[Music]
L: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's
enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren
Gawne. G: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and
today we're talking about when sentences
come with baggage. But first, we have new
merchandise for you! L: Whoo! New merch! G: By
very popular demand, we have scarves that
have tree-structure diagrams on them
they're very subtle, there are no words,
there are no labels, so they can belong
to whatever theoretical framework you're
interested in, whether that's syntax trees,
language family trees, syllable structure
trees... They look really cool, we're really
excited to see them around your necks. L:
We
have them in grey, cream, light pink, teal,
and red, and we've also taken the
opportunity to add a few more colours
that were requested to the IPA scarf
lineup as well, so if you were thinking
of getting an IPA scarf or one of our
new tree scarves, we have some new colours.
We
also have new colours for some of the "Not
judging your grammar, just analysing it"
zip bags and notebooks. G: And we also have
a bunch of new items that say "Heck yeah
descriptivism" or "Heck yeah language
change," because we couldn't pick, so if
you want to be extra excited about
linguistic descriptivism
or language change, you can now do that.
And if you want a black or a grey IPA
scarf
with all your favourite characters from
the International Phonetic Alphabet on
them, you can get those too. L: And, as always,
if some of those colours don't take your
fancy, all of our patrons can order
custom colour merch in whatever colours
they like! G: Just go to
lingthusiasm.com/merch!
[Music]
G: I am really excited about this topic,
because this gets to take me back five
years to when I was obsessed with
watching a YouTube series called The
Lizzie Bennet Diaries. L: And I watched it
entirely on your recommendation. G: And it
was good! Right? L: And just for the sake
of
it, not because I wanted to be ready for our
presupposition topic. G: No, I think
I actually got our producer
Claire into it before, and then she got
you into it. L: Yeah. G: So, The Lizzie Bennet
Diaries is not
about linguistics, it's a YouTube
adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and
Prejudice set in the modern day, and it
has very little to do with linguistics,
in fact, except for the fact that one of
its episodes, episode 63, has this really
good example of exactly what we're
talking about in this episode. And I feel
like watching this episode five years
ago, when I was still in grad school, I
had this moment when I was like, this is
exactly what I have been learning about
presuppositions for. So I want to act
this out for you. L: Okay. Should we act it
out together? G: Yeah, but I need to give
a
little bit of context first. L: Okay. G: So,
if
you know anything about the story of
Pride and Prejudice,
you know, spoiler alert! There's sorry, the
book's really old! L: You've only had 200
years to read it, folks.
G: So, where we are up
until this point is Darcy has done the
first really awkward proposal to
Lizzie, and she has said, "No, who are you
kidding?"
And then he has given her a letter where
he explains himself, and because
this is a YouTube vlog series, all of this
has happened as if in the vlogs. And at
this moment, Lizzie has read the letter,
but she hasn't talked about it on the vlogs,
because if you'll recall from the book,
it has very, you know, kind of private and
personal information about other people
in the letter, so she doesn't feel like
she can talk about it. And so at this
moment, Caroline, who is Bingley's sister,
who also probably has a thing for
Darcy, has come over to Lizzie's videos
and been like, "Hey Lizzy, so, like, what's
up?" And this is where our scene starts. Do
you want to be Lizzie or Caroline? L: I'm
happy to be Caroline. G: Okay. L: It's all
good. Like,
I'm not going to deny you the
opportunity to be Lizzie in a
run-through of The Lizzie Bennett Diaries.
G: I
appreciate you, you're a good friend! L: I'm
not
a monster!
G: Caroline is also a great character, she
causes all these, like, really interesting
semantic moments in the story. L: I'm
really happy to play the semantically
integral character. Okay! Okay. G: All right!
So,
Lizzie says, "You have been watching my
videos!" L: No, I haven't! That's why I need
you to catch me up! G: You've been watching
my videos, and now you want to know
what's in Darcy's letter. L: No, I don't!
G: I
believe an appropriate response would
have been "What letter?"
L: Ooooh, busted! That's Lauren being scandalised,
not Caroline being... busted... G: Yeah, okay.
Cut scene! We're
back as ourselves. So what happens here,
after the end of this scene Lauren, what
do you think about Caroline's, like,
video-having-watched state? L: Well, she's
clearly
busted, as I have declared, because the
response should have been "What letter?"
