Newman et al.: "An Event-Related fMRI Study of Syntactic and Semantic Violations" (2001)

This paper reports on a brain imaging study in which people were given either ordinary English sentences or sentences with one of two types of error (p. 349):

• Yesterday I sailed Todd's hotel to China. (semantic violation)
• Yesterday I cut Max's with apple. (syntactic violation)

The sentences were presented one word at a time. They don't seem to say when recordings started, but they do mention "critical" words (p. 139).

The results were the following:

The syntactic errors lit up Brodmann's area 6, which includes the premotor cortex. It also activated the a spot in superior temporal gyrus which was either Brodmann's area 21 or 22.

The semantic errors activated a number of regions, including several quite frontal regions. The strongest activation was here inside the the fissure between the two halves of the brain, that is, in the medial section of the cortex.

Here a table:

And here is a picture (Fig. 1, p. 352):

The picture is ugly as hell, but I like that they are so infatuated with this beautiful brain: "The structural image used is from one subject, chosen for its particularly high quality … the choice of one anatomical image over another does not alter the localization of the results—the differences are purely aesthetic." (From the caption of Fig. 1.)

Regarding the syntactic observations, they comment:

Our findings suggest that the superior frontal gyri, including not only premotor cortex, but those portions of it which likely correspond to the supplementary motor area, are involved in the processing of syntactic phrase structure violations. While this is an unusual finding, … it is not unique: Ni et al. (2000, Experiment 2) found superior frontal gyrus activation in response to morphosyntactic violations. (p. 355)

What do we make of this? Well, it would seem that what you do when you read I cut with cake knife is quite literally comparable to pulling an emergency brake: You use the same inhibitory resources as those that are involved in holding yourself back from pushing the wrong button in a stop-go experiment, or training yourself to perform a complex series of movements with your fingers.

Baggio and Hagoort: "The balance between memory and unification in semantics" (2011)

This paper contains some interesting anatomical details about how the N400 component might be produced.

Once Upon a Time

The theory proposed is essentially this:

First, the temporal regions of the brain get their cues from the visual about 200ms after reading a word. Then, they go on to pull the right semantic building blocks out of the drawer. After that, they send a message to the inferior frontal parts of the cortex, which then helps construct the right sentence-level meaning out of the building blocks.

The idea is then that if this construction process runs into trouble, an excess of negative charge is observed after another 200ms.

Cycles and Loops

The theory also spells out the directionality of the communication: The visual cortex can talk to the temple, but the temple can't talk back; the temple can talk to itself as well as to the forehead, but the forehead can only talk back to the temple, not to itself. This allegedly explains the timeline of activation in these two areas.

In schematic form, the feedback loops thus look as follows (their Fig. 3, p. 18):

In terms of the anatomy involved, these are the underlying brain structures (Fig. 2, p. 16):

The different little blobs have names, but they aren't much differentiated in the larger narrative.

Wheres, Whats, and Whens

It's a little surprising that the N400 should be attributed to the construction of meaning rather than simply to the matching of data with expectations.

The argument for this relies crucially on the assumption that the frontal brain regions are instrumental in provoking the N400: Much of the evidence cited on page 13 assumes that this is true and uses this to link the timeline constructed on the basis of EEG studies to the topological map constructed on the basis of fMRI studies.

This data doesn't bear on the question if increased activation in the frontal areas aren't related to the N400. Although ambiguity does indeed activate the frontal cortex, this does not necessarily imply that ambiguity is related to the N400.

