I heard some of Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the Sept. 11th commission on the radio yesterday, and heard her and her questioners use task again and again as a verb, as in:
(1) to task someone to do some job
(2) to task someone with doing some job
(3) to task some job to someone
I hadn’t realized task could be used this way, but I did two Google searches, and found about 9300 hits for the string “tasked * with”, and about 8400 hits for the string “tasked * to”. During a cursory check of some of the results pages for “tasked * to”, all the relevant hits I saw were examples following the pattern in (2), none following (3). I don’t know if that’s because that usage really is less common than the one in (2), or just because examples following this pattern tend to have more than one word between tasked and to. I did find 9 examples, though, when I searched for the string “tasked the job of”, most in passive sentences such as I was tasked the job of ….
The other usage that struck me was from Rice’s opening statement, which contained the phrase harden terrorist targets. I’ve been familiar with the phrase hard target since I saw the 1993 Jean-Claude van Damme movie of that name. I’m also well familiar with the verb harden, meaning “to make or become stiff or inflexible” (in a literal or figurative sense). But this is the first time I’ve heard harden used to mean “to make or become more difficult”. I didn’t try a Google search on harden, since I hesitate to think of the kind of websites I’ll get directed to with that keyword. But I did try it on the Linguists Search Engine, requiring that it be used as a transitive verb, and didn’t find any other instances of hardening targets, games, or tests. Have any of you readers heard harden used in this way?
Friday, April 09, 2004
Can You Task Someone with Hardening a Target?
From the Mouths of Babes?
Betsy Newmark had her high school government students take part in a budget-balancing simulation, with interesting results:
The liberal kids happily cut away at military spending, NASA, and foreign aid. They were then dismayed to find that they hadn't cut very much of the deficit. The conservative kids whittled away at social welfare and increased the tax cuts. They too were unable to make substantial headway on the deficit. However, the cut that both the liberals and conservatives agreed on was whacking away at Social Security and Medicare. Cries of "throw Granny off welfare" and "buy your own drugs" were heard. They were ruthless. Some of them reduced Social Security down to zero, cackling cheerfully all the while.In general, I’m suspicious of “from the mouths of babes” interpretations, because kids hold all kinds of magical and bogus beliefs. Ask a group of children what they’d do if they were president, and they’ll say “give everyone free healthcare,” “give everyone a good job,” “give everyone a pony,” etc. And liberals will latch onto these statements and observe how young children really know what’s important, unlike all those crotchety old folks who would turn a cold shoulder on their fellow man. So I’m hesitant to say “from the mouths of babes” when the result is one I find more pleasing.
Still, I think a useful lesson comes out of Newmark’s classroom experiment, and it’s the same one her students learned: you can’t have everything you want, so something has to get cut. The simulation in question is far better than the open-ended questions usually posed to kindergarteners because it incorporates some real-world constraints, and the difference in outcomes is apparent. Of course, the subjects were high schoolers who may already have been tainted by their elders’ jaded and cynical worldviews…
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Do Men Have a Right to Abortion, Too?
WARNING: This post is way too long.
In a letter to Reason magazine (not yet available online), Brian Sorgatz writes:
It is hypocritical of the government to guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion while forcing a man to pay child support against his will. As Karen DeCrow, former president of the National Organization for Women, said, “If women have the right to choose if they become parents, men have that right, too.”This is an argument to be taken seriously, although I’m not sure whether I agree with it in the final analysis. There is a real incongruity in the way women’s and men’s obligations to potential future offspring are treated. Think of it this way: Both a man and a woman have the opportunity to avoid parenthood by abstaining from sex. But once they’ve had sex, the woman has at least one additional opportunity to avoid parenthood – by having an abortion. The man does not have this option. If he has sex that results in conception, and if the woman chooses to give birth and raise the child, the man is on the hook for child support – whether or not he wanted to have a child at the time of sex, whether or not he favored an abortion, whether or not he wanted to give it up for adoption. I’ll consider a few responses to this line of argument that I don’t think quite work, and then a response I think is more viable.
Paternity suits should be abolished. Every argument in favor of them is a mirror image of an argument against legalized abortion. Compare: “If men don’t want to support their offspring, they should use condoms” with “If women can use the pill, why do they need a right to an abortion?” And when so-called deadbeat dads are labeled irresponsible, it mirrors the anti-abortionists’ stereotype of women who want abortions as irresponsible sluts.