There's this assumption that she knows
about the letter, because she's not like,
"Aah! Take a step back, what are you talking
about?" G: But she denied it! She's said no!
L: But she said, "No, I don't know what's
happening," not "no" to the earlier bit of
information that is in the sentence. G: Yeah,
like, "No, I don't want to know what's in
the letter.
Oh wait, I still am presupposing
that there's a letter." L: Yeah, so the letter
is just in there as baggage. G: Yeah,
the letter gets brought along for
the ride. L: Yep. G: And so this was really
interesting to me because it's a very
clear example from the situational
context and of course Lizzie is not a
linguist, but she's saying, "I recognise
that there was this extra meaning that I
was bringing along that you shouldn't have
been aware of." L: Lizzie is a natural
linguist!
G: She's a natural linguist! There's a similar
type of thing that can happen the classic
example of this nature is if I were to
say to you, "Hey Lauren, is the present
king of France bald?" L: Ooh! Okay, let me
think. Umm... let me think about who the present
king of... hey, wait a
minute! G: What just happened! L: This is
a
trick question!
Like, whether they're bald or not is not
the relevant fact? The relevant fact is
that there hasn't been a king of France
since the revolution in
178... oh jeez, my history teacher is
going to be very upset with me. 1789? G: That's
probably right. I don't know. L: I'll check
that.
G: This is a
very good Masterpiece Theatre! Yeah, so,
the problem with that is again, it
presupposes that there is a present king
of France. In the way that if I said, "Is
the present Queen of England bald?" you
know, you'd have a real answer to that
question. L: Oh! No, I think. It looks like
her hair, but how do we know? But I feel like
I'm definitely on firmer ground with
that than asking about kings of France.
This is a famous example because
Bertrand Russell, who was a philosopher,
it was one of his
favourite sentences, he loved bringing
this one out as a dinner party
conversation piece to get people talking
about how sentences come with all
this additional information, and we kind
of presume a whole bunch of knowledge
and put it at the front. G: That sounds like
a great dinner party topic of
conversation, I'm going to do that now!
L: Yeah, I teach undergraduate semantics on
the theory that what you're doing is
teaching people how to have really great
anecdotes for parties. G: I'm into it. L:
So,
this is a famous one, it comes up when
we're teaching this kind of thing, but
it kind of comes from the philosophical
tradition of understanding how meaning
works? And it amuses me, because a lot of
philosophers don't realise that a bunch
of the time what they're doing is
actually linguistics when they're doing
kind of this language theory stuff. And
it really just makes me happy that
there are all these philosophers that think
they're doing philosophy and it's like, "You're
all actually linguists! You just don't know
it!"
G: Everything is linguistics! I think my favourite
thing about presuppositions well, one of
my many favourite things, in addition
to the many jokes that rely on it which
we're definitely going to get into! One
of my favourite things is that one of
the ways to spot a presupposition is the
response that you need to have to a
sentence that has a buried
presupposition. So if you reply to, you know,
"Do you want to know what's in Darcy's
letter?" and you say, "Yes, I do," that
presupposes that Darcy wrote a letter.
And if you say, "No, I don't," that still
presupposes that Darcy wrote a letter. So
if you want to not be Caroline and not
get stuck, you have to say, "What letter?"
or
"Actually, I didn't know there was a
letter," or "Hey, wait a minute! There was
a
letter?"
And the "hey, wait a minute!" one gets
abbreviated HWAM. H-W-A-M. It's an acronym,
okay. So it's the HWAM test. You're
like, "HWAM, there isn't any king of France!"
"HWAM,
Darcy wrote a letter?!" L: Yeah, you need
a
little HWAM stamp to stamp on
examples. G: Yeah! L: Declare them as
presuppositionably cancellable. G: A little
stamp you can stamp on someone's
forehead when they make an unwarranted
presupposition. HWAM! L: HWAM! G: You could
tattoo it on your knuckles, it's got the
right number of letters. L: ...yeah. I'm gonna
stick with the rubber stamp, personally. G:
I
mean, it also just sounds like a
superhero move: HWAM! Or, HWAM! There isn't
a
king of France! There you go. L: Yeah. So
this
is a way of cancelling the presupposition.
So the idea that Darcy wrote a letter is
a presupposition, the idea there is a
king of France is a presupposition.