Contents

Rather than go through the article step by step, I thought it might be good to provide an annotated table of contents of its six sections. Now that I see how long my comments became, I'm not so sure. At any rate, here it is:

1. INTRODUCTION: We can understand "combinatorics" like syntactic analysis as a last resort to make sense of inputs that are not seen before in the exact same form (p. 2).
1. Memory, unification, and control: Memory is located in the temple, "unification" (i.e., the construction of complex forms out of simpler ones) in the frontal areas (p. 3).
2. Unification the formal way: Think of lexical-functional grammar representations and the like. "This morning, I worked all night" does not unify.
3. Semantics processing as constraint satisfaction: Memory supplies the building blocks, executive control stacks them together (p. 4)
4. What a theory of semantics processing should do: It should both account for the ability to comprehend for novelty (e.g., "The ship sailed into the living room") and for the averse reactions to it.
2. MEMORY AND TEMPORAL CORTEX: Simple recall is not enough even for cliches, because context matters too (p. 7).
1. Memory and the N400: Based on what you've understood so far, you've built up an expectation; if that expectation is violated, you have an N400 response.
2. The N400 and temporal cortex: "The N400 priming effect has been shown to have primary neuronal generators in temporal cortex" (pp. 8–9) The reference is to a paper by Ellen Lau et al.: "A cortical network for semantics" (2008).
3. UNIFICATION AND FRONTAL CORTEX: In order to get "a much processing mileage as possible" out of recall routines, the brain looks for "the nearest attractor state at each word-processing step" (pp. 9–10). A footnote explains that this can either be explained with reference to Hopfield networks or predictive coding, but "The theory presented in Sections 4 and 5 is more consistent with the former framework, which is also a more standard approach to language in the brain than Bayes" (note 3, p. 10).
1. Unification and Integration: Integration basically means selection from a menu based on converging evidence; unification means constructing new menu items in accordance with stated constraints (p. 10).
2. Unification and the N400: The N400 cannot only track expectation or retrieval, since it is also evoked by sentences like "The journalist began the article," which require a post-hoc reconstrual of the verb "began" (p. 12–13). It is, they say, "hard to see how a noncombinatorical account could explain these data" (p. 13), which are attributed to Baggio et al.: "Coercion and compositionality" (2010) and Kuperberg et al.: "Electrophysiological correlates of complement coercion" (2010). An additional discussion takes up the role of the inferior frontal gyrus in "unification."
3. Unification and selection: Conventional wisdom has it that the frontal cortex is involved in "controlled retrieval" (p. 14). But word-association tasks show that it is more active when you try to find a word related to "wheel" than when you are looking for a word related to "scissors" (which is much easier and less ambiguous). Moreover, the voice experiments by van Berkum et al. (2008) show that other types of hard-to-combine stimuli activate the inferior frontal gyrus (pp. 14–15).
4. THE BALANCE BETWEEN MEMORY AND UNIFICATION: The temporal areas do retrieval, integration, and prediction; the frontal areas do unification (p. 15).
1. Connectivity matters: There are several pathways between the temple and the forehead, including some we had forgotten about (p. 16).
2. Neurotransmitter dynamics: The temple talks to the forehead using the rapidly decaying transmitters AMPA and GABA; the forehead talks back using a much more slowly decaying transmitter called NMDA (pp. 17–18).
3. A typical processing cycle: After about 200ms, the temple knows what the visual cortex sees; it then talks to itself to built predictions and to the forehead to trigger competitive selection (p. 19). The forehead cannot talk to itself, but only talk back to the temple (pp. 19–20).
5. A DYNAMIC ACCOUNT OF THE N400: One first sweep retrieves relevant representations, and a second sweep back checks consistency.
1. The N400 component: The wave itself is always present and reflects the feedback within the temple (p. 21).
2. The N400 effect: If a word is unexpected in the sense of having lower "semantic relatedness" to the preceding context, the wave is higher (p. 22). This should allegedly be the result of the forehead talking back to the temple.
3. Testability and falsifiability: This is all very scientific and stuff. Specifically, "patients with focal lesions in [the frontal areas] BA 45 or BA 47 are expected to show at most the onset of an N400 response [not a full-fledged one,] corresponding, in the theory, to the feed-forward spread of activation from sensory areas and inferior temporal cortex to MTG/STG." (p. 23).
6. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, the N400 is a reaction to a message from the font of the class: "The theory explains the N400 as the result of the summation of currents injected by frontal cortex due to the local spread of activation to neighbouring neuronal populations (pre-activation). In our theory, pre-activation and unification are not independent step-like processes, suggesting mutually exclusive accounts of the N400" (p. 24).

