For reasons that may not make sense to anyone else, I recently performed a Google search for “They Might Be Giants” and “Belly Button.” This was the second hit: a paper by a Stanford linguist named David Beaver (that’s not an aptonym, is it?) called “Have You Noticed That Your Belly Button Lint Colour Is Related to the Colour of Your Clothing?” Here is the abstract:
Karttunen identified a class of semi-factive verbs. This was erroneous, but enlightening. Stalnaker and Gazdar explained Karttunen’s data as involving cancellation of presuppositions as a result of pragmatic reasoning, an account reformulated by van der Sandt. In this paper I present a large number of naturally occurring examples bearing on the question of how factive verbs interact with implicatures, and show that many of these examples are problematic for existing accounts. I end by presenting suggestive evidence involving the relation between presupposition and information structure.
I love living in a society that values this kind of research. But I also think it is funnier than Woody Allen‘s best writing. The above paragraph reminded me a bit of some earlier economics papers I discussed, as well as a comment once made by a grouchy New York Times writer discussing another New York Times writer who had just received a promotion: “He writes as if he were badly translated from the Croatian.”
If anyone can translate the abstract above out of the Croatian, and additionally tell me how it relates to belly buttons, I’d be most obliged.
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Someone clearly taught Mr. Beaver the importance of a catchy title. And with the early sub-title “Pre-fight coverage”, I was rather encouraged. However, I’m not sure I’d qualify it as terribly funny. Of course, I’m not terribly inclined to find Woody Allen funny. Though, perhaps I’m not giving him a chance. At least in print, he is less likely to stammer and stutter.
randomesq.com
Someone clearly taught Mr. Beaver the importance of a catchy title. And with the early sub-title “Pre-fight coverage”, I was rather encouraged. However, I’m not sure I’d qualify it as terribly funny. Of course, I’m not terribly inclined to find Woody Allen funny. Though, perhaps I’m not giving him a chance. At least in print, he is less likely to stammer and stutter.
randomesq.com
Perfect timing, I needed a laugh right about now.
Perfect timing, I needed a laugh right about now.
Sounds like one of those fake research papers from MIT:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Sounds like one of those fake research papers from MIT:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
I like the way Stephen Dubner thinks. And writes. I cannot abide this other sort of writing, he writes of, however. The writing of convoluted academia. My fantasy: A huge, Truly HUGE Lord God! Bird FLIES through all the horrid, twisted, barbed-wire words and scatters all those demented plops of horridness afar! Then….a cool breeze. A few, delicate clouds of misty reason shadowed, perhaps, with some restrained eloquence. And the sky. The clear, blue sky of unsullied, uncluttered, fresh meaning! Hooray!! Praise the Lord! Praise the Bird!
I like the way Stephen Dubner thinks. And writes. I cannot abide this other sort of writing, he writes of, however. The writing of convoluted academia. My fantasy: A huge, Truly HUGE Lord God! Bird FLIES through all the horrid, twisted, barbed-wire words and scatters all those demented plops of horridness afar! Then….a cool breeze. A few, delicate clouds of misty reason shadowed, perhaps, with some restrained eloquence. And the sky. The clear, blue sky of unsullied, uncluttered, fresh meaning! Hooray!! Praise the Lord! Praise the Bird!