresses a command ('deontic necessity' - it can also express 'epistemic necessity' as in 'It must be cold outside'). Does 'shall' seem politer? Does a warning sign need to be polite? Unknown. Some more good suggestions here.

(photo credit not known; it's all over the internet)

Eric Pickles' personal taxpayer has funded a limo... oh wait

I'm aware that it's been far too long since I blogged. Life and work have both been a bit busy; I'll be blogging about our Genius of Language events soon. For now, I thought I'd share this crash blossom with you. This news story has now got a new headline, but when I saw it it looked like this:

Eric Pickles' Taxpayer Funded Limo Bill Passes Major Milestone

A crash blossom is a syntactically ambiguous headline that is either humorous or misleading or simply confusing, usually due to the telegraphic style of headlinese. In this case, it sounds like Eric Pickles has his own personal taxpayer. 

Noun phrase juxtaposition confusion

Associated Press caused a twitter hoo-ha when they mistakenly led a lot of their followers to think that there had been yet another air crash, this time involving the plane carrying the bodies of people who were killed in the recent Malaysia Airlines crash. They phrased it like this:

Breaking: Dutch military plane carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash lands in Eindhoven.

Lots of people reasonably thought that this meant that this plane had crash landed in Eindhoven. It didn't; it meant that the bodies from that crash have been taken to Eindhoven, where the plane has landed safely. You can read the Gawker article linked above for all the responses (my favourites are those who say 'well, AP style is 'crash-land' so it clearly didn't mean that').

One of the tweets, about halfway down the Gawker article, says that 'AP should have thrown some tactical commas/hyphens/apostrophes in that one'. Bear with me while I derail my linguistics blog into the realm of punctuation for today's post.

Quick survey

Under the cut I'll explain this, but before you go there, decide on the answer to these questions:

If you heard the phrase The black ladies'/lady's bicycle, so you didn't have spelling as a clue, what could it mean?
a. a black bicycle designed for women
b. a bicycle belonging to a black woman
c. both a and b
d. neither

If you heard the phrase The ladies'/lady's black bicycle, again without spelling as a clue, what could it mean?
a. a black bicycle designed for women
b. a bicycle belonging to a black woman
c. both a and b
d. neither