What follows is an abstract for an academic conference (explanation to come) on “dangling modifiers” in context. This is only an abstract, with a 200-word limit and no space for a bibliography (though I’ll add two items below).
Archive for the ‘Language processing’ Category
The context of danglers
October 1, 2011Premodifier, postmodifier
July 29, 2011On Facebook today, Jeff Shaumeyer unloaded a variety of linguistic oddities that had come past him recently. Including this challenge to language processing:
True Blood Actor Denis O’Hare Marries Partner Hugo Redwood
Former Vampire King of Mississippi Russell Edgington portrayer Denis O’Hare married his partner, interior designer Hugo Redwood yesterday in New York. (link)
Thank goodness for the headline. Otherwise, as Shaumeyer observes, the sentence approaches crash blossom proportions.
The nanosecond of uncertainty
October 31, 2009A couple of years ago, Neal Whitman and Mark Liberman scrutinized a claim by James J. Kilpatrick. From Mark’s summary, here:
James Kilpatrick complained in print about the “horrid” headline “Mass Transit Not An Option for All Drivers”, on the grounds that “if mass transit is not an option for ‘all’ drivers, it cannot be an option for even one driver”. He added, “Even a little ambiguity is a dangerous thing. The problem with this Horrid Example is that it creates a nanosecond of uncertainty.”
Neal Whitman and I ignored the “nanosecond of uncertainty” business, since a literal application of this idea would put pretty much all of the English language off limits.
Mark and Neal focused instead on Kilpatrick’s treatment of negation and quantification (and Jan Freeman joined in with a discussion of another example from this point of view). Here I’m going to go a bit further with the “nanosecond of uncertainty” matter and the dangers of “even a little ambiguity”.
Slifted allegations
October 28, 2009In the letters section of the New York Times on October 25 (in the Week in Review section), readers commented on conflicts between the public’s right to know and the rights of those involved in legal proceeedings. The last letter accused the Times (and other news media) of subverting the presumption of innocence, via the syntax of the sentences the paper uses to report charges (involving a construction known in the syntactic literature as Slifting).
Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the Times, then explained why journalists sometimes chose Slifting, but conceded that the letter-writer had a point.
A momentary compound problem
May 9, 2009The editorial “Toward Fair Lending” in today’s New York Times begins:
The predatory lending bill that passed the House on Thursday is less than what is needed …
I had a moment of right-branching parsing of predatory lending bill, as
predatory + [ lending + bill ]
(saying that some bill about lending is predatory), though I quickly realized that this interpretation was absurd and that the intended parsing was left-branching:
[ predatory + lending ] + bill
(referring to some bill about predatory lending, that is to say, about lending in a predatory fashion).
I’m not faulting the editorial writer for producing a potentially ambiguous expression (though “the bill about predatory lending” would have been clearer, at the expense of an extra word); potential ambiguities are everywhere, after all. Probably most readers moved right over “predatory lending bill” without a twinge.
Right-branching vs. left-branching has been in the literature for about 50 year, at first in connection with the idea that right-branching structures were easier to process than left-branching ones, at least for English speakers, though the topic was quickly complicated by the observation that some languages are rich in right-branching constructions (and were consequently labeled “right-branching languages”), while others are rich in left-branching constructions (and were consequently labeled “left-branching languages”).
In English, some NP examples can go either way out of context: small children’s school ‘school for small children’ (left-branching) or ‘children’s school that is small’ (right-branching). But even out of context, many examples massively favor one or the other parsing (because of real-world plausibility): young children’s school ‘school for young children’ (left-branching), new children’s school ‘children’s school that is new’ (right-branching).