Instead of putting on some HWAM knuckledusters,
maybe we can put on some lab coats,
Gretchen. G: Okay, we can put our linguist
lab coats on. L: And try some more presupposition
testing, because this is one of those
great areas of linguistics where you can kind
of prod at examples and see how they
react and see whether you can cancel
them.
So if you have a "hey wait a minute"
reaction, that's a good indication
that there is some kind of
presupposition. G: Okay. Do you have an
example for us? L: Well, we had the HWAM.
G: Okay. L: Another thing to do is to
find a way that cancels it by bringing
in additional information. G: Okay. L: So,
"the
present king of France is bald" could be
cancelled by saying, "the present king of
France is bald and also not recognised
as a monarch because of the revolution."
G: Oh, so there's some pretender, or some
descendant that has set up a puppet court
and claims to be the king of France. L: Yeah.
G: Mm! L: One of my favourite presupposition
cancellings is a really cheeky one because
it's something that is so we don't even
think of it as a presupposition, because
it's so semantically wiped for us, but
when we say "good morning" G: Ohh! L: We say,
"Good morning!"
And someone goes, "No, it's not." It's my
favourite presupposition cancelling
because that's the way you
greet people, you just say "good morning."
And it's more of a, like, "I wish you a
good morning" rather
than "you are having a good morning." But,
you know, someone says "good morning" and
you reply with, "Actually, my boss was late
and the coffee shop had run out of
muffins" you're cancelling their
presupposition of goodness in the
morning. G: I like it.
L: A slightly fancier test, but one that I
think shows how complicated our
presupposed knowledge is, is something
that's called "projecting" in the
literature, which is where really
complicated sentences, or more
complicated sentences, can lead to really
interesting presupposition carrying or
cancelling. And I'll give you two
examples sentences to think
about, and then we'll talk through them,
Lizzie Bennet-themed. So: "Lizzie thinks
that Darcy's brother is delightful"
versus "Lizzie said that Darcy's brother
is delightful." G: So I think to the
first one I have to go, "Hey, wait a minute!
I didn't know that Darcy had a brother!"
L: Yeah. But if Lizzie thinks that Darcy's
brother is delightful G: Maybe she just
thinks Bingley's actually his brother, or
something. L: Maybe. Like, you can construct
a
reality in which you presuppose
that Darcy has a brother. But if I said,
"Lizzie said that Darcy's brother is
delightful..." G: Yeah, then it doesn't
matter if it's true or if I think it's
not true, I'm not bothered by it,
because I'm just like, well, now she's
asserting that. L: Yep. So because Lizzie
said it, you go, "Hey, wait a minute! Why
would she say he has a brother? I didn't
think he did." She's saying it as some
kind of, like, joke, or to throw me off-track,
because it's what she says. But if
if you report what she thinks, you're
more likely to agree that the
presupposition holds and that Darcy has
a brother, or that you're
misunderstanding something. G: Hmm. But if
you have, like, "Lizzie knows that Darcy's
brother is delightful..." L: I think what
happens is that people just run this
with all permutations of possible
thinking/knowing/believing. G: Yeah, 'cause
I
think if I say, "Lizzie knows that Darcy's
brother is delightful," that implies that
I, the speaker who's saying the sentence
L: Yeah. G: now I also think that Darcy has
a
brother and that this brother is
delightful. L: Hey, wait a minute, Darcy doesn't
have a brother!
G: When you first wrote these examples, I
went in and changed them, because I was
like, "It has to be Darcy's sister, 'cause
he doesn't
have a brother." L: I can't believe you didn't
trust me. G: And then I was like, "Wait,
wait, this is what you're trying to do." L:
This is the point of the examples. G: This
is the point
of these examples. L: I feel
sorry for people who don't know anything
about Lizzie Bennet Diaries, or Pride and
Prejudice, or Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies, or Pride and Prejudice BBC,
or Pride and Prejudice the film,
because they're like, "Yeah, Darcy might
have a brother, whatever." G: Whatever, who
cares.
Yeah, if you don't know, The Lizzie Bennet
Diaries is free, you can watch it on
YouTube, it'll take... many hours. L: Yeah.