1. The obvious response is to say, “He accepted the risk of having to pay child support when he had sex.” But as Sorgatz indicates, this is an argument that abortion rights advocates always reject when it comes to a woman; “She accepted the risk of having a child when she had sex” is not considered a valid argument against abortion. To put it another way, the woman does not accept that risk when she has sex; the incongruity demands justification.
2. Another response is to note the potentially dire consequences of Sorgatz’s policy. Wouldn’t we end up with lots of children being raised by single moms, without any financial support from their fathers? Sounds plausible. Then again, the incentives would change. Knowing they could not obligate their sexual partners to pay child support, more women might (a) refuse to have sex in the first place without some contractual promise of support, (b) use more reliable birth control methods, or (c) have more abortions. On the other hand, they might just rely more on public welfare – indeed, reducing the welfare burden is one major reason the government works so hard to identify deadbeat dads and make them pay. However, the fact that the government has established exploitable welfare programs is not the fault of men who choose to have sex. Blaming such men for creating a burden on the welfare system is a little like blaming the Gap for letting your teenage daughter run up a monstrous credit card bill. If you wanted to avoid that burden, you should have refused your daughter the credit card (or given her a card with a low credit limit). And besides, the welfare burden argument could be directed just as plausibly against women who choose not to have abortions, thereby creating more future welfare cases.
3. Another response notes that repudiation of child support is not thoroughly analogous to abortion. An abortion prevents a child from ever coming into existence, whereas the repudiation of child support denies funds to a child who already exists. If we think of child support as an obligation owed to the child, not to the child’s mother, then the situations differ because an abortion avoids creating the source of the obligation. There are two difficulties with this argument. First, our legal system does not really treat the obligation to support one’s child as unavoidable. If both parents choose not to keep the child, it can be put up for adoption, and neither biological parent will be obligated to provide for it – even if no one but an orphanage will take it. Yet when the biological mother decides to keep the child, the father is financially obligated. Thus, the woman has the ability, post-sex, to create a financial obligation on the man.
Second, from an economic perspective, there is something perverse about imposing liability on the party who has the least opportunity to prevent that liability from existing in the first place. The man has one opportunity to prevent the occurrence of a child (abstaining from sex), while the woman has two (abstaining from sex, having an abortion). In general, if you want to give people the right incentives, you want to place liability on those who have the greatest capacity to reduce its incidence. In the current system, where liability is distributed over both parties, the woman who chooses to carry a child to term (and keep it rather than give it up for adoption) imposes an external cost on whoever else has to pay for it – either the father or the state. The result is an inefficiently small number of abortions.
4. In my opinion, all the above responses are inadequate, although #3 comes close to satisfying me. But here is a response that I do find (relatively) convincing. Think of sexual activity as creating an implicit contract about how to deal with any consequences that arise. Ideally, the contracts would be explicit: people about to engage in coitus would specify in detail the terms of their intercourse, including the obligations of each party vis-à-vis any pregnancy that might arise from the act. If the parties could not reach mutually agreeable terms, they would not have sex. Of course, this would never happen, because people about to have sex are not inclined to stop long enough to have a summit meeting, write up an agreement, call a contract lawyer, etc. In other words, transaction costs are too high, so people rely on a vague, implicit contract instead.
In this kind of situation, the legal system must decide the default terms of the contract. I suggest it should do so by asking the following hypothetical: If people did take the time to agree on a contract, what would the terms be? We can never know the answer for sure, in part because different couples would likely reach different contracts, while an implicit contract by its nature is one-size-fits-all. But the economic theory of bargaining gives some hints as to the likely outcome. Contracts rarely impose perfectly symmetrical duties; instead, what the parties give and receive depends on their threat points, meaning what their positions would be if no bargain were reached. In this case, there is good reason to believe that women have a stronger threat point. If popular stereotypes are correct, then men (in general) desire sex more, and thus they are willing to make more concessions to get it. Even if they are dealing with a particular woman who wants sex a great deal, she likely has many outside options (other willing partners), and that competitive pressure will tend to reduce the man’s relative bargaining power. Finally, the potential downside of the bargain, pregnancy, is a more serious burden for women, and therefore more favorable terms will be necessary to induce women’s cooperation.