Bloomfield: Language (1933), chs. 9 and 24

Leonard Bloomfield was a die-hard behaviorist in his approach to linguistics, and he aggressively against any attempt to explain metaphors or any other linguistic phenomena in "mental" terms (§9.4, pp. 142–144).

He was, however, well aware of the many metaphorical etymologies change in English and other languages, and he did put forward a few speculations about their forms and causes. The relevant parts of his book are in particular Chapter 9 ("Meaning"), particular pp. 149–50, and Chapter 24 ("Semantic Change").

The Ubiquity of Metaphor

My first claim—that he recognizes how widespread everyday metaphor is—can supported by the following quote:

Very many linguistic forms are used for more than one typical situation. In English, we speak of the head of an army, of a procession, of a household, or of a river, and of a head of cabbage, of the mouth of a bottle, cannon, or river; of the eye of a needle, and of hooks and eyes on a dress; of the teeth of a saw; of the tongue of a shoe or of a wagon; of the neck of a bottle and of a neck of the woods; of the arms, legs, and back of a chair; of the foot of a mountain; of hearts of celery. A man may be a fox, an ass, or a dirty dog; a woman, a peach, lemon, cat, or goose; people are sharp and keen or dull, or else bright or foggy, as to their wits; warm or cold in temperament; crooked or straight in conduct; a person may be up in the air, at sea, off the handle, off his base, or even beside himself, without actually moving from the spot. The reader will be able to add examples practically without limit; there is no greater bore than the enumeration and classification of these "metaphors." (p. 149)

He proposes what now appears like a kind of pragmatic repair theory of the comprehension of such phrases:

The remarkable thing about these variant meanings is our assurance and our agreement in viewing one of the meanings as normal (or central) and the others as marginal (metaphoric or transferred). The central meaning is favored in the sense that we understand a form (that is, respond to it) in the central meaning unless some feature of the practical situation forces us to look to a transferred meaning. … He married a lemon forces us to the transferred meaning only because we know that men do not go through a marriage ceremony with a piece of fruit. (p. 149)

He adds a cautionary note on ignoring the difference between languages in this respect:

We are likely to make the mistake of thinking that the transferred meanings of our language are natural and even inevitable in human speech — the more so, as they appear also in other European languages. This last, however, is merely a result of our common cultural traditions; while transferred meanings occur in all languages, the particular ones in any given language are by no means to be taken for granted. Neither in French nor in German can one speak of the eye of a needle or of an ear of grain. To speak of the foot of a mountain seems natural to any European, but it would be nonsense in Menomini and doubtless in many other languages. (p. 150)

Although he doesn't use the concept of "dead metaphors," it is also clear from his discussion of the "isolation" of meaning (Ch. 24, p. 432) that he thinks that many metaphors have no imagistic content for contemporary English-speakers.

The Dynamics of Meaning Change

Bloomfield; photo from the Yale website.

In the chapter on semantic change, Bloomfield first reviews the many metonymic and metaphoric paths by which a word can change its meaning over time, noting:

The surface study of semantic change indicates that refined and abstract meanings largely grow out of more concrete meanings. (p. 429)

He then moves on to the more complex question of what the cause of these changes are. As one might expect, he dismisses

… so-called psychological explanations, such as Wundt's, which merely paraphrase the outcome of the change. Wundt defines the central meaning as the dominant element of meaning, and shows how the dominant element may shift when a form occurs in new typical contexts. … This statement leaves the matter exactly where it was. (p. 435)

As an internative to these tautological theories, Bloomfield suggests that the engine of semantic change has to be the context in which the language is embedded:

The shift into a new meaning is intelligible when it merely reproduces a shift in the practical world. A form like ship or hat or hose designates a shifting series of objects because of changes in the practical world. If cattle were used as a medium of exchange, the word fee 'cattle' would naturally be used in the meaning 'money,' and if one wrote with a goose-feather, the word for 'feather' would naturally be used of this writing-implement. (p. 436)

Linguist Hermann Paul, from Spiegel.de.

