Telling someone their brain is a collection of hacks and kludges is one thing; showing them, having them experience it, is on another level altogether.
Relatedly, my favorite quote from Egan’s Permutation City: “You have to let me show you exactly what you are.”
Another classic example of the brain’s hackishness, which does not seem to have been mentioned here before, is the sentence, “More people have been to Russia than I have.” If you say this sentence to someone (try it!), they’ll at first claim that it was a perfectly reasonable, grammatical sentence. But then you ask them what it means, they’ll start to say something, then stop, look confused, and laugh.
(Yes, there is a parsing of “have” as “possess”, but this is (a) precluded by inflection, and (b) not ever what someone initially comes up with).
Does this test not work when written down? Or am I unusual? The sentence jarred immediately on the first reading, and I went back and read it about three times to try and figure out if it could have any meaning at all before carrying on to the rest of the paragraph.
I have never before attempted to transmit it in writing, and I’m not a linguist. But apparently, it works for at least somewhat for at least some people (see Oscar_Cunningham below). Still, I’m sorry to have spoiled for you the effect of hearing it.
Same experience here. I read it through a few times to whether if it was ungrammatical or just weird. I got a feeling of mental reward when my confusion dissolved and the actual possible meaning clicked. It would take a particular kind of brain for someone to phase a sentence that way.
I don’t see how that is a system crasher sentence. I think I can successfully parse it as “I must succeed in agreeing with you more”. Yes, it takes a while to figure out the meaning because turning each negative into a positive is a separate step, but there is a meaning in the end, unlike the sentence about Russia.
“Grammatical stress” isn’t a technical term, as far as I know. In any event, the phenomenon we’re discussing here is the grammatical function of a word being communicated by the intonation pattern (as well as, probably, the speed pattern) of the sentence in which the word occurs.
“Grammatical stress” isn’t a technical term, as far as I know.
I am not a linguist, but I’ve see the term “grammatical stress” used to denote situations where the stress of a word is determined by its syntactic context, and where a difference in stress may imply a different syntactic structure of the sentence. This is in contrast to lexical stress, which is a context-independent property of each word, and intonation, whose variation doesn’t affect the syntactic structure, but merely changes things at the level of pragmatics.
Now that I’ve googled around a bit, I see that these terms aren’t really standardized, and authors who use them typically make sure to include their favored definitions to avoid confusion. If you use “intonation” also for what I call “grammatical stress” above, then fair enough. (And for all I know, such usage might indeed be more common.)
Still, I think the contrast I have in mind is worth pointing out. In the above example, the difference in stress implies a different syntactic structure—“have” can either be a complete verb phrase, or just an auxiliary verb referring to an antecedent (i.e. a verb phrase ellipsis). This is different from situations where changing intonation affects only pragmatics.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to restrict the use of “intonation” to describing pitch patterns that don’t convey syntactic information. I suppose if one did that, one would have to simply say “pitch” for what we are talking about here, unless there’s another term available.
Come to think of it, you’re right. It make sense to define “intonation” in purely phonetic terms (i.e. as pitch variation), and in that sense, it’s certainly present here. It is possible that I got a mistaken idea about the common technical meaning of this term in my amateurish forays into these subjects.
I meant inflection: “Alteration in pitch or tone of the voice.” But to avoid confusion in the future, I will try to use the linguist’s definitions of these words, since they’re more precise.
Also, the Wikipedia article suggests that tone rather than intonation might actually be the correct word, since there is a semantic difference.
I will try to use the linguist’s definitions of these words, since they’re more precise.
Thank you.
Also, the Wikipedia article suggests that tone rather than intonation might actually be the correct word, since there is a semantic difference.
No; “tone” refers to a phenomenon in certain languages (most famously Chinese) wherein otherwise identical words are distinguished from each other—in isolation, nothing to do with their placement in a sentence—by the contour of one’s voice when pronouncing them. The kind of contextual variation of pitch that you are talking about—intonation—is pretty much universal to human speech in all languages.
English intonation may become semi-lexicalized in common expressions such as “I’unno” (I don’t know), and therefore starts to approach the domain of tone.
In this case, “have” is the auxillary verb, rather than the ordinary verb “to posess”, and you can tell that by the intonation. That’s otherwise identical words distinguished from each other.
Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but I’m puzzled by this reply. It’s as if you stopped reading my comment immediately after the phrase “otherwise identical words distinguished from each other”, and ignored the next part, which happened to be the most important part. So let me try again, using bold for emphasis:
“tone” refers to a phenomenon in certain languages (most famously Chinese) wherein otherwise identical words are distinguished from each other—in isolation, nothing to do with their placement in a sentence—by the contour of one’s voice when pronouncing them
Did you actually read the Wikipedia article that you cited? Here’s an example it gives from Chinese:
1. mā "mother"
2. má "hemp"
3. mǎ "horse"
4. mà "scold"
5. ma (an interrogative particle)
This should have made it clear that we’re talking about a different phenomenon from anything that occurs in standard varieties of English. In Chinese, the intonation pattern of an individual word is actually lexical—it’s a fixed property of the word that applies even when the word is pronounced in isolation, entirely like the pattern of consonant and vowel sounds in the word. The five Chinese words above are not homophones, unlike “have” (“possess”) and “have” (auxiliary) in English. The two senses of English “have” can’t be distinguished when the word is pronounced by itself.