In short, if women and men wrote contracts before sex, it seems pretty likely that women would successfully demand a variety of concessions from men. The resulting contract might look a lot like the status quo. You might characterize the contract as having three signature lines – one for the man, and two for the woman. Each person “signs” the contract once by having sex. But no child, and no parental obligations, result unless the woman “signs” a second time by not having an abortion. Essentially, the contract includes an option to be exercised at a later time by one party. This is quite common in the world of business – stock options, for example, give the owner a right (but not obligation) to buy stock at a specified price at a later date – so I see no reason to rule them out of sex contracts.
One implication of the contractual approach I’ve outlined here is that the status quo ought to be modified to allow explicit “opting out” of the one-size-fits-all contract. The courts of law cannot avoid imagining implicit contracts from time to time, because people often engage in transactions without written terms, and even written contracts often leave some contingencies unaddressed. But an implicit contract only establishes a default, which can usually be overridden by an explicit contract with different terms. In the present case, anyone would be able to demand a modified and explicit contract as a pre-condition of sex. If the other party refused, then either (a) they wouldn’t have sex, or (b) they’d have sex anyway, in which case the default rules would apply. In practice, I suspect this system would look very much like the status quo, because most people would continue to have sex without lengthy negotiations. But the right to opt out would free the system from the troubling appearance of coercion and discriminatory treatment observed by Sorgatz.
P.S. To anti-abortion folks: Yes, I'm pro-abortion. But I've had that argument too many times for it to be interesting anymore, so this post takes the correctness of the pro-abortion position as given.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Ideological Wheeling and Dealing
Tyler Cowen and Brad DeLong just had an interesting exchange (Tyler 1, Brad 1, Tyler 2, Brad 2, Tyler 3) on the subject of libertarianism versus liberalism (or, if you prefer, classical liberalism versus modern liberalism). In the end, Tyler offered Brad a deal: he would agree to vote against a presidential candidate specified by Brad, if Brad would post (without irony) the following message on his blog: “The classical liberal recipe of increased immigration is superior to strengthening the welfare state. I just don't think it will or can happen, so I will advocate the next best thing.” Brad took the deal, with some caveats.
I must say that Tyler got the better of this deal, because one vote ain’t worth much. I know a lot of people who’d sell theirs for a ham sandwich. But then again, Brad didn’t have to give up much – he just had to state the truth.
Lynne Kiesling offered the following commentary, which is what really got me thinking:
After reading all of this, though, I continue to think that an argument for classical liberalism over modern liberalism cannot be premised on pragmatic/utilitarian/consequentialist terms alone. I think the question to pose to Brad is this: do you want a social environment based on the primacy of the individual and on negatively-defined rights? I think that core philosophical question will always separate the mutton from the lamb, so to speak.Here’s why Lynne’s mistaken: Tyler’s proffered deal was accepted, whereas I strongly suspect Lynne’s would have been rejected. Why? Because deontological arguments are simply not as persuasive as consequentialist arguments to the vast majority of people. Given a choice between (a) closing a deal that would result in a somewhat more libertarian society and (b) losing a deal that would have resulted in a very libertarian society if it had just been accepted, I’ll take the first one.
More later.
Monday, April 05, 2004
Ooh, Baby, You Know What I'm Like
Doug, age 5, routinely says things like this (and has been doing so for a couple of years):
(1) He was like, “Why’d you do that?” That’s what he was like, Daddy.Now I am a fluent user of the like of reported speech or thought, and will often utter sentences like the first one in (1). But the second one? No way. At least, not with this meaning of like. For me, what he was like can only mean “what he was similar to” or “what kind of person he was.”
The second sentence in (1) is an example of one kind of “extraction,” in which the object of a verb or preposition or some other word does not appear in its ordinary position, instead appearing nearer the front of the sentence. Here are some examples of extraction which just about every speaker of English could say, with the ordinary position for the extracted object indicated by the __, and extracted object itself underlined:
(2) Topicalization: (I didn’t see Glen, but) Neal, I saw __.What Doug has done in (1) is to use the like of reported speech/thought in a free relative construction, precisely along the lines of That’s what I saw in (2). Just as what corresponds to the missing direct object of saw here, what corresponds to the missing reported speech/thought following like in (1). I’ve also heard him make questions with like (What was he like? meaning, “What was his reaction?”), though I haven’t heard him do topicalizations or clefts with it.
Question: Who did you see __?
Cleft: It was Neal that I saw __.
Free relative: That’s what I saw __.
