In Um…, Erard examines the various sorts of mistakes that we use when we are speaking. This includes such things as spoonerisms like saying "our queer old dean" instead of "our dear old queen" and malapropisms as in "Lorraine, my density has brought me to you!". Here's some promo text from the front page of the book's web site.

You make thousands of verbal blunders every day. They mean more than you think.

Um… is the first book to tell you how.

I have not yet read the book (it'll take me a little while to get a copy here in Japan), but I look forward to reading it because contrary to many books on how people speak which tend to preach about how people ought to speak, Um… takes the approach that these are facts about language production and can therefore tell us something about how people approach communication and relationships with those they communicate with. I've read a couple of other pieces by Erard which are available on-line as well as listened to the first chapter of the book (on the web site) and listened to an interview with him on WBUR in Boston and he sure seems to be the type of researcher who approaches the data with questions (rather than pre-conceived expectations) and draws conclusions from the data itself.

In the WBUR interview, I particularly liked the way he responded to the question as to how to reduce the number of ums and uhs in our speech. Here's my transcription/paraphrase of his reply:

I've gotten a lot of questions about how can I reduce the number of uhs and ums. While this is not a how-to book there are some how-to things that can be pulled from it. I think one message is certainly to be more interesting. People natively, without being cued, will listen to content—about half the people will listen to content of a presentation about half the people will listen to delivery or style but where the content starts to get a little boring more people start to listen to the style and the delivery and those are the people who are going to note your uhs and your ums and your disfluencies. So I say keep those people listening to the content. Keep being interesting. [RealPlayer, Windows Media: quote starts at 16:30]

This is an excellent response and well-grounded, too. It is consistent with research performed by Nicholas Christenfeld (1995) at University of California-San Diego (though I'm not quite sure where Erard gets the half-and-half numbers). I won't go into the gory details of Christenfeld's study, but briefly, he found that when listeners attended to the content of a speech, they essentially did not perceive any disfluencies. So Christenfeld's advice to speakers was precisely what Erard said: Keep the listeners focused on the content by being interesting.

Now, all of that said, I have one concern about this book. Although I believe that Erard is hardly prejudiced against those who utter uh and um in speech (he confesses to being a user himself), I fear that his characterization of uh and um as slips, stumbles, and verbal blunders is misleading, if not just plain wrong. Filled pauses (as many researchers call these) are known to be quite different from many other sorts of disluencies. It turns out they are not correlated with such things as anxiety and task difficulty as other disfluencies are. Furthermore, they aren't really blunders—at least not in the same way that “our queer old dean” is. In fact, if you buy into Clark and Foxtree's (2002) characterization of filled pauses as interjections, then these filled pauses are inserted into the speech stream in the same way that other words are. In this sense, they are not blunders, but rather they prevent a blunder from occurring.

Furthermore, there is a rather large sub-class of filled pauses which are most definitely not blunders. Consider the filled pause in the rather emphatic denial, Uh … no! Or as one caller on the WBUR radio show notes, some filled pauses are used to manage the change of conversational turns. In addition, there are filled pauses used as attention-getting devices: Um, excuse me… And then there are filled pauses used when turning down an invitation: Um, I'm afraid I can't. I already have other plans.

My fear then is that the book will inadvertantly contribute to the continued stigmatization of filled pauses in spontaneous speech. Of course, I think those who read the book in full with an open mind will understand that Erard does not intend that, but I wonder if many casual readers will use the title and slip-cover text to reinforce their existing prejudices about the use of filled pauses in everyday speech. In fact, it seems that those in the popular press are already doing so. Benjamin Zimmer notes that Allure Magazine draws on Erard's book in order to advise readers about “Bad Words” including uh and um.

Well, perhaps misunderstandings among readers are unavoidable when it comes to language. People have strong prejudices where language is concerned and the best we can hope to do as linguists is to keep chipping away at these prejudices where we can. So I commend Erard for writing a book that addresses this subject in an objective way and in an entertaining way (or so I think—I still have to read it remember—though I doubt I'll be disappointed).