The two latter examples are references to examples he had discussed previously (pp. 428 and 435): The English fee comes from Old English feoh (live-stock, cattle, property, money), and the English pen comes from the Latin penne (feather).


While this contextual theory in itself is clear enough, it still leaves open the question of why people stop using an old word or, in some cases, start using a new one when alternatives exists.

In the last couple of pages of the chapter, Bloomfield sketches a couple of possibilities, mostly of stylistic nature. One of the more interesting ones is his perceptive description of how "the salesman" might not want to sell a house as a house, since the availability of the alternative home will make house call up an image of "an empty shell that has never been inhabited" (p. 442).

Michel Bréal: Semantics (1900)

Bréal; from Wikimedia Commons.

Apparently, this book by Michel Bréal is considered by some to be a foundational document in semantics. However, it's not mentioned in Saeed's textbook, and I wouldn't have heard of it if it weren't for a footnote in a paper by Harald Weinrich — so think it's fair to say it's fallen pretty much into obscurity by now.

I looked at because I was interested in seeing what Bréal had to say about metaphor. It turns out that his observations are that the phenomenon is (1) widespread (2) mostly dead (3) often synaesthetic.

The Psychological Basis of Metaphor

As for the widespread nature of metaphor:

Our business is not to claim admiration for these images, which indeed have ceased to be images, but to show that language is full of them. (p. 123)

His take on the emergence of metaphors seem to be that they are invented for communitative purposes, not that that it reflects deep psychological structure. Most of his attention is devoted to the connection between cultural variables (e.g., Roman land ownership institutions) and the choice of metaphors.

However, he says that they demonstrate "the universal intelligence, which does not vary much from one nation to another" (p. 123). In his discussion of grammatical analogy, he also claims that opposites like night/day and dead/alive tend to take on similar forms, and that "Language here reveals to us a fact of psychology;" providing a hand-wavy sketch of the psychology of this phenomenon (p. 68).

The Death of a Metaphor

There is not doubt that Bréal thinks that metaphors wither and die over time:

But the metaphor remains such at its outset only; soon the mind becomes accustomed to the image; its very success causes it to pale; it fades into a representation of the idea scarcely more coloured than the proper word. (p. 122)

But for the child who learns to speak them the complication [of faded historical meanings] does not exist: the last meaning, the meaning farthest removed from it original, is often the first learnt. (p. 133)

More indirectly, this is also evidenced by his interest in the difficulty of etymological problems. He notes, for instance, that it is not immediately obvious which of the meanings of the Latin gemma are the older, "pearl" or "bud." In fact, Cicero seems to have gotten the historical order wrong (p. 125).

Synaesthetic Metaphors

Bréal also notes the importance of cross-sensory transfers of meaning:

A special kind of Metaphor, extremely frequent in all languages, comes from the communication between our organs of sense, which permit us to transport the sensations of sight into the domain of hearing, or the ideas of touch into the domain of taste. We speak of a "a warm reception," "a broad style," "a bitter reproach," "a black grief," with the certainty of being understood by everybody. … A deep sound, a high note were originally images. (pp. 129-30)

Again, however, he warns the reader not to pull etymologies out of a hat:

Sometimes it is difficult to tell exactly from what organ of the body these expressions came: for example, it was long considered doubtful whether the adjective clarus came from sigh or from hearing. Without the words acies, acus, acutus, acer, we should not know that acid (the French aigre) did not always belond to the sense of taste. (p. 130)

 So much for introspective psychology, then.

Glazer and Rubinstein: "A Model of Persuasion with Boundedly Rational Agents" (2012)

Suppose you have a belief or opinion about the logical atoms p, q, and r. Somebody then asks you what you think about these three issues and tells you that you will get 100$ if your opinions satisfy the following rules:

1. If p and q, then r
2. If q and ¬r, then p
3. If ¬p and ¬q, then ¬r
4. If ¬p and q, then ¬r
5. If r and ¬q, then ¬p
6. If p and r, then ¬q

The person awarding the prize actually have no way of checking your actual beliefs, so you can really say anything you like which is consistent with these rules.