Okay,
so that's some ways that we can kind of
pick apart presuppositions, and we can
see that they're quite complicated and
slippery, and it's not always as easy
immediately as, like, "Whoa, what king of
France?" G: Yeah, they require certain amount
of world knowledge as well. L: Yeah. G: Because
oftentimes we accommodate a
presupposition without even really
thinking about it. Like, the king of
France one gets us because that's part
of world knowledge that there isn't a
king of France. L: Yeah. G: But I'm sure if
I
said to some people, "The
president of Canada is bald," people might
be like, "Oh, okay!"
Wait a second, Canada has a prime
minister! L: Oh, yeah, I didn't even pay
attention to that. G: Yeah! We know a certain
amount of whether France is a
monarchy, because the French
Revolution was a pretty big deal but L: It
was a pretty big deal. G: in more subtle
cases of world knowledge, you don't
necessarily pick that kind of thing up.
L: Yeah. Do you know what's really upsetting
to me? G: What's that? L: Is that the "is
the
present king of France bald" wouldn't
have worked in the time that Pride and
Prejudice was written, because it was
written, like, a decade after the monarchy
collapsed. G: Oh no! Then you have
to say, like, "Is the present king of
France headless?" It's true, like, the day
after. L: "Is the present king of France Napoleon?"
No,
only recently. Because I was, like, it
would have been so great if we could
have had: "Is the present King of
France bald?" completely collapses now; at
the time of Elizabeth and Darcy, totally
would have held, but alas, no. G: Ahh. So
it
still had this weird
presupposition for them. L: We haven't had
a
present king of France for quite a while!
G: But it's not just so, a lot of the
examples we've been using so far have been
with names of people and names of roles
that people have, which is something that
you can presuppose. L: Yeah. G: But
you can also do it with other kinds
of words, not just names. One example that
I really like is somebody on Tumblr,
quite a while back, because I was looking
through my presuppositions tag, asked me
if I could recommend my favourite
etymological dictionary. Lauren, what's
your favourite etymological dictionary? L:
My
favourite etymological this is, like, such
a linguist
question, isn't it? My favourite etymological
dictionary. A dictionary that is just
etymologies? I mean, obviously EtymOnline.
G: But is it your favourite? L: I mean, I
said "obviously" because it's like the only
one. G: I know! L: I mean, the Oxford English
Dictionary does
some etymology, and some of the other
ones... G: They do some etymologies, but it's
often behind a paywall.
L: Yeah. G: Yeah, so when I replied to this
at
the time, I was like, "Well, I don't have
a
favourite, I just have one. It's EtymOnline,
you should go read it." L: It's really nice
to not have to make choices in life. G: You
know,
"There's one that's online that's good
that you should check." Or I
think maybe they asked "some of your
favourite etymological dictionaries"? And
I
was like, "There's... there's just this one."
This was a joke that I used to play with
my siblings, 'cause I'd be like, "You're my
favourite brother! You're my favourite
sister!" when I was growing up. I only have
one of each. L: Yeah, it is a good it's like
a top Mother's Day card: "To my favourite
mother." G: Yeah. If you actually have two
mothers for some reason, that's
really mean, but... L: Yeah, true. G: When
you only
have the one, it's just clever.
L: Your birth mother is sitting
there crying while your stepmum is,
like, really smug. G: Yeah, don't actually
do
this if you have multiple mothers. L: Don't
do this if you have more than one
mother, but if you're conveniently
single-mothered, as I am convenient for the
sake
of this joke that's pretty good.
G: Yeah! So you can pull the "favourite X."
L: What's your favourite theory about how
language determines thought? G: It's my least
favourite theory! L: Kind of backs you into
a
corner there. G: You know, if you're the
only person in a race it's like, you came
first in the marathon that I had in my
backyard ten minutes ago! That no one else
ran in! L: Yeah. G: But you came first! Good
job!
L: It's a good way to talk
yourself up. G: Yeah. I'm my favourite person
in my apartment right now, yeah!
Motivational self-help talk for
presuppositions! L: Aww! There are other ways
in
which presuppositions are really just an
excuse to talk about great strategies
for irritating siblings.
And one set of those is including the
use of "stop." G: Mmm. L: So, the classic
"stop hitting
yourself" presupposes that you chose to
start hitting yourself. G: So this is the
classic thing where
you go to your sibling and you
make their own hand hit them? L: You
pick up someone else's hand and use it
to hit them, which, like, makes I'm really
glad that you also agree that this is
the thing that you do. G: Oh yeah, very much!
L: 'Cause, like, I don't want to sound like
the person that's the aggressive sibling.
