The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (37 page)
Read The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
Every person who sells any controlled substance which is specified in subdivision (d) shall be punished…. (d) Any material, compound, mixture, or preparation which contains any quantity of the following substances having a potential for abuse associated with a stimulant effect on the central nervous system: Amphetamine; Methamphetamine…
The jurors must not be swayed by mere sentiment, conjecture, sympathy, passion, prejudice, public opinion or public feeling.
In the first case, a woman was distraught over being abandoned in a restaurant by her date, and drove off in what she thought was the date’s Cadillac, which she then totaled. It turned out to be someone else’s Cadillac, and she had to recover the money from her insurance company. Was she covered? A California appellate court said yes. The policy was ambiguous, they noted, because the requirement
with the permission of the owner
, which she obviously did not meet, could be construed as applying narrowly to
any person responsible for use by the named insured
, rather than to
the named insured
(that is, her)
and any person responsible for use by the named insured
.
In the second case, a drug dealer was trying to swindle a customer—unfortunately for him, an undercover narcotics agent—by selling him a bag of inert powder that had only a minuscule trace of methamphetamine. The
substance
had “a potential for abuse,” but the
quantity of the substance
did not. Did he break the law? The appellate court said he did.
In the third case, the defendant had been convicted of raping and murdering a fifteen-year-old-girl, and a jury imposed the death penalty. United States constitutional law forbids any instruction that would deny a defendant the right to have the jury consider any “sympathy factor” raised by the evidence, which in his case consisted of psychological problems and a harsh family background. Did the instructions unconstitutionally deprive the accused of
sympathy
, or did it deprive him only of the more trivial
mere sympathy?
The United States Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that he was denied only
mere sympathy;
that denial is constitutional.
Solan points out that the courts often resolve these cases by relying on “canons of construction” enshrined in the legal literature, which correspond to the principles of parsing I discussed in the preceding section. For example, the Last Antecedent Rule, which the courts used to resolve the first two cases, is simply the “minimal attachment” strategy that we just saw in the Sherlock sentence. The principles of mental parsing, then, literally have life-or-death consequences. But psycholinguists who are now worrying that their next experiment may send someone to the gas chamber can rest easy. Solan notes that judges are not very good linguists; for better or worse, they try to find a way around the most natural interpretation of a sentence if it would stand in the way of the outcome they feel is just.
I have been talking about trees, but a sentence is not just a tree. Since the early 1960s, when Chomsky proposed transformations that convert deep structures to surface structures, psychologists have used laboratory techniques to try to detect some kind of fingerprint of the transformation. After a few false alarms the search was abandoned, and for several decades the psychology textbooks dismissed transformations as having no “psychological reality.” But laboratory techniques have become more sophisticated, and the detection of something like a transformational operation in people’s minds and brains is one of the most interesting recent findings in the psychology of language.
Take the sentence
The policeman saw the boy
that the crowd at the party accused
(trace)
of the crime.
Who was accused of a crime? The boy, of course, even though the words
the boy
do not occur after
accused
. According to Chomsky, that is because a phrase referring to the boy really does occur after
accused
in deep structure; it has been moved backwards to the position of
that
by a transformation, leaving behind a silent “trace.” A person trying to understand the sentence must undo the effect of the transformation and mentally put a copy of the phrase back in the position of the trace. To do so, the understander must first notice, while at the beginning of the sentence, that there is a moved phrase,
the boy
, that needs a home. The understander must hold the phrase in short-term memory until he or she discovers a gap: a position where a phrase should be but isn’t. In this sentence there is a gap after
accused
, because
accused
demands an object, but there isn’t one. The person can assume that the gap contains a trace and can then retrieve the phrase
the boy
from short-term memory and link it to the trace. Only then can the person figure out what role
the boy
played in the event—in this case, being accused.
Remarkably, every one of these mental processes can be measured. During the span of words between the moved phrase and the trace—the region I have underlined—people must hold the phrase in memory. The strain should be visible in poorer performance of any mental task carried out concurrently. And in fact, while people are reading that span, they detect extraneous signals (like a blip flashed on the screen) more slowly, and have more trouble keeping a list of extra words in memory. Even their EEC’s (electroencephalograms, or records of the brain’s electrical activity) show the effects of the strain.
Then, at the point at which the trace is discovered and the memory store can be emptied, the dumped phrase makes an appearance on the mental stage that can be detected in several ways. If an experimenter flashes a word from the moved phrase (for example,
boy
) at that point, people recognize it more quickly. They also recognize words related to the moved phrase—say,
girl
—more quickly. The effect is strong enough to be visible in brain waves: if interpreting the trace results in an implausible interpretation, as in
Which food did the children read
(trace)
in class?
the EEC’s show a boggle reaction at the point of the trace.
Connecting phrases with traces is a hairy computational operation. The parser, while holding the phrase in mind, must constantly be checking for the trace, an invisible and inaudible little nothing. There is no way of predicting how far down in the sentence the trace will appear, and sometimes it can be quite far down:
The girl wondered who
John believed that Mary claimed that the baby saw
(trace)
.
And until it is found, the semantic role of the phrase is a wild card, especially now that the
who/whom
distinction is going the way of the phonograph record.
I wonder who
(trace)
introduced John to Marsha. [
who
= the introducer]I wonder who Bruce introduced
(trace)
to Marsha. [
who
= the one being introduced]I wonder who
Bruce introduced John to
(trace)
.
