‘I will not vote (although I will)’

It’s a bit like finding a butterfly...

I spent quite a bit of the afternoon discussing attributive use (in some sentences about reasons – a subject for a future blog post) and then relaxed with a cup of tea and Nate Silver's psephology blog. And in the comments, a beautiful attested example of attributive use.

The bit in question is the second part of the second sentence (after the colon). What is especially nice is that  in the added material in parentheses he gives his own opinion, which given that it is the exact opposite of the one before the brackets, makes it quite clear that in the bit before the brackets he is expressing a view that he attributes to Gallup’s model.

It seems incredible how Gallup manages to consider unlikely voters people who will in effect vote. I took Gallup's likely voter model and tested it upon myself: I will not vote (although I will)
1. Thought given to election (quite a lot, some) some 0
2. Know where people in neighborhood go to vote not all 0
3. Voted in election precinct before (yes) yes 1
4. How often vote (always, nearly always) nearly 0
5. Plan to vote in 2012 election (yes) yes 1
6.Likelihood of voting on a 10-point scale (7-10) 9 1
6. Voted in last presidential election (yes) yes 1
total =4; < 5; unlikely voter.

(From a comment by ‘Pete58’ on this post on a blog about polls in the US election at The New York Times. I’ve corrected a typo: motel → model.)

This is either a kind of free indirect quotation, or at least an instance of a larger category that includes free indirect quotation. That is, it’s like the way that the second sentence is used in the last example below:

a. Mary said to me, “You are neglecting your job.”
b. Mary told me I was not working hard enough.
c. According to Mary, I am “neglecting” my work.
d. Mary was pretty rude to me. I am neglecting my job!

(From p. 413 of Wilson, D. (2000). Metarepresentations in linguistic communication. In D. Sperber (Ed.), Metarepresentations: a multidisciplinary perspective. (pp. 411–448). Oxford: Oxford University Press.)

Looks like I might be one of those LINGUIST linguists after all

... because I may have come up with a property of contrastive reduplication that isn't already in the literature.

Here's an example of contrastive reduplication:

I don't drink that herbal stuff. Haven't you got some TEA tea?
(where the caps on TEA indicate stress.)

There are several labels for this in the literature: contrastive reduplication (Ghomeshi et al. 2004), lexical cloning (Horn 2006) and identical constituent compounding (Hohenhaus 2004).

I noticed the phenomenon in my own speech a few years ago (I found myself saying 'TEA tea') – but hadn't thought about it much until I saw an excellent talk by Ewa Waƚaszewska last week at the relevance theory conference in Poland. (The references to the literature are from her handout.)

The conveyed meaning is a stereotypical or prototypical category based on the lexical category: e.g. 'tea' covers many different types of infusion, but 'TEA tea' (as used above) only covers infusions made with material from the tea plant (camellia sinensis). More about meaning in a minute.

Contrastive reduplication (CR) is not just repetition of a word. As Ewa pointed out, the prosody is different (more equal stress, and a pause before the repetition of the word) in e.g.:

Give me something to drink, but not coffee. I want tea, tea!

Also what is conveyed is quite different. There is no necessary narrowing of the category here, just emphasis, and this is typical for repetition.

It occurred to me that another test is what happens with plurals. My intuition is that this is good:

Those people wondering around Warsaw are actually academics here for a conference. They aren't TOURIST tourists.

And this is bad:

Those people wondering around Warsaw are actually academics here for a conference. They aren't *TOURISTS tourists.

Whereas for the first word in repetition the plural is correct and the singular is impossible:

Warsaw is so busy these days. The centre is crawling with tourists, tourists!

Warsaw is so busy these days. The centre is crawling with *tourist, tourists! 

I assumed that this would be old hat, but Ewa and Diane Blakemore (who has a student currently working on CR) both said that they didn't think it was in the literature. So perhaps I am a LINGUIST linguist. (Despite working almost exclusively on stuff outside the language faculty, I mean.)

