Pinker, Steven;
The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature
Viking, 2007, 499 pages
ISBN 0670063274, 9780670063277
topics: | linguistics | cognition
Yet another fact-filled fun-to-read yet serious investigation on language, this time telling us how language informs our thinking. I started this book thinking that at last Pinker had turned to issues of semantics and pragmatics, and less about syntax, reflecting the trends that have overturned the chomskyan over-reliance on syntax. However, the second chapter, on language acquisition, returns to familiar Pinker-ian themes : In cracking the code of language, then, children's minds must ... dig into the grammatical structure hidden in the words and their arrangement. 30
There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic. Though these ideas are woven into language, their roots are deeper than language itself. They layout the ground rules for how we understand our surroundings, how we assign credit and blame to our fellows, and how we negotiate our relationships with them. A close look at our speech-our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies-can therefore give us insight into who we are. - Preface Mark Twain exploited the semantics of factive verbs when he wrote, "The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that aren't so."5 (He also allegedly wrote, "When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now, and soon... I will remember [only] the things that never happened.") [FN 5. Possibly apocryphal, or a paraphrase of sayings by Josh Billings; see Kim A. McDonald, "Many of Mark Twain's Famed Humorous Sayings Are Found to Have Been Misattributed to Him," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 4, 1991, A8.]
for 250 years there have been doubts as to whether [the man called Shakespeare] composed the plays we attribute to him. This might sound like the theory that the CIA imploded the World Trade Center, but it has been taken seriously by Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and many modern-day scholars, and it rests on a number of damning facts. Shakespeare's plays were not published in his lifetime, and authorship in those days was not recorded as carefully as it is today. The man himself was relatively uneducated, never traveled, had illiterate children, was known in his hometown as a businessman, was not eulogized at his death, and left no books or manuscripts in his will. Even the famous portraits were not painted in his lifetime, and we have no reason to believe that they resembled the man himself. Because writing plays was a disreputable occupation in those days, the real author, identified by various theories as Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe, and even Queen Elizabeth, may have wanted to keep his or her identity a secret.
Americans became victims of their own middle-class respectability a
generation later. In a scene from When Harry Met Sally set in the 1970s, a
pair of baby boomers get into an argument about Sally's sexual experience:
HARRY: With whom did you have this great sex?
SALLY: I'm not going to tell you that!
HARRY: Fine. Don't tell me.
SALLY: Shel Gordon.
HARRY: Shel Sheldon? No, no. You did not have great sex with
Sheldon.
SALLY: I did too.
HARRY: No, you didn't. A Sheldon can do your income taxes. If you
need a root canal, Sheldon's your man. But humpin' and pumpin)
is not Sheldon's strong suit. It's the name. "Do it to me,
Sheldon." "You're an animal, Sheldon." "Ride me, big
Sheldon." It doesn't work. (p. 14)
Spam is not, as some people believe, an acronym for Short, Pointless, and
Annoying Messages. The word is related to the name of the luncheon meat sold
by Hormel since 1937, a portmanteau from SPiced hAM. But how did it come to
refer to e-mailed invitations to enlarge the male member and share the
ill-gotten gains of deposed African despots? Many people assume that the
route was metaphor. Like the luncheon meat, the e-mail is cheap, plentiful,
and unwanted, and in one variant of this folk etymology, spamming is what
happens when you dump Spam in a fan. Though these intuitions may have helped
make the word contagious, its origin is very different. It was inspired by
a sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus in which a couple enter a cafe and
ask the waitress (a Python in drag) what's available. She answers:
Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg
bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam;
spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam
tomato and spam; spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam
spam baked beans spam spam spam, or Lobster Thermidor: a Crevette with
a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and
aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on
top and spam.
You are probably thinking, "This sketch must be stopped - it's too silly."
But it did change the English language. The mindless repetition of the word
spam inspired late-1980s hackers to use it as a verb for flooding newsgroups
with identical messages, and a decade later it spread from their subculture
to the populace at large. 12
[OED: spam, v.
Etymology:
In sense 2 probably with specific reference to a 1971 sketch from the British
television comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus, set in a café where
Spam was served as the main ingredient of every dish, and featuring a
nonsense song whose lyrics consist chiefly of the word ‘Spam’ repeated many
times over, at times interrupting or drowning out other conversation (see
also quot. 1994 at sense 2); perhaps influenced by jam v.1 3c.
2. trans. Computing slang. [Compare Spam n.] To flood (a network, esp. the
Internet, a newsgroup, or individuals) with a large number of unsolicited
postings, or multiple copies of the same posting. Also intr.: to send
large numbers of unsolicited messages or advertisements.