Why is extraction with like so natural for Doug and so wrong for me? My gut feeling is that the like of reported speech or thought is just different from ordinary verbs, prepositions, or even adjectives. It's even different from the truly adjectival like, which I can extract from just fine:
(3) A cold fish is what he was like __.But why is it different? How? The only thing I can put my finger on is that this usage of like is a late addition to my grammar, and feels different stylistically from everything else. Doug, however, hears this like without any of the baggage that I have, and quite rationally subjects it to the same extraction rule that other verbs and verb-like words or phrases are subject to. In this way, the slippery slope event I referred to in my last posting has come to pass. I predict we will all hear a lot more of sentences like (1) as members of Doug's cohort grow up.
The difference between Doug's like and mine becomes even more radically apparent when he says stuff like this:
(4) I was like, just about to win, is what I was like.Good heavens! Now he's gone too far! Not only does he subject to extraction the like of reported speech/thought , he dares to do it with the conversational-hedge like! Muffy Siegel did a well-publicized study on this use of like, but even she says she hasn't heard anything like (4).
The Slippery Slope of Language
Glen had some interesting comments on my last posting, where I discussed sentences following the pattern of Others were attempted to be killed. He said:
In order to make that conclusion [that this construction is grammatical], wouldn't you need to know the frequency with which [it] appears relative to other constructions that express the same idea? Or, perhaps, the frequency with which native listeners and readers have an adverse reaction to it? After all, if the phrasing struck *you* as wrong, and it struck *me* as wrong, I'll bet it strikes *lots* of people as wrong.What I found with my corpus search was that it was common and regular enough that I could not in good conscience simply dismiss it as a speech error. I found enough examples that, if this were a foreign language I were documenting, the prima facie conclusion would be that for at least some speakers, the way to turn a sentence like Someone attempted to kill others into a passive is to make both attempted and kill passive. Now I agree that there are probably a lot of speakers who, like Glen and me, find the sentence ungrammatical, or at least odd. From a linguist’s point of view, all this means is that people like Glen and me are speaking a different language from the people who have this construction. True, the languages are mostly alike, enough so that the speakers of each can easily understand each other, but they are different languages nonetheless. A more common way of referring to languages that are mutually intelligible (as these two are) is to call them dialects of the same language.
Glen continues:
It might even strike some of the speakers as wrong. I can easily imagine saying trying to construct a passive voice sentence, realizing halfway through that it couldn't *quite* be done, and finishing incorrectly rather than starting over.Good point, if we’re talking only about spoken English. However, the other examples I found were in written English, which has had more time to be corrected by its authors. But even granting this point, suppose that all my examples are instances of people completing a sentence even though they know it’s not grammatical, just because they can’t think of a better way of doing it in the time they have. Now imagine you’re a kid learning the language. When you hear these sentences, as far as you know they ARE grammatical, and you infer a rule to generate them, without the mental baggage that the earlier speakers may have attached to them. And now in your grammar (and in the grammar of many of your peers who were exposed to similar input), these sentences are a completely legitimate part of your language.
As Mario Rizzo and Glen might put it, a “slippery slope event” has occurred: Letting the ungrammatical sentence pass has allowed speakers acquiring the language to accept it as grammatical. And now that their grammar will generate this kind of stuff, who knows what other surprises will be generated by whatever rule they’ve inferred? And from the rules that the next generation of speakers infer from what they hear this generation saying? This kind of slippery slope is a common way for language to change; John McWhorter, in The Power of Babel, describes it quite entertainingly. The process is so common that I even have an example from my own life, but since this posting is long enough, I’ll save it for my next one.
IHS Seminars: Apply NOW
Other bloggers have recently sung the praises of the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), but I wanted to join the chorus. If you’re a college or graduate student, and you have an interest in the ideas of liberty, I highly encourage you to apply for one of IHS's free summer seminars. You won’t regret it. The official application deadline was March 31, but they’ve decided to continue accepting applications through April 9 (this Friday). It’s an online application, and it doesn’t take long to fill out. The application deadline for the Social Change Workshop, which grad students should consider especially seriously, is April 15. Hey, did I mention that the seminars are free?
I first attended one of these seminars in 1992, and I’ve been a faculty member for the last three summers (and will be again this summer). As a student, I found the seminar both inspiring and mind-blowing; and even now, over 10 years later and with a lot more education under my belt, I still find it among the most intellectually stimulating events of my year.
Sex in Prime Time
I’ve never been fascinated by prime numbers, in part because I never really saw their practical application for anything except mundane mathematical chores (like finding a lowest common denominator). But this could make me a convert: Why do cicadas come out to breed only once every 17 years?
