Only the Celebrity’s Name

I was reading an article in the newspaper last week about how celebrity-written novels are almost always ghost-written. It’s kind of funny how insistently celebrities will say they really wrote the novels themselves, and then still admit they used ghost writers. This passage made me laugh:

When [Snooki] Polizzi appeared on Today in January, Matt Lauer asked, “Did you really write this book?”
“I did,” Polizzi said, “because, if you read it, you’ll know the first page that I wrote it — ’cause, like, it’s all my language.” (When pressed further, she admitted she had a co-writer.)

This one, too:

[Hillary] Duff … said in an interview that she came up with the plot and characters. … “It is my story,” Duff said. “It is my book. I wrote it, and she helped guide me through the process.”

But this sentence was quite surprising to me:

When the typical celebrity novel is published, only the celebrity’s name is printed on the book cover.

No kidding? They seriously leave off the title? I thought the celebrity’s name usually went above the title, and in a bigger typeface than the title, but always, there was a title. Looking at the pictures accompanying the article, I could see that Snooki’s book had “SNOOKI” across the top, but underneath was the title, A Shore Thing. Nicole Richie’s book clearly had the title Priceless on it. Turning again to the text, I read on:

Generally, publishers think two names on a cover is a turnoff to readers, especially in fiction.

Aha! It’s another case of only scoping not over an entire noun phrase, but on something within the noun phrase. In 2009, I wrote about thinking the sentence Only the manly men came in meant that no women came in; the only people who came in were men (and manly ones at that). Really, it meant that, in addition to whatever women may have come in, the only men who showed up were manly ones. I was thinking only scoped over the manly men, but really it was scoping over just the adjective manly. This time, I thought only was scoping over the noun phrase the celebrity’s name, but really it was scoping over just the possessive noun celebrity’s.

Once again, it just goes to show that even following the rule of placing only closest to what it modifies won’t always make things clear.

De Dicto and De Re

Doug and his friend Grant were standing in the kitchen yesterday, trying to figure out what they wanted to do.

“So, what do you want to do?” Doug asked.

“Something Adam doesn’t want to do,” Grant answered. “Wait, that sounded bad! I meant, I wanted to play Hide-and-Seek, but Adam never wants to play that.”

I looked up from my computer. “Oh, you got caught in a de dicto / de re ambiguity!”

It seems Grant had never heard of de dicto / de re ambiguities. I enlightened him. “What you meant was, you wanted to play Hide-and-Seek; Adam never wants to play that; so you want to play something Adam didn’t want to play.”

“Yeah…”

“That’s called the de re meaning. But it sounded like you were saying, ‘I don’t care what we do, just as long as it’s something Adam doesn’t want to do.’ That’s the de dicto meaning.”

“Oh, uh, OK,” Grant said.

The ambiguity comes down to a difference in whether or not the something takes wide scope over the (unstated) want in his elliptical statement (I want to do) something Adam doesn’t want to do. If it does, we get Grant’s intended de re meaning: “There exists an activity X that Adam doesn’t want to do, and Grant wants to do X.” If it doesn’t, we get the exclusionary de dicto meaning: “Grant wants it to be the case that there exists an activity X such that Adam doesn’t want to do it and Grant does.”

Of course, I didn’t get into that with Grant. I could tell he was happy enough just to have this useful new vocabulary!

Only the Manly

“You’d never catch me sticking my bare hand down a hole like that!” Laura said, as she ran the clippers over the back of my neck. Jim and Stan, two of the other barbers, were sitting in the waiting chairs talking about an outdoor activity that I’d never heard of called noodling. Noodling, I learned, was the sport of catching catfish with just your hand, usually by sticking it into a likely-looking hole in a creek and, if you were lucky enough for a catfish to bite it, pulling out the catfish by its jaw. Part of the thrill was not knowing what might be in one of these holes. Instead of a catfish, it might be nothing at all, or a muskrat, or a snapping turtle. In fact, Stan said, the guy who’d introduced him to noodling was missing a finger — because of an incident involving a gun that he’d picked up by putting his hand over the muzzle.