Show someone the gorilla video, or another of the inattentional blindness tests.
Telling someone their brain is a collection of hacks and kludges is one thing; showing them, having them experience it, is on another level altogether.
Relatedly, my favorite quote from Egan’s Permutation City: “You have to let me show you exactly what you are.”
Another classic example of the brain’s hackishness, which does not seem to have been mentioned here before, is the sentence, “More people have been to Russia than I have.” If you say this sentence to someone (try it!), they’ll at first claim that it was a perfectly reasonable, grammatical sentence. But then you ask them what it means, they’ll start to say something, then stop, look confused, and laugh.
(Yes, there is a parsing of “have” as “possess”, but this is (a) precluded by inflection, and (b) not ever what someone initially comes up with).
“More people have been to Russia than I have.”
Does this test not work when written down? Or am I unusual? The sentence jarred immediately on the first reading, and I went back and read it about three times to try and figure out if it could have any meaning at all before carrying on to the rest of the paragraph.
I have never before attempted to transmit it in writing, and I’m not a linguist. But apparently, it works for at least somewhat for at least some people (see Oscar_Cunningham below). Still, I’m sorry to have spoiled for you the effect of hearing it.
Same experience here. I read it through a few times to whether if it was ungrammatical or just weird. I got a feeling of mental reward when my confusion dissolved and the actual possible meaning clicked. It would take a particular kind of brain for someone to phase a sentence that way.
Ooh, same embedded system crasher as “I couldn’t fail to disagree with you less.”
I don’t see how that is a system crasher sentence. I think I can successfully parse it as “I must succeed in agreeing with you more”. Yes, it takes a while to figure out the meaning because turning each negative into a positive is a separate step, but there is a meaning in the end, unlike the sentence about Russia.
You picked a particularly bad context in which to confuse inflection with intonation (one of my greatest pet peeves).
Wow. That difference is new to me. Thanks, I’ll remember that!
If we’re going to be really precise, wouldn’t the difference here be a matter of grammatical stress rather than intonation?
“Grammatical stress” isn’t a technical term, as far as I know. In any event, the phenomenon we’re discussing here is the grammatical function of a word being communicated by the intonation pattern (as well as, probably, the speed pattern) of the sentence in which the word occurs.
komponisto:
I am not a linguist, but I’ve see the term “grammatical stress” used to denote situations where the stress of a word is determined by its syntactic context, and where a difference in stress may imply a different syntactic structure of the sentence. This is in contrast to lexical stress, which is a context-independent property of each word, and intonation, whose variation doesn’t affect the syntactic structure, but merely changes things at the level of pragmatics.
Now that I’ve googled around a bit, I see that these terms aren’t really standardized, and authors who use them typically make sure to include their favored definitions to avoid confusion. If you use “intonation” also for what I call “grammatical stress” above, then fair enough. (And for all I know, such usage might indeed be more common.)
Still, I think the contrast I have in mind is worth pointing out. In the above example, the difference in stress implies a different syntactic structure—“have” can either be a complete verb phrase, or just an auxiliary verb referring to an antecedent (i.e. a verb phrase ellipsis). This is different from situations where changing intonation affects only pragmatics.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to restrict the use of “intonation” to describing pitch patterns that don’t convey syntactic information. I suppose if one did that, one would have to simply say “pitch” for what we are talking about here, unless there’s another term available.
Come to think of it, you’re right. It make sense to define “intonation” in purely phonetic terms (i.e. as pitch variation), and in that sense, it’s certainly present here. It is possible that I got a mistaken idea about the common technical meaning of this term in my amateurish forays into these subjects.
I meant inflection: “Alteration in pitch or tone of the voice.” But to avoid confusion in the future, I will try to use the linguist’s definitions of these words, since they’re more precise.
Also, the Wikipedia article suggests that tone rather than intonation might actually be the correct word, since there is a semantic difference.
Thank you.
No; “tone” refers to a phenomenon in certain languages (most famously Chinese) wherein otherwise identical words are distinguished from each other—in isolation, nothing to do with their placement in a sentence—by the contour of one’s voice when pronouncing them. The kind of contextual variation of pitch that you are talking about—intonation—is pretty much universal to human speech in all languages.
Wikipedia says:
In this case, “have” is the auxillary verb, rather than the ordinary verb “to posess”, and you can tell that by the intonation. That’s otherwise identical words distinguished from each other.
Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but I’m puzzled by this reply. It’s as if you stopped reading my comment immediately after the phrase “otherwise identical words distinguished from each other”, and ignored the next part, which happened to be the most important part. So let me try again, using bold for emphasis:
Did you actually read the Wikipedia article that you cited? Here’s an example it gives from Chinese:
This should have made it clear that we’re talking about a different phenomenon from anything that occurs in standard varieties of English. In Chinese, the intonation pattern of an individual word is actually lexical—it’s a fixed property of the word that applies even when the word is pronounced in isolation, entirely like the pattern of consonant and vowel sounds in the word. The five Chinese words above are not homophones, unlike “have” (“possess”) and “have” (auxiliary) in English. The two senses of English “have” can’t be distinguished when the word is pronounced by itself.
Wow, it took me a long while to realise what was wrong with that sentence.