Being Human

Over on his You Don't Say blog, John McIntyre notes a spectacularly awkward sentence from the New Yorker and asks, "Is this a new tic of New Yorker style, or have I just begun noticing it?" The offending sentence:

“Horton, you’re one of the few people New York seems to agree with,” Tennessee Williams, another regional Young Turk who dreamed of changing the shape of commercial theatre, said.

John explains that he knows "there is a longstanding journalistic resistance to inverting subject and verb in attribution" and understands why some writers might be averse to the construction, but objects to a blanket prohibition against this inversion (known in the syntax trade as "quotative inversion"), especially when it leads to tin-eared sentences like one reporting the Tennessee Williams quotation.

It turns out that here at Language Log Plaza we've been alert to the New Yorker's anti-quotative inversion quirk from the earliest days of the blog.

Here's the history, with some digression to other blogging on the syntax of quotations.

Chris Potts was in first, with a 9/22/03 posting "A ban on quotative inversion?" (here) and a follow-up the next day, "More on the quotative inversion conjecture" (here). Then on 10/6/03 Mark Liberman chimed in (here) with a comparison of the New Yorker's awkward verb-last sentences to the verb-last sentences of German that Mark Twain complained about in his comic essay "The Awful German Language". And the next year (12/19/04, in "Diagram this", here) Geoff Pullum added a more complex example from the New Yorker. So ended the Early Years of quotative inversion in these parts.

Skip ahead to this year, and a 1/5/09 posting on my blog (here) about a report from Neal Whitman (on ADS-L) about Bill Walsh's proscribing quotative fronting (without inversion) in combination with subject omission in a following conjunct, in things like

(1) “I’m leaving,” Jones said, and walked out of the room.

Neal Whitman joined in (on his blog, here) with the reason for his query to ADS-L. He had noted that in her children's books, Beverly Cleary was a very heavy (indeed near-categorical) user of the non-repeated subject, as in (1). Neal found the usage unremarkable — until he came across Walsh's proscription, which he found puzzling.

(A digression: in her 1990 Muggie Maggie Cleary repeated the subject in these coordinations, but then seems to have reverted to her non-repetition ways in later books. The Muggie Maggie episode was probably the work of an editor who had been exposed to the "rule" Walsh cites.)

Following up on this, I posted on my own blog (here and here) on quotation fronting and quotative inversion, with links to the 2003-04 postings on Language Log about "awkward sentences that would have been much improved by quotative inversion", despite the New Yorker's aversion to it.

And that brings us up to John McIntyre.

Andrew Clegg asks "Is this true?"

I'm more familiar with a different just-so story intended to explain the same alleged generalization: infants' phonetic abilities are initially limited, and this creates pressure to develop variants of words for caregivers (and other things infants are likely to want to name) that suit their preferences.

I don't know of any non-anecdotal studies of the generalization, much less of the relative strength of parental egoism and infant incapacity in explaining it; and I don't have time this morning to search. But maybe a reader can help Andrew out.

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I'm just reading a long but gripping study that used social network analysis to look at murder as a social interaction between gangs in Chicago to understand how stable networks of retaliation are sustained over time.

However, I was struck by this bit in the introduction, which really highlights the social nature of murder:

But we know that murder is not in fact such a random matter. It is first and foremost an interaction between two people who more often than not know each other: approximately 75% of all homicides in the United States from 1995 to 2002 occurred between people who knew each other prior to the murder (Federal Bureau of Investigation, selected years).

We also know that the victim and offender tend to resemble each other socially and demographically (e.g., Wolfgang 1958; Luckenbill 1977). Young people kill other young people, poor people kill other poor people, gang members kill other gang members, and so on. Thus, contrary to stratification theories, a particular murder is not so much the outcome of the differential distribution of attributes as it is an interaction governed by patterns of social relations between people similar in stature and status.

It's an amazing paper which combines a social network analysis drawn from police murder records with field work that involved talking to gang members to understand their perception and use of violence.

Link to PubMed entry for 'Murder by structure'.
Link to DOI entry for same.

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Via The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, comes news of an awesome (if spiteful) bit of gubernatorial wordplay from the office of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano had sponsored a bill which passed unanimously granting the Port of San Francisco financial power to redevelop a former shipyard for a new neighborhood known as Pier 70.

Ammiano also had made something of a scene at a Democratic Party fundraiser early this month in San Francisco at which Schwarzenegger, a Republican, had been invited by former San Francisco mayor and Assembly speaker Willie Brown, a Democrat. This surprised many, in light of the heated budget wars between the governor and legislature.

Ammiano could be heard invoking the cry of Republican South Carolina's Rep. Joe Wilson at President Barack Obama's address to a joint session of Congress - "You lie" - as others heckled Schwarzenegger's brief speech. After the governor left, Ammiano took the stage with a rambling criticism of Schwarzenegger for a variety of offenses — among them the governor's vetoes of bills that would have legalized gay marriage.

When the governor's office delivered a veto-message for Ammiano's own port bill a few days later, on Oct. 12, there appeared to be an unmistakable hidden message within: Reading the first letter of each line of the letter's two main paragraphs:

"My goodness. What a coincidence," a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. "I suppose when you do so many vetoes, something like this is bound to happen."