On the meaning of CR: I said above that it induces prototypical 'narrowing'*. If I understood (and remember) Ewa's talk properly, though, she was presenting (not necessarily endorsing) an argument that this is not right because the narrowings can be to different, sometimes largely disjoint, categories. e.g. LINGUIST linguist might on one occasion be narrowed to linguist concerned with language proper (rather than, say pragmatics), on another to linguist in the generativist school, and on another, perhaps to person who knows and can use many languages (i.e. polyglot).

I'm not sure if Ewa endorses this argument, but it seems to miss the mark. We know that prototypes are context-sensitive (since the work of the psychologist Laurence Barsalou). But then the fact that CR can narrow to different categories is to be expected, just as long as the result is always communicated to be prototypical. And as far as I can see, it is. TEA tea can be used as above, or it can be used as I found myself using it, to mean (roughly) British-style blended 'breakfast' tea, crucially served with milk (i.e. prototypical tea for the average Brit).

CR means something like this: starting from the lexical category, find a more specific category, which the speaker is presenting as prototypical.

Anyway, I'm not claiming that this analysis of the (procedural) meaning of CR is novel. It may be that something along these lines is what Ewa had in mind.

---
*The scare quotes on 'narrowing' are because I think that in ad hoc concept formation the correct formulation is to talk about clusters, not extensions.
See this post and our paper on the subject: Allott, N. & Textor, M. (2012). Lexical pragmatic adjustment and ad hoc concepts. International Review of Pragmatics, 4(2), 185–208
(I've edited this note to link to the new post and the paper now that the paper is out).

Clegg's unusual speech act (follow-up)

Several people have pointed out that Clegg's apology is not for breaking his promise, but for making it in the first place. Rather an unusual speech act. Julia Hartley-Brewer's comparison seems apt:

Nick Clegg's apology for breaking tuition fees pledge is like a husband saying "sorry for my affair, next time I won't vow to be faithful"

And.. no more UK politics here for some time, I promise.

‘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".

Linguistic underdeterminacy gags

From the 'clippings' (i.e. attested examples) sent in to last week's News Quiz:

Heard on Radio Newcastle:

In the news at six: the queen visits the north-east as part of her jubilee tour and road deaths increase for the first time since 2009.

Seen on a poster:

Would customers please note that from Jan. 1st 2011 the following left-luggage charges will apply:
£5: large suitcase or rucksack
£4: medium case or holdall
£3: senior citizens

The humour obviously in both cases due to a kind of pragmatic garden-pathing which makes an absurd (unintended) interpretation come to mind before the right one.

There's quite a literature on the enrichment of 'and' to 'and as a result of that' (or in other cases 'and after that', or 'and during that time') much of it summarized and discussed in ch 3 of Robyn Carston's 2002 book Thoughts and Utterances. Clearly the meaning of the word 'and' falls well short of fixing (i.e. underdetermines) what it may be used to convey on a particular occasion. (The scholarly debate hasn't been about that, but about i) whether 'and' is linguistically ambiguous; and ii) whether the different readings affect the proposition expressed by the speaker or just what the speaker implies.)

I can't think of any discussion of cases like the second one, but it's clearly another example where the form of words used leaves the hearer with quite a lot of working out to do, and – more interesting to me: it's an example of another kind of working out that needs to be done.

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.)

“a parody parodying a parody”

... is an accurate summary of the following post by someone pretending to be Richie Benaud on Twitter: “These parody accounts are a nuisance and damaging the game I love. RB.”

The post title is a quotation from an article about the sporadically amusing, and now defunct, fake Kevin Pietersen Twitter account. There seems to be a lot of this sort of parody about, some of it really well-crafted.

Rhetorical questions to which the answer is 'No!' (#1)

Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

Quoted in Adam Roberts' review of The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. His diagnosis of overwriting seems accurate to me. We know it when we see it; but what is it?

The day T-Rex took everything literally

From a few days ago at Dinosaur Comics.

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.

