Language Politics

From today's New York Times article on Ozzie Guillen's suspension:

[The article] also quotes him saying: "I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years," but Mr. Castro is still here, he added, referring to him as an expletive.

Here we run up against the limits of indirect quotation. In the locution refer to X as Y, the as phrase contains indirectly quoted material, as we can verify through standard indexicality tests (e.g., change of personal pronouns):

1a. Ozzie said, "Castro is my favorite dictator." (direct quotation*)
1b. Ozzie referred to Castro as his favorite dictator. (indirect quotation)

While the NYT will not sully itself by telling us exactly which expletive Guillen used to refer to Castro, we can be reasonably sure that he did not utter the word expletive. That is, "Castro is an expletive" or similar is not a plausible direct quotation. The awkwardness of the excerpt above thus reveals an interesting fact about the as phrase in refer to X as Y: it seems to support only quotation, and not the more abstract paraphrase involved in the use of the category term expletive. Metaquotation of this sort appears to be impossible in an environment associated with quotation or mention; instead, we must choose a construction in which we can unambiguously use (not mention) the term. In this case, all we need to do is change the preposition: referring to him with an expletive.

So much for the NYT's prose. Ozzie's linguistic problems may not have such a simple fix.

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, with the state's Republican voters set to pick which member of the assholocracy they'd like to see take on Barack Obama, the New York Times runs the following headline:

Iowa, the Early Decider, Still Hasn't

The English syntactic process that leaves a gap after the negative auxiliary hasn't in the headline above is called verb phrase ellipsis (VPE). The idea behind VPE is that a sentence like the one in the headline above is derived from a structure in which the verb phrase in question is present: Iowa, the early decider, still hasn't decided. The details of how one gets from this fully articulated structure to the VPE'd headline above differ among frameworks and implementations, but everyone more or less agrees on this basic premise.

VPE is a relatively well-understood process. We have known at least since the classic treatment of Hankamer and Sag (1976) that there are syntactic (as opposed to merely pragmatic) constraints on where the missing verb phrase can find its antecedent. One such syntactic constraint prohibits the antecedent (of, e.g., decided) from being found in a morphologically related noun (such as decider): this is, in the terminology of Postal (1969), an anaphoric island. Moreover, even Ward et al. (1991), in their thorough debunking of the idea that anaphoric islandhood is anything other than a pragmatic phenomenon, note that do so anaphora, a close cousin of VPE, is systematically/grammatically unable to find its antecedent in an anaphoric island.

All of this is to say that the headline above is not merely awkward, or stilted, or too-clever-by-half. It is ungrammatical. It is ungrammatical for the same reason that it is ungrammatical to call those who produce the aforementioned paper printers of all the news that's fit to; and for the same reason that, if the Super Bowl gets cancelled, it is ungrammatical to describe that circumstance by saying that This highly anticipated happening didn't; and for the same reason that it is ungrammatical to say, of the author and editor responsible for the headline above, These presumably-native English speakers nonetheless can't. Forget about split infinitives: this is honest-to-goodness ungrammaticality we're talking about here. Perhaps if this campaign without end ever does, the NYT can turn its attention to English syntax.

Update, Jan. 3: Perhaps I have been a bit hasty. It seems that there is a difference in acceptability for some speakers between examples like the headline above, where the anaphoric island for VPE is contained in an appositive/parenthetical phrase, and the ones I made up, where the anaphoric island is more fully integrated into the clausal syntax. Consider the following pairs:

There are undoubtedly further details to be unraveled here; for example, I would not be at all surprised to find that the choice of auxiliary affects the acceptability of anaphoric-island VPE (aspectual haven't sounds better to me than modal can't in the examples above). The syntactic complexity or argument structure of the anaphoric island and ellipted VP may also affect acceptability (i.e., the relative simplicity of decide vs. the greater complexity of speak English).

Thanks to Andrew Garrett for bringing the discrepancy in judgments discussed here to my attention.

References:
Hankamer, Jorge, and Ivan Sag. 1976. Deep and surface anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry 7:391–428.
Postal, Paul. 1969. Anaphoric islands. Chicago Linguistic Society 5:205–239.
Ward, Gregory, Richard Sproat, and Gail McKoon. 1991. A pragmatic analysis of so-called anaphoric islands. Language 67:439–474.