The Art of Stress: Free Blogging

So my first interpretation of this title was that the article would make the case that free blogging (either blogging pro bono or using blogging tools that cost nothing like WordPress and the like) causes not just stress, but the kind of stress that is somehow aesthetically superior. All right, that last part is a little ridiculous, but since I am relatively new to blogging, almost anything seems plausible.

Nevertheless, I did manage to nail down the intended interpretation which would have been greatly facilitated by the addition of a hyphen:

The Art of Stress-Free Blogging

This reminded me of a puzzle in a book I spent many hours with as a child. It goes something like this:

The president of Flatz Beer, Inc. was distinctly proud of his company's product and so he commissioned that this motto be placed on the backs of all of the company's delivery trucks: "Flatz is our finest beer. There is no beer so good." After it was completed, the trucks looked like this:

Soon after the company started using the trucks, people could be seen laughing when the trucks were making deliveries. Sales plummeted and the company was forced to remove the motto from the trucks.

Why?

I wish I could print the answer to this question upside-down at the bottom of the page, but alas, html formatting has not advanced that far. But most of you would probably not need to look at the answer anyway because this one is not too difficult: When the doors where open, the right-hand door alone reads, "our beer is no good"—not exactly words of extolment.

Of course, the problem with the article title above is relatively minor compared to the Flatz Beer fiasco, but still, the take-away lesson seems to be that in the current era of blogging and rss and various web 2.0 technologies, we cannot presume that the text that we write will always appear in the original formatting we intended. Insofar as possible, we need to anticipate other formats in which our text may be rendered and plan the text accordingly. Unfortunately, this no doubt adds stress to the task of blogging—especially if you're doing it for free.

[Update (2 Sep 2007): I happened to find one reference to this puzzle in a web forum at Ambrosia Software. Scroll down near the bottom to find it or just do a page search for "Flatz".]

For me, this sentence is ungrammatical. While there are some (e.g., peevologists and peevebloggers) who would take this as evidence of waning educational standards and thereby bemoan the pitiable state of the education system, that's not my interest. For me, it's much more interesting to try to figure out why the writer wrote the sentence this way. So let's walk through a couple of possibilities here.

First is the possibility that (be) stuck is being used as an adjectival passive to mean that it is possible that the labels may be in a state in which they are immovable (i.e., they can get stuck). If so, then we have a case of syllepsis, which has recently become an occasional topic of discussion on Language Log (see zeugma on Wikipedia for further info). Syllepsis occurs when coordinated constituents are not parallel to each other. In other words, in this case, while stuck is an adjectival phrase, pulled off easily is a verb phrase.

Syllepsis is—theoretically speaking—ungrammatical: Most syntactic theories rule it out (are there any that don't?). However, it is rather different from other sorts of ungrammaticality in that good writers use syllepsis on occasion, apparently for humorous effect. Follow the links above to Language Log and Wikipedia for many examples. However, in the current case, it sure doesn't seem like syllepsis was the author's intention. If so, I fail to see the humor…

So another possibility is that the writer intended that the meaning of the sentence convey the reusability of the stickers—that they may be affixed and subsequently removed with ease. This meaning seems far more plausible as package labeling: This feature of the stickers would certainly attract the attention of those who have ever tried to peel the "leading brand" of stickers off the windows—they get stuck forever!

This, though, is where things start to get a little messy. If this is the intended meaning, then stuck must be used as a verb which requires three arguments: an agent, a theme, and a location as follows.

1. John stuck the label on the window.
   agent = John; theme = label; location = window
2. These labels can be stuck or pulled off easily.