1994 Time 25 July 51/3 What the Arizona lawyers did that fateful April day
was to ‘Spam’ the Net, a colorful bit of Internet jargon meant to evoke
the effect of dropping a can of Spam into a fan and filling the
surrounding space with meat.]
Though it may seem incredible that such a whimsical and circuitous coinage
would catch on, we shall see that it was not the first time that silliness
left its mark on the lexicon. The verb gerrymander comes from a
nineteenth-century American cartoon showing a political district that had
been crafted by a Governor Elbridge Gerry into a tortuous shape resembling
a salamander in an effort to concentrate his opponent's voters into a
single seat.
But most silly coinages go nowhere... p.17
... the power of a word to soak up emotional coloring - to have a connotation as well as a denotation. The concept of a connotation is often explained by the conjugational formula devised by Bertrand Russell in a 1950s radio interview: I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded. The formula was turned into a word game in a radio show and newspaper feature and elicited hundreds of triplets. I am slim; you are thin; he is scrawny. I am a perfectionist; you are anal; he is a control freak. I am exploring my sexuality; you are promiscuous; she is a slut. In each triplet the literal meaning of the words is held constant, but the emotional meaning ranges from attractive to neutral to offensive. The affective saturation of words is especially apparent in the strange phenomena surrounding profanity, the topic of chapter 7. It is a real puzzle for the science of mind why, when an unpleasant event befalls us - we slice our thumb along with the bagel, or knock a glass of beer into our lap - the topic of our conversation turns abruptly to sexuality, excretion, or religion. It is also a strange feature of our makeup that when an adversary infringes on our rights - say, by slipping into parking space we have been waiting for, or firing up a leaf blower at seven o'clock on a Sunday morning - we are apt to extend him advice in the manner of Woody Allen, who recounted, "I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words." These outbursts seem to emerge from a deep and ancient part of the brain, like the yelp of a dog when someone steps on its tail, or its snarl when it is trying to intimidate an adversary. They can surface in the involuntary tics of a Tourette's patient, or in the surviving utterances of a neurological patient who is otherwise bereft of language. But despite the seemingly atavistic roots of cursing, the sounds themselves are composed of English words and are pronounced in full conformity with the sound pattern of the language. It is as though the human brain were wired in the course of human evolution so that the output of an old system for calls and cries were patched into the input of the new system for articulate speech. Excretion is an activity that every incarnate being must engage in daily, yet all the English words for it are indecent, juvenile, or clinical. Also conspicuous by its absence is a polite transitive verb for sex - a word that would fit into the frame Adam verbed Eve or Eve verbed Adam. The simple transitive verbs for sexual relations are either obscene or disrespectful, and the most common ones are among the seven words you can't say on television. Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits. Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war. " — George Carlin, Class Clown, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on elevision", [1972: arrested after performing this in Milwaukee]
In recent years the Internet has become a laboratory for the study of language. ... a story that circulated widely by e-mail in 1998: During the final days at Denver's Stapleton airport, a crowded United flight was canceled. A single agent was rebooking a long line of inconvenienced travelers. Suddenly an angry passenger pushed his way to the desk and slapped his ticket down on the counter, saying, "I HAVE to be on this flight, and it HAS to be first class." The agent replied, "I'm sorry, sir. I'll be happy to try to help you, but I've got to help these folks first, and I'm sure we'll be able to work something out." The passenger was unimpressed. He asked loudly, so that the passengers behind him could hear, "Do you have any idea who I am?" Without hesitating, the gate agent smiled and grabbed her public address microphone. "May I have your attention, please?" she began, her voice bellowing through the terminal. "We have a passenger here at the gate WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHO HE IS. If anyone can help him find his identity, please come to the gate." With the folks behind him in line laughing hysterically, the man glared at the agent, gritted his teeth, and swore, " [Expletive] you!" Without flinching, she smiled and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but you'll have to stand in line for that too." The agent's comeback to "Do you have any idea who I am?" springs from a mismatch between the sense in which the passenger intended his rhetorical question-a demand for recognition of his higher status-and the sense in which she pretended to take it-a literal request for information. And the payoff to the onlookers (and the e-mail audience) comes from understanding the exchange at a third level-that the agent's feigned misunderstanding was a tactic to reverse the dominance relation and demote the arrogant passenger to well-deserved ignominy.
