One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech
October 30, 2019 3:42 AM   Subscribe

 
Aw, it's not "You never did the Kenosha Kid"
posted by chavenet at 4:05 AM on October 30, 2019 [10 favorites]


I was sure the sentence would be about Buffalo Buffalo.
posted by emelenjr at 4:15 AM on October 30, 2019 [28 favorites]


Oh this is very fun.
Is it the same region that controls pitch in tonal languages? It feels like it “should” be, but also like the full cortical networks supporting linguistic pitch production and perception might be discrepant in those two cases. I’m super curious though! Also, what about singing?

I wish Wired would link to the relevant journal article or conference abstract in this kind of article. I searched PubMed but wasn’t able to find it.

Unrelatedly, I work with biomedical data, and I am humbled when I realize the lengths that so many people will go to to contribute to science. Bless this participant.
posted by eirias at 4:21 AM on October 30, 2019 [5 favorites]


These pretzels are making me thirsty!
posted by wellred at 4:55 AM on October 30, 2019 [11 favorites]


In the 80s, my friend used to quote some movie that had a line with those qualities: "I did not ask for the anal probe."

Never knew what movie it was, looked it up just now - Passion Fish, John Sayles.

It works really well for this exercise.
posted by Miko at 5:07 AM on October 30, 2019 [10 favorites]


It actually has more than seven potential meanings, since multiple emphasis is perfectly valid.

"*I* never said *she* stole my money" is slightly different both from "I never said *she* stole my money" and "*I* never said she stole my money".
posted by kyrademon at 5:20 AM on October 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


"*I* never said *she* stole my money" is slightly different both from "I never said *she* stole my money" and "*I* never said she stole my money".

I don’t find any difference in the first two of those — the emphasis on *she* kind of outweighs that on *I*.
posted by klausman at 5:38 AM on October 30, 2019


*I* never said she stole my money = Someone else did or may have said she stole my money, but I did not.

I never said *she* stole my money = I did not say she stole my money; however, I did say someone stole my money.

*I* never said *she* stole my money = Someone else did or may have said she stole my money, but I did not; however, I did say someone stole my money.
posted by kyrademon at 5:48 AM on October 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


I never said my hovercraft was full of eels.
posted by emelenjr at 6:02 AM on October 30, 2019 [50 favorites]


kyrademon — that’s interesting. Would you also hear the union of two different meanings, regardless of which two words were emphasized? What about three or more words?
posted by klausman at 6:07 AM on October 30, 2019


I didn't order this bean plate.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:10 AM on October 30, 2019 [11 favorites]


It actually has more than seven potential meanings, since multiple emphasis is perfectly valid.

There are also different types of emphasis, which multiplies things out even more. Sentences that are just sort of neutral, information giving sentences have one type of emphasis; you'd get those more neutral emphasis in a context like this; try to imagine A and B being pretty matter-of-fact here:

A and C are chatting; A walks up to say hi and catch up
A: Hi all. What're you talking about?
B: Oh, you know, just talking to C about this drama that's been going on with Claire. I was telling C that I never said she stole the money, and it's all a big misunderstanding.

This would be a different emphasis than, say:

A: Claire's going around telling people that you're accusing her of theft.
B: I never said she stole the money; I said she borrowed it without permission.

Where stole is being explicitly contrasted with something else in the context.

So, for kyrademon's example, what's going on is that the utterance has multiple things that are being contrasted. Say:

A: Claire's going around telling people that you're accusing her of theft.
B: I never said she stole the money; Mike said she borrowed it without permission.

Folks who are interested can check out the free MIT course on the ToBI annotation system for one way linguists try to write all of this down.
posted by damayanti at 6:12 AM on October 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


I didn't order this bean plate.

Funnily enough, one of the usual example sentences linguists use to show this shifting emphasis does involve "beans":

John ate the beans; John ate the beans; John ate the beans.
posted by damayanti at 6:13 AM on October 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


Idea for insomnia app: audiobook of the Harvard Sentences.
posted by thelonius at 6:16 AM on October 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


Sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!
posted by mwhybark at 6:42 AM on October 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


"John ate the beans; "

Oh God. What else were people doing with the beans that we have to emphasize John ATE them?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:46 AM on October 30, 2019 [19 favorites]


Oh God. What else were people doing with the beans that we have to emphasize John ATE them?
...did you not see the comment upthread about the anal probe?
posted by xedrik at 6:48 AM on October 30, 2019 [14 favorites]


*slow clap*
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:49 AM on October 30, 2019 [5 favorites]


Sleep! *That’s* where I’m a viking!