However, most people will probably find it difficult to synthesize a coherent story from these rules, and they will respond by hacking a little about with their actual beliefs until they find some modified version of the truth which is consistent or close to consistent with the rules.

One plausible hypothesis about how this hacking is carried out is that you find one or more rules that are violated by your actual beliefs and then revise your statement about the conclusion of the if-then rule. This is easier than revising the antecedent of the rule, since the consequent always contains a single bit only.

If you use this revision scheme, then a series of revisions can be seen as a walk around the three-dimensional hypercube which represents the possible truth assignments to p, q, and r. The six rules mentioned above, for instance, corresponds to the following steps around the hypercube:

In this particular case, each "profile" (assignment) violates exactly one rule and points in the direction of a unique other profile which does not. If you keep revising your statement according to the bit-fixing procedure described above, you will thus always eventually end up in the accepted state 000 (unless you happened to start in the accepted state 100). But there are many other rule collections that do not have this property.

However, in this paper, Jacob Glazer and Ariel Rubinstein collect a number of interesting facts about such accessibility relations on the hypercube. They argue that rule set is consistent (satisfiable) if it has no symmetric connections. They also discuss how to convert arbitrary rule sets into "canonical" rule sets where each profile has at most one arrow emanating from it. Throughout most of the paper, they assume that ordinary agents are incapable of taking more than one step through these diagrams.

From a mechanism design standpoint, the most interesting question is of course when one can design a rule set with the property that boundedly rational agents with the "wrong" beliefs are tricked into submitting statements that actually violate the rules, while agents that have the "right" beliefs are led to submit statements that are consistent with the rules.

It turns out that the crucial feature which allows for such sorting of the agents is that all connected components of the "rejectable" region contain a cycle. If this is the case, then the designer can pick a rule set that will send all rejectable profiles around in a circle inside the rejectable region. In Glazer and Rubinstein's formulation, such agents will be trapped in "a circle of lies."

There is a number of interesting parallels that the paper doesn't touch on, but which would be natural to follow up on. From an information-theoretic standpoint, for instance, the collections of arrows on the hypercube could be taken to represent a decoding procedure, and a solution to the design problem would then be a zero-error decoding method. From a statistical perspective, the arrows correspond to a certain type of Gibbs sampling, and it is in fact known that a Markov chain Monto Carlo scheme very similar to this one is a useful solution method for Boolean satisfiability problems.

Hattiangadi: Oughts and Thoughts (2007)

Front cover (from amazon.com).

This book, based on Anandi Hattiangadi's doctoral dissertation, embodies pretty much everything that's wrong with analytic philosophy — the scholasticism, the narrowness, the in-breeding. Opening up the book on a completely random page, I find the following example:

Similarly, if we want to explain why Jones tokened a 'horse' thought, but Smith did not, we might cite the fact that there was a horse in front of Jones but not in front of Smith. However, if there is a horse in front of both of them, but Jones is in the light and Smith is in the dark, we will cite the fact that the horse in front of Jones was well lit. In that case, it looks like it is the light rays bouncing off the horse and into Jones's eyes that caused the 'horse' thought, since the in the absence of that condition, in Smith's case, a 'horse' thought was not caused. (p. 138)

And so on. You probably get the point.

Private Commitments And Bananas

The reason why I checked out the book from the library is that it contains a discussion of the issue of normativity in semantics. In fact, its last chapter before the conclusion is called "Is Meaning Normative?" (ch. 7).

Hattiangadi doesn't think so. Her argument comes in three species:

1. Meaning can't be based on prescriptions, promises, conventions, etc. because that would only work if you could already understand those prescriptions, promises, conventions, etc. So they would presuppose meaning (pp. 193–97).
2. If you assume that norms are somehow a matter of personal, private, inner commitments, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense: "Eating a banana instead of an apple does not mean that I have failed to do what I ought to do in anything other than the trivial sense that I have violated the hypothetical imperative conditional on my intention" (p. 201). This argument often co-occurs with the character Matilda, who is a notorious liar.
3. Since norms and rules are only negative and restrictive, they won't generalize, for some reason: "The rule that tells me to apply 'horse' only to horses does not tell me that 'horse' applies to all horses" (p. 206).

