Perspective in language

Language often indicates perspective:

(1) Give me that.
(2) *Give me this.

The reason that (2) is weird -- by convention, an asterisk marks a bad sentence -- is that the word this suggests that whatever is being requested is close to the speaker. Consider also:

(3) Jane came home.
(4) Jane went home.

If we were currently at Jane's home, it would be more natural to say (3) than (4). Of course, we could say (4), but we would be shifting our perspective, treating wherever Jane was as the reference point, rather than where we are now (this is particularly common in story-telling).

A less prosaic example

That is all fairly familiar, so when I turned to section 6.1 of Chapter 1 of Leonard Talmy's Toward a Cognitive Semantics, titled "Perspectival Location", I wasn't expecting anything particularly new. Then I read these examples (p. 69):

(5) The lunchroom door slowly opened and two men walked in.
(6) Two men slowly opened the lunchroom door and walked in.

These sentences describe the same event, but place the reader in a very different position. As Talmy points out, when reading (5), one gets the sense that you are in the lunchroom, whereas in (6), you get the sense that you outside of the lunchroom ... either that, or the door to the lunchroom is transparent glass.

Implied movement

Talmy gives another great pair of examples on page 71:

(7) There are some houses in the valley.
(8) There is a house every now and then through the valley.

The first sentence implies a static point of view, far from the houses, allowing you to see all the houses at once (Talmy calls this "stationary distal perspective point with global scope of attention"), whereas (8) gives the sense of moving through the valley and among the houses, with only a few within view at any given time ("moving proximal perspective point with local scope of attention")


Writing

Talmy's purpose is to put together a taxonomy of linguistic devices, and most of this chapter is trying to lay out all the different factors along which language can vary (for instance, the different types of perspective one can take). And that is of course why I'm reading it.

But it's also interesting to think about as a writer. One flaw in bad writing is using sentences that adopt the wrong perspective (telling a story about Jennifer, who is in the lunchroom, and then using (6)). This example from Talmy shows just how complicated the issues are ... and the tools available to a good writer for subtly guiding the reader through the story.

Statistics for Idiots

Republicans in the House are proposing to cut funding for food safety programs, despite a rise in food-born illness. Congressman Jack Kingston explains, that the nation's food supply is "99.99 percent safe". Politifact says, "That sounds great, but is it true?"

Actually, it doesn't sound that good to me. Suppose Kingston means that you only have a 0.01% chance of getting ill any particular time you eat (which seems to be the case). And let's say people eat 3 times a day. That gives you a 10.4% chance of getting sick any given year. I'd rather not get sick at all, particularly when many of the illnesses are easily preventable.

Tenure, a dull roar

Slate ran an unfortunate, bizarre piece on tenure last week. FemaleScienceProfessor has a good take-down.  Among problems, it repeats the claim that the average tenured professor costs the average university around $11,000,000 across his/her career -- a number that is either misleading, miscalculated, or (most likely) an outright lie. But, as FemaleScienceProfessor points out, tenure itself costs next to nothing, so anyone who says eliminating tenure will save money really means cutting professor salaries will save money but doesn't want to be on the record saying so.

If this seems like deja vu, it is. I just wrote a post about a similarly confused feature in the New York Times. That post is still worth reading (imho).

Which raises the question of why tenure is under attack. I have two guesses: 1) it's a way of ignoring the progressive defunding of public universities, or 2) part of the broader war on science. There are possibly a few people who genuinely think tenure is a bad idea, but not because eliminating it will save money (it won't), because it'll soften the publish-or-perish ethos (yes, the claim has been made), or because it'll refocus universities on teaching (absurd, irrelevant, and beside the point). Which leaves concerns about an inflexible workforce and the occasional dead-weight professor, but that's not on my list of top ten problems in education, and I don't think it should be on anyone else's -- there are bigger fish to fry.

Sell off Harvard Medical School!

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus contend

Colleges are taking on too many roles and doing none of them well. They are staffed by casts of thousands and dedicated to everything from esoteric research to vocational training—and have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people... Spin off medical schools, research centers, and institutes... For people who want to do research, plenty of other places exist—the Brookings Institution, the Rand Corporation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute—all of which do excellent work without university ties.

Never mind that Howard Hughes is intimately tied to the present university system, let's say we're in favor: sell off Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, etc., until all that's left is the College. That'd make it what? -- Wellesley + men? (This question is meant to be snarky, but not anti-Wellesley, for which I have the utmost respect, as will be clear in the rest of the post).


It's the money, stupid.


The blogosphere has been rising to the defense of the research university, with posters and commenters focusing on the (alleged) claim that universities use research dollars to fund the loss-leading undergraduate programs. Here's Mike the Mad Biologist:

[O]n a federal grant, usually somewhere between 30-40% of the total grant award doesn't go to the researcher for research costs (salaries, supplies, etc.), but to the institution. Now, some of that money is spent on actual administrative costs, but the rest goes to the university*. So if the university spins off $50 million, or $100, or, in the case of the University of Iowa, $169,175,021 of NIH funding alone (never mind other government sources), that's tens of millions of dollars that have to be recovered. Since I've called for more of a research institute model, I'm not opposed to spinning off research institutes. But I have no idea how universities that receive a lot of research dollars will make up the revenue shortfall.