[
who
= the target of the introduction]
This problem is so tough that good writers, and even the grammar of the language itself, take steps to make it easier. One principle for good style is to minimize the amount of intervening sentence in which a moved phrase must be held in memory (the underlined regions). This is a task that the English passive construction is good for (notwithstanding the recommendations of computerized “style-checkers” to avoid it across the board). In the following pair of sentences, the passive version is easier, because the memory-taxing region before the trace is shorter:
Reverse the clamp
that the stainless steel hex-head bolt extending upward from the seatpost yoke holds
(trace)
in place.Reverse the clamp
that
(trace)
is held in place by the stainless steel hex-head bolt extending upward from the seatpost yoke.
And universally, grammars restrict the amount of tree that a phrase can move across. For example, one can say
That’s the guy
that you heard the rumor about
(trace)
.
But the following sentence is quite odd:
That’s the guy
that you heard the rumor that Mary likes
(trace)
.
Languages have “bounding” restrictions that turn some phrases, like the complex noun phrase
the rumor that Mary likes him
, into “islands” from which no words can escape. This is a boon to listeners, because the parser, knowing that the speaker could not have moved something out of such a phrase, can get away with not monitoring it for a trace. But the boon to listeners exerts a cost on speakers; for these sentences they have to resort to a clumsy extra pronoun, as in
That’s the guy that you heard the rumor that Mary likes him
.
Parsing, for all its importance, is only the first step in understanding a sentence. Imagine parsing the following real-life dialogue:
P: The grand jury thing has its, uh, uh, uh—view of this they might, uh. Suppose we have a grand jury proceeding. Would that, would that, what would that do to the Ervin thing? Would it go right ahead anyway?
D: Probably.
P: But then on that score, though, we have—let me just, uh, run by that, that—You do that on a grand jury, we could then have a much better cause in terms of saying, “Look, this is a grand jury, in which, uh, the prosecutor—” How about a special prosecutor? We could use Petersen, or use another one. You see he is probably suspect. Would you call in another prosecutor?
D: I’d like to have Petersen on our side, advising us [laughs] frankly.
P: Frankly. Well, Petersen is honest. Is anybody about to be question him, are they?
D: No, no, but he’ll get a barrage when, uh, these Watergate hearings start.
P: Yes, but he can go up and say that he’s, he’s been told to go further in the Grand Jury and go in to this and that and the other thing. Call everybody in the White House. I want them to come, I want the, uh, uh, to go to the Grand Jury.
D: This may result—This may happen even without our calling for it when, uh, when these, uh—
P: Vesco?
D: No. Well, that’s one possibility. But also when these people go back before the Grand Jury here, they are going to pull all these criminal defendants back in before the Grand Jury and immunize them.
P: And immunize them: Why? Who? Are you going to—On what?
D: Uh, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will.
P: To do what?
D: To talk about anything further they want to talk about.
P: Yeah. What do they gain out of it?
D: Nothing.
P: To hell with them.
D: They, they’re going to stonewall it, uh, as it now stands. Except for Hunt. That’s why, that’s the leverage in his threat.
H: This is Hunt’s opportunity.
P: That’s why, that’s why,
H: God, if he can lay this—
P: That’s why your, for your immediate thing you’ve got no choice with Hunt but the hundred and twenty or whatever it is, right?
D: That’s right.
P: Would you agree that that’s a buy time thing, you better damn well get that done, but fast?
D: I think he ought to be given some signal, anyway, to, to—
P: [expletive deleted], get it, in a, in a way that, uh—Who’s going to talk to him? Colson? He’s the one who’s supposed to know him.
D: Well, Colson doesn’t have any money though. That’s the thing. That’s been our, one of the real problems. They have, uh, been unable to raise any money. A million dollars in cash, or, or the like, has been just a very difficult problem as we’ve discussed before. Apparently, Mitchell talked to Pappas, and I called him last—John asked me to call him last night after our discussion and after you’d met with John to see where that was. And I, I said, “Have you talked to, to Pappas?” He was at home, and Martha picked up the phone so it was all in code. “Did you talk to the Greek?” And he said, uh, “Yes, I have.” And I said, “Is the Greek bearing gifts?” He said, “Well, I want to call you tomorrow on that.”
P: Well, look, uh, what is it that you need on that, uh, when, uh, uh? Now look [unintelligible] I am, uh, unfamiliar with the money situation.
This dialogue took place on March 17, 1973, among President Richard Nixon (P), his counsel John W. Dean 3rd (D), and his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman (H). Howard Hunt, working for Nixon’s reelection campaign in June 1972, had directed a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building, in which his men bugged the telephones of the party chairman and other workers. Several investigations were under way to determine if the operation had been ordered from the White House, by Haldeman or Attorney General John Mitchell. The men were discussing whether to pay $120,000 in “hush money” to Hunt before he testified before a grand jury. We have this verbatim dialogue because in 1970 Nixon, claiming to be acting on behalf of future historians, bugged his own office and began secretly taping all his conversations. In February 1974 the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives subpoenaed the tapes to help them determine whether Nixon should be impeached. This excerpt is from their transcription. Largely on the basis of this passage, the committee recommended impeachment. Nixon resigned in August 1974.