Meaning: I knew I was a viking somewhere, but I just remembered it's when I'm sleeping.
Works better with a slap to the forehead.
posted by signal at 6:50 AM on October 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


> "Would you also hear the union of two different meanings, regardless of which two words were emphasized? What about three or more words?"

Not necessarily.

For example, "I *never* said she *stole* my money" means pretty much the same thing as "I never said she *stole* my money" -- i.e., "I said she did something with the money other than stealing it." But of course, that is different from "I *never* said she stole my money" -- i.e., "I did not ever speak words aloud indicating that she stole my money". Although this may simply be because the meaning of the second is already implied and therefore subsumed by the first, so it's a combined meaning that has no effect. "I *never* said she stole *my* money" would work similarly, I think.

Some get a little too complex to parse easily. "I never said *she* stole my *money*" could, depending on context, take the double emphasis meaning: "Someone stole my money, but it was not her; however, she stole something from me which was not money". However, I could easily see it shading into either "I never said *she* stole my money" or "I never said she stole my *money*", depending on the specific context and emphasis given.

Some are just difficult to parse. "I never said *she* stole *my* money" means ... what exactly? Does it imply I said that someone else stole someone else's money? I guess so, but it starts to become so difficult to pick out from emphasis that it would be easier to rephrase unless the context is very specific.

As far as I can see, more than two emphases in a short sentence tend to be more about emotional impact than meaning: "I NEver SAID she STOLE my MOney!" sounds more like someone frustratedly saying it for the third time than trying to combine four shades of meaning.
posted by kyrademon at 6:56 AM on October 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Some people accept that the Spanish Inquisition may nevertheless arrive at some point in time.
Some people expect some other Spanish Inquisition, but not the definitive one.
Some people expect the Hungarian or Chinese Inquisition.
Some people expect a Spanish omelette.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:57 AM on October 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


We had one of these in a machine parser class back in the old, old days of machine speech recognition (before the answer to that problem was the same as every other one: "throw huge amounts of data and processing power into a neural net and bingo!"). Anyway the phrase was:

"She made the robot fast."

We came up with about a dozen different meanings, just based on word definition, IIRC. Some favorites were "She tied the robot down" and "She was able to attend the festival in which robots chose to abstain from eating."
posted by The Bellman at 7:02 AM on October 30, 2019 [27 favorites]


I don't really get emphasizing "never" versus neutral (or is that the "neutral" condition?) other than being emphatic.

buffalo would have been a nice experiment (if they had anyone who hadn't heard of it, or the analogous ducks) for differentiating semantic processing vs phonemes. The recent papers have been especially clever by decoding neurons that map to vocalization instead looking for higher order encodings.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 7:07 AM on October 30, 2019


She quickly blew the cover of the disguised robot!
posted by kyrademon at 7:09 AM on October 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


She had frantic sex with the robot!
posted by kyrademon at 7:10 AM on October 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


You never said you stopped beating your wife
posted by Mchelly at 7:10 AM on October 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


For some reason this line in the article struck me as very amusing: Even linguists who are well aware of this phenomenon are amused by it
posted by skewed at 7:11 AM on October 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


She set the robot to a time ahead of the correct time!
posted by kyrademon at 7:13 AM on October 30, 2019 [5 favorites]


This is fun.
posted by kyrademon at 7:13 AM on October 30, 2019


Another internet-famous language game: insert the word “only” anywhere in the following sentence.
She told him that she loved him.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:13 AM on October 30, 2019 [17 favorites]


She set the robot to a time ahead of the correct time!

Holy cow I have been using this example for over 30 years and I have never thought of that one! Thank you!
posted by The Bellman at 7:17 AM on October 30, 2019 [6 favorites]


She made the colored imprint of a robot resistant to fading?
posted by kyrademon at 7:23 AM on October 30, 2019 [5 favorites]


I'll allow it!
posted by The Bellman at 7:24 AM on October 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


A couple similar things we used to laugh about back in the 80s:
"Just say no."
"Just do it."
posted by hypnogogue at 7:30 AM on October 30, 2019 [5 favorites]


Substitute monkey for money then let’s talk
posted by From Bklyn at 7:35 AM on October 30, 2019


This is why arguing over the internet is a fool’s errand.
posted by Arson Lupine at 7:45 AM on October 30, 2019


One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech

One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech
posted by Reyturner at 7:55 AM on October 30, 2019


kyrademon: It actually has more than seven potential meanings, since multiple emphasis is perfectly valid.