The Megyn Kelly–Bill O'Reilly conversation about Friday's unconscionable pepper spraying incident at UC Davis has now gone viral (see video here), and Kelly has, unsurprisingly, garnered the lion's share of criticism for her meme-ready comment that pepper spray "is a food product, essentially." (We all look forward to the inevitable segment in which Kelly gamely downs a slice of pizza doused with the stuff.)

Not to be outdone, O'Reilly counters later in the discussion with his own howler:

"I don't think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police."

If O'Reilly's comment lacks the patented Fox News mix of shock value and dismissiveness favored by Kelly, it more than makes up for it in the deftness of its metaphorical sleight-of-hand. Setting aside the troubling framing of public outrage at police brutality as a special right, explicitly enumerated only so that O'Reilly can, in the same breath, deny it to us—to say nothing of the vexed relationship between freedom and rights in right-wing political discourse—what makes O'Reilly's football metaphor so pernicious is the fact that it applies the wrong metaphorical mapping to police and the citizens they are sworn to serve and protect.

O'Reilly would have us be spectators, imagining ourselves in the role of the police and unjustifiably complaining about perceived deficiencies in the execution of a task whose actual demands we cannot understand. A more apt, if still imperfect, metaphor would have us as referees, the agents with the ultimate authority to enforce the rules of fair play. Notice the very different roles played by the UC Davis students in these two metaphors: if we are Monday-morning quarterbacks, then we are invited to take on the perspective of the police and thus view the students as our opponents; if we are referees, then we are neutral arbitrators who must place the students and the police on an equal footing.

Metaphors run deep, and O'Reilly's flawed football mapping will only further entrench the repugnant notion that student protestors are a public enemy. Perhaps, though, we can embrace the football talk for good ends: while we can't play Monday-morning quarterback, we can examine the video replay, call penalties, and issue ejections.

The UC Berkeley administration's absurd overreaction to the Occupy movement on its campus (well documented on YouTube and elsewhere) has, perhaps unsurprisingly, produced a Nixonian, doth-protest-too-much linguistic blunder to go along with it. Here are the chancellor, provost, and vice chancellor for student affairs, as quoted in the Daily Cal last week:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.

Setting aside the problematic (to put it mildly) nature of the second sentence's semantic content, there is a basic pragmatic, rhetorical difficulty here: denial names its object, and calling something by name makes it discursively and cognitively salient. To deny that an action constitutes non-violent civil disobedience is to make your listener start thinking about non-violent civil disobedience. As an argumentation strategy, this is about as weak and self-defeating as it gets. As Nixon could attest, declaring that you're not a crook simply makes people associate you with the word crook. Likewise, declaring that linking arms is not non-violent civil disobedience just makes people associate linking arms with non-violent civil disobedience (an association that doesn't require much of a mental leap to begin with).

This is pretty elementary Don't Think of an Elephant territory: if only Birgeneau et al. had bothered to stop by one of George Lakoff's classes (on their own campus!), they might have learned this very basic linguistic lesson. Maybe after their refresher on the free speech movement...

Salon's Steve Kornacki today ponders the success of Republican Congressional obstructionism. He writes, "since the economy is miserable, swing voters are now inclined to embrace views that blame Obama." In order to justify the blocking of presidential initiatives—even ones with broad popular support—Republicans thus need only to point out those initiatives' association with Obama.

In this, they are aided by the conflict- and horserace-obsessed political media. Consider the two headlines Kornacki cites:

"Senate GOP kills Obama's plan to subsidize hiring of teachers, first responders" (AP)

"Republicans block popular piece of Obama jobs bill" (Reuters)

While the Reuters headline notes the popularity of the relevant portion of the plan, they both make explicit reference to the fact that the plan is Obama's. Any criticism the GOP might court by blocking a popular piece of legislation ("why would they do that?") is thus nullified by the mention of that legislation's connection to Obama ("same old, same old: they can't work together"). These headlines are steeped in the logic of political conflict. The economic merits of the plan, such as they may be, belong to a completely different rhetorical universe and are not even contemplated here.

I thus do not share Kornacki's strained attempt at a sanguine conclusion: "It seems conceivable that a drumbeat of these sorts of headlines could, over time, penetrate the consciousness of some of the swing voters who are instinctively inclined to blame Obama over the GOP." On the contrary, with the mainstream media doing the GOP's rhetorical work for it, the drumbeat of such headlines only further entrenches the political cynicism and apathy that allow obstructionism to flourish in the first place.