Then talk turned to the snowstorm we had last week, the one that canceled two days of school for Doug and Adam. That got me to thinking about how many of the allotted “calamity days” for the school year had been used, and while I was doing that, I missed what Jim said next. Laura laughed and I came back to the present.

“Did you hear what they said?” she asked. “Jim and Stan and Harry all came to work that day, but Len was snowed in. So Jim said that only the manly men came in.”

“Ha!” I laughed, and then thought. Hmmm…

Only the manly men came in.

Laura seemed to be speaking from firsthand knowledge when she told me that Jim and Stan and Harry had come in. It sounded like she’d been able to make it to work that day, too. So if my intuition was right, it was not true that only the manly men came in: Only the manly men and Laura had come in!

Outside the United States or Canada

On Monday I went to give blood. On several occasions, I’ve noticed linguistically interesting phrases while I was participating in a blood drive, and it happened again this time. I was going through the health questionnaire (now on computer), confirming that I had never, even once, paid money to have sex with someone; giving the right answer for the “close contact with someone who has been vaccinated for smallpox” question; and remarking on the fact that a lot of email scammers are not eligible to give blood. (Not for being email scammers per se, but for living in Nigeria.) Then I came to this question:

In the past three years, have you ever been outside the United States or Canada for a period exceeding three months?

This one had never given me pause before, but this time I had to think a little. Well, I thought, I’ve been in the United States for a lot longer than the past three years. Except for that weekend trip we took to Niagara Falls a couple of months ago. During that weekend, I was outside the United States, but since that’s less than three months, I don’t need to worry about it.

However, I thought, for all these years except for the weekend in Niagara Falls, I have been outside Canada, right here in the United States! So maybe I should answer yes?

They Always Forget the Winner’s Name

I read this headline on the front page of the sports section yesterday:

People always seem to forget Home Run Derby winner’s name

I had never heard of the Home Run Derby, but it sounded like some kind of baseball-related annual event. And, apparently, year after year people had trouble remembering the name of whoever won it. A bit strange, I thought. Maybe it was one of those pieces of baseball lore involving a curse, like the Curse of the Bambino, or the Cubs’ Billy Goat Curse. I was curious, so I started reading the story. It began:

Justin Morneau received 70 text messages after winning Monday’s All-Star Home Run Derby, he said, with many making reference to the trophy presentation, when the event’s sponsor referred to him as “Jason.”

“It happens a lot,” Morneau said Tuesday, with a smile and a shrug. “People call me Jason all the time.” (link)

So it wasn’t that people always forgot the name of the Home Run Derby winner; they always (or often, anyway) forgot the name of Justin Morneau, who happened to be this year’s winner. Yes, I’d been caught by the old de dicto / de re ambiguity.

De dicto means “of what is said”, which is the interpretation I’d given the headline: They said Home Run Derby winner, so I thought they had in mind that particular role, regardless of who was filling it. De re means “of the thing”, or in this case, the actual person, Justin Morneau. This, of course, was the intended interpretation.

De dicto / de re is a particular kind of scope ambiguity, involving an element that makes reference to different times (or even different possible worlds), and a quantifier. In this case, it’s the always that makes reference to different times. To know whether something is always true, you need to know if it’s true at all particular times under consideration. The quantifier here is the, which combines with Home Run Derby winner to identify the sole individual who fits that description (assuming that we’re talking about this year).

When the Home Run Derby winner is taken to have wide scope over the always, we get the intended de re reading:

There exists a unique individual X, such that:

1. X won the Home Run Derby
2. for all relevant times T, at time T people forget X’s name.

On the other hand, when always is taken to have wide scope over the Home Run Derby winner, we get the strange de dicto reading:

For all relevant times T, there exists a unique individual X, such that:

1. X wins the Home Run Derby at time T
2. people forget X’s name at time T.

Actually, there’s one more circumstance that made this ambiguity possible. If the headline had said

People always seem to forget Justin Morneau’s name

there would have been no ambiguity, since no matter what time you’re talking about, Justin Morneau refers to the same individual. In semantic terms, it’s a rigid designator. In contrast, the non-rigid designator the Home Run Derby winner, like Speaker of the House, the Tomato Queen, and the dread pirate Roberts, refers to different individuals at different times.

