The semantics of "call"

(picture from this Flickr page)

Breakfasting at a local diner this post-Thanksgiving morning, my niece Ashley pointed to a sign on the door and asked "why do some sings say 'please call again' when they mean 'come back again'?"

Helluva question Ashley. First, WordNet lists a large number of synsets (meanings) for the word call (13 noun synsets and 28 verb synsets). It's a highly polysemous word. The relevant meaning for this use is "to pay a brief visit". Lacking access to the OED (the price I paid for leaving the academic world ... sigh), I used instead the Online Etymology Dictionary (and trust that it is relatively accurate) which lists this entry for call: "From Meaning "to visit" (M.E.) was literally "to stand at the door and call;" sense of "a short formal visit" is from 1862; caller "visitor" is from 1786."

So, why has this otherwise outdated meaning persisted in the retail customer service frame? I suspect it has to do with politeness. This older meaning evokes a friendliness, even a neighborliness which encourages customers who have missed the hours of service to not be offended. Something like that.

Deer Meat & Semantic Narrowing

Andrew Sullivan! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! Take a frikkin linguistics course! Ugh! Sullivan (and I love the little blogging devil, really) but damn! He promotes some of the most ass-backwards, wrong-headed linguists outside of that dried up old fogy Willy-boy Safire. Today, Sullivan posted a passage from another blogger decrying the degradation of language (yawn) which made a plainly wrong and easily falsifiable claim:

"Words have value in their ability to distinguish and to discriminate. And they are only ever damaged in one direction: they become more abstracted, more broad, less specific, less forceful, less memorable, less powerful, more middling, less individual. " [my emphasis]

Sigh ... after years of teaching Linguistics 101 courses, this is just tiresome. And yet, here I shall plunge into the conventional examples (with 21st century hyperlinks, oooh, ahhhh).

There are many kinds of semantic change. Sullivan's reference focuses on one, widening, where a word's meaning changes from subordinate level to superordinate level (i.e., from specific to general). But there are many examples of the opposite, or narrowing (or some would use the term sepcialization) involving a change from superordinate level to subordinate level (i.e., from general to specific).

You don't belive me? You want examples? Okay.

Example 1: meat (pdf here)
Narrowing: the meaning of the word narrows to have a more specific meaning. The word mete (“meat”) in Old English used to mean “food.” Its meaning has narrowed to mean “food in the form of animal flesh.”

Example 2: skyline (original here)
Narrowing: Change from superordinate level to subordinate level. For example, skyline used to refer to any horizon, but now it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers.

Example 3: hound (original from Google books here)
Old English hund 'dog' narrowed to Modern English hound to refer to 'a particular breed of dog'.

Example 4: deer (original here)
SPECIALIZATION, in which the meaning of a word narrows over the years (deer once meant any four-legged beast and now means only members of the family Cervidae).

Some fine day, these examples will be general knowledge ... someday ... (sigh) .. someday ...

"think" vs. "believe"

Good ol' Sitemeter never fails to yield its share of fascinating factoids. For example, earlier today some brave Canadian Googler found my blog by searching for, and I quote, "think vs believe semantic difference".

Having nothing but love for my readers, I think it only fair that I might attempt to address the deep and profound "think" vs. "believe" distinction. Let us take the following two sentences as our minimal pair:

1. Willy thinks that the wine is good.
2. Willy believes that the wine is good.

In both (1) and (2) above there is a verb of cognition (e.g., FrameNet frames Awareness, Certainty) which takes a clause as its complement. The difference lies in the nature of the truth value predicated of the complement clause by the matrix verb (think vs. believe).

We could couch this truth value predication either in terms of a) epistemic modality or b) evidentiality. Either way, the verb "think" denotes lesser confidence in the truth of the complement clause than the verb "believe" (and they both denote less confidence than the verb "know").

So (1) should be interpreted as meaning Willy has weak confidence in the belief that the wine is good, whereas (2) should be interpreted as meaning that Willy has strong confidence that the wine is good. So the difference between "think" and "believe" is one of degree in confidence of the truth of X (where X is a proposition...which is a tad redundant if you take it to be the case that only propositions have truth value...)

You'll have to try the wine yourself to decide if Willy knows his wine or not.

Definitely A Winner

(screen shot from SF Chronicle)

The San Francisco Chronicle delved into linguistics Thursday:

Arien O'Connell was vindicated Wednesday morning - sort of.

The fifth-grade teacher from New York City ran the fastest time in Sunday's Nike Women's Marathon, but she was told by race officials that she didn't win because she wasn't among the "elite" runners who were given a 20-minute head start.

O'Connell was unhappy - and as corporate sports giant Nike quickly learned, she wasn't the only one.

Faced with a blast of criticism from all over the country, Nike issued a statement Wednesday saying that it "recognizes Arien O'Connell as a winner.

Did you catch that? It says a winner - not the winner.

Even though she ran 11 minutes faster than the "elite" woman who was given first place, O'Connell's career-best finish will exist in an odd parallel universe where, no matter how fast you run, you can't win the race unless you're among a special few." [my emphases]

In typical introductory linguistics courses, we would teach students that the English indefinite article "a" is used to introduce a new referent into discourse. But of course, it's uses are far more varied, as this case demonstrates. In this case, Nike chose to use the indefinite article "a" in a partitive function implying that O'Connell was one member of a set of winners (and causing readers to infer that the set of winners has more than one member, otherwise they would have used "the" ... someday I'll brush up on Grice to be able to explain this reasoning more clearly).