The significance of dot dot dot

Young people have difficulty understanding the "coyly placed line of white space," according to (great sf author) Samuel Delaney. Michael Swanwick (also a writer of outstanding sf) quotes/summarises:

Today, I watch seminar rooms of graduate students misread both Bester and Conrad because they no longer have to wonder about the possibility of such illegal elements occurring in the story and the compensating possibility of suggestion as a writerly strategy for representing both sex and violence. In Tiger! Tiger! the demonic antihero, Gully Foyle, invades Robin's exploded apartment and stalks across her living room to where she cowers away from him on the couch. There is a line of white space . . .

Foyle, of course, rapes Robin. But many of Chip's students simply can't see this. Nor, in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which the death of the African woman that Kurz has been sleeping with, occurs in another line of white space, can half the students understand that when Kurz cries, "The horror! The horror!," he is thinking of her death.

And, further down the page, he concludes:
"If he raped her, why didn't the writer say so?" "If they shot her, why didn't Conrad show her fall dead?" my graduate students ask.

The answer, of course: because they couldn't, and their audience knew they couldn't, so the author could safely assume that the reader would infer what was unsaid.
Delany continues:

It makes me wonder what other techniques for conveying the unspoken and the unspeakable we have forgotten how to read over four or five thousand years of "literacy."

As Swanwick says, that final sentence is "a speculation that opens vistas." He says, "Ever since, I've been thinking about the Bible and Gilgamesh and most especially the works of Homer and what I'm not seeing when I read them."
I wonder, though. It's not that a blank space here is an arbitrary convention. If you guess that something is missing then you can guess that it was unwritable for some reason. So it's not a rule that only makes sense once you learn it: it follows from some simple assumptions about communication and society. Delaney's students are halfway there when they ask the question: Why didn't he write it, if he meant it?
Similarly, one can guess why Victorian translations into English of books in various foreign languages sometimes switch into Latin, mid-sentence, when describing sex.
Of course we might be missing out on a lot of what, say, Homer assumed we would take as read because, firstly, he(/they) might have found things unsayable that we can't now guess, and secondly, he might have used some more arbitrary conventions that were known to his listeners/readers but which we can't work out from first principles.
One more or less arbitrary convention that I never understood the need for is the (19th c?) habit of shortening proper names to initials: Took the landau to T., where I met S., P. and X. and we discussed A.'s betrothal to Z. But it earns its keep in retrospect just by making this Woody Allen gag possible:

Should I marry W.? Not if she won't tell me the other letters in her name.

xkcd on the usefulness of linguistics

New list for pragmatics in Norway

nor-prag:

A list for

a) brief announcements of forthcoming events/activities/publications
relating to pragmatics in Norway, or otherwise likely to interest many
members of the list, and

b) substantive comments/queries/discussions focusing mainly on pragmatics,
particularly relating to research being carried out in Norway, or to the use of
languages spoken in Norway.


(Set up with Kaja Borthen of NTNU, Trondheim, where they have quite a few people working on pragmatics, due to a great extent I think to the efforts of Thorstein Fretheim, who is emeritus there now.)

More information and sign-up form.

The cooperative listener?

In a comment on this post on Language Log, Spell Me Jeff wrote:

I've been doing some admittedly shallow searching on topics like Grice and cooperative principle, and all I'm finding focuses on the role of the speaker. Surely there is work describing a "cooperative listener"?

I think that there are several areas of research that may be relevant, including work on:

1. what expectations hearers have,
2. whether the Cooperative Principle is real/operative,
3. charity in interpretation (perhaps the hearer-side counterpart of cooperation), and
4. feedback that hearers provide to the speaker (also a candidate for being the hearer-side counterpart of cooperation).

There has been a lot of work on what expectations hearers have (and what they are justified in having). For example neo-Griceans such as Larry Horn and Stephen Levinson try to boil Grice's maxims down to two or three. According to Levinson, each of them can be expressed as a guideline for the speaker and a rule of thumb for the hearer.
e.g. Speaker side: Say as much as you can.
Hearer side: What isn't said, isn't. (Levinson 2000, p. 31)

A classic paper on hearer expectations (and speaker maxims) is Wilson and Sperber 2002, which argues that there is no maxim of truthfulness and, correspondingly, hearers do not expect speakers to say only things that are literally true:

"hearers expect to be provided with true information. But there is an infinite supply of true information which is not worth attending to. Actual expectations are of relevant information, which (because it is information) is also true. However, we have argued that there just is no expectation that the true information communicated by an utterance should be literally or conventionally expressed..." (pp. 627-8)

On the Cooperative Principle more specifically, a number of theorists have argued that talk-exchanges need not be cooperative, and that the fundamental explanation for speakers tailoring their utterances to their audience is simply that they want to be understood (Kasher 1976, Sperber and Wilson 1986, inter alia; but see Grice's reply to some of these criticisms: 1989, around p. 369). If this is right then hearers can't generally expect cooperation, but they can expect that utterances will have been sufficiently tailored for them to be understandable and worth processing. Relevance theory can be seen as an attempt to spell out what this amounts to, and how it could be enough for communication to work:

The goal of inferential pragmatics is to explain how the hearer infers the speaker’s meaning on the basis of the evidence provided. The relevance-theoretic account is based on another of Grice’s central claims: that utterances automatically create expectations which guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning. Grice described these expectations in terms of a Co-operative Principle and maxims of Quality (truthfulness), Quantity (informativeness), Relation (relevance) and Manner (clarity) which speakers are expected to observe (Grice 1961; 1989: 368-72): the interpretation a rational hearer should choose is the one that best satisfies those expectations. Relevance theorists share Grice’s intuition that utterances raise expectations of relevance, but question several other aspects of his account, including the need for a Co-operative Principle and maxims, … The central claim of relevance theory is that the expectations of relevance raised by an utterance are precise enough, and predictable enough, to guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning. (Wilson and Sperber, 2004, p. 607)

An interesting question is what the hearer counterpart of cooperation is. It may be charitable interpretation, as perhaps manifested in interpretations of misspeakings, such as taking someone who says 'I was feeding the penguins in the park' to have been expressing the proposition (or trying to) that she was feeding the pigeons.

There is a huge literature on the 'principle of charity' in the philosophy of language, most famously in the work of Quine and Davidson, e.g.: "Assertions startingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of languages." (Quine, 1960, p. 59) Note that this principle, if applied rigorously (and perhaps simplemindedly), gets the pigeon/penguin example wrong and makes a mess of irony e.g. my saying 'It's beautiful weather again' in a downpour.

Formulations of the principle of charity all seem to run into some trouble or other. Whether it is assuming the speaker is speaking the literal truth, or assuming the speaker is expressing coherent beliefs, or assuming the speaker is like the hearer in her attitudes -- all appear vulnerable to counterexamples, that is, cases where operating with one of these expectations, the hearer would fail to correctly understand the speaker. One can argue that these 'counterexamples' are just exceptions to a general rule, of course. But the failures seem rather systematic.

One way in which hearers generally are rather cooperative is in their provision of feedback to the speaker to indicate various things: that they are following (or not), that they agree (or not), that they would like to hear more (or to cut in). Herb Clark has done interesting work on this (e.g. Clark and Krych 2006). There is also work on this sort of thing, particularly the way that speakers and hearers 'negotiate' taking turns in conversation, in Conversation Analysis (e.g. Sacks et al 1992).


Clark, H. H. & Krych, M. A. (2004). Speaking while monitoring addressees for understanding. Journal of Memory and Language, 50(1), 62-81.
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Kasher, A. (1976). Conversational maxims and rationality. In A. Kasher (Ed.), Language in Focus: Foundations, Methods and Systems. (pp. 197–216). Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel Publishing Company.
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960) Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Sacks, H., Jefferson, G. & Schlegloff, E. (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd Ed. 1995). Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (2002). Truthfulness and relevance. Mind, 111(443), 583–632.
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (2004). Relevance theory. In L. R. Horn & G. L. Ward (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics. (pp. 607–632). Malden, Mass: Blackwell.

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.

What colour is a peach with a dark red skin?

Sometimes the answer is ‘white’, and sometimes ‘yellow’.