In the film Fargo, two kidnappers with a hostage hidden in the back seat are pulled over by a policeman because their car is missing its plates. The kidnapper at the wheel is asked to produce his driver's license, and he extends his wallet with a fifty-dollar bill protruding from it, saying, "So maybe the best thing would be to take care of that here in Brainerd." Many other kinds of speech are interpreted in ways that differ from their literal meaning: If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome. We're counting on you to show leadership in our Campaign for the Future. Would you like to come up and see my etchings? Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it. These are clearly intended as a request, a solicitation for money, a sexual come-on, and a threat. If a speaker and a listener were ever to work through the tacit propositions that underlie their conversation, the depth of the recursively embedded mental states would be dizzying. The driver offers a bribe; the officer knows that the driver is offering him a bribe; the driver knows that the officer knows; the officer knows that the driver knows that the officer knows; and so on. p.23 There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns on conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact. - Mark Twain [does not cite source. From Life on the Mississippi, ch. 17. Preceding lines discuss how the Mississippi has shortened 240 miles in 176 years - hence it must have been a million miles long a million years ago. ]
it has long been known that the fit between the scenario behind a verb and
the constructions it may appear in is highly inexact. Ultimately it's the
verb itself, not the underlying concept, that has the final say. For
instance, a given concept like "eating" can underlie both a transitive verb
as in devour the pate (you can't say Olga devoured), and an intransitive
one, as in dine (you can't say Olga dined the pate).
[verbs with similar meanings can appear in different
constructions (like dine and devour, or hinted and rumored) 34]
A good way to appreciate the role of verb constructions in language is to
ponder jokes that hinge on an ambiguity between them: same words, different
constructions. An old example is this exchange: "Call me a taxi." "OK,
you're a taxi."13 According to a frequently e-mailed list of badly translated
hotel signs, a Norwegian cocktail lounge sported the notice "Ladies are
requested not to have children in the bar." In The Silence of the Lambs,
Hannibal Lecter (a.k.a. Hannibal the Cannibal) taunts his pursuer by saying,
"I do wish we could chat longer, but I'm having an old friend for dinner."
And in his autobiography the comedian Dick Gregory recounts an episode from
the 1960s: "Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and
this white waitress came up to me and said, We don't serve colored people
here. I said, That's all right. I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole
fried chicken." 32
[FN 13. Attributed to the American ambassador Joseph Hodges Choate
(1832-1917), who said it to a guest at an embassy function who mistook him
for a doorman; see [www.barrypopik.com/article/570/call-me-a-taxi-youre-a-taxi|barrypopik.com] ]
There are special constructions, for example, in which English speakers use
transitive verbs intransitively, as when a parent says to a child "Justin
bites- I don't want you to bite". There are also circumstances in which we can
use intransitive verbs transitively, as when we say
Jesus died a long, painful death.
And we all stretch the language a bit when we paint ourselves into a
syntactic corner or can't find any other way to say what we mean, as in
I would demur that Kepler deserves second place after Newton, or
That really threatened the fear of God into the radio people. 33
Some people raise an eyebrow at linguists' practice of treating their own
sentence judgments as objective empirical data. ... but in practice
linguistic judgments can go a long way. 34
[AM: Clearly, they are legitimate and extremely useful to an argument. They
may also be called empirical, but can they be called "objective"? I would
call it "shared-subjective" which is halfway between phenomenal subjectivity
and "objectivity". The examples are also somewhat "empirical". When a
physicist comes up with an equation or theory that meets some need, isn't
it just as subjective? The observation was empirical, but perhaps the
equation is subjective. Descartes saying "I think therefore I am" is really
saying "You think, therefore you are" and hence it too, is shared subjective. ]
[Imagine you are a child...]
You have learned a few thousand words, and have an inkling (not
conscious, of course) of the difference between subjects, verbs, objects,
and oblique objects.
For instance, say you've heard load in a sentence for the first time, such as
Hal is loading hay into the wagon. Say you have an idea of what the words
mean, and from watching what's going on, you can see that Hal is pitching hay
into a wagon.
Object / Location alternation:
A safe bet is to file away the information that load can appear in a sentence
with a subject, which expresses the loader (Hal); an object, which expresses
the contents being moved (the hay); and an object of into, which expresses
the container (the wagon). You can now say or understand new examples with
the same verb in the same construction, like May loaded some compost into the
wheelbarrow. (Linguists call this the content-locative construction, because
the contents being moved are focused upon in the object of the sentence.) But
that's as far as you go-you don't venture into saying May loaded (meaning she
loaded something into something else), or May loaded into the wheelbarrow.