Now, my take on the events in question is somewhat cynical: almost all individual-based sporting events are rigged in one way or another to favor the top pros. The practice of seeding in Grand Slam tennis tournaments is a good example (Agassi once said he thought seeding ought to be abolished, and I agree).

Arien O'Connell ran a great race and deserves to be recognized for that. But what counts as "the winner" is Nike's call, not ours. I don't have a problem with Nike's statement. One fair question, though, is whether they referred to the other winner as "a winner" too?

Singular 'they' is old, logical, and grammatical

(pic of Andrew Sullivan from his Wikipedia entry)

Like most linguists, I roll my eyes at prescriptivism. Yet it rears its ugly head again and again, and the now stale and tiresome complaints about singular they have popped up again. Andrew Sullivan is currently acting as a conduit and because his blog is so popular, he has the ability to reinforce this issue with a wide audience. To his credit, Andrew says "I often use her as a generalizing pronoun. But this kind of dispute is better left to experts..." It remains to be seen what rules he will follow in the future. I'll try to keep my eyes open.

But the point is that English singular they has been around for a long time. It is not new by any stretch. English has no gender neutral plural pronoun, so we speakers have long been faced with the challenge of "working around" our deficit.

I will act as conduit to my little piece of the blogosphere for Geoff Pullum's April 26, 2008 advice:
"Avoid singular they if you want to; nobody is making you use it. But don't ever think that it is new (it goes back to early English centuries ago), or that it is illogical (there is no logical conflict between being syntactically singular and semantically plural), or that it is ungrammatical (it is used by the finest writers who ever used English, writers who uncontroversially knew what they were doing)."

FYI: here's a sampling of various Language Log singular they posts going back four years, all of which seem to support Pullum's advice:

All posts tagged "singular they".

Facebook phases out singular "they" (Benjamin Zimmer, June 27, 2008)

Canadian Department of Justice: use "singular they" (Mark Liberman, April 13, 2008)

Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof (Geoffrey K. Pullum March 02, 2008)

Singular they on Facebook (Eric Bakovic, April 28, 2007)

"Singular they" mailbag (Mark Liberman, September 15, 2006)

"Singular they": God said it, I believe it, that settles it (Mark Liberman, September 13, 2006)

Is "singular they" verbally and plenarily inspired of God? (Mark Liberman, August 21, 2006)

They are a prophet (Geoffrey K. Pullum, October 21, 2004)

Semantics: "Bailout" vs. "Rescue"

(screen grab from CNN)

In last night's presidential debate, Senator McCain made an interesting semantic distinction between two words used to refer to the Treasury department's infamous financial plan:

Clark: Well, Senators, through this economic crisis, most of the people that I know have had a difficult time. And through this bailout package, I was wondering what it is that's going to actually help those people out.

McCain: Well, thank you, Oliver, and that's an excellent question, because as you just described it, bailout, when I believe that it's rescue, because -- because of the greed and excess in Washington and Wall Street, Main Street was paying a very heavy price, and we know that [emphasis added].

What is the difference between a bailout and a rescue? There is a nice cognitive semantic point to be made: I think bailout foregrounds the undergoer participants who are being helped and their failure to help themselves, whereas rescue foregrounds the actor participants who are doing the rescuing and their benevolence. My own take is that a bailout presupposes the participants being helped caused their own misfortune whereas a rescue presupposes they did not.

The indispensable political polling blogger Nate Silver posted about this very topic here. nate's big takeaway:

"...the proposal has been referred to colloquially as the "bailout" or very commonly the "Wall Street bailout" (the latter term brings up more than 7,000 hits in Google News). Where is Frank Luntz when you need him? If the proposal had instead been framed as, say, an "economic recovery" plan, it would probably be far less politically toxic."

Pundit Plays Linguist. Fails.

(screen shot of a guest at McCain's BBQ. Video here)

Political pundits almost pathologically believe they have greater influence than they really do. Case in point, Talking Points Memo's editor and publisher and chief blogger Josh Marshal has been trying to promote the use of the phrase "ride the swing" as a metaphor for the case when "a reporter who has gotten way too cozy with a politician and has had their supposed objectivity affected" (original explanation here). The phrase refers to a posh BBQ that McCain hosted at one of his Arizona ranches where journalists were treated to a very comfy social experience that bordered on bribery (click on "video here" below the pic). As far as I can tell, Marshal is the primary pusher of the phrase and its most frequent user (a couple other examples here and here).

I suspect Marshal's linguistic campaign will fail. Attempts by a single person to explicitly promote the use of a new metaphor are rarely successful. This is not how language works. Successful new coinages are generally adopted less self-consciously. The process is not well understood, but examples like Marshal's are few and far between. Additionally, there are already several good metaphors for related frames, such as "drank the cool-aid" (which has equally obscure origins involving jungles and religious cults). Not sure we need a new one just for journalists.

(HT to my colleague CC for bringing this to my attention. At first, we had no clue what this metaphor referred to, and as such we literally couldn't understand what it was meant to evoke. CC did some blogger detective work and discovered its origin).