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.

‘My PR people have been drafting ways to say this’

Nick Clegg's apology video with honest subtitles (via The Guardian).

Why? Well, I think it's funny, but also it's interesting to consider what the criterion is for the substituted phrases. Sometimes the subtitles seem to represent Clegg's thoughts, and sometimes just the truth which the phrase uttered is supposed to obscure.

The best substitutions? Probably the ones that the Guardian article pointed out:

"There's no easy way to say this" -> "My PR people have been drafting ways to say this" 

"That was a mistake" -> "That was a lie".

An example of ironic use of a single word:

I married, let me see, about a month after you left France, and a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris. (from Nabokov's That in Aleppo Once...)

The writer obviously can't be the one who thinks the Germans are gentle, so the effect is that the word is used attributively and with a dissociative attitude – it conjures up the possibility of someone who would, absurdly, see the Germans as gentle - though neither of these facts is marked in the form of words used. Tacitly attributive, tacitly dissociative use is the analysis of verbal irony postulated in Sperber and Wilson's work on the subject.

That in Aleppo Once... deserves a thorough pragmatic analysis. Unusually, it's both not at all clear who the (fictional) writer is and clear that who the narrator is matters very much to one's understanding. At first it seems to be a letter written by the protagonist to a Russian emigré writer, 'V.', but there are indications that V. has taken the letter and turned it into the short story that one is reading. The title is one of them, since the letter-writer tells V. not to use it: "It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V., you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you took that for a title. "

So it's not just that the narrator is unreliable; it's not clear who he is, and whether anything in the story happened at all. And that's without going into the obvious similarities - and differences - between V. and the non-fictional author, Nabokov. (See here for some interesting comments on the story.)

Pragmatics wins at High Court

Paul Chambers' conviction for sending a message "of a menacing character" has been overturned on appeal.

Rightly so – because it was always obvious (to everyone except, amazingly, the original judge in the case, and the judge at the first appeal) that his tweet: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" – was a joke.

It's a kind of irony and/or parody: his message was something like: It's crazy to say "You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Various comedians were called as experts in the case, but I'm not aware that they asked any linguists to comment, which is a bit of a shame. On the other hand, here pragmatics ≈ common sense, in that the intuition is clear enough to everyone. (Except the first two judges, as I said, and they get slapped down with some force in the new judgement: "We have concluded that, on an objective assessment, the decision of the crown court that this 'tweet' constituted or included a message of a menacing character was not open to it.)

Guardian story here.