G: I mean, I obviously, personally never did
this. L: Mm-hmm, yes, it was your favourite
younger brother who would do it all the
time. G: I have witnessed this
happening among hypothetical siblings
that may or may not be mine. "Stop
hitting yourself" or you can be like,
"Stop hitting me!"
and then you can try to bring the wrath
of your parents down on the sibling, even
if they weren't actually hitting you. L: Or
one that I get asked all the
time, which is like, "When did you stop
eating meat?" As a vegetarian, it's a topic
that I don't give much thought to, but
other people are really interested in. G:
Right,
so if you've been
vegetarian your entire life, then it's
like, "Well, I didn't stop because I didn't
start." L: Yeah, it presupposes G: Have you?
L: See? There you
go, you're really interested now, aren't you,
in how long I've been a vegetarian. G: Ah,
no. The
other classic example of ones
that assume an emotional valence towards
a situation so if you have something
like "how are you coping with your thesis?"
L: Augh.
G: You're like, "Actually, I'm enjoying it!"
or
"Actually, it's been going pretty
well these days!"
L: Ahh, I finished mine, like, five years
ago and I
still get an automatic twinge just
hearing you ask that question. But yeah, there
were times when G: I thought you were gonna
say
you
finished yours five years ago and people still
ask
you that question. L: No. But people would
ask you. And some months you'd be
having a really good month,
things were under control, and you'd be
like, "Well, I'm coping fine! It's all good."
But you can't ever ask this question,
like, neutrally or positively, you
have to presuppose that things aren't
optimal because
it's a stressful experience. G: I get asked
this question about my hair, because I
have very curly hair, and people say,
"How do you deal with your hair? How
do you manage your hair?" And I'm like, excuse
me! I like my hair, I resent that it has
to be a thing to be dealt with! L: "How do
you deal
with the burden of your hair?" G: "How do
you keep yourself from murdering your
hair?" Like... no! L: So, I think we've declared
those as the Annoying Youngest Sibling
paradigm of questions. G: I think this fits
very well with our overall Pride and
Prejudice theme that has appeared for
this episode. L: Yup,
yes. Definitely. G: There are definitely some
younger siblings in Pride and Prejudice!
L: I'm gonna go out on a limb and
say some annoying younger siblings in
Pride and Prejudice. G: I think that
could be said! L: Yeah. So that's
that set of that class of words. G: And
there's also a set around the
number of times you've been doing
something. So if you say, you know, if
someone else is getting up and
going to the kitchen and you're like, "I'll
have
some water, too!" It's like excuse me, I wasn't
planning on bringing you water!
L: "Oh,
I'd love some of those biscuits if
you're opening the packet!" G: It's like,
I
wasn't... I wasn't opening that. Or, "Since
you're better at mowing the lawn, I'll
just let you do it!"
L: Yeah. Presupposes that you're better at
mowing the lawn. G: Or just because I'm
smarter than you doesn't mean that you
couldn't do... L: That one you have to use
with younger
siblings all the time. G: Yeah, I mean,
you're contractually obligated. L: Yeah, so
I
guess they also fit in with the Annoying
Youngest Sibling theme. G: I mean, older
siblings I feel like I should admit as
an oldest sibling can also, presumably, be
annoying. L: I wouldn't know!
G: The
other ones that I really like
are questions like "Why is Darcy such
a jerk?" L: I love that it's just like
there's no question that he is a jerk,
because we're getting straight to
understanding the reason for it. G: Yeah,
or, like, at the end of the book
spoiler alert when Lizzie finally gets
engaged to Darcy L: Whaaat! G: "Why did you
get engaged
Darcy when he's such a jerk?" L: Yep.
G: "Why would you want to get engaged to
such a jerk?" presupposes that he's still
acting in his, like, jerky behaviour from
the beginning of the book. L: Yeah. I think
of "why" questions as, like, if
presupposition is about bringing baggage
in, then using a
"why" question is about bringing
really space-efficient baggage? Like you
just fit so much baggage in so
efficiently with a question
presupposition. G: I think the most epic
example of that that I found when I was
researching this was a study from
one of those, like, Psychology
Today kind of journals, you know, pop
science things, and the question that
they had in their headline was "Why do
people want to eat babies?" L: Now, you
messaged this to me with no context. G: I'm
sorry! L: And I really did not know how to
answer that. G: Sorry! I feel like I need
to clear up
for the record that I do not want to
eat babies! L: It's funny in retrospect now
that I
know that you were sending it to me for
the episode, but why do people write
headlines like "Why do people want to eat
babies?" G: I mean, it got our attention!