In the present case, the writer uses the passive voice, so there's not need to specify the agent. That leaves two arguments. The theme gets specified in the subject position as labels. So the question is what happens to the location and then the preposition on. My guess here is that the writer confused the adjectival passive form (which requires only the theme) and the regular verb form. Thus, a location argument (e.g., on windows/glass surfaces) was not written. This confusion might have been facilitated by the desire to write in that genre of labelling language in which terseness is highly valued and noun-phrase ellipsis (i.e., null arguments) is perfectly acceptable.

If this is the case, then it is plausible to ask why the writer did not face similar confusion with pull off. The reason for this, I conjecture, is that there is no adjectival passive be pulled to cause such a confusion.

There is however, one question which bothers me. I am surprised that this mistake was made at all. I take it that the minimally corrected version of this sentence should be with the simple addition of the preposition on as in (3).

3. These labels can be stuck on and pulled off easily.

Personally, I find this significantly better. Furthermore, I feel like the elided noun-phrases in both constituents (stuck on Ø and pulled off Ø) kind of support each other. That is, if there was no coordination, I think I'd be less likely to elide the noun phrase: These labels can be stuck on surfaces easily or These labels can be pulled off surfaces easily. Now why is that? Does ellipsis somehow facilitate ellipsis? Could it be that once you start eliding, you can't stop? Interesting questions, but I'll have to explore them in a later post.

House Democrats to unveil Iraq war plan

In a direct challenge to President Bush, House Democrats are advancing legislation requiring the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the fall of next year.

He objects to the title because the democrats' proposal is not a war plan but rather a retreat plan. One commenter, Shochu John, takes the view that the headline sounds fine: "It means plan regarding the Iraq war, no?" This is an interesting difference of opinion. Whose interpretation is correct? Well, linguistically, both of them.

The difference arises from the structural ambiguity of the compound noun phrase Iraq War Plan. There are two different ways to parse this phrase, as follows.

1. [Iraq [war plan]]
2. [[Iraq war] plan]

Tigerhawk seems to be interpreting the phrase with the parse shown in (1), with the meaning of a war plan concerning Iraq, while Shochu interprets it with the second parse with the meaning of a plan for the Iraq war.

This kind of ambiguity is quite common with compounds as the following examples show.

3. big book bag
4. American football players

Sometimes, though, the ambiguity is less obvious because one of the interpretations is just entirely implausible as in the following cases.

5. red shopping list
   [red [shopping list]]
   ?[[red shopping] list]
6. red vegetable increase
   ?[red [vegetable increase]]
   [[red vegetable] increase]

The only natural interpretation for (5) is that the list is red—I have no idea what red shopping might be. Similarly, the only natural interpretation for (6) is that the vegetables are red—a red increase means nothing to me. Of course, red shopping and red increase might be able to take on some sort of idiomatic meanings, but the point here is that they can't be used meaningfully on the fly: No consistent meaning can be derived from them compositionally.

So both Tigerhawk and Shochu John are right. However, that raises a couple of different but related questions. First, is there any natural reason to prefer one alternative over the other, and second, why did Tigerhawk and Shochu not see each other's interpretations?

For the first question, there are some studies to show that people do have some underlying preferences for how to parse ambiguous structures. One central idea here that might give us some answer to this question is the late closure principle (usually attributed to Lyn Frazier in her Ph.D. dissertation). According to this, people prefer to attach incoming words and phrases to the existing structure within the most recently analyzed constituent. For instance, there is a preference to interpret (7) below as meaning that Jim met Barbara yesterday rather than that Sally said so yesterday. In this sense, the processor prefers to keep the current constituent 'open' as long as possible—hence, the name 'late closure'.

7. Sally said that Jim met Barbara yesterday.

The late closure principle has mainly been used to look at attachment of adverbials to the most recent embedded clause or a higher independent clause. I have not yet found a study which seeks to apply it to the context of noun compound ambiguity. Assuming that late closure does extend to noun compound parsing, then what would we expect? Let's use (3) above, big book bag, to illustrate how the processor will parse the phrase. The parse would be built as shown in (8)-(10).

