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.

Ne translatez pas les languages

A friend posted this photo on facebook the other day:



A number of highly intelligent people then missed the point of the joke and began to comment on how bad the translations are. I think they're pretty good imitations of the languages in question, with one big error: the 'German' looks (unmistakably) more like Dutch in the second half of the sentence.

These are not intended to be translations, of course, or rather they're deliberately not accurate. They're just meant to amuse the English-speaking audience by including funny words to compound the humour of the warning in English ('avoid pouring on crotch area'). After all, we love nothing more than when a foreign language does something in a funny way (cf. Welsh popty-ping for 'microwave' or German Handy for 'mobile phone') so it's nice to imagine that these might be for real.

Let's begin with the French. The grammar is fine, as far as I know: you'd make an imperative in French with the negative and the 2nd person plural inflection, just as it's done there. The phrase dans l'area seems OK to me, too. The vocabulary used just isn't French, that's all. The verb for 'pour' should, I think (Google Translate helped) be verser so you'd have ne versez pas. I don't know if you'd also need a pronoun in there (don't pour it) or not. And, of course, no French person ever says ooh-la-la, but it's stereotypically French and referring to ones' crotch that way goes nicely with the French reputation for romance.

Next, the 'German'. This one caused a bit more controversy in the comment thread, because it very obviously isn't German. My German is less good than my French, but I'm pretty certain the word order here is wrong as well as the vocabulary and morphology. I think you would say literally 'drop you not...' rather than 'not drop...', which is what we appear to have here: nein is German for 'no'. Then the verb is obviously just English again, with droppen instead of pourez. I think they've simply selected words that have a combination of letters that resemble the language in question (so French has a word pour, for instance, but it doesn't look very Germanic).

Next, though, I think we've got a nice case of representing an accent in words that look like (or indeed exist in) the language. So ze haut kaffe does not mean 'the hot coffee' in German (haut apparently means 'skin', for instance, and the German for 'coffee' is in fact kaffee, which they could have used instead), but it looks German-ish and sounds like someone saying the hot coffee in (some kind of representation of) a German accent. It reminds me of this a bit. Notice also that the 'German' has an overt object with article, while the French has nothing at all ('don't drop _ on the crotch area' vs 'don't drop the hot coffee on the crotch area').

Then it most definitely switches to Dutch-looking words, if we hadn't already. Dutch word order is a little bit more familiar to English speakers as well, I think, although I know even less Dutch than I do German. Anyway, here we've got a dead giveaway for Dutch: that word oont. It just has a Dutch-like feel to it, though I don't know why (double 'o'? final 't'?). And then finally the lovely phrase, ze knakkers. Again, this is definitely Germanic and in fact Google Translate does give 'knackers' as the translation of this as a German word (it gives 'frankfurter cherry' if you tell it knakkers is Dutch!).

Good work, coffee-cup-humour-producing-person!

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'. 

A tricky pronunciation problem

(from Viz)

I doubt that you would suspect this

A recent Language Log post pointed out a humorously ambiguous headline:

The joke is of course that it sounds like the kebab van drove over and duffed up the hapless teen, with the by phrase expressing the agent of the jaw-breaking incident. The intended meaning is the one in which by is a preposition, and the by phrase locates the teenager at the time of the attack (ie he was by a kebab van). Much lolz ensues.

This wasn't the only humour to be wrung from the language in the headline: commenter Bobbie made the following quip, which was immediately either genuinely or wilfully misunderstood by Victor Mair:

Bobbie is taking advantage of the fact that in English, we can say that you have broken your X (if X is a body part) and it does not mean that you did the breaking. There's a term for that which I can't remember just now. Anyway, so Bobbie says what (s)he says, implying that it is unlikely to be the case that the teenager did it himself. Victor Mair's comment was initially baffling to me, because of course American English speakers wouldn't use suspect instead - that would mean the exact opposite! Other commenters said much the same lower down the comment thread.

Some of those commenters also noted that doubt used to mean roughly what suspect means. It's sense 6d in the OED, marked as archaic, and from the examples there, you can see how the semantic shift could have happened. Just add it to the long list of English verbs whose meaning has completely reversed over time.

Lost 'lost ''lost' sign' sign' sign

A wonderful example of centre embedding from a ridiculously silly blog, via my friend Valdemar:

The image shows a lost sign, and the lost thing that it's advertising is another lost sign. And the thing that sign was advertising (before it got lost) was a lost sign... and so on. 