L: Yeah.
G: Unfortunately, I tried to click on the
study, and the link was from ages ago and
it doesn't work anymore.
L: Oh no, so we'll never know! We'll never
know. G: So we'll never know. I think
this refers to when you have a
baby people do say this like, "Oh, I just
want to, like, omnomnom it all the way up!"
and they kind of, like, nibble on it,
but not with your teeth?! L: Oh, right. G:
I've seen people
do this with babies. L: Yeah, okay. G: But
not in like
a consuming-eat sort of way, just in
like a "making the mouth movements at" sort
of way. L: Yeah. G: I hope this is the case,
because I don't want to discover some
sort of, like, weird thing that apparently
is so well-known you can put it in a
headline. L: So the examples we've been
giving might give you the impression
that there's just a specific set of
words that we use to construct
presuppositions. And that's true, we
have a Wikipedia article that has a list
of words that trigger presupposition in
this way, but it's not just specific
words. It's also words in particular
contexts. G: Yeah, absolutely.
One of my favourite and by "favourite" I
mean least favourite examples of this is
when certain parents, disproportionately
male parents, get referred to as
"babysitting" when they're taking care of
their own children. L: Oh, this happened when
and I'm not gonna link to any of them,
because I refuse to do any of them
dignity but there was a massive
furore because when Serena Williams
went back to playing tennis, her husband
sat by the court looking after their
child while she did her job. G: Mm-hmm. L:
And everyone was like,
"Oh, it's so cute! He's babysitting while
she goes back..." But it's like he's not babysitting,
it's his own freakin' kid, what do you mean?
G: Yeah!
L: "Babysitting" presupposes that you're
looking after someone else's child,
usually for some kind of financial
gain. G: Yeah, exactly. And if it's your own
child, like, hopefully your partner
isn't paying you to look after your own
child, that would be L: That would be your
own personal arrangement, whatever. G: But
generally it's the case that people are
taking care of their own children as
co-parents and, you know, it gets referred
to as babysitting. L: Yeah. So in this case
it's this word, babysitting, but used in a
particular context presupposes something
that doesn't quite gel with it. G: Yeah. The
other
example that we encounter a lot for this
is when certain varieties of
English, or varieties of a particular language,
get referred to as "having an accent," or
"losing an accent," or "accented," or "accent-less,"
which presupposes that there is
some variety of English that isn't an
accent. Everything's an accent.
L: Yeah. G: There isn't
one neutral version of English that
is the zero centre. L: Even though our
default assumption is that we're the
ones that don't have an accent.
Gretchen, you have an accent, but I don't.
G: No, no, I'm the one that doesn't
have an accent, you have an accent. L: Ahh,
what a
pickle we've put ourselves in! G: I really
enjoy describing partly because
you can sometimes do this to play with
people's expectations, like if you're
talking to somebody and
you can tell that they think of
themselves as, you know, "Oh, I've got this
very standard American accent or
British accent" to be like, "No, no, you're
the accented one. Canadian English
is just the normal one, I don't know what
you're talking about."
L: Yeah, kind of flip their
presupposition back on them. G: Yeah! But
at
the same time, I know that the
accent that I have within Canadian
English is considered "less
accented" than other varieties, so I don't
wanna do that when it's not flipping the
script. L: We found some more great examples
in the wild of presuppositions, but I'll
let you decide which one you want to
share first.
G: So, the way that I found these is I did
a
search on Twitter for "presupposition" and
I filtered it by only people that I
follow? And I went back, like, eight years
to all these linguists that didn't know
that their tweets from, like, 2011
L: Were gonna be used as G: Where they were
like, "Huh, look at this example of a
presupposition!" Because it turns out I
haven't blogged about this very much. L: So
thank you to linguists of Twitter. G: Thank
you to linguists of Twitter. Thanks to
Lynne Murphy, who tweeted not so long ago
an example which went "Which Americanisms
make you wince?" This is from a British
newspaper, which presupposes that some
Americanisms make you wince, or
similar
examples like "What are your linguistic
pet peeves?" or "Which words should be
banished?" presupposes that some words
should be banished and that people have
linguistic pet peeves, when this is
also something that is not
necessary and is not something that
should be presupposed. L: Emily Bender on
Twitter shared a quote and then kind of
deconstructed the presupposition in it.