8. [_A big]
9. [_NP [_A big] [_N book]]
10. [_NP [_A big] [_N [_N book] [_N bag]]]

When the processor sees big it will parse it as an adjective node. Then when it sees book it will parse it as a noun node and then combine it with big to form a noun phrase (NP) node. However, when the processor sees bag then it will parse it as another noun node and then combine it with the most recent constituent, book to form a noun-noun compound. Thus, the preferred interpretation of the phrase would be a book bag which is big.

This fits my intuition when I read the phrase with neutral prosody—flat intonation (stress on different words in the phrase varies my judgment, as non-neutral prosody is known to do). I admit, though, that I'd like to know if this judgment is broadly observed. As I said above, I've not yet found a study that actually investigates the processing of ambiguous compounds, so this might be a nice area for some fresh research.

The remaining question is why Tigerhawk and Shochu John differ in their interpretations of Iraq war plan. Well, Tigerhawk appears to follow the late closure principle and therefore assumes the default interpretation. More speculatively, his interpretation might be reinforced because of the position he wishes to take that the Democrats' proposal is not a war plan. But how about Shochu John? how does he arrive at the alternative interpretation? Well, here my answer is entirely speculative. It is clear from his several comments on the page that Shochu intends to take a contrary position to Tigerhawk's point, and the alternate interpretation of the phrase supports that. So the question is whether Shochu is overlooking the default interpretation in order to arrive at the alternate interpretation. But for this question, there is no direct evidence one way or the other.

One final question is to what degree the writer of the AP headline was aware of the potential ambiguity of the headline as written. Here, again, we can only speculate, but it is somewhat telling that, according to Tigerhawk, the headline was later changed to “Democrats want Iraq pullout by fall 2008″. Tigerhawk remarks that this "is both illuminating and more precise." Perhaps so, but crucially here, it's no longer ambiguous.

[Update (1 Sep 2007): Heidi Harley describes a similar problem with ambiguity in noun-phrase formation and drives the point home nicely with graphical depictions of the competing structures as well as audio files showing how prosody disambiguates the two possibilities.]

There has in fact been one particular form of politeness that has been so systematic and almost formulaic across so many people and so many places that it is quite striking. This is the custom where Japanese people say Thank You twice. I don't mean that they say Thank you, thank you! as an expression of gratitude. Rather, they are sure to say thank you in each of two independent and successive encounters.

What I mean is this: Imagine I do a favor for a Japanese acquaintance—not just any favor, like loaning someone a pencil, but rather a favor of some consequence, like spending a couple of hours helping them do some domestic chores. Of course, when the favor is completed, the acquaintance will say thank you and I will leave and that will be that. However, the next time I meet the acquaintance, they will invariably thank me again. And it will be the first thing they say after we meet in this subsequent encounter. And they will most likely use a fixed expression for this as in (1).

1. この間はどうもありがとうございました。
   Thank you for what you did before.

Of course there may be a few emphatic modifiers thrown in, or they might be more specific about the actual favor they received, but this expression is always at the core. I find two things remarkable about this. First, although there surely are people in the US who customarily do this, and no one would find it strange if someone offers a second, independent expression of gratitude, it is not a common occurrence and it is certainly not expected either (at least not in the midwest where I grew up: perhaps other regions have different cultural values where this is concerned). So for me, this was quite a surprising difference in cultural customs.

The second thing I find remarkable (well, used to find remarkable—I think I understand it now) is that people all over the country seem to use the same formula down to the very syntactic structure. I guess it can be attributed to the cultural attitude against deviation from the norm but I didn't really expect that that attitude could be strong enough to cause an entire nation of people to adhere so strictly to a particular script for such a modest social event. But perhaps I underestimate the influence of social forces.