In the New York Times reporting on Citigroup's $285 million settlement of fraud charges with the SEC this week, we find the following quote from the defense attorney for one former Citigroup employee:

"He was not responsible for any alleged wrongdoing – he did not control or trade the position, did not prepare the disclosures and did not select the assets."

A defense attorney can probably be forgiven for reflexively inserting the adjective alleged before the word wrongdoing. In negative environments like the one above, however, this tactic may have the opposite of its intended effect, weakening the assertion of the client's innocence rather than strengthening it. If the goal is to rule out as much as possible—as suggested by the speaker's use of the negative polarity item any—then one wants a maximally simple and general term to follow any. Any modification of that term restricts the set of things being ruled out, thereby weakening the negative assertion's overall force. Moreover, in the case of an intensional adjective like alleged, the modification might yield a set of things totally disjoint from actual wrongdoing; under negation, this leaves open the possibility that the client was in fact responsible for actual wrongdoing. In the simplest case, then, it would be far stronger to drop alleged and say He was not responsible for any wrongdoing.

Of course, things are rarely so simple. The use of alleged in this case may be necessitated in part by a desire to frame the reference to the immediately following list of activities for which the defendant denies responsibility. That is, the attorney rightly wants to avoid referring to controlling and trading the position, etc., as wrongdoing. This reveals the interesting semantic nature of alleged in this example. In phrases like alleged murderer, we withhold judgment as to whether a particular person is a murderer, but we typically presume that the label murderer properly applies to someone (given the facts at hand). The label is uncontroversial; only its object is unknown. In the Citigroup case, the attorney seeks to deny that a set of known events and activities can appropriately be called wrongdoing. Here, the label itself is controversial; its object is known to all.

If the enumeration of these activities is to stand in apposition to a noun phrase headed by wrongdoing, then what one really wants is a definite/partitive noun phrase: any of the alleged wrongdoing. Then, the claim is that the client was not responsible for any of those things that are alleged to constitute wrongdoing. Instead, in the quote above the claim seems to be that the client was not responsible for anything that qualifies as alleged wrongdoing. Denying the particular in this case is, remarkably, stronger than denying the qualified general.

Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen, quoted in today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on the state's soon-to-be-implemented concealed-carry law:

"One of the oldest arguments out there is that the criminals – the ones who aren't entitled to have firearms – are carrying concealed already. They're the ones we're worried about, not the ones who are going to be abiding by the law.

[...]

"I'm a proponent of concealed carry for law-abiding citizens... because there's just not this pile of anecdotal cases where law-abiding citizens are abusing firearms to the detriment of the public."

Of interest here is Van Hollen's use of the adjective law-abiding and the noun criminals. Both of these terms are typically used to denote stable, unchanging properties. They differ in this respect from adjectives like hungry or asleep, which denote changeable properties that last a comparatively short time. In linguistic parlance, the former are individual-level properties, the latter stage-level properties.

A handy linguistic test for diagnosing the individual- vs. stage-level distinction is the whenever test. Stage-level adjectives like hungry can happily occur in a whenever clause: Whenever I'm hungry, I eat a hamburger. Individual-level adjectives like tall cannot: consider the awkwardness of Whenever I'm tall, I eat a hamburger. By this test, law-abiding clearly qualifies as an individual-level adjective: it is highly awkward to say, e.g., Whenever I'm law-abiding, I leave my gun at home.

By behaving grammatically as an individual-level adjective, law-abiding enjoys some prototypical individual-level connotations that it does not properly denote. Individual-level adjectives typically denote properties that are stable through time and over which the subject has little or no control: tall, smart, brown-eyed, Swiss, etc. Inherent properties of individuals (if such properties exist) are individual-level properties. In literal terms, law-abiding can at best denote a tendency or propensity toward obeying the law; far from being an inherent property of an individual, it is one that requires continual acts of compliance in order to apply to someone. Put more simply, unlike with tall, you're law-abiding until you're not. This is, of course, to say nothing of the complications arising from one's possibly variable degree of adherence to the plethora of laws in our society: is a habitual jaywalker who steals his neighbors' wifi, but also pays his taxes and gets the requisite concealed-carry training, a law-abiding person?