Those all seem to be pretty bad arguments. The first one, in particular, is an exact parallel to the often-used argument against relativism which, like St. Anselm's proof of God's existence, can be used to support any theory of meaning or knowledge, however whacky.

Barclay et al.: "Comprehension and Semantic Flexibility" (1974)

This paper reports on a number of experiments which aim at showing that people highlight specific properties of a noun when they hear it in a sentence. Reading the sentences He tuned the piano and He lifted the piano, you thus form two different representations (or "encodings") of the concept "piano" in working memory.

The paper uses four different cued recall experiments to investigate this effect:

1. Sentence objects are recalled based on feature cues: Something heavy cues He lifted the piano.
2. Sentence objects are recalled based on feature cues, but now with control sentences that differ only on the objects: Something heavy cues He lifted the infant.
3. Whole sentences are recalled based on object-feature cues: Pianos are heavy cues He lifted the piano.
4. Whole sentences are recalled based on object-feature cues as well as object cues: Piano cues He lifted the piano.

The materials are not reprinted in the paper.

Vendler: "Verbs and Times" (1957)

As with his paper on quantifiers, I read this paper in Linguistics in Philosophy (1967), but it first appeared in Philosophical Review in 1957. It's also floating around the internet here and there.

The Aspectual Garden

The paper is essentially a presentation of a taxonomy of verbal aspects.

Vendler makes a distinction between verbs that express states, and verbs that don't. Among those that don't, he distinguishes between those that have no clear end goals, and those that do.

Among processes with end goals, he distinguishes between those that consist only of a change of state, and those that consist both of an extended process and a change of state.

Here is his taxonomy with the names he uses:

• States are extended processes which involve no action and produce no change;
• Activities are extended processes which involve action but still produce no change;
• Accomplishments are extended processes which culminate in a change of state;
• Achievements are punctual events which consist of a change of state.

In my textbook on semantics, these classes are described by sorting them first according to the static/dynamic dimension, and then by plugging the dynamic verbs into the four cells of a table with a telic/atelic dimension and a durative/punctual dimension.

The result of this analysis is that Vendler's "achievements" are split into two classes: punctual atelic semelfactives and punctual telic achievements. Activities would then be the durative atelic processes, and accomplishments would be the durative telic ones. All static verbs are still lumped together in one big class called states.

This alternative model is taken from Carlota Smith's The Parameter of Aspect (first edition, 1991).

Diagnostics for the Classes

Vendler's taxonomy involves three different dimensions of difference. He himself proposes a number of tests that can distinguish the two poles of each dimension.

The Progressive Test

The easiest distinction to make is the one between static verbs and everything else. As Vendler notes, only dynamic verbs accept progressive forms (p. 99), so one can't say things like

• *I am resembling …
• *I am owning …
• *I am resenting …

For the same reason, one can also not answer the question

• What are you doing?

with a static sentence.

The Completion Time Test

Since telic processes have an implied end state, it makes sense to ask how long such a process took (to accomplish). For atelic processes, this frequently makes less sense (p. 100–101):

• I takes me forever to write an email. (durative, telic)
• *It took me all afternoon to sit in my chair. (durative, atelic)
• It took the bomb an hour to explode. (punctual, telic)
• ?I took me an hour to cough. (punctual, atelic)

However, this test is not very reliable, since one can also construe the atelic verb as designating a desired end state of some other process. For instance, if I want to sneeze but can't, the sentence it takes me a long time to sneeze sound less weird.

A bit of googling shows that people occasionally do write things like that. The verb sleep also provides a good problematic example.