Of course, when I say Justin Morneau refers to the same individual at any given time, I’m ignoring details like what it refers to during times preceding Morneau’s birth. Likewise for interpreting sentences such as I dreamed Justin Morneau had never been born or In my world, Justin Morneau is not a baseball player, but a prehistoric mammal-like reptile whose fossilized remains were found in my backyard, and the question of what happens if Justin Morneau tries to cross the same river twice. For now, I’ll just leave matters with Jason Moreau as the winner of this year’s Home Run Derby.

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If It’s Not for Everyone, It’s Not for Anyone

Once again, I find myself wondering exactly what James J. Kilpatrick is thinking. He begins this week’s column with:

This was a headline in USA Today on April 28: “Mass Transit Not an Option for All Drivers.”

Did you wince? Roll your eyes? Did you groan? Then you have the soul of a grammarian, and will go to heaven when you die…. There you will lecture the seraphim on the distinction between “all” and “not all,” and you will explain to them that if mass transit is not an option for “all” drivers, it cannot be an option for even one driver.

Doug Gets Rich

When Doug’s class went on an end-of-the-year picnic to a nearby park last week, they had to wear their official school T-shirts. These shirts are to be worn only on field trips (like this one), or on certain designated days at school, so it had been a while since I’d seen the shirt. I looked at it while I packed Doug’s lunch: It’s a beige shirt, with a 6-inch-diameter picture of a penny on the front. Under the penny are the inspiring words from the fourth-grader who won the T-shirt design contest last year:

If I had a penny for every new thing I learned at [this school], I’d be rich.

These words stared me in the face a few minutes later, as I rubbed sunscreen into Doug’s arms and neck. I pondered them while he put on his shoes and backpack. Just before he left for school, I got a penny, and said, “Doug, I want you to have this penny. Do you know what it’s for?”

“No,” he said.

“This penny,” I said, “is for every new thing you’ve learned at [your school]!”

You know, I don’t think Doug appreciated what I was doing for him. I saw that same penny again this morning, in the bottom of the washing machine with Doug’s school T-shirt and the shorts he wore that day.

Dagwood’s Lack of Focus

Dagwood is sitting watching TV in today’s strip, and Blondie asks him what he’s watching. He enthusiastically tells her that “it’s an old-fashioned movie,” because:

The cowboy only kissed his horse!

The trouble is, there is no indication of where the stress(es) should fall, which would show which chunk of the sentence is being focused, or in other words, which chunk only applies to. The pattern of stress could be any of the following:

1. The cowboy only kissed his horse.
2. The cowboy only kissed his horse.
3. The cowboy only kissed his horse.
4. The cowboy only kissed his horse.

In the first pattern, the entire phrase kissed his horse is focused, with stress on kissed and a slightly lower (in phoneticians’ terms, downstepped) pitch on horse. With this intonation, Dagwood would be saying that in old-fashioned movies, all cowboys ever do is kiss their horses. They never have cattle drives or poker games or showdowns at high noon. Hmmm.

OK, let’s try the next one. Here, just kissed is focused, so we conclude that the only things cowboys do to their horses in old-fashioned movies is kiss them. Not ride them, or feed them, or shoot them; just kiss them. As an aside, I wonder why columnists like James Kilpatrick never point out the kind of ambiguity we get between #1 and #2 when they get on their soapbox about the proper placement of only. They can’t show a nice disambiguation just by moving the only around, so it seems they ignore the issue. Anyway, I don’t think #2 is the intended reading, either. Next!

In the third stress pattern, just his is focused, implicating that in modern movies, cowboys are indiscriminate about whose horses they kiss. (Dagwood could also conveyed this meaning by putting the only right before the his and stressing the his.) Interesting visual, but I still don’t think we’re there.

In the fourth stress pattern, the focus is on horse; in old-fashioned movies, the only things cowboys kiss is horses. (The same meaning as you’d get if you put the only right before the his and stressed horse). So in old-fashioned movies, cowboys don’t kiss women, children, or other men. Oh, now I get it! This is another Brokeback Mountain joke!

Frankly, I find the first three readings funnier.