Anyway, I have been so impressed by this particular feature of Japanese culture that when my son's school asked me to contribute a short article about anything, I decided to focus on this. Here's the article as it was printed in Japanese. I did write it myself, but my wife cleaned it up considerably. If you don't read Japanese, don't worry—it basically says what I have written here so far.

先日職場である人を手伝いました。手伝いを終えた時その人はすぐにお礼を言ってくれました。次の日職場に着くと、その人は「昨日はどうもありがとうございました」と、言ってくれました。

日本で育った皆さんには多分これが当たり前の事に思えるでしょうが、私のようにアメリカで育った人間には、こんな風に思えるかもしれません。「なぜ二回もお礼を言うんだろう。一回で十分なのに。」。英語では「Thank you」を一回だけ言えば十分です。何度も言うことはめずらしいでしょう。でも、よく考えたら何か物足りない気がします。もちろん、その場でお礼の言葉を言えば感謝の気持ちは伝わります。しかし、時間がたったら、その気持ちを忘れる場合もあります。だからちょっと物足りないのかもしれません。お礼の言葉を繰り返す事によって、その感謝の気持ちを持ち続ける事ができます。つまり、自分の生活の中にその人のことを考える時間を持つ事ができるという事です。それが人間関係をより深くしてくれているのではないでしょうか。

私が日本の文化で好きなことは、このお礼の習慣です。日本の任天堂のゲームボーイといっしょにこの習慣も世界中に輸出してほしいです。

When living in a foreign country, one must adapt to and adopt some of the cultural practices of the host culture in order to survive. This is one particular cultural practice that I have not yet mastered. There are times when I successfully remember to say a second thank you, but there are times when I forget to say it at the very beginning of the next encounter or not until a later encounter. I'm not sure how people see me when I fail to do this properly. On the one hand, they might regard me as not showing proper gratitude and thus may feel less inclined to do me a favor later. On the other hand, I may benefit from another aspect of the politeness of Japanese culture: being forgiving of foreigners who aren't fully familiar with Japanese cultural practices (but are conscientiously trying…).

Over the last three decades, Japan has become particularly well-known for its exporting of a wide variety of consumer goods: cars, tvs, stereos, walkmans, portable games, animation, and sushi. And yet it seems that Japan has had far less success exporting certain social values. It may be but a small thing, but I would really like to see Japan somehow export the custom of saying thank you twice together with all those Nintendo game units.

While I can laugh at these characters as much as anyone else, I confess that I've always wondered why filled pause use should be seen as somehow correlated with below-average intelligence. It's not difficult to find people who believe that there is a correlation and believe it firmly. Back when I was maintaining the FPRC, I got a message from a man who was a member of Toastmaster's International —an international organization dedicated to helping members improve their public speaking skills. He sent me a list of some "talking points" for public speaking. One point on the list was as follows.

'Um' sounds dumb; 'uh' sounds like 'duh'!

A few years ago, I was considering a particular textbook for my English as a foreign language class when I found this admonishment:

If you use [filled pauses] too often you sound stupid.

But is there any real evidence that this is true? I mean, has anyone actually done a study to see if there's a correlation between the rate of filled pause use and measures of intelligence? A few years ago I started looking around to see if I could find a connection. The short answer is—I found nothing. I found only one study that actually compares these two things (more on that in a moment). There are some studies that measure the listener's perception of a speaker, but none of these look at intelligence. They do observe that listeners may make other negative judgments about a speaker who has a higher rate of filled pause use: less credible, less truthful, less open, or less confident. But the conclusiveness of even these studies is limited by the fact that participants were explicitly asked to listen to and judge the manner of the speakers. When people are so primed, it does not surprise me that they would easily notice filled pauses and make (negative) judgments about them based on their own prejudices about language production. But we normally don't listen to people with the goal of critiquing their manner of speech; rather, we listen to them in order to understand the message they wish to convey. Thus, when people are paying attention to content, perhaps they don't notice the form as much and therefore don't make these kinds of negative inferences about the speaker. [This hypothesis is dealt with very nicely in Christenfeld, 1995 ---a paper I intend to discuss in greater detail in a later post.]