The Temporal Extension Test

Reversely, one can ask for the amount of time spent on an atelic process, but not a telic one:

• *I wrote an email for an hour. (durative, telic)
• I sat in my chair all afternoon. (durative, atelic)
• *The bomb exploded for an hour. (punctual, telic)
• I coughed for an hour. (punctual, atelic)

However, this test also rules out atelic processes that can not easily be "ground" into repeated actions:

• *I took a breath for an hour. (punctual, atelic)
• ?I sneezed a single time for an hour. (punctual, atelic)
• *He died throughout 1918. (punctual, atelic)

The test can thus only reliably be used to distinguish between telic and atelic processes in the durative case. In the punctual, things might go wrong.

The Homogeneity Test

Although durative telic processes have a completion time, this completion time cannot be interpreted as a temporal extension. If it took me an hour to reach the summit, that doesn't mean that I was engaged in an activity called "reaching the summit" in that whole period (p. 104).

This difference can also be exploited in a test:

I wrote my first draft between 9 and 12                 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (invalid?)

I wrote my first draft between 10 and 11.                

I ran aimlessly around between 9 and 12             

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (valid)

I ran aimlessly around between 10 and 11.            

I realized how wrong I was between 9 and 12                 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (invalid)

I realized how wrong I was between 10 and 11.                

I coughed loudly between 9 and 12              

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (valid)

I coughed loudly between 10 and 11.             

However, this test isn't perfect either. While it does select precisely the atelic processes in these cases, the test might actually reject paradigmatically telic processes like write a letter or draw a circle. It is not always clear that the time interval pertains to the end point of the process rather than the process as a whole.

The Twice Test

Vendler doesn't mention this, but it should be mentioned that although we can almost always "grind" punctual processes into durative ones, we can counteract this tendency by insisting one counting the events in questions:

• I blinked twice.
• I blinked for an hour.
• ?I blinked twice for an hour.

To see to what extent this test is able to separate durative from punctual verbs, we can try to plug sleep into the same frame:

• I slept twice.
• I slept for an hour.
• I slept twice for an hour.

Is this last sentence acceptable? If so, we have a working diagnostic; if not, we have a problem.

The Spot Test

Although punctual processes can almost always be "ground" into durative ones, it is difficult for a punctual verb to have a durative complement. Concretely, Vendler notes the difference (p. 114):

• I saw him run.
• I saw him cross the street.
• *I spotted him run.
• *I spotted him cross the street.

This observation, however, does not sit easily with the fact that you can realize how wrong you were or, even worse, that you can realize how wrong you always were.

Shuy: The Language of Defamation Cases (2010)

Roger Shuy is a so-called "forensic linguist," meaning that he appears as an expert witness in court cases that centrally involve questions about language, such as libel suits. He's written a number of books reporting on cases he's been involved in, the most recent being The Language of Defamation Cases.

His discussions are interesting because they show how quickly our unreflected notion of "meaning" starts to come undone when it gets exposed to the extreme hair-splitting that libel suits unavoidably entail. "What a statement means" becomes less rather than more clear when you look at it up close.

Frank Celebrezze v. The Plain Dealer

In 1986, the (Republican) Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer ran a series of stories about the (Democratic) Ohio Supreme Court justice Frank Celebrezze. Shortly thereafter, Celebrezze lost the race for re-election for the Supreme Court.

Before the publication of the articles, Celebrezze had taken campaign donations from labour unions, and some of these labour unions had members who were convicted of involvement in organized crime. As a judge, he had also voted against the conviction of people accused of organized crime at least twice.

So, one might conjecture that he was corrupt, and the mafia had bought his vote — and this was exactly what the two journalists Gary Webb and Mary Anne Sharkey claimed in a series of Plain Dealer articles, published immediately before the Supreme Court election.

Or was it? A closer reading of the articles in question revealed that they did not directly state that Celebrezze was corrupt, but one might argue that they suggested as much. Celebrezze consequently sued The Plain Dealer, and both he and the paper hired linguists to back their case.

Shuy represented the paper, and a local English professor was made Frank Celebrezze's case. Both experts wrote a report, but the case was eventually settled outside the court for an undisclosed sum.