It's called centre embedding because, unsurprisingly, it means embedding a phrase in the centre of another one. By 'in the centre' we don't mean that it's precisely central, but rather that words from the higher-up phrase are on both sides of the embedded one. Here's an example of the more common type of embedding we find in English:

I really hate people [who don't think of others]

The bracketed part is a relative clause, which means that it tells you more about people, and it's embedded in the main clause. It's at the end, which is nice and easy to understand. We can go on for a surprisingly long time like this:

This is the farmer sowing his cornThat kept the cock that crowed in the mornThat waked the priest all shaven and shornThat married the man all tattered and tornThat kissed the maiden all forlornThat milked the cow with the crumpled hornThat tossed the dog that worried the catThat killed the rat that ate the maltThat lay in the house that Jack built!

Every line in that rhyme is a new embedded clause, but we can keep track of it all and it's not terribly remarkable. We actually do it quite a lot in normal speech. This example, which inspired Language Log's Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding, contains a whole stack of embedded clauses and other stuff but is completely understandable, and was produced in natural speech in an interview:

"When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie."

The thing with centre embedding is that it is totally grammatical (it does not break any of the rules of English (by which I mean the rules that speakers intuitively know and that cannot be broken, rather than the prescriptive rules that we all break in our everyday speech), but not acceptable (i.e. speakers don't say things like this and if asked, don't think they are good sentences at all). This is very different from most other grammatical puzzles that we (linguists) have, which are far more often of the type 'this is ungrammatical in most dialects but some speakers produce it - why?' or 'this theory predicts this to be ungrammatical but it's not, because it occurs in language X - why?'. 


It's really striking how quickly examples of centre embedding get impossible to parse (work out the grammar of). In the poster, we can of course easily understand the phrase with no embedding at all:

Lost sign

But then even just one layer of embedding, equivalent to I hate people who don't think of others, is a bit hard to work out:

Lost lost sign sign

And then when you get just one more, it's too hard:

Lost lost lost sign sign sign

The quotation marks help a bit here, but not much, and that's obviously no good in spoken language. This example is obviously designed for humour, and some are more or less easy to work out. Wikipedia (yeah, I'm being lazy today - I've got a PhD to write) cites this example of double embedding, attributing it to De Roeck et al (1982):

Isn't it true [that example-sentences [that people [that you know] produce] are more likely to be accepted]?

The double-embedded part that might cause trouble is the that people that you know produce part, but here it's not too difficult, perhaps because we're used to hearing know+verb constructions. But the Wikipedia page also says (summarising Karlsson 2007) that three is the maximum degree of embedding in written language, and even two is vanishingly rare in spoken language. It gives this example of super-tricky centre embedding, where the first one (with one level of embedding, and not centre embedding) is fine, but adding just one centre-embedded clause makes it incredibly difficult to parse:

A man [that a woman loves]

A man [that a woman [that a child knows] loves]

It means a man who is loved by a woman, who in turn is known by a child. But you try working that out while you're in full conversational flow. It's supposed to be basically just that while we're super-good at keeping track of relations and actions, we're really really bad at keeping track of a whole load of subjects without linking them to their predicates (what they did). 


Finally, this completely incomprehensible paragraph from SpecGram: 

An apparently new speech disorder a linguistics department our correspondent 
visited was affected by has appeared. Those affected our correspondent a local grad student called could hardly understand apparently still speak fluently. The cause experts the LSA sent investigate remains elusive. Frighteningly, linguists linguists linguists sent examined are highly contagious. Physicians neurologists psychologists other linguists called for help called for help called for help didn’t help either. The disorder experts reporters SpecGram sent consulted investigated apparently is a case of pathological center embedding.

Meta-linguistics

It's a funny old thing, researching language, because you've got to use your object of study to describe your object of study. You have to talk about language using language. Mostly, this is OK, because we can distinguish between metalinguistic mentions of language and actual use of language.

One thing that often happens (and this one isn't linguistics-specific) is that you find yourself using the non-technical version of a word more when you're talking about the technical term (or maybe you just notice it more). I'm researching questions, and I catch myself using question all the time: 'the question is how this can be applied to X' and so on.