The only evidence I have find that could be taken by some as showing a correlation between filled pause use and measures of intelligence is a study by Basil Bernstein, sociologist, who did a series of studies in the 1960s looking at language as a social code. He found no correlation between intelligence and filled pause use. On the other hand, he did find that social class was correlated with filled pause use: Those from higher social classes were more likely to use filled pauses than those from lower social classes. So, if you believe that higher class people are more intelligent (I emphatically do not believe this; but I know there are some who unashamedly believe so, and others who believe so but would never openly admit it), then it seems proper to conclude that all those people who don't use filled pauses are pretty stupid. God help them.

Well, the evidence (or lack thereof) suggests strongly that the idea that frequent filled pause use is evidence of substandard intelligence is just another one of those myths that has developed through popular media. Now, if only the truth could spread through the media as quickly and as easily as the myths…

[Update (15 May 2007): I got the picture of Art Carney as Ed Norton above from Wikipedia, but it seems that their article no longer features the photo. If you own the copyright to the photo or know who I should credit the photo to, please contact me.]

This is one of those problems that seems easy at first. For instance, once I say that filled pauses are things like um and uh in speech, then pretty much everybody knows just what I'm talking about (with strong intuitions from their own personal experience). However, when we approach this problem formally, it turns out not to be so easy. I have a hard time coming up with a nice objective definition of a filled pause, because I almost always end up introducing some subjectivity into it. For instance, one possibility might go as follows.

Definition 1: A filled pause is a conventional—though non-word—expression used to stall for time during the processing of spontaneous speech.

This definition doesn't satisfy me because once we start to say how a filled pause is used, then we're getting at the intentions of the speaker, and it is very difficult to say definitively what a speaker's intentions are. Somebody might utter um reflexively as a means of stalling for time, but perhaps somebody might utter um intentionally because they want me to think that they are stalling for time (or to make some other inference about their intentions). So, ideally, I'd like to have a formal definition that doesn't depend on the subjectivity of speakers' intentions.

The definition of filled pauses at Wikipedia (there called fillers) manages to leave out the subjectivity.

Definition 2: [F]illers are sounds or words that are spoken to fill up gaps in utterances.

This definition, although it sounds nice, has a logical problem: It presupposes that the utterances contain gaps in the first place. But how can know that if it actually contains a filled pause? It's important to remember that speech production is not like, say, road maintenance. Over time, a new road may develop potholes which may then later be filled. That would be a filled gap. However, a gap in an utterance—once it occurs—may not subsequently be filled. It forever remains a gap. Similarly, a filled pause in an utterance forever remains a filled pause. [Note: I am aware that the same logic can be applied to show the problematic nature of the term filled pause---it presupposes there was a pause there in the first place. However, the terminology has been established for some time now and will be difficult to change.]

Another idea might be to focus merely on the phonological aspect of filled pauses. Consider this:

Definition 3: A filled pause is expressed in the following sequence of phonemes: /ə/, /əm/.

Any bilingual speaker will of course realize that one problem with this definition is that it applies only to English. Other languages have different phoneme sequences that make up filled pauses. In Spanish, it is /ɛstɛ/; in French, it is /œm/; and in Japanese it is /ɛ:to/ or /ɑno:/. But this could be solved by simply stipulating in the definition that the sequences are language-specific and then just listing what they are for each language. There are still, however, two problems that remain. First, not all sequences of these phonemes are filled pauses. In English, for instance, the word some /səm/ contains the target sequence /əm/, but is almost certainly not to be counted as a filled pause. We would not want a speech recognition engine to make this mistake. So we could just say that filled pauses are (part of) the input stream leftover after all the words have been detected.

