The Stuff of Thought

If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from?

A writer is someone who writes.

But fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce,

hammers don't ham and haberdashers don't haberdash.

If the plural of tooth be teeth, should the plural of booth be beeth?

One goose, two geese - so one mouse two meese?

If a man wrote a letter, perhaps he also bote his tongue.

Richard Lederer,  Crazy English

Why do we have noses that run and feet that smell?

Random Person on the Internet

How much money should the insurer have paid out to Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Centre site? Silverstein held insurance policies that stipulated a maximum reimbursement for each destructive `event`. So was he due $7bn (two towers, two collapses, two events), as his lawyers argued, or was he due only $3.5bn (one plot, one event)? With this unusually expensive debate over semantics, I was introduced to Steven Pinker's book on `The Stuff Of Thought`*.

If you are a native English speaker, you'll probably have no trouble picking the correct sentence from the choices offered below:

• Tex nailed posters onto the board.
• Tex nailed the board with posters.*

• Serena coiled a rope around the pole.
• Serena coiled the pole with a rope.*

• Ellie covered the bed with an afghan.
• Ellie covered an afghan onto the bed.*

• Jimmy drenched his jacket with beer.
• Jimmy drenched beer into his jacket.*

• Hal loaded the wagon with hay.
• Hal loaded hay into the wagon.

But how do you do it?! And why does one of the sentences in the pair sound so odd? Since both phrases are equally as successful at conveying the meaning (would you ever be puzzled by someone saying Amy poured the glass with water ?), what is it that makes one of them wrong? Why can't all verbs work in both a content-locative construction (which is the formal name of phrases where the content is the focus) and a container-locative one (where it's the container that sits under the spotlight)?

• Hal loaded the wagon with hay.    < --- container-locative (A)
• Hal loaded hay into the wagon.    < --- content-locative (B)

How in fact do speakers (and, more intriguingly, small children) work out that certain verbs can't appear in otherwise perfectly good constructions? Or work out that certain other verbs can? (Notice that in the last pair, both sentences are equally valid). Here are then two formal questions:

1. Question #1: Can one teach a computer to reliably generate a content-locative construction given a container-locative one? (And vice-versa?)
2. Question #2: Can one identify the property of verbs which designates them to the two camps - those that work in both constructions (as in load) and those that don't (as in drench)?

Virgin Mary on a Cheese Sandwich?

Often, seemingly haphazard linguistic patterns such as the above are in fact underwritten by a formal rule. For instance, the mystery of why -er and -est can't be applied to certain adjectives (you can't be specialer that your friend or the beautifulest in the world) found its match when someone noticed they can only work with words that are monosyllabic (redder, nicer, older) or have at most an insubstantial second syllable (prettier, simpler, narrower).

The oddity concerning the verbs above (with some that work only in content-locative constructions and other only in container-locative ones) puzzled linguists for some time. This was, in part, due to the influence of computer scientist-cum-linguist Noam Chomsky, whose work made people inclined to think of language rules as operations of cut-and-paste. Saying that the locative rule concerning contents and containers cared about the meaning of the verb was like claiming that 'your word-processing program refused to cut and paste words with certain meanings while happily doing so with all the other ones'.

But as it turns out, meaning matters. The content-locative constructions can be thought of as saying "A causes B to go to C" (Hal loaded hay into the wagon.) while the container-locative that "A causes C to change state (by means of causing B to go to C)" (Hal loaded the wagon with hay.) These two ways of thinking about the same event are a simple and elegant explanation of why the locative rule allows certain verbs to take on the first construction, others the second and others still both of them:

A rule of semantic reconstrual (the gestalt shift): If a verb means "A causes B to move to C" it can also mean "A causes C to change state by means of moving B to it". In both cases, the affected entity (B for meaning #1, C for meaning #2) should be expressed as the direct object.

Now, words in Hal loaded hay into the wagon and Hal loaded the wagon with hay don't just move around for no particular reason. The rule says the affected entity must go from oblique object to direct object. Still - the rule so far only answers Question #1. What about why some verbs can make the transition while others cannot?

Stick Men

To answer that, the first thing you must notice about the pairs of sentences above is that the two formulations are not perfectly synonymous. When one loads hay into a wagon it can be any amount (even a couple of pitchforks). If, on the other hand, the wagon is loaded with hay then we might reasonably expect it to be full once the action has been completed. Linguists call this subtle difference the holism effect.

The holism effect is not a mere accident, but rather follows from the very nature and purpose of the locative rule: to change the focus from the content to the container or the other way around. And it reveals something about how the mind conceives such a change. In fact, the holism effect applies to direct objects in general**:

• Moondog drank from the glass of beer where the glass is an oblique object of from, and is consistent with him taking only a few sips, while
• Moondog drank the glass of beer where the glass is now a direct object, means he's drunk all of it.

A Direct Object is a pretty important syntactic role (second only to the Subject and Predicate). The glass is more in the mind's forefront in the second sentence then in the first. In the examples above, the affected entity is always the Direct Object, and doesn't quite make it to Subject rank only because an agent is also present in the sentence (and we care more about agents than we do about objects, perhaps for evolutionary reasons, since agents can eat you while objects tend to be more passive***).

In fact, sometimes the holism of the affected entity (the Direct Object) rubs off onto the agent herself (the Subject), as if the mind is presented with 'a sensuous image of an entity so saturated with stuff or bits that the mind blurs the two and apprehends the entity as doing what the stuff or bits ordinarily do':

• Bees are swarming in the garden.
• The garden is swarming with bees.

• Juice dripped from the peach.
• The peach dripped with juice.

The reason this is even possible is because the English language treats a changing entity (usually the Direct Object) in the same way that it treats a moving one (usually the Subject). This for instance doesn't happen in Romanian****. Ray Jackendoff, a linguist, explored much of how words denoting motion in a physical space often come to denote change (a kind of metaphorical motion) in a state-space, as in

• The manager kept Petro at work.
• The doctor kept Pedro well.

• Chris went to Paris.
• Chris went crazy.

We, in fact, use metaphorical translations of space concepts all over the place (we say stock markets have risen and that our mood went down). Good is up and bad is down, the future is in front of us and the past behind and events on a time scale travel towards us (the end of the night drew nearer) or away from us (the meeting was moved back to Monday) - though they can also stand still and wait for us to come to them (we were approaching January).

Furthermore, when we conceptualise an entity moving in state-space we apply the same schematization to it as we do to things moving in the physical world. This means that 'when the mind conceptualises an entity in a location or in motion it tends to ignore the internal geometry of the object and treat it as a dimensionless point'. And since we say a wagon goes from empty to full the same way we say a car has gone from London to Paris, it now makes perfect sense that the wagon does not allow intermediate states in the container-locative construction: spatially we tend to think of the car as either in London or in Paris, not giving much thought to the road in between.

Finally we now have all the ingredients required to answer Question  #2: that it is both the meaning of the verb as well as the meaning of the construction which inform us of which verbs can accept the locative alternation. This allows us to understand why we can Throw a cat into the room but cannot Throw the room with a cat - since we cannot conceptualise throwing something into a room as enough to change the state of that room.

Another example. To pour means to allow liquid to move from A to B in a continuous stream. It specifies a relation (letting not forcing for instance) and the attribute of the motion (slow perhaps). It says something about the motions but nothing at all about the state of the container: you can pour water in a glass (making it full), onto the floor (making it wet), over a person (making her angry), but nothing predictable happens to the receiver. In that way it is different from spew, splash and spray which say intrinsically something about how the state of the container has changed: something can be spewed, splashed or sprayed but not poured. Which is why we can say Hannah poured water into the glass but not Hannah poured the glass with water. Fascinating, isn't it?

* This is a book I warmly recommend - all the examples above are shamelessly cherry-picked from there. Also, you might want to check this guy out on TED, his talks are usually quite entertaining.

** Remember, in the locative rule, first the container was the direct object (Hal loaded the wagon with hay), then the content (Hal loaded the hay into the wagon).

*** Just by the by, when an object becomes active, as in the tree that's about to squish you, or the car that's about to run you over, both linguistically and mentally they become agents which is why we say that we tend to anthropomorphise objects when they do things. As it turns out, this might be one of the reasons why the concept of deities comes so naturally to most of us (since natural phenomena happen, it is a mental reflex to ascribe agent features to them). But more about that in a another post.

**** Albinele bazaie in gradina cannot become Gradina bazaie cu albine.