The Apple of Discord

A number of quotes were brought to bear on the case. Most of them were headlines like this one:

Chief Justice denies mob role in contributions (p. 101)

But also some excerpts from the articles themselves were used, including this one:

In 1982 Celebrezze cast a tie-breaking vote against convicting Liberatore of arson. State records show that five days later, a Celebrezze campaign fund was given $5,000 … (p. 103)

The question was: Do these two sentences together imply that Celebrezze received the campaign donation as a result of his vote, or does it not?

The Argument Pro

According to Celebrezze's expert, both snippets of text indirectly implied that Celebrezze was guilty. With respect to the headline, the argument was a pragmatic one about presupposition:

If the headline had read Chief Justice Says Accusations Concerning Mob Role are False then the presupposition would have been that someone had made such accusations, not that the mob role was a given fact. (p. 101–102)

In other words, the claim is that the verb deny is veridical, or factive, while accusations concerning is not.

In the case of the quote, the argument refers to discourse coherence relationships:

Juxtaposing the two claims (that the judge had cast a tie-breaking vote and received money five days later) creates the obvious innuendo that there is a cause and effect relationship between the vote cast and the money paid. (p. 103)

So a reader searching for a coherent link between the two sentences will stumble upon cause–effect as the first likely candidate. This can be compared to the following examples, adapted from Jennifer Spenader:

• Bill is worried that John might try to gain access to his safe. He'll have to change the combination. (therefore)
• Bill is worried that John might try to gain access to his safe. He knows the combination. (because)
• Bill is worried that John might try to gain access to his safe. I like spinach. (??)

Although the general claim that people will automatically search for discourse relations is sound enough, it is worth remembering that the choice of discourse relation is notoriously difficult to consistently agree on.

Arguments Contra

Shuy's own argumentation focused on the impotence of linguistics with respect to what a reader will extract from a text, or what the motives of a writer are:

There is no way that a linguist can actually reach inside the mind of the writer to determine what that writer intended. (p. 107)

There is no way that linguistic analysis can prove such attributions of a person's intentions. (p. 109)

The plaintiff's expert's use of expressions such as "must have," "they are affected," and "readers would" attribute results or behaviors [to the reader] that linguistic analysis simply cannot provide. (p. 111)

This is a surprisingly self-defying argument to hear from a person who is himself a forensic linguist. If it were really the case that linguistics has nothing to say about how a text works or what it reveals about the author, what is it doing in the courtroom in the first place?

The argument is also strange given that Shuy in the same chapter explains that he once had a courtroom disagreement with another linguist who "actually agreed with my conclusions but claimed that the field of linguistics could lead neither of us to such findings" (p. 98). To my ears, this sounds surprisingly close to saying that there is "no way that linguistic analysis can prove such attributions of a person's intentions."

The Flexibility of Forensic Linguistics

Further, when Shuy appears on the other side of a court case, he also seems to embrace a much more liberal approach to meaning:

Otherwise benign words and expressions, such as "made plans," "was alone," "secretly left the house," "went unanswered," "left town," and "living with," can convey meanings far beyond their usual dictionary senses, especially in the context of a broadcast about a murder. (p. 61–62)

But oddly, this is not the case with words like deny in the context of newspaper reporting on mob crime.

It seems that the conclusion we can draw is that linguistics either can or cannot say something about meaning, depending on whom its employer is on a given day. In the murder case (chapter 4), journalists are thus clever manipulators setting up snares for their helpless sources and listeners:

Most listeners are not very likely to notice the discourse framing of the broadcasts or that there was little attempt to clarify important ambiguities. (p. 68)

But in the corruption case (chapter 7), they have regained their agency, and the newspaper is liable only for explicit accusations, not innuendo:

… there is no such accusation in the articles, which present the facts about the relationship between the plaintiff and the local unions … The Plain Dealer claimed that the readers could draw whatever conclusions, if any, that these facts suggest to them. (p. 115)

Probably, the oscillation between these two poles of semantic theory is destined to go on as long as linguists continue to see meaning as a feature of words rather than situations.