What I have in mind is a real-life version of a well-known example from the literature on context-sensitivity. It's a recipe, and the ingredients list calls for:

6 large or 12 tiny white or yellow peaches, with dark red skins

This brought to mind the commonly-used example of a red apple. If I tell you I have a red apple, I may mean one that is red fleshed, or one with a red skin (and there are other possibilities). The use of this example in the current debate may be due to Anne Bezuidenhout. The idea that the combination of a modifier like a colour term and a noun does not in itself determine an interpretation, because of variations in the way that the colour applies (to put it vaguely), goes back at least to Charles Travis' work:

Suppose, for example, someone says that the leaves on the tree are green. Fine. We understand what it would be for things to be that way; we grasp the thought expressed. Now suppose someone says that his bedroom walls are green. Again, we grasp that thought; know how things would be according to it. If someone says that the cheese we left in the refrigerator when we went on vacation is green, again, so far, so good. Now suppose someone calls his Uncle Hugo green. Might we not, for all of the above, be baffled as to what is supposed to be so according to that thought, unhelped by our knowledge of what being green is, adequate though it was for grasping those other thoughts? Would we not, for all that, know what being green is? (Travis, 1994, p. 168)

Travis, C. (1994). On constraints of generality. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series, 94, 165–188.

Edited to add: I see that Recanati cites Lahav saying that the ‘red apple’ example comes from Quine:

For a bird to be red (in the normal case), it should have most of the surface of its body red, though not its beak, legs, eyes, and of course its inner organs. Furthermore, the red color should be the bird's natural color, since we normally regard a bird as being « really » red even if it is painted white all over. A kitchen table, on the other hand, is red even if it is only painted red, and even if its « natural » color underneath the paint is, say, white. Morever, for a table to be red only its upper surface needs to be red, but not necessarily its legs and its bottom surface. Similarly, a red apple, as Quine pointed out, needs to be red only on the outside, but a red hat needs to be red only in its external upper surface, a red crystal is red both inside and outside, and a red watermelon is red only inside. For a book to be red is for its cover but not necessarily for its inner pages to be mostly red, while for a newspaper to be red is for all of its pages to be red. For a house to be red is for its outside walls, but not necessarily its roof (and windows and door) to be mostly red, while a red car must be red in its external surface including its roof (but not its windows, wheels, bumper, etc.). A red star only needs to appear red from the earth, a red glaze needs to be red only after it is fired, and a red mist or a red powder are red not simply inside or ouside. A red pen need not even have any red part (the ink may turn red only when in contact with the paper). In short, what counts for one type of thing to be red is not what counts for another.’ (Lahav, 1989 : 264)

Lahav, Ron (1989). 'Against Compositionality: the Case of Adjectives', Philosophical Studies, 57 : 261-79.

Of course there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, the peach example and the recent use of the red apple example, and, on the other hand, Quine and Lahav's point. The recent debate is over the point that (e.g.) 'red apple' may be used to mean different things, while the older quotations argue that 'red' in 'red apple' means something different from 'red' in 'red book' etc.

Thought, interpretation and communication

My teaching this term. How do we communicate? How can we know whether to believe what someone tells us? Finally, how are these questions connected?

An introduction to the Gricean programme in philosophy of language and pragmatics, then an introduction to the topic of 'testimony' in epistemology. Finally a look at some of the latest research on 'epistemic vigilance', which brings these two areas (and more) together.

The course handout.

Conference on the development of pragmatic abilities in children

In Oslo. I think this is going to be very interesting. (I'm one of the local organisers, which is a privilege, but expect to be mainly an interested spectator.) Here's the description:

The last ten to fifteen years have seen a rapid proliferation of research on the development of the communicative capacity in children and its interaction with the development of other metarepresentational capacities such as those for mindreading, argumentation and epistemic vigilance. The aim of this workshop is to take stock of this research and consider some of its implications for theories of pragmatics and metarepresentation. We have therefore invited speakers working on development from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including those of Tomasello (2008), Csibra & Gergely (2009) and relevance theory (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 2002, Carston 2002), to present some of their research and to consider its implications for theories of communication and for the relation between communicative abilities and other types of metarepresentational capacity.

There are more details, including names of speakers, at the conference website. The programme will follow soon.

Edited to add: it is open to all, and there is no charge.