T-Rex on the poverty of the stimulus

I was a bit slow to blog this one, which came out in August.

In the meantime, someone I pointed it out to says that it’s great apart from “They will stone-cold deduce rules of grammar FROM OBSERVATION ALONE”, and suggests that the author didn't finish reading the chapter on the poverty of the stimulus. The problem, of course, with what T-Rex says is that the whole point of the poverty of the stimulus argument is to establish that infants do not work out grammar from observation alone: rather, there is some innate knowledge of language.

But I’m inclined to give T-Rex (or at least his creator Ryan North, who has a master’s in computational linguistics and a dog called ‘Chompsky’) the benefit of the doubt. I think either North or T-Rex is being somewhat ironic. He (whichever one of them it is) doesn't really think that babies independently invent the idea of language or deduce the rules of grammar from observation alone, just that it might seem as though they do – to T-Rex, or to someone he is satirising.

Utahraptor is wrong, though, in saying that babies crawl off cliffs given half a chance. In fact we have an innate drop-detector which is available very early in infancy. Babies may fail to distinguish between small and large drops (pdf) though.

As likely as any other theory…

From Bizarro comics via Language Log.

“I have no idea why you’re talking”

A Dilbert strip from last week.

The day T-Rex took everything literally

From a few days ago at Dinosaur Comics.

xkcd on the usefulness of linguistics

Words uttered underdetermine speech act performed: comic

Another xkcd about pragmatics.

Speech acts, modals and the first-person perspective

In today's XKCD:

Pre-utterance utterance interpretation and the meaning of a ringing phone

In yesterday's Dilbert:

This is an interesting case for Griceans and relevance theorists. Normally a ringing phone means (naturally and non-naturally?) that someone wants to speak to you, and Dilbert assumes that that is so here. I assume that Alice and Wally intend him to think this, and they don't intend to start a conversation: they were hoping that what did in fact happen, would happen. That is, their intention was to get Dilbert worrying about who could be calling him, with what problem etc. (Doing ‘pre-utterance utterance interpretation’, that is.)

According to Grice the following two intentions are essential to speaker meaning (there's also a third that is not relevant here):

i) S intends S’s utterance of x to produce a certain response r in a certain audience, A.

ii) S intends A to recognise S’s intention (i).


This is one of the examples where the producer of the stimulus has the first intention but does not want that intention to be recognised, i.e. does not have the second intention. All of which is a fairly long-winded (but illuminating) way of saying that what we have here is manipulation, not communication – and a vindication of Grice's second condition.