Noncompositional

I’m no expert on forensic linguistics, but I think I’ll go ahead and comment on a recent case that has some relevence to language use.

The case involves Liz Seccuro, who says she was raped 21 years ago by then-college classmate William Beebe during a UVA fraternity party. At the time she communicated the crime to campus authorities (who had jurisdiction), but after Beebe dropped out she dropped the matter (or, depending on which source you listen to, the university dropped the ball by not notifying the police, or by being lax on rape cases).

Then, just last September, she received a snail-mail letter from Beebe apologizing for what he had done. This started a communication between them, via e-mail, in which Beebe admits to and apologizes for the crime. The letters later contributed to his arrest, as Virginia does not place a statute of limitations on felony charges, including rape.

When I was listening to the story on CNN, I thought, man, this is an open-and-shut case, especially considering some of the statements that Beebe makes in the e-mail. For instance,

Dear Liz, I want to make clear that I’m not intentionally minimizing the fact of having raped you. I did.

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Last Friday, comedian Al Lubel did a routine on Letterman. The last bit of his segment made some interesting linguistic observations, especially regarding street/warning signs. Of course, instructional and directive language in English is subject to some grammatical principles that are absent in the rest of the language, including allowing null instantiation of stuff that is usually required. Taking some examples from the closest cookbook at hand, Healthy Asian Vegetarian Dishes (gaps shown with –):

Halve the squash lengthwise. Slice — into 1/2-in (1-cm) slices. Combine all the sauce ingredients, stirring — to break up the beancurd, then set — aside. Pour in the water … . Transfer — to serving dish and garnish — with toasted sesame seeds, if desired.

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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.

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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Ah, the law. You know, they’ve got a lot of words in there, and if people who write laws (or legally-binding documents) aren’t careful, the pristine, unambiguous, straightforward language of the law could get contaminated by the ugliness of conventional meanings, like conventional connotations and Gricean implicature. But surely no one, least of all honored lawyers, would exploit a brief lapse of judgement of a law-writer to maneuver themselves into an advantageous position. Surely…

An article in Saturday’s issue of the Wall Street Journal tells the story of one Victor Washington, former NFL athlete, who after several years in the game, left the league due mostly to continuous knee problems. He filed for disability benefits:

Mr. Washington filed his claim in May 1983. Orthopedists hired by the NFL plan enumerated his painful problems, such as arthritis, degenerative joint disease and an inability to fully extend one knee. A Rutgers University professor of psychiatry hired by the NFL wrote — according to later court files — that depression and difficulty with concentration, “combined with his physical injury and significant pain (both knee and back) indeed render him disabled by his football related injuries.”

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In an earlier post I pondered the felicity of phrases like tying run and go-ahead run in various situations in a baseball game. T. Carter replied, confirming that just about all the factors you might expect play a role: who is on base, up to bat, how each got there, and how late in the game it is.

It was pointed out to me that this final factor, which I originally conceived as lateness in the game, is better thought of as crucialness for the game. Thus in post-season games, where each run counts that much more, one is more likely to heard phrases like and now the go-ahead run is at the plate! This seems like an entirely reasonable observation. In fact, the whole point behind using phrases like these is that they frame the person on base/at bat not just as a person playing the game (no matter how effective a player they may be), but as the potential effector of a game-dynamics-changing play. It ratchets up the tension, gets the listener involved, makes the game more exciting. I’d be curious to know if coaches use phrases like this. My account would predict that they wouldn’t, first because there is no “audience” that must be excited into watching the game (the players are no doubt as focused as they’ll get), and second because wouldn’t that jinx the at-bat? Then again, I could be wrong, and maybe it’s common to slap a guy up onto the field with a “all right [name], you can put us back in the lead, just focus on the ball” or some such thing.

A question for baseball fans.

We have these terms – tying run and go-ahead run. These can be used to talk about the actual “run” (event?), or metonymically for the batter who, as they say, “represents” that run.

Now, I was watching game 1 of the world series this evening, and when I started watching, the Sox were up by 1, and it stayed like this for a long stretch of time (until the Sox scored another run). Not once did I hear anything about the “tying run” being at the place, probably for the good reason that when a team is 1 down, every batter is the tying run, so there’s no point in using that terminology. In fact, it seems like a more likely time to talk about, say, the tying run is a situation like this: a team (is at bat and) is down by some n > 1, and a batter gets on base. The next batter is then the tying run. Similarly, if a team is 1 down and someone is on base, then the batter at the plate is then the go-ahead run. I’m right on this, right? (Just checking) (Also, I’d guess that as the game gets closer to the end, these phrases get used more often, as who exactly is ahead of who becomes increasingly more important)

Now, how about this situation? It’s (oh, say) the top of the fifth inning, and home team is up by 3. One man is on, and then a 2-run homer is hit, so now they’re only 1 down. Would it be likely (appropriate) to talk about the next guy up as the “tying run”? Or is it too early in the game? Maybe there’s a more appropriate way to talk about it? Anyone? Contrast this with the situation where the batting team is down by 3, and there are two men on base – is the batter then the “tying run”? Any difference?

I’m currently watching a new CBS series, Threshold. The premise is that the US government has a consultant who develops contingency plans for worst case scenarios. When one such scenario arises – namely, first contact with an alien intelligence (or artifact thereof) – a team is brought together to face the challenge. One member of the team, Arthur Ramsey (played by Peter Dinklage), is introduced as a “linguist and applied mathematician.” And he’s also a womanizer and a drinker. Cool! Or so one might think.

Actually, one might groan, expecting yet another use of the word linguist. However, with the first episode almost over, there’s really not much to say about how he’s a linguist, except that he obviously prefers to think about math more than human language. I say this because he has very interesting ideas about expressive aphasia. When a person exposed to the alien artifact goes rather mad and begins to attack people and utter strange sounds, Arthur says (paraphrasing)

(You don’t understand what he’s saying) because you’re not a linguist. To you it’s probably unintelligible word salad, but it’s actually very similar to what you see with people with expressive aphasia.

He goes on to explain that they often say things backwards, so here’s what we have to do to understand what he’s saying: play the tape backwards! Ingeneous.

Other linguist traits: ability to say “hello” in 200 dialects (not sure if he means varieties of a language or if he’s taken the “it’s all dialects” idea to heart), a fondness for pig latin, one use of the word adjective where word would be more natural, and the ability to have fractal patterns “speak to him” (math is just another language, after all). But apparantly the abilities do not doing acoustic analysis of the sounds given off by the artifact – this job goes to the astronautical engineer. I guess Ramsey is more of an S?