The quote was: "Given that ours is a
scientific discipline, you must be
careful to ground your argument in
previous research." And Emily Bender's like,
"Well, do they imagine that the
disciplines outside the sciences don't
ground their research in previous work?" G:
Ooh!
L: That, like, anything that's not a hard
science just fabricates things anew
every time without any reference to
what goes ahead?
G: Time doesn't exist except for science-science!
L: Yeah. G: I don't know what you're talking
about. The only area
that has time is science.
Humanities and social sciences just
exist in this non-time-bound sphere. L: I
feel like this is a good time to send people
back to the episode about existing in
time as a human. G: That's true, we
did a solstice episode about existing
in time. Possibly one of my favourite
examples, which comes from a non-linguist,
saying, "As his name is not
Biggest Bird, we are to understand that
Sesame Street is home to at least one,
perhaps more, truly immense, unseen birds."
L: I feel like so much of our discussion so
far has been, like, wow, look at all this
extra baggage you get and you don't
realise it, and I feel like this person is
just trying to shove more
baggage in than is possible with this example.
G: This is the
equivalent of, like, sitting on your
suitcase, trying to jam it close. L: How much
more presupposition can I try and
pretend is in this name? G: I mean, I think
there's a genuine example
beyond the facetious example where if
you say something is bigger, it's
implying that it's also not the biggest.
L: So, like, "something's bigger than Texas"
doesn't presuppose that there could
be something that is even bigger again.
G: Yeah, so it's a stretch, but it's a funny
stretch. Or a more mundane example from
Sherry Yong Chen on Twitter where she
posted a photo of "Welcome Back" on this
sign of a neighbourhood pub? Which was
clearly trying to presuppose that you
had already been there, you know, so that
they could welcome you back as like a
"we're part of a neighbourhood" sort of
thing. L: And I think it's
worth taking like, we've been giving some
very constructed examples and I think
the reason that people keep coming back
to the "present king of France" example,
etcetera, is that they're very clean and
clinical and easy to dissect what's
happening. But the reality is we use
presupposition to get through
conversation every day of our lives.
G: Absolutely. L: You know, if we're talking
about Emily Bender, you presuppose that
that is the Emily Bender that we both
know, or that will be locate-able in the
show notes of the show, and if I had to
say, every time, "Emily Bender,
who's a computational linguist, who you
may know from Twitter," like, that's just
gonna get a very tedious conversation.
G: Like, a person that I know who is a
person! L: Yeah. G: Who's alive! L: And if
I
had to stop you every time and be like,
"Whoa, you have a sister?" Like, that's gonna
get tedious. G: Yeah, normally we're pretty
seamless about this, especially
introducing random family members, or
introducing, you know, if I say, "Oh, I
can't chat with you right now, I've got
to go pick up my dog from the vet,"
you can accept that even if you
don't know that I have a dog (I don't
have a dog). But this is the example. L: I
was like, "You have a dog?! This is news
to me, Gretchen!" G: You've been to my place,
you've seen I don't have a dog! L: Yeah. But
presupposition works
in a way that it's like, conversation is
busy. The fact that I have a dog is not
the important thing, it's the fact that I
can't talk to you right now, that's the
important thing, so let's just go with it.
G: Yeah, you just kind of quietly update
your mental ledger for which
bits of baggage are being hung on
to. L: Yeah. G: A really interesting example
of
this comes from a Language Log post from
a couple years ago by Julie Sedivy,
and she talks about boasting through
presuppositions? L: Mmm! G: And she gives
the
example of a politician who was trying
to find a way to integrate into his
conversation, like, "Look, I created 7
million jobs!" without saying "I've created
7 million jobs and you all need to know
about it." L: Yeah. G: And eventually what
the
advisers came to was to do that
boast through presuppositions. So saying
something like, "The 7 million jobs we've
created won't be much use if we can't
find educated people to fill them.
That's why I want to create a tax
reduction for college tuition to help
kids go to college to take those jobs."
L: Yeah. G: And so you get the 7 million jobs
in there, that we've created, but you
don't have to say, "We've created 7
million jobs!