With some back-of-the-envelope calculations of probability, I'm sure we could set about refuting McLear's disingenuous response that the acrostic is merely a "coincidence." Scholars of Shakespeare have argued whether the following acrostic in A Midsummer's Night Dream, in which the character Titania spells out her own name, could have appeared by chance:

Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no,
I am a spirit of no common rate,
The summer till doth tend upon my state;
ANd I do love thee. Therefore go with me.
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee;
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep…

But I think in this case it's pretty clear that we're dealing with intentionally mischievous acrostic-making in the Governor's office. It reads very smoothly, so kudos to the writer of the veto message. Could it have been Ahnold himself? Doubtful, although he might have told someone in his office to construct the acrostic. (I wonder if whoever did it also leaked the story to reveal his or her handiwork.)

Kudos too to Mark Silva of The Swamp, for coming up with a novel taboo avoidance strategy in his headline, "Schwarzenegger to foe: (Veto) 'you'."

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I just found a some curious case reports on two people who had hallucinations in everyday life owing to unrecognised narcolepsy, but not realising it, they assumed their hallucinated episodes had genuinely occurred.

Unlike in psychosis, where affected people often believe that their hallucinations are real, people who have narcolepsy and have hallucinations are usually able to realise they were triggered by the condition.

In this case, the people were unaware that they had a tendency to hallucinate and so the boundaries between hallucination and reality began to blur.

The 45-year-old technical manager had a multi-year history of daytime sleepiness... He frequently had curious experiences during the day – the neighbour throwing litter into the patient's bin; his wife throwing precious objects away. Sometimes he saw himself trying to clean dirt on the side of a ditch. These memories and experiences were confusing. They gave rise to a surprised and suspicious state of mind.

Improbable and incomprehensible things happened, leaving him in doubt. Sometimes he gave sensitive-paranoid interpretations to the events, he also denounced the neighbour for filling his bin. His paranoidity drove his psychiatrist to the diagnostic conclusion of a delusional psychosis.

Recently he had a severe conflict with his chief on account of a vivid experience of having had sexual intercourse with the chief's wife, which he mentioned to colleagues. Remembering every detail, he was convinced that his story was true, but the reactions of those around him gradually convinced him that this experience could be a hallucination.

The man was eventually referred to a sleep clinic, diagnosed with narcolepsy and successfully treated.

The other case is of a young woman who hallucinated that she had been sexually assaulted on a bus - an experience so vivid that she reported it to the police with numerous details of the offender.

She later realised that that she could have been wrong and as part of the court case for making a false police report she was medically assessed and also diagnosed with narcolepsy after a sleep lab assessment.

Link to PubMed entry for case reports.

A few days ago, Kurt Andersen interviewed the novelist Richard Powers on Studio360. You can listen to the whole nine-minute interview here:

In the middle of the interview, Powers breaks into a sequence of declarative phrases with final rising pitch — what's sometimes called "uptalk". Before and after this sequence, which sets the stage for an account of his decision to become a writer, he consistently uses falling patterns. It seems clear that he means the rising contours to have a rhetorical effect. But it's equally clear that the intended effect is not to signal insecurity or to call into question his commitment to the truth of what he's saying. So as part of my on-going campaign to document uptalk — especially non-stereotypical examples — here's a description.

The preceding passage starts this way, with Powers describing why he left physics:

You- you mentioned the- the- the "two cultures" crisis that uh
that Snow put on everyone's agenda but uh
in fact the crisis really is the "million cultures" crisis and uh
how- however much exhilaration I took out of physics, it w- rapidly became clear to me that uh
even two physicists working in closely related fields couldn't always communicate with each other, and- and for me to make any kind of meaningful contribution
would require
a kind of intense specialization, where year after year I learned more and more about smaller and smaller domains, until I was in-
in danger of knowing everything there was about nothing.

Powers goes on to explain why graduate school in literature was also too confining, and continues to use phrase-final falls. Then comes the story of how he decided to write a novel — and right up to the crucial moment of decision, he mostly ends his phrases with rises:

Andersen: So when you decided OK, this is I- I- I'm not gonna be
uh a scientist, I'm not going to be uh
a literature
teacher
then you- did you just simply make the decision OK I'm going to write novels and
start writing them? Powers: The books actually started/
on a Saturday morning/ uh in- in uh nineteen eighty one/
I was living in the Fens/ just behind the Fine Arts Museum/
the- the MFA in Boston/
and there was a- a retrospective exhibition
of the German photographer August Sander.
and I had no prior exposure to this work/ Andersen: The early 20th century photographer? Powers: German photographer from the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century um
and uh I remember going into this first American retrospective/
and turning around the corner and/
seeing this magnificent and haunting photograph, of these three young men
in their Sunday best, walking along a muddy road just glancing out over their right shoulder as if
suddenly surprised by the photographer.
Leaning forward, reading the caption on this photo
which read
"three– or three young Westerwald farmers on their way to a dance, nineteen fourteen"
So of course they were not on their way to the dance that they thought they were on their way to/
and just down the road was world war one. Andersen: And so you suddenly
had your mission. Powers: I did, I- I looked at that photograph/
I had an almost intact story in mind/
this was a Saturday/
on Monday I went in to- to my data processing job/
and gave my two weeks notice.