But this then brings us to the second problem: Some speech segments may contain ambiguity because of homophony between filled pauses and real words. For example, the following pair of sentences may be expressed with the exact same sequence of phonetic symbols.

1. I ate a rabbit. /aI eIɾ ə ræbIt/
2. I ate uh rabbit. /aI eIɾ ə ræbIt/

While there's not a whole lot of difference between the two sentences (for instance, 1 entails 2), nevertheless they do have different propositional content, and in certain contexts, that difference could be crucial to communication.

Yet another possibility is to focus on the semantic value of a filled pause.

Definition 4: A filled pause is an element of speech that makes no contribution to the semantic proposition of the utterance which contains it.

This isn't too bad, but is way too broad. There are many other things we would not to regard as filled pauses that could pass this definition. Interjections and Particles are a good example. There is no difference in the propositional content of the following three utterances.

3. He's strong!
4. Gosh, he's strong!
5. He's strong, man!

Thus, while the empty semantic value definition is surely part of the answer, the definition still needs other things to give it the proper specificity and diagnostic power. In short, it seems that some elements of all of the above definitions is necessary. Here is one more proposal.

Definition 5: A filled pause is a semantically empty element of speech which fits a language-specific conventional phonetic form and delays (either intentionally or not) the transfer of the speaker's message.

I'm still not sure I'm satisfied with this, but it seems to capture the good points of the previous three definitions without introducing much other baggage. Feel free to comment on this definition. In addition, though, keep looking for further posts which may refine this concept further. Like most academic questions, this topic not yet closed.

She didn't say "John Edwards is a faggot." She would never say that — not because she respects the rights of gays to full equality before the law (she doesn't) — but because it wouldn't be funny. Coulter wants to make people laugh more than anything; she is, as I have argued here, a right-wing ironist and comedienne as much as she is a political commentator. [full text here]

Even Coulter herself seems to be claiming it was a joke … sort of. According to CNN.com,

CNN has reached out to Coulter's representative, and received no response.

But the New York Times reported that she responded, in an e-mail, "C'mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean." [full text here ]

I don't deny that she meant it as a joke and that it was even successful as a joke: Reports say there was "more than a smattering of laughter" after she said it. What seems to be lost in this view though is the harm that is done by the use of the word 'faggot'. Some will probably close their minds here convinced that I'm one of those bleeding-heart liberals. But this has nothing to do with politics at all but rather good science.

Everyone is probably familiar with the old saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." As children, this was how we were taught to respond when the neighborhood bully started calling us names [because bullies are known to cease their taunts in the face of such profound wisdom...]. And this saying remains with us throughout our lives as a sort of axiom. However, a couple of decades ago, a pair of psychologists decided to put this idea to the test. In particular, they wanted to see what kind of influence the use of derogatory ethnic labels might have on the attitudes of third-party observers towards the targets of those labels.

Greenberg and Pyszczynski (1985) did an experiment in which participants watched a debate between a black man and a white man and then afterward discussed which of the two won the debate. Unknown to the participants, one of the discussants was actually a confidant in the experiment. At some point during the post-debate discussion, the confidant would make the strong assertion, "There's no way that <x> won that debate!" In the experimental control condition, the <x> would be a unbiased referring expression such as guy. However, in the test condition, the <x> would be a derogatory ethnic label (i.e., nigger). The results were quite interesting. In the test condition, two observations were made. First, participants uniformly condemned the confidant for the racist remark. But in spite of that, they were still more likely than those in the control condition to negatively evaluate the black debater.

Greenberg and Pyszczynski conclude that derogatory ethnic labels activate stereotypes associated with the groups these labels target and these stereotypes influence our judgments of people in those groups. This occurs even if we do not actually believe the stereotypes. In this respect, just using derogatory ethnic labels in everyday speech may actually have harmful effects on ourselves, on others, and most of all on those who the labels target as well as their associates (Kirkland, et al., 1987). Their experiment focuses on ethnic labels, but I assume that the results would extend to other kinds of labels (sexuality, gender, etc.) [If any one has any evidence to suggest otherwise, I urge you to share it in the comments.]