In literal terms, then, Van Hollen is saying something close to a tautology: a law-abiding citizen, by definition, cannot be abusing firearms to the detriment of the public. By way of inference from its individual-level status, however, the term law-abiding (like criminals) unhelpfully encourages us to partition the set of citizens into two non-overlapping classes: the law-abiding and the criminals. Instead of addressing the real complexity of the situation, this usage deliberately blurs it, leaving little conceptual space for the changeable, often unstable nature of abiding by the law and the dire consequences that can ensue when an armed citizen suddenly exits a law-abiding stage.

In today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Guy Boulton writes:

People who are young, healthy and have good jobs that don't provide health benefits will pay more for health insurance under federal health care reform.

People who are older, or have health problems, will pay less. So will those who work in low-paying jobs and buy insurance on their own.

At the same time, the number of people without health insurance in Wisconsin would drop by 340,000 by 2016.

Let's set aside Boulton's needless and debatable inclusion of the adjective good as a modifier of jobs that carry no health care benefits, as well as his decision to employ a double negative (without and drop) in order to convey a net gain of 340,000 insured Wisconsinites. What is particularly interesting—and misleading—about Boulton's prose is the way in which it establishes a contrast between two comparative noun phrases whose than clauses have been elided.

The basic function of a than clause is to make a standard of comparison linguistically explicit. If you say I pay more than Bob does, the clause than Bob does provides the standard of comparison (namely, the amount that Bob pays) for the comparative term more, which in turn tells you that the amount you (the subject) pay is higher than that standard. When no standard of comparison is overtly indicated in the sentence, we are free to recover one from context.

In Boulton's first paragraph, the subject matter of the article and the prepositional phrase under federal health care reform lead the reader to infer that the standard of comparison associated with pay more for health insurance should be something like than they pay now, prior to health care reform. That is, despite the absence of an overt than clause to provide full clarity, we can safely assume that the intended comparison is between what the young and healthy will pay post-reform and what they pay pre-reform.

In the second paragraph, things get murkier. The grammatical parallelism between the first two paragraphs might be taken to indicate that the standard of comparison here is just like the one above, but with the subjects changed accordingly (in linguistic terms, a case of sloppy identity under ellipsis): i.e., the standard would be the amount that those who are older or have health problems pay prior to health care reform. On the other hand, the first paragraph has now provided us with another salient possible antecedent for the standard of comparison: the amount that the young and healthy will pay after the implementation of health care reform. On this second reading of the sentence, the comparison is between what the old and unhealthy will pay post-reform and what the young and healthy will pay post-reform. In the absence of a than clause to point the way, the reader is free to choose either interpretive path.

The second reading makes the controversial, and untrue, claim that the old and unhealthy will in general pay less for health care than the young and healthy under health care reform. The report referenced (but not linked to) in Boulton's article is freely available online; see in particular tables 16 and 17 on p. 27, which show that, according to the authors' projections, even those "winners" in health care reform age 50 and over will still pay more than "losers" in their 20's, that "winners" age 60 and over will pay more than "losers" in their 20's or 30's, and so on, to say nothing of the fact that there are "winners" and "losers" in all age brackets. A quick perusal of the Journal-Sentinel's comments section (not recommended under any circumstances) reveals that this second reading of the comparative in Boulton's second paragraph, though false, is readily available for many readers, with predictable effect on the tone and ideological bent of discussion.

Perhaps Boulton can be absolved of the sin of journalistic bias in favor of the lesser sin of journalistic laziness: the jaundiced eye he casts on health care reform is only slightly less unblinking than that of the tendentiously named Wisconsin Office of Free Market Health Care (created by Scott Walker in early 2011), the state agency that commissioned the report in question. Indeed, the broad outlines of Boulton's article largely follow those of the Office's press release. Though Boulton thankfully eschews the Office's use of boldface for the details it finds most dreadful, he also drops the scare-quotes that the report's authors had dutifully included around the terms "winners" and "losers", in an apparent attempt to mine some deep social meaning from the jargon of academic economists. Whatever its root cause, the rhetorical slipperiness of Boulton's elided than clauses does his readers a major disservice. We should expect more.