"*I* never said *she* stole my money" is slightly different both from "I never said *she* stole my money" and "*I* never said she stole my money".


So there are up to 27 meanings. (When texting someone we should probably suffix each phrase with a hexadecimal number indicating emphasis. This could resolve a lot of ambiguity)
posted by kurumi at 8:40 AM on October 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


So welcome to my TED talk about how it's probably actually not-useful advice to tell writers not to use italics for emphasis, particularly in dialogue-heavy scenes with multiple characters, particularly particularly if any character is being sarcastic or ironic or is otherwise prone to emphasize whatever they are saying in a manner other than with the most obvious emphasis, and that (while I have no proof of this, I'm convinced that) the origin of the canard that you don't need to use italics for emphasis if you're, like, a genuinely good writer, man, actually lay in editors making a practical business decision as part of the editorial process, that decision being "My printer is going to shoot me in the face if I make them pull the italics case out this frequently," back when that literally meant the physical case within which they kept the italic versions of the typeface they were printing the piece of writing in, when printing meant literal printing, like getting ink on an image (in this case text) and then pressing it against paper to make a print, rather than spraying ink onto paper out of a complicated machine.
posted by Caduceus at 8:43 AM on October 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


I never said I ate the plums...


oh wait, I did.


They were delicious.
posted by ikahime at 8:51 AM on October 30, 2019 [9 favorites]


This is just to say

Without knowing
how I would have
placed emphasis
on these words
you will never really know
what I meant

Forgive me
all words
are made up
anyway

Thor said so
posted by The Bellman at 9:06 AM on October 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


> "So welcome to my TED talk about how it's probably actually not-useful advice to tell writers not to use italics for emphasis"

I'm still going to (politely) tell the guy in my writers' group who sprinkles them around his dialogue like a five year old with glitter that it makes all of his characters sounds like they are trapped in a bad movie where everyone thinks increasing their volume is exactly the same thing as showing emotion.

He also likes to end paragraphs with ellipses for no particular reason...
posted by kyrademon at 9:32 AM on October 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


my name is Cow
and when im fed
my tung wants salt
i lik the bred

so sik of grass
want wheat instead
for emfasis
i lik the bred
posted by wanderingmind at 9:42 AM on October 30, 2019 [14 favorites]


> "She was able to attend the festival in which robots chose to abstain from eating."

If anything, she was the highlight of the festival!
posted by lucidium at 10:26 AM on October 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


Now do this study on actors!
posted by invitapriore at 10:31 AM on October 30, 2019


He’d kill us if he got the chance.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 11:01 AM on October 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


Not entirely related, but there's this Hokkien (a Chinese "dialect") tongue-twister that goes: gong gong gong, gong gong gong gong, gong gong gong gong. The sound is the same but the tones are different.
posted by destrius at 11:58 PM on October 30, 2019


... more Chinese here. It's all about the tones.

忧郁 (yōuyù) - melancholy
犹豫 (yóuyù) - hesitation
由于 (yóuyú) - because, then
鱿鱼 (yóuyú) - squid
有余 (yǒuyú) - have surplus
优于 (yōuyú) - better than
posted by Termite at 3:24 AM on October 31, 2019


Hang on. Where's the chinese poem about lions?

Random Google result: https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Readings/shishishishishishi.html

Shí shì shīshì Shī Shì
Shì shī shì shí shí shī
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī
Shí shí shì shí shī shì shì
Shì shí shì Shī Shì shì shì
Shì shì shì shí shī shì shǐ shì
Shǐ shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī shì shí shì.
Shí shì shī shì shǐ shì shì shí shì.
Shí shì shì shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī shī.
Shí shí shǐ shí shì shí shī shī
Shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

Give the pitch processing center of your brain a real workout!
posted by Zudz at 2:21 PM on October 31, 2019 [4 favorites]


Sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!
You know, it doesn't work so well with exclamation points. Or does that just mean that we only get to play with the emphasis on "that's where I'm a?"

This was a very interesting post. I wonder a bit whether the different-emphasis sentences convey the same meaning to all native speakers? Considering how often people misunderstand each other, I'm betting on "no."
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:51 AM on November 1, 2019 [1 favorite]


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