Glen Gets Literal

My brother Glen noticed and wrote about a strange usage of remarry in an advice column, where it said someone “remarried two years ago to a woman I’ll call Beth.” Paraphrasing Glen’s comments, both marry and remarry can be used intransitively (although get married is more idiomatic than intransitive marry):

John married.
John remarried.

Both verbs can be used transitively, too:

John married Marsha.
John remarried Marsha.

However, if you use remarry transitively, the “again” component of the meaning must take wide scope over the direct object. Thus, John remarried Marsha has to mean that John married Marsha again, not that John married again, and this time the bride was Marsha.

So far Glen and I are in agreement. But Glen maintains that even the insertion of a to before a woman I’ll call Beth fails to get the semantics right. My take is that it doesn’t even get the syntax right. To use a to with either marry or remarry, in my dialect you have to use the periphrastic get (re)married, and even then the to sounds a bit strange with remarry.

The very oddness of the phrasing, though, is what I think lets the reader get the semantics right. You read it and think, “Why is there this unnecessary to? The writer must be trying to convey some meaning that wouldn’t be conveyed by the simpler phrasing.” And then you figure out that the meaning that the writer is trying to avoid is that the man married Beth twice. (Or as it’s put in the linguistic subfield of pragmatics, you draw a Q-inference.) But I agree with Glen that you don’t get this meaning from the compositional semantics of the phrase, just from the context.

Glen moves from there to the general ambiguity of marry illustrated in, “The minister married me,” and from there to an amusing musing on interspecies mating and polyandry, based on ambiguous song lyric that I really need to add to my list.

All that talk about the semantics of marry took me back ten years ago, when I was introducing my wife fiancée then-fiancée now-wife to Mom and Dad. “And we’re getting married!” I told them. “To each other!” Later, when Dad told me he heartily approved, I checked just to make sure he’d said “heartily” and not “hardly.”

Something Catastrophic Didn’t Happen … Too Bad Something Else Catastrophic Did.

Glen of Agoraphilia sent me another example of a scope ambiguity a few days ago. Here’s what he wrote:

In the L.A. Times yesterday, I found the following in an article about health insurance:

“In fact, most Californians probably have a family member, friend or co-worker who lacks health insurance, though they may not always be aware of it. ‘You may not know it if they haven’t talked about it or if something catastrophic hasn’t happened,’ Brown said.”

Hmmm. I’m betting this is another case, like “not all are” versus “all are not,” where my grammar must be more restrictive than other English speakers. When I hear, “something catastrophic hasn’t happened,” I don’t hear, “nothing catastrophic happened”; I hear, “there is at least one catastrophic thing that did not happen.” Which, one hopes, is pretty much always. Wouldn’t it suck if all possible catastrophes happened at the same time?

It’d suck, all right. The reading of “there is at least one catastrophe that didn’t happen” can be represented like this, with the negation inside the scope of the existential:

EXIST(x, catastrophe(x) & NOT(happen(x)))

The intended reading of “it is not the case that there is a catastrophe that happened” can be represented like this, with the existential inside the scope of the negation:

NOT(EXIST(x, catastrophe(x) & happen(x)))

I guess Glen out-literals me in this case. Whereas we agree in hearing “Everyone can’t” to mean the same thing as “No-one can,” in this case I have a little easier time getting the correct reading than he does. Instead of immediately getting the narrow-scope negation that Glen gets, I get the intended one, but it comes with a nagging feeling that something’s not quite right, which I then identify as the scope ambiguity.

But whether a reader reacts like Glen does, or like I do, it’s still a case of unclear language that can cause readers to stumble. Of course, some slack has to be cut, since the ambiguous sentence is from a spoken language, not written. I’d guess it’s probably just easier on the fly to negate “Something catastrophic happened” by negating the verb than to work out the interaction of the quantifier and the negation and come up with, “Nothing catastrophic happened.” In fact, I suspect that might be what goes on when people say, “Everyone didn’t pass.”

Even so, I’ve seen plenty of this kind of scope ambiguity in written English, and I’m surprised it doesn’t get at least as much attention in English composition classes as the attachment ambiguities known as dangling participles or misplaced modifiers.