In Salon today, Michael Lind writes:

...two contenders for the Republican presidential nomination debated whether it is a fact or a theory that humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons descend from a common ancestor.

Lind's phrasing illustrates the perils of not attending to the distinction between the popular understanding of the word theory and its scientific and philosophical meaning. In the excerpt above, Lind perhaps unwittingly echoes the anti-scientific right in using theory pejoratively, as a term of abuse, even as he attempts to discuss its application to scientific reasoning. Failure to identify and insist on the distinction between the two meanings, whether through ignorance, carelessness, or deliberate conflation, only more deeply entrenches the anti-scientific rhetoric that is so prevalent in American politics.

Theories are attempts to form a coherent and systematic understanding of disparate facts. Facts are inert; theories are useful. Almost anything that you understand or believe is based on some theory or other. Imagine, as social scientists like to do, that you are in a prehistoric jungle. Your companion eats the fruit of a tree and dies. You might sensibly conclude that, if you ate the same fruit, you would also die. But that is just a theory, not a fact. The only fact at our disposal is that the companion died after eating the fruit.

To take a more interesting example, consider gravity. It is hard to imagine any serious contemporary politician disputing the theory of gravity. But gravity is just a theory. To be sure, it is an extremely good theory: it relates such disparate phenomena as the fact that you don't float off the ground, the fact that the moon and planets follow the particular paths that they do in the night sky, the fact that our communications satellites stay in the positions we expect them to so we can talk to our friends in faraway places while we watch Andy Reid waste timeouts on another coast, and so on. But it is still just a theory; it has, as Rick Perry might put it, some gaps. It is perfectly conceivable that the theory of gravity may at some point be supplanted by a better and more comprehensive theory (indeed, this has been a major project of theoretical physics for decades), and that future generations might look back at us and say, "Can you imagine? They believed in gravity!"

Appreciating the distinction between facts and theories is central to any rational discussion of science, in politics or elsewhere. Lind asks whether the descent of the great apes from a common ancestor is a fact or a theory, but this is a category mistake. The relevant facts include the existence of the various hominids and hominid fossils, the details of their genetic code, and so on. Any hypothesis, positive or negative, about their relationship now or in the past is a theory. Indeed, the conviction that we come from somewhere, that things happened before the start of recorded history, is a theory. It may be a theory with no plausible alternative—i.e., a very elegant and compelling theory—but it is a theory all the same. If journalists and public intellectuals paid more careful attention to the very different senses of the word theory in popular and scientific usage, politicians and others might have more trouble dressing up anti-scientific rhetoric in respectable lexical clothing.

One notable linguistic consequence of this summer's economic debate has been the rise of the term job creators, which has become a fixture of conservative talking points on the economy. While there is no shortage of reasons to be skeptical of the term itself—its implicitly exclusive focus on private-sector employment, its espousal of trickle-down economics, its use as a euphemism for the wealthy and as an ideological cudgel in the debate on government revenues, etc.—perhaps its most pernicious property is the way in which it artificially narrows our attention when we talk about unemployment. Job creators, with its agentive -or suffix, seeks to answer the question of who adds jobs to the economy. Left unasked are the crucial questions of when and why jobs are added.

This obfuscation is a problem for anyone who is genuinely concerned about unemployment. Even if one concedes the point that wealthy individuals and private-sector companies are primarily responsible for job growth, policy makers must seek to understand when and why those people and companies hire new workers. As Paul Krugman has repeatedly argued, it's not for lack of cash on hand. Yet the term job creators unhelpfully implies that any remedy must be directed toward those who do the hiring. Even commentators who question the term's premises can be constrained in their analysis by its morphological makeup: for example, John Paul Rollert suggests this week that we are simply focusing on the wrong who.

English lacks derivational morphemes that indicate the when and why of a given situation or event. That is, when and why have no morphological counterpart to who's -or suffix; instead, we have awkward noun compounds like job creation conditions and hiring reasons. The morphological facts are mirrored in the syntax of English: subjects are obligatory in English sentences, but adverbial phrases indicating time and reason are optional and can be freely omitted. Informally speaking, we might say that the language makes it easier to talk about agents than about times, reasons, and conditions. This is where grammar and rhetoric part ways: while the grammar of English does nothing to prevent us from asking about the when and why of job creation, the morphologically ready-made job creators distracts our attention from them with each repetition.