You should definitely believe us when we
say this." L: And it gives it, like, solidity,
'cause you're not jamming it in as new
information, you're treating it and the
sneaky thing about presuppositions is
that they're in that part of the
sentence that we treat as old
information or existing information. G: Yeah,
exactly. So in the comments on that
post, there's a woman saying that she's
found this to be really effective for
introducing people to the idea that
she's a lesbian, because she just says,
you know, "my wife." "Oh, my wife would kill
me if I watched that new episode of
Torchwood without her! Have you seen it?"
And then people just have to add the "my
wife" to the background information, and
she finds it's less
confrontational, makes for an easier
conversation, than saying "I have a wife,
how do you feel about that?" L: Yep, very
handy. G: Yeah, so presuppositions can
communicate things about social norms as
well. And one really interesting example
of how we seamlessly update our
information via presuppositions comes
from forensic linguistics, actually. L: Oh,
that's cool!
G: Yeah! So this is when you use linguistics
in a courtroom
to determine how people can give
evidence and be asked questions and all
sorts of things. And in this particular
example so it's a study by a memory scientist
called Elizabeth Loftus they show people
videos of car crashes, and then they'd
ask them questions about what they'd
seen.
Sometimes they'd ask them questions in two
stages, or they'd ask them certain
questions that had presuppositions in
them. So they asked them, "Do you remember
seeing the stop sign?" people would be
like, "Yeah!" or "Sure, maybe." They
answer "yes" at a higher rate than the people
who are asked "Do you remember seeing a
stop sign?" which is not a presupposition.
L: Right. G: There is an updated version of
the
study that was recently done in French
by a linguist who I know named Elizabeth
Allyn Smith at the University of Quebec at
Montreal. And so she made a video and
played it for Montrealers which again,
you know, showed a robbery. So she had
them fill out a questionnaire. The first
questionnaire was things like, "Did you
see a trash can?" or "the yellow trash can"
or "the green trash can." And the trash can
was actually yellow. L: Yep. G: And then a
week
later she had them come in and say, "What
colour was the trash can?" and they could
select green or yellow. L: Uh-huh. G: And
so in the
cases where so sometimes they got no
extra presupposition information,
sometimes they got the correct
presupposition information, and sometimes
they got incorrect presupposition information.
L: Yeah. G: And she found that people would
give the incorrect answer! They'd
say it was green when it was actually
yellow when they'd had this type of
presupposition, but they did so at slightly
different rates than the English
speakers did in the same studies. L: Huh!
G: So they
were less likely to be influenced when
you added true information, but they were
more likely to be influenced when
you added false information. L: Right. G:
Than
the English-speakers. And of course
there's a bunch of stuff that could lead
to this, and I think she's
planning follow-up studies to figure out
exactly which factors affected this, it
might have been French or English, it
might have been other differences in the
paradigm of the study. But think about,
like, some of this can even differ
cross-linguistically how much you update the
information that you think is in the
world based on a presupposition. L: Which
has massive implications for how
people are cross-examined in court, right?
G: Absolutely. L: Like if you squeeze a whole
bunch of
presuppositions into questions, you could
potentially confuse people's ideas of
what happened. G: And if you
feed someone false information in
presuppositions and they agree to it, and
then they give false answers later and
you can prove that they gave false
answers, you can use that to discredit
a witness. L: Mmm. That's... mean. G: Who
maybe was
just doing what we do in conversation
all the time.
[Music]
G: For more Lingthusiasm and links to
all the things mentioned in this episode,
go to lingthusiasm.com.
You can listen to us on iTunes, Google
Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else
you get your podcasts, and you can follow
@Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get scarves
with the International Phonetic Alphabet
or tree diagrams on them and other
Lingthusiasm merch at
lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as
@GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is
AllThingsLinguistic.com. L: I tweet and blog
as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus
episodes, ask us your linguistics
questions, and help keep the show ad-free,
go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow
the links from our website. Current bonus
topics include memes and poetry, the
semantics of sandwiches, and conlangs. And
you can help us pick the next topic by
becoming a patron. If you can't afford to
pledge, that is okay too, we also really
appreciate it if you can rate us on
iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to
anyone who needs a little more
linguistics in their life. G: Lingthusiasm
is created and produced by
Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our
audio producer is Claire, our editorial
producer is Emily, and our production
assistant is Celine. And our music is by
The Triangles. L: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
