Here, I want to look at one example of communication to critique it from the perspective of framing, to give an idea of what framing is all about.

Have a look at this bumper sticker:

Framing is always part of linguistic communication. Linguistic communication is a symbolic process, by which meaning is generated in a recipient, meaning that originated from another linguistic being, by reference to a commonly understood system of symbols and symbolic relationships. If I say the word “fish” you might think of some aquatic vertebrate animal easily available to your mind, maybe a trout. That is not because the word “fish” sounds, looks, or feels inherently fishish, but because we are communicating in a language in which “fish” is a shared symbol.

Which of the following words is not a word for “fish”?

se i?a
seekor ikan
hove
eng Geess

You would not know that the first three mean “a fish” while the fourth one means “a goat” unless you also know Samoan, Indonesian, Shona, and Luxembourgian. The link between the thing and the word is arbitrary. That is what makes the word a symbol for a fish, instead of, say, an icon for a fish (which would look at least somewhat like a fish, and might be hard to say out loud using voice).

But what if I meant the verb “fish” instead of the noun? Go get a fishing pole, a worm, and the other gear, and try to catch a fish. You would probably know the difference between the noun and the verb because of other parts of the sentence. Like I might say, “Hey you, go fish” (verb) as opposed to “Hey you, look at that fish” (noun).

The difference here is typically thought of as grammatical. The actual symbol being used is not really “fish” but rather the collection of words arranged in such a way to be identified as a noun, or a verb, or some other thing. This can be less obvious in English which tends to disassociate the grammatical elements compared to some other languages. (This is probably a feature of both Romance and Germanic languages generally). Thinking of words as distinct sets of letters set off by surrounding white space is a hindrance for English speakers when it comes to understanding the symbolic nature of language.

But what about this difference: I say to you “go, fish!” as you stand on the dock next to a boat loaded up with angling gear. This might compel you to get in the boat and start hunting for fish. But if instead of standing on the dock, we are inside sitting around a table and we have a bunch of playing cards in play, and I say “go fish!” we are probably playing the card game by that name, and your next move is to look for a card in the deck.

The difference between being on the dock and looking in the deck is a matter of framing. The symbolic utterance is “go fish” but it has multiple possible meanings. But there is something else involved in this act of symbolizing, that allows you to be more likely to correctly interpret my words. In this case, it is the physical context (out by the lake vs inside at the table) and the presence of certain artifacts (the paraphernalia of angling vs a deck of cards). That additional information keys the frame to either being about an outdoor activity involving fish or an indoor activity involving a deck of cards.

In the symbolic structure represented in the NCSE bumper sticker, what is the meaning of the three elements “EVIDENCE”, “>”, and “Misinformation”?

I believe you are supposed to take the “>” as a greater than sign, so EVIDENCE is greater than Misinformation. The details of the typeface (bold vs. not bold) reinforces this. The additional symbol, the Darwin’s Phylogeny drawing in the earthy sphere tells us this bumper sticker is about science and evolution, and is anti-misinformation, but never mind that for now. Just given the two words and the greater-than sign tell us all we need to know.

Or does it? Stick with the assumption that the symbols are symbols, ie., arbitrary in meaning. If so, why is “>” greater than? If this bumper sticker is meant to convince mathematicians that evidence is greater than misinformation, then yes, that makes sense, the meaning is clear, but this is also a waste of good paper and glue, because mathematicians, or sciency people who have some affinity to math, already know that. But what if the person interpreting this symbolic entity happens to be primarily a computer expert who programs in the scripting language bash? That might sound like a small, obscure, group, but it is not. Raise your hand if you know enough bash to know what two words with a “>” between them means! In bash, greater than is symbolized by “-gt” and the “>” symbol means something totally different. Like this, for example:

cat EVIDENCE

means spew the contents of a file named “EVIDENCE” to what is called “standard output,” which means onto the screen, normally. However,

cat EVIDENCE>Misinformation

means redirect from standard output, and copy the contents of a file named “EVIDENCE” to the end of the file called “Misinformation” and if that file does not exist, create “Misinformation” and fill it with the contents of “EVIDENCE”.

From the bash point of view, evidence is the basis for misinformation. This bumper sticker is, maybe, saying that evidence is bullpucky, or creates bullpucky, or the basis for bullpucky. This would be an example of the framing stepping big time on the message.