We linguists have a fun extra game to play, however. We can use the very linguistic things that we are talking about in the language we use to talk about them. Sometimes this happens by accident, similarly to the above example. But sometimes, you see the opportunity to slip one in as a little in-joke for your readers who are paying attention. I read this sentence today:

The idea... is supported by the fact that only in embedded finite clauses is it possible to front an XP.*

This is a classic example of its type. It's talking about fronting XPs (moving phrases to the start of the clause) in embedded (subordinate) clauses, and in doing so, does just that itself. that only in embedded finite clauses is an embedded clause - it's the complement of fact (it tells you what the fact is). And within it, we have a fronted phrase, only in embedded clauses - it would normally be at the end:

It is posible to front an XP [only in embedded clauses].

Linguist humour. There are whole blog posts to be written about humorous example sentences, comedy names for new generalisations and the like.

*Reference: Breul, C. 2004. Focus structure in Generative Grammar: An integrated syntactic, semantic and intonational approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Implicit goodness

Consider the following exchange:

A: Morning.
B: Glad you think so.

(I heard this said on TV; perhaps on Last of the summer wine.)

There is so much pragmatic implicature in here it's outrageous. B, by saying glad you think so (with stress on you), implies that he does not agree. But what is it that he does not agree with? Morning is not something you can agree or disagree with; it's not a proposition and as such has no propositional content and no truth-value. And it can't be interpreted as meaning that 'morning is here', or 'it is morning' - that's definitely not what he's disagreeing with.

Obviously, Morning is a truncated form of the greeting Good morning. The good is understood. This kind of shortening is something we do a lot, because it's a set phrase, said often, and we know what's meant even if half of it is missing. But in itself, this is not something you can (dis)agree with either: good morning is also not a proposition.

What we really mean when we say Good morning (or Morning) is I wish a good morning to you. We are expressing our hope that our interlocutor has a pleasant day. But again, you can't disagree with what someone hopes - it really isn't your place to do so.

B, in the exchange above, has correctly inserted the implicit Good, but then wilfully misinterpreted Good morning to be a shortened form of It is a good morning. That is a proposition, and can certainly have a truth value - it is either true that it is a good morning, or it is false.

If English still had a case system, incidentally, this kind of deliberate reanalysis couldn't happen. The phrase Good morning would be accusative in the speaker's intended interpretation, but nominative in the hearer's reanalysis. So presumably those languages that do have overt case lack this kind of hilarious repartee.

I've got a couple of questions

To me, a couple means two. If I say I'd like a couple of poppadoms, I want two poppadoms. It might sometimes mean about two, though it might not be exactly two - I might for instance say that I met a friend a couple of days ago, and not be unduly put out if I realised that it was actually three days ago. And equally, if I ask for a couple of chips and you give me three or four, I'm not going to complain or pull you up on your failure to carry out my request. If, however, you gave me eight chips, then I'd have to stop you and tell you I only wanted a couple. It means two, though there's some leeway for a bit more (not less though - a couple can never ever mean one).

But it doesn't necessarily mean two for everyone. As far as I can see, there are some people for whom it always means two, and exactly two, and those people are to be found all over the internet referring to their outdated rule books and invoking etymological arguments. You can ignore those people. There are also people who, similar to me, perhaps, mean around two but maybe three or four. And there are some people who mean three, or four, or a few, or more than two anyway.

I had an encounter when I told someone of this persuasion (with an Irish dialect) that I had a couple of questions. I asked precisely two questions, and after she answered them she waited patiently for the next. When I said that was it, she said Oh, you meant two when you said a couple. For her, a couple definitely meant more than two.

On the TV programme Two and a half men (I like it, OK? It makes me laugh) Charlie Sheen responds to another character saying I only had a couple of [something - drinks, maybe?] with the line,

Jack the Ripper only killed a couple of prostitutes.

Jack the Ripper killed at least five women (and they were still women, by the way, despite being prostitutes). I wonder if Charlie sees a couple as always being more than two, or 2-5, or if he was deliberately expanding the meaning of the phrase for the sake of the joke.

Phonetics vs phonology

From Speculative Grammarian, the difference between phonetics and phonology:

Very bad Latin joke

A gentleman, having ordered a meal at a fine London restaurant, decided that he would like some wine to accompany his meal. So he summoned the wine steward and asked for a bottle of hock.


"Hock, sir?" asked the steward.


"Yes, hock, man. You know: hic, hunc, huius, huic, hoc."


"Hmm ... very good, sir."


The food duly arrived, but without the wine. This perturbed the gentleman slightly, as he was accustomed to a higher standard of service. He began to dine, and at the next opportunity he beckoned the steward again.


"Didn't I order a bottle of hock?"


"Yes, sir, you did - but then you declined it."


(From this extremely comprehensive and knowledgeable page of Latin phrases.)