Thus, Coulter's comment about Edwards is offensive because it targets homosexuals and does them harm. By using the term, the stereotypes about homosexuals are activated in the minds of the audience members which then affect their judgments about these people later on.

I'm sure many of us do not want to believe that we would be so easily influenced, but the facts are what they are. So while Coulter's comments may accurately be portrayed as a joke, one cannot therefore conclude that they are harmless.

Ann Coulter calls John Edwards 'faggot'

WASHINGTON, March 2 (UPI) — Best-selling right-wing author Ann Coulter, speaking to a conservative audience in Washington Friday, called former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., a "faggot."

Coulter was a featured speaker at the 34th annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Following her prepared remarks, televised on C-Span, Coulter was asked to talk about Edwards.

“It turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm kind of at an impasse — I can't really talk about Edwards,” she said.

Now, the first thing to note here, as observed by linguist Geoffrey Pullum here, and by Time Magazine's John Cloud here, is that Coulter did not “call John Edwards [a] 'faggot'”. She constructed her remarks in such a way that the listener draws an inference linking Edwards to homosexuality. This is called conversational implicature. Notice that it would not be logically inconsistent for her to continue her remarks by saying "…but Edwards is not a faggot." In other words, an entirely plausible interpretation given the text is that she made the assertion that the use of certain charged words ('faggot', for example) in public discourse can lead to severe repercussions and she cannot speak of Edwards without using some such word. So, those who are claiming that she called Edwards a 'faggot' are (either ignorantly or intentionally) stretching the truth of the matter. For better or for worse, UPI is remaining consistent on this:

Companies pull ads from Coulter site

NEW YORK, March 6 (UPI) — Three companies say they will pull ads from the Web site of New York political commentator Ann Coulter who called a prominent Democrat a "faggot."

Editor & Publisher, on the other hand, gets it right:

Editor Explains Why Paper Dropped Coulter Column
By Dave Astor

NEW YORK At least one newspaper has canceled Ann Coulter's column after she implied that Democratic politician John Edwards is a "faggot."

I will grant, however, that communication is more than just the text. There is the context to be considered as well. Those who know her, know that she is likely to say controversial things and that she has said controversial things regarding homosexuality before; furthermore, she was addressing an audience unlikely to be offended by use of the term 'faggot'. In this context, the implication that Edwards is a faggot may not be the only plausible interpretation, but it sure seems to be the most likely interpretation. I have little doubt that as an experienced writer and speaker, she knows this and uses it for presentational effect. Nonetheless, I still want to insist that we get right exactly what she has said and has not said.

Coulter's comments are offensive (I'll argue this in my next post) whether one claims that she called Edwards a 'faggot' or merely implicated it. Yet there certainly are cases where the distinction between actually asserting something and conversationally implicating it is crucially important. For instance, the title of this post is a great (and commonly-used) example of this: "If I've said something offensive, I'm sorry." This is what has been referred to as a non-apology apology. While it may sound apologetic, the apology is only conversationally implicated. But again, note that it is not logically inconsistent to continue, "…but I haven't said anything offensive, so screw you." It's interesting to note that CPAC released a press statement on March 5th regarding the Coulter affair which suggests they know quite a lot about how useful conversational implicature may be.

"Ann Coulter is known for comments that can be both provocative and outrageous. That was certainly the case in her 2007 CPAC appearance and previous ones as well. But as a point of clarification, let me make it clear that ACU and CPAC do not condone or endorse the use of hate speech," said David A. Keene, ACU Chairman. [full text here]

At first glance, this might sound like they are condemning her comments. But that is, at best, only conversational implicature. If they do not believe that her speech constitutes 'hate speech', then their statement fails to condemn her comments: It's a non-condemning condemnation.