There's an easy way of answering the question: write to any of the numerous, high-calliber exclusively-undergraduate institutions that makes the American education system so interesting: Wellesley, Swarthmore, Amherst, Grinnell, Oberlin, etc. For the last 150-200 years, such schools have focused on teaching, and teaching caliber is weighted heavily in tenure decisions. I had phenomenal professors. To name a few, Arlene Forman could have taught a turnip to speak Russian, and Jim Walsh delivered spellbinding lectures despite unpromising subject material (e.g., linear algebra). People who had never even attended Ron DiCenzo's classes nonetheless raved about the vicarious experience. 

Research University vs. Liberal Arts College

I loved the small liberal arts college experience and wouldn't have traded it for anything. But I have friends who feel the same way about the large research university: the inspirational presence of movers and shakers in the research world, they feel, is irreplaceable. I'm skeptical, but the great thing about the American education system is that it provides both options, something that many (all?) other countries lack. The only distressing thing is that so many students -- along with the Chronicle of Higher Education and essentially every blogger I read and all their commenters -- seem completely unaware that an alternative to the research university exists.

America has research-only institutes. It has undergraduate-only schools. And it has that fabulous hybrid institution: the research university. Arguing that we need to start founding undergraduate-only schools is like saying America really needs subways. Maybe we need more subways (I think we do!), but claiming they don't exist is just ignant, and it's an insult to the ones that exist and the people who made them possible.

The Purpose of Language

A book I'm currently reading quotes the well-known linguist Charles Fillmore as writing

the language of face-to-face conversation is the basic and primary use of language, all others being best described in terms of their manner of deviation from that base... I assume that this position is neither particularly controversial nor in need of explanation.

If only it were so. Uber-linguist Noam Chomsky said in a talk I attended that language is not "for communication." I've never been quite sure what he meant by this, so I decided this was a good time to find out.

Googling turned up this interview, in which his statement is much more mild. He seems to simply state that to the extent language is used socially, it isn't always for the purpose of communication. I can get on board with that.

This other interview, however, makes a stronger claim. Here is a representative quote:

If human language has a function at all it's for expression of thought. So if you just think about your own use of language, a rather small part is used for communication. Much of human language is just used to establish social relations. Suppose you go to a bar in Kyoto and you spend an evening talking to your friends. You're not 'communicating'. You're rarely communicating. You're not presenting them with any information that changes their belief systems. You're simply engaged in a kind of social play.

Perhaps. I'm still with Fillmore that this seems to be derivative on communication, but I'm not even sure what kind of evidence could be found that would favor one position or the other.

Fearing the Terminator

I heard one of the guys behind Games With A Purpose speaking on Future Tense a few days ago (sadly, their names are not listed on the website, and I don't recall who it was). He pointed out that many people are concerned about his project of "making computers smarter." A good example is a recent commenter on this blog.

This researcher's response to such concerns is, essentially, "Computers have already taken over the world, and they are stupid. Wouldn't it be better if they were smarter?"

That's one argument, though I'm not sure how well it speaks to those who worry about the Terminator. Another argument would be that, sure, smart computers are scary. But the world is already pretty scary, and smart computers would make it a little less so. The question is whether the advantages outweigh the risks.

In the past, it has. Whatever side-effects technology has had -- and I'm including global warming, here -- so far it's made life unimaginably better (for one thing, without modern technology, not only could you not read this post, but many if not most people reading this post would have died before reaching their present age).

This is the essence of Dan Savage's retort to a writer who worried about the harmful effects of chlorine in water: (approximately) "I'd rather have a little bit of chlorine than a whole lot of cholera."

Talk about the extraordinary

In a chapter from The Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th Edition, Gilbert notes that people have a

an odd habit and a not so odd habit. The not so odd habit is that they describe behavior that is driven by extraordinary dispositions as having been driven by extraordinary dispositions. The odd habit is that they describe behavior that is driven by ordinary dispositions as having been caused by external agencies.

This may sound like a lot of unnecessary jargon, but he immediate breaks it down (Gilbert is an extremely clear and entertaining writer and definitely worth reading):

When one runs screaming from a baby rabbit, one usually owes the bystanders an explanation. Such explanations are acceptable when they are couched in terms of one's extraordinary dispositions--for example, "I have a morbid fear of fur" or "I sometimes mistake baby rabbits for Hitler." On the other hand, when one retreats from a hissing rattlesnake, one does not typically explain that behavior in terms of ordinary dispositions ("I dislike being injected with venom" or "I feel death is bad") but rather, in terms of the stimuli that invoked them ("It shook its thing at me").

This turns out to be part of a broader phenomenon in language, as Gilbert notes. People tend to avoid saying the obvious and focus on the unusual (Grice was probably the first to notice this). This might seem like a very reasonable thing to do, but there is nothing necessary about it. That is, it's easy to imagine people who are as likely to state the obvious as the non-obvious (and there in fact seem to be some people like that, at least in sitcoms). 

What I think is the most interesting part of this, though, is not that people tend to state the non-obvious, but we as listeners expect the speaker to do this. That suggests either some very sophisticated learning or evolution. (The fact that young children are terrible at distinguishing the obvious from non-obvious in conversation doesn't mean that it is a learned skill; it could be a genetically-programmed behavior that simply comes online later in development, just like puberty.)