Noncompositional

I’ve been trying to post this entry for a while, but something always seems to make me put it off another day or so.

Anyway, I recently heard a talk by cognitive psychologist Daniel Casasanto, on some experiments he’s been doing to see if there is any nonlinguistic evidence for conceptual metaphors (like TIME IS SPACE and SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS). Of course, in natural language the asymmetry between space and time is clear, in that words from the domain of space are co-opted to talk about time, while the other direction doesn’t generally happen. And experiments like those done by Lera Botoditsky (asking people what “the meeting was pushed forward two days” means under different conditions) have shown that people’s linguistic behavior can be primed by physical experience. But this still relies on a linguistic task. Casasanto and his colleagues did several experiments that were ultimately non-linguistic in nature, and showed that the results are consistent with conceptual metaphor theory.

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…language is complicated. Just a few examples from recent life.

At work, I wanted to speak with someone (call him W), but he was on the phone. I ended up having to leave before I could talk W, though waved a piece of paper in front of him with the most important piece of information that I wanted to transmit to him. Much later, I encountered W and we had a conversation. I asked him, “who were you talking to earlier?” His answer was, “Probably Sarah.” (changing the name). This is like those sentences like since you asked, I’m planning a trip to Hawaii or if you’re thirsty, there’s juice in the fridge, where the first halves of the sentences give motivation for saying the second half (”since you asked, I’ll now tell you: [...],” and “if you’re thirsty, you should know–therefore I tell you: [...]“). Though it’s a little harder to paraphrase “probably Sarah.” Maybe, “Since I’ve talked with many people throughout the day, you haven’t picked out a small enough set that I can answer definitively, but since I know you’re probably asking about a phone conversation that you’re sure I had (and not ones that you didn’t witness but might conjecture that I’ve had), and further, you probably want to know about the person whose conversation with me prevented us from talking earlier, you probably want to know that person’s identity; it’s Sarah.”

Next, consider hold on. Consider trying to use it outside of an imperative. I can think of one good situation: Someone says to you, “Hold on.” You reply, “holding on.” Okay, now consider hold it. Can it be used outside an imperative? Maybe the previous situation will work. A: Hold it! B: Holding it. That sounds rather more ridiculous than “holding on.” Ah, language.

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I just discovered a paper published last year in Linguistic Inquiry, that perhaps should be of interest to people thinking about constructional approaches to language, and more indirectly, how constructions should relate to diachrony.

den Dikken, Marcel. 2005. Comparative Correlatives Comparatively, LI 36(4): 497-532

Target’s slogan now is “Expect More. Pay less.” This has always bugged me.

A comparative adjective like more takes two semantic arguments: that item which is “more” (i.e., that which there are many of), and the standard of comparison (i.e., that which there is not so much of). So you have more books than I do, more books than magazines, and so on. If you omit either of these, they must be contextually retrievable. So if you say that you have more slotted spoons, then there must be some established number of slotted spoons that exist somewhere, or there must be some number of other items to which the spoons are being compared (in number and in type). If you say you have more than him, then whatever you have more of must be available immediately to everyone involved (either that, or you’ll get asked “of what?” straight away).

So when Target says “expect more,” I wonder: more of what, and more than what? The first is one or all of: products, helpful people, or abstractly, “a better experience.” But more than what? This is where I get tripped up. I always interpret this as “if you go to Target, you will (inevitably) end up expecting more.” But clearly this can’t be what they mean. It must be “you (should) expect more (good things from your shopping experience), so you should come to Target.” A bit convoluted, I say. The second part, pay less works fine for me: if you go to Target, you will pay less. It also works with the convoluted interpretation. But what they don’t want it to mean is something like: “consider how much you pay at Target: you should pay less (than that).”

A similar thing happened with Blockbuster’s “The end of late fees. The start of more.” Consider a parallel construction: “you have less money, but I have more.” This clearly means that “I have more money,” not “more of some other contextually salient item.” So one might be tempted to read Blockbuster’s slogan as “…the beginning of more late fees.” Of course, since they are explicitly ending them (rather than making them less; though the facts of their no-late-fees policy is rather tricky, but that’s beside the case), you either (1) get an incomprehensible reading, where they are both ending and starting late fees, or (2) interpret “more” as “more good stuff.”

In a related case, bed retailer Levitz has a commercial where they talk about some expensive bed, and the voiceover says (paraphrasing): “Is $400 a good price for this luxury bed? At Levitz, it’s a great price!” This is what happens when you want to stick in adverbial modifiers like “at Levitz,” all willy-nilly. What they’ve done (if I remember the commercial correctly), is relativized the evaluation of “great price” to being at Levitz. So what this means is that “at $400 dollars, this mattress is a good deal, if you’re only thinking about buying at Levitz.” The implication is that at some other location, $400 for the same item would be outrageously expensive. I’m pretty sure that’s not what they meant. The problem is that they already introduced the price. If they had just said, “at Levitz, the price is great: just $400,” everything would be okay. Oh well. I’m sure they didn’t lose any business over it.

Back in December, Chris posted on a particular use of which, exemplified by the following sentence:

Proulx’s short story contains graphic, vulgar and explicit pornographic language of homosexual sex between the two cowboys, which some who saw the movie, say remains faithful to the short story.

I just realized that this is a ridiculous sentence, and so the comment I left on the original post misses the point. I’ll return to the point later, but for the current exposition, I will alter the sentence to:

Brokeback Mountain contains graphic, vulgar, and explicit pornographic language of homosexual sex between the two cowboys, which some critics say remains faithful to the short story.

I suggested (having mis-read the first sentence as the altered second one) that the proposition expressed by the first half of the sentence, namely Brokeback mountain…cowboys was the antecedent of the which, similar to cases like I went on a double date, which was a really bad idea. An important thing to keep track of is: what exactly are the possible denotations of story (including content/product metonymy), and exactly what sort of things can remain faithful to what other sort of things.

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First, two short tidbits. Starting from booksellers: a recent post from Mark Liberman prompted be to check out You’re Wearing That on Amazon. Turns out that it’s currently ranked #31 in sales, and was at #24 yesterday. That’s pretty cool.

Second, a speech error. The other day we were discussing various types of subjectless sentences in English, and so the topic turned at one point to diary style English (Woke up. Went to School. Got Schooled). One person who was trying, I suppose, to create an adjectival form of “dairy (style)” came up spontaneously with journalistic. Whoops. But if you start with journal as a (sub)type of diary, and then access its (listed) adjectival form, then you’ve got journalistic. Unfortunately, that word means something rather different.

Finally: I recently realized that there’s an interesting use of (pseudo-)transitive talk, and it looks something like this:

A: I’ll be coming over. B: When? A: I don’t know, later. B: Okay, are we talking 9pm here, or are we talking midnight?

Transitive talk has several (rather old) senses, just as old as the intransitive senses. They include ‘to express in speech’ To heare heresyes talked and lette the talkers alone., ‘to speak a particular language, have a manner of speaking’ He speaks French/slang, and ‘to have a discussion about’ Let’s talk business.

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