From then on, Powers reverts to falls.

Andersen: It sounds as though you had a mission for a career of fiction writing, not just a book. Powers: ((Well I'm)) I'm not sure it's a mission, I think it's simply
the shape that my own temperament takes.

I'm skeptical that there's any systematic difference between the rises often used with yes/no questions, and the rises used for various other reasons, as in Powers' story.  As an additional andecdotal piece of evidence in this discussion,  here's a comparison (at the scale of  time and pitch display) between the end of Andersen's question and the start of Powers' answer:

Andersen: … did you just simply make the decision OK I'm going to write novels and
start writing them/

Powers: The books actually started/
on a Saturday morning/ uh in- in uh nineteen eighty one/

To really address this question in a responsible way, of course, would require comparing the dynamics of  a large number of examples of both kinds, paying careful attention to the alignment of the pitch contour with the syllable sequence and with the amplitude contour. But these are among the many examples that make me doubt that there's a systematic difference in such cases (as has sometimes been suggested) between rises that start at the bottom of the speaker's range and rises that start higher.

You'd also want to try some perception experiments.

Here's the picture, "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance":

Another version of the story is here, in a 2003 interview published in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER
When did you begin your writing career?

RICHARD POWERS
In the early eighties, I was living in the Fens in Boston right behind the Museum of Fine Arts. If you got there before noon on Saturdays, you could get into the museum for nothing. One weekend, they were having this exhibition of a German photographer I’d never heard of, who was August Sander. It was the first American retrospective of his work. I have a visceral memory of coming in the doorway, banking to the left, turning up, and seeingthe first picture there. It was called Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914. I had this palpable sense of recognition, this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze. I went up to the photograph and read the caption and had this instant realization that not only were they not on the way to the dance, but that somehow I had been reading about this moment for the last year and a half. Everything I read seemed to converge onto this act of looking, this birth of the twentieth century—the age of total war, the age of the apotheosis of the machine, the age of mechanical reproduction. That was a Saturday. On Monday I went in to my job and gave two weeks notice and started working on Three Farmers.

Today's Nature has an excellent piece about an increasing and currently not well-researched trend for fMRI brain scan 'neurofeedback' treatments, where the patient is shown a visual representation of the activity of a certain brain area in the hope of learning to control it.

In this case, the big idea is that a patient with chronic pain is shown real-time activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, an area in the frontal lobe associated with the 'unpleasantness' of pain (rather than just its physical sensation), and they can see when they doing something to successfully reduce the activity and can try and learn to do it reliably.

The article looks at the work of Sean Mackey who researches the area but is appropriately skeptical about a number of companies who have recently sprung up offering this as a treatment, despite the lack of firm evidence.

As you may recall, this premature commercialisation is a bit of a pattern with fMRI research, as you can also buy the services of companies offering 'lie detection' and 'neuromarketing' despite a similar lack of evidence for their usefulness.

However, the piece also looks more generally at the neuroscience of pain which is, if you'll excuse the pun, becoming a hot area, both as the understanding of pain moves away from the idea that it happens 'in the body' to the idea that it is handled by numerous brain circuits, each which may be involved if different aspects of the experience and our behavioural reaction to it.

In some of his other work, Mackey's laboratory has used fMRI to explore these connections between pain processing and cognitive processes. Fear of pain, for example, can increase the pain itself, and Mackey's group studied some of the brain regions involved in this anticipation. In another study he showed that watching someone else in pain activates brain areas that are fairly distinct from those active during one's own pain. And in unpublished work he has found that romantic love can lessen the experience of pain. Mackey says these connections demonstrate how strong an influence conscious thought may have over pain processing.

Link to Nature article 'Shooting pain'.

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Today I got mail from the Republican National Committee — a survey they want me to fill out and (of course) an attached contribution form.   I don't know why they sent it to me, because in spite of their urging me "and other grassroots Republicans" to respond to their survey, I am not a registered Republican.   Maybe it's because my neighborhood is mostly Republican, though our nearest neighbors are bigwigs in the local Libertarian party.  In any case, many of the survey questions contain presuppositions that make them hard to answer.  They don't ask me if I've stopped beating my wife, er, spouse, but they do want to know if (for instance) I "believe that Barack Obama's nominees for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the U.S. Senate".

And they ask, "Should English be the official language of the United States?"  They don't say what this has to do with the President's agenda; it's totally irrelevant to his agenda, as far as I know.  But I don't know all that much: maybe Obama is campaigning to eradicate English from the country and I just haven't noticed?  I do know that I'm proud to belong to an organization, the Linguistic Society of America, that has come out strongly in opposition to the Official English movement.  In 1987 the LSA  membership voted to approve an eloquent Resolution to this effect, proposed by Language Log's  Geoff Nunberg (though he wasn't a Language Logger at the time, because Language Log didn't yet exist).   Read it here:

http://www.lsadc.org/info/lsa-res-english.cfm

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