Sunday, April 04, 2004
Passive Aggression
Here in central Ohio, they’ve been busy getting the (most recent) highway sniper suspect Charles McCoy indicted, and the latest yesterday was about how Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien will be seeking the death penalty. Here’s what he said, as recorded on the front page of the Columbus Dispatch:
(1) We are alleging that there was a course of conduct over a period of time in which one person was killed and others were attempted to be killed.This is one of those situations where I say, “I know what you’re trying to say, but I just don’t think it can be said that way.” O’Brien is using the passive voice in order to keep the focus on the events, and the first time he does it, there’s no problem. If you have an idea that would be expressed like (2) in the active voice, phrasing it in the passive, as in (3), is pretty straightforward:
(2) Someone killed one person.But what happens when you try to do it with something like (4), where the verb you intuitively want to make passive (kill) is not the main verb?
(3) One person was killed.
(4) Someone attempted to kill others.The main verb here is attempted, and kill is just part of the infinitival complement of attempted. If you put the direct object of kill in front and put the main verb attempt into the passive, you get this:
(5) *Others were attempted to kill.Eww. That sentence just ain’t right, as I’ve indicated with the *. So what do you do instead? If you’re Ron O’Brien, you go ahead and put kill into the passive, too:
(6) Others were attempted to be killed.As it turns out, it’s not just the Franklin County Prosecutor who does it. I searched via Linguist’s Search Engine and Google for other instances of some form of be+attempted+to+be+[passive participle], and found plenty of them. Below are a few (the first from LSE, others from Google). Examples also exist with try, but my impression was that more of them came from sites in countries where English is not the primary language.
- He stated the provision in the State law was attempted to be corrected this year
- Corrections are attempted to be diagnosed and fixed within a 24 hour period.
- “During play'” is from the time play is attempted to be started or is started, until “play ends.''
- Additional major funding for this project will be attempted to be obtained from New York State Insurance Committee
- Never before has such an eclectic palette of music been attempted to be put into one mix
- I've never seen so many fakes and forgeries in one area being attempted to be sold as genuine articles.
(7) How to handle errors when an IMG/Image is attempted to load?So, it looks like I was wrong: I know what Ron O'Brien was trying to say with were attempted to be killed, and you can say it that way. It is not an error in sentence planning, but an apparently fairly regular way of putting attempt and try (in their infinitive-taking incarnation) into the passive. What is even more interesting to me, though, is that even though all the example sentences I found make sense, they don’t seem to do so in a semantically compositional way. That is, it’s not enough to know what each word means in were attempted to be killed, and build up the meaning of the phrase piece by piece (as can be done with was killed)—you have to impute some of the meaning to the phrase as a whole. (Either that or just give up and say that the last piece of the meaning doesn’t come from the grammar; we just kinda get it from the context.) In short, these examples support the idea behind a theory known as construction grammar (i.e. that some of the meaning of phrases comes not from any particular word in them, but from the construction of the phrase itself), and pose a problem for strongly lexicalist theories, which assume all meaning of a phrase is wired into individual words and built up into larger and larger parts of the phrase.
UPDATE: Mark Liberman tells me that the kind of passive I attempted in (5) has a name: long passive. Though it is ungrammatical in English, it is fairly common in German. Results of a corpus search for it done by Susi Wurmbrand can be found here. As for whether other languages without long passive use the same double-passive alternative seen here, I don't know.
Rules We Follow Without Knowing It
Neal’s post below, in which he described his 5-year-old son’s use of a rule of English pronunciation that he almost certainly could not describe, reminded me of the following passage from Hayek:
The first of these attributes which most rules of conduct originally possessed is that they are observed in action without being known to the acting person in articulated (‘verbalized’ or explicit) form. They will manifest themselves in regularity of action which can be explicitly described, but this regularity of action is not the result of the acting persons being capable of thus stating them.Hayek was speaking of rules in a different context – the rules of ethical and just conduct. But he recognized the generality of his point:
We cannot consider here the difficult question of how men can learn from each other such, often highly abstract, rules of conduct by example and imitation … This is a problem most familiar to us in the learning of language by children who are able to produce correctly most complicated expressions they have never heard before; but it occurs also in such fields as manners, morals, and law, and in most skills where we are guided by rules which we know how to follow but are unable to state.(Both passages appear on p. 19 of Hayek’s Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol. I: Rules and Order.)
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