Here, the framing is pre-done, or primed, in advance. A person who is likely to see a “>” as a mathematical symbol understands the bumper sticker as meant. A person who spends all day with bash scripts may well get the same meaning, but their brain may alternatively go right to “>” as the redirect symbol, and figure that evidence becomes misinformation, or that misinformation is made out of evidence. That would be a bumper sticker fail.

On top of this, consider that even though the meaning of symbols is arbitrary, icons also exist as part of our linguistic communication. So, that green thing that looks like an arrow might be showing us that EVIDENCE becomes, or goes to, Misinformation. That is still a matter of framing, but in this case, more the absence of a key to set the frame up properly. The recipient of the message is simply trying to interpret what starts out as nonsense (as do all symbols until our brains figure them out), by giving a meaning of implied directionality to the thing that looks like an arrow, and coming up with a reasonably comfortable interpretation of the message. Evidence leads to misinformation.

I love the NCSE. I’m a big supporter. They have helped me greatly in the past. This bumper sticker, though … might be lesser than other options.

*Framing was originally formulated in the work of Anthropologist Gregory Bateson, though not everyone acknowledges (or knows) that. This was picked up and greatly expanded by Erving Goffman, and his work was sufficiently significant to attribute the origin of framing to him, though he was building on Bateson. Framing then spread as an idea across anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy, and was noticed by linguist George Lakoff and evile Republican strategist Frank Luntz, and applied to communication strategy. Biographies of the framing concept will vary, but this is my story and I’m sticking to it.

Probably not. But it turns out that the reason, if the following video is accurate, is interesting.

I have two questions for the historical linguists in the room. First, is there a name for this rhymification effect? Is is common? Is it confined to certain regions or cultures? Is it linked to Cockney in some way?

OK, that was a lot of questions, but really, all the same question. My second one is simpler: Where does the phrase “Swinging dick” come in? It is a Britishism for, I think, Square Mile money managers and investors. According to something I saw on TV once.

1. Without a careful definition of what you mean by “word” and by “language X”, questions like “how many words are there in language X” are pretty much meaningless, because different definitions will yield very different numbers.

This is very much off the mark. I can measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a variety of techniques, and get different measurements for a variety of reasons. The measurements may differ but they still tell me a great deal about the initial question especially when compared with other measurements (like how far away the sun is in comparison).

The way you have worded your paragraph tells me that if I wanted to examine different languages (say, grouped by language family or geography or whatever) to see if there were big difference in lexicon size, it would be impossible. Are you certain you want to make that argument?

In fact, we are mostly in agreement about the difficulties (see below) but that is not the point of the original post. The original post is about an Internet meme that claims that it is all utterly impossible.

2. The same thing applies, with the added issue of what you mean by “know”, to the question of “how many words of language X does a specific person know?” Another layer of variation is added by generalizing the question to “how many words of language X does an average four-year-old or 18-year-old know?” There’s an obvious answer, subject to the usual sampling-error problems, but the result is a bit like asking about average income — the mean value may not be very useful in telling you what you really want to know about the distribution.

I agree that mean values are not especially interesting without understanding variance (though you’ve objected to my quest for variance in item one) but this is not really related to anything I’ve said in my post or comments thereon.

3. Most sensible definitions for (1) and (2) above create serious practical difficulties for counting. That is, they define an answer, but the prescribed process for finding it is hard to carry out, and especially hard to automate in a way that produces an accurate result.

Interesting point, and it fits with what a lot of linguists seem to think of language. I don’t happen to subscribe to the approach that it is all to big and mysterious to study systematically.

4. Extrapolating accurately from samples raises its own special problems here…

I can’t find the place where I scorned this.

5. Despite all these difficulties, researchers over the years have gone through the steps of defining carefully what they mean by “word”, “language”, “know”, etc., and then carried out these steps…

Please seem my comment regarding a room full of beer loving linguists. I don’t think I ever said that defining “word” or “meaning” is easy or something that can be done with precision. What I did imply is that comments such as your number 1 (above) are very serious overstatements of the impossibility of it all, and more specifically, when we see an entry in a dictionary with dozens of meanings listed, we are not really faced with the question: “Is this one word or fifty?” while acknowledging that we may still be faced with the question “is this 32 words or 50?”

6. Comparisons across languages are made more difficult by the fact that