So far so good. In a little while you hear load in a new construction, like
Hal loaded the wagon with hay. Once again hay is being pitched into the
wagon, and as far as you can see, the sentence has the same meaning as the
familiar sentence Hal loaded hay into the wagon. You can add an addendum in
your mental dictionary to the entry for load: the verb can also appear in a
construction with a subject (the loader), an object (the container, such as a
wagon), and an object of with (the contents, such as the hay). Linguists call
this the container-locative construction, because now it's the container
that's being focused upon.
You find many others which appear in two synonymous constructions but differ
in whether it is the content or the container that shows up as the direct
object:
Jared sprayed water on the roses.
Jared sprayed the roses with water.
Betsy splashed paint onto the wall.
Betsy splashed the wall with paint.
Jeremy rubbed oil into the wood.
Jeremy rubbed the wood with oil.
do you make a leap of faith and assume that any verb that appears in one of
these constructions can appear in the other one?
[BUT... ] When the locative rule is applied willy-nilly,
it cranks out many errors. For example, if you apply it to Amy poured water
into the glass, you get Amy poured the glass with water,
Tex nailed posters onto the board.
*Tex nailed the board with posters.
Serena coiled a rope around the pole.
*Serena coiled the pole with a rope.
Ellie covered the bed with an afghan.
*Ellie covered an afghan onto the bed.
Jimmy drenched his jacket with beer.
*Jimmy drenched beer into his jacket.
if there is a trait, it's far from obvious, because the verbs that submit to
the rule and the ones that resist it are quite close in meaning. For example,
pour, fill, and load are all ways of moving something somewhere, and they all
have the same cast of characters: a mover, some contents that move, and a
con- tainer that is the goal of the movement. Yet pour allows only the
content- locative (pour water), fill allows only the container-locative (fill
the glass), and load goes both ways (load the hay, load the wagon).
attempts to show that parents correct their children's deviant sentences, or
even react differ- ently to them, have turned up little. 26 Parents are far
more concerned with the meaning of children's speech than its form, and when
they do try to correct the children, the children pay little heed. The
following exchange is typical:
CHILD: I turned the raining off.
FATHER: You mean you turned the sprinkler off?
CHILD: I turned the raining off of the sprinkler.
Pinker asks: Q. How does the child learn that sentences such as She siphoned the bottle with gasoline [p.40] is not acceptable, when siphon,v is literally one in a million. 27 ? ? Pinker finds this a paradox. [Pinker, S. 1989. Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Here he called it "Baker's paradox", based on a paper by the linguist C. Lee Baker, C. L. 1979. Syntactic theory and the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry, 10, 533-581. Baker himself attributed it to the psycholinguist Martin Braine, 1971. ] [AM: However, if he would consider rules not as rigid true-false entities, but as graded (probabilistic), this would not be so paradoxical. The only instances of siphon heard do not have this structure, so the distribution of constructions associated with it do not have this structure. Or, this usage has high probability values (high acceptability).] In Crazy English, the language maven Richard Lederer calls some of them to our attention: If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings. But fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, hammers don't ham, humdingers don't humding, ushers don't ush, and haberdashers do not haberdash. .If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth? One goose, two geese-so one moose, two meese? If people ring a bell today and rang a bell yesterday, why don't we say that they flang a ball? If they wrote a letter, perhaps they also bote their tongue. 29 Each entry in the construction index (the lexicon-grammar complex) contains many of these distributions, linked to their semantics. When the child hears Boggs flung the ball or Vern shot two moose, those irregular forms stake out their cells in a mental matrix and fend off the rival forms fLang and meese (together withfLinged and mooses).31 The pickle we find ourselves in is common to induction of all kinds (human, computer etc.): how to back off from an overly general hypothesis in the absence of negative data. [Baker, C. L. 1979. Syntactic theory and the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry, 10, 533-581. Osherson, D. N., Stob, M., & Weinstein, S. 1985. Systems that learn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Pinker, S. 1979. Formal models of language learning. Cognition, 7,217-283. Valiant, L. 1994. Circuits of the mind. New York: Oxford University Press. ] If you frame a conclusion too broadly, and don't have complete corrective feedback from the world (say) you grow up thinking all swans are white, and never get to New Zealand, where you'd see black swans), you are in danger of never finding out that you are wrong. In this case, a hypothetical child is tempted to generalize that all verbs about moving something somewhere can be expressed in either of two English constructions. Yet somehow children grow into adults who generalize beyond the verbs they have heard while uncannily holding back from some of the verbs they haven't heard. The locative construction (along with similar constructions) presents us with a paradox of a child seeming to learn the unlearnable, and thus became a focus of attention among linguists and computer scientists interested in the logic of learning in general. This book referes to Chomsky only six times, whereas Lakoff is referred ten times.