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.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
But would you expect to be able to read an abstract on any other academic topic, say microbiology, and understand it? Beaver is not trying to be obtuse; since I’m a linguist it doesn’t sound convoluted to me, but I can see how it would be to a layperson.
If you want to learn about linguistics as a layperson, you can pick up books by authors like Stephen Pinker and find some eloquent writing on the subject. You may also find the Language Log interesting (http://www.languagelog.com/), where Beaver and other well respected linguists blog about language related issues, usually in terms that are easy to understand.
But would you expect to be able to read an abstract on any other academic topic, say microbiology, and understand it? Beaver is not trying to be obtuse; since I’m a linguist it doesn’t sound convoluted to me, but I can see how it would be to a layperson.
If you want to learn about linguistics as a layperson, you can pick up books by authors like Stephen Pinker and find some eloquent writing on the subject. You may also find the Language Log interesting (http://www.languagelog.com/), where Beaver and other well respected linguists blog about language related issues, usually in terms that are easy to understand.
“David Beaver” is not an aptonym as far as I can tell. At least, beavers are not noted as linguists, and not euphemistic for anything linguistic either. Now, if he were studying feminism or gender studies or something…
Side note: I took several linguistics classes from Beaver as an undergraduate. He’s a great guy, and doesn’t take himself nearly as seriously as many a professor I’ve interacted with.
“David Beaver” is not an aptonym as far as I can tell. At least, beavers are not noted as linguists, and not euphemistic for anything linguistic either. Now, if he were studying feminism or gender studies or something…
Side note: I took several linguistics classes from Beaver as an undergraduate. He’s a great guy, and doesn’t take himself nearly as seriously as many a professor I’ve interacted with.
What little linguistics I know is very rusty. But I recall an (English factive verb is one that takes a clause that expresses a proposition (a statement that is true or false) as it’s object, as in “I BELIEVE that snow is white.” Figuring out how human languages work, both the syntax and semantics, is extremely important. The results have very valuable practical applications, including better information retrieval, machine translation, spoken language understanding, human-computer interfaces, etc. Obviously the abstract was written for other linguists and not economists.
I’m not sure what a semi-factive verb is, but I’d guess it is one that has both factive and non-factive readings.
What little linguistics I know is very rusty. But I recall an (English factive verb is one that takes a clause that expresses a proposition (a statement that is true or false) as it’s object, as in “I BELIEVE that snow is white.” Figuring out how human languages work, both the syntax and semantics, is extremely important. The results have very valuable practical applications, including better information retrieval, machine translation, spoken language understanding, human-computer interfaces, etc. Obviously the abstract was written for other linguists and not economists.
I’m not sure what a semi-factive verb is, but I’d guess it is one that has both factive and non-factive readings.
The field in question is actually Pragmatics, not Semantics, and the paper in question makes perfect sense to anyone with even an undergraduate-level exposure to Pragmatics (which is all I have). There are plenty of examples out there of the use of jargon to obscure meaning, but Beaver’s paper is not one of them. The apparently nonsensical terms such as “semi-factive”, “implicature” and “presupposition” are actually technical terms in the field of Pragmatics, with (relatively) precise definitions, and are used correctly in a way that is perfectly meaningful to those familiar with the field. Expressing the same ideas without the terminology would double the length of the paper and frustrate its intended audience. You might just as well have posted a mathematics paper and criticised the authors for using funny symbols instead of nice, clear English.
The field in question is actually Pragmatics, not Semantics, and the paper in question makes perfect sense to anyone with even an undergraduate-level exposure to Pragmatics (which is all I have). There are plenty of examples out there of the use of jargon to obscure meaning, but Beaver’s paper is not one of them. The apparently nonsensical terms such as “semi-factive”, “implicature” and “presupposition” are actually technical terms in the field of Pragmatics, with (relatively) precise definitions, and are used correctly in a way that is perfectly meaningful to those familiar with the field. Expressing the same ideas without the terminology would double the length of the paper and frustrate its intended audience. You might just as well have posted a mathematics paper and criticised the authors for using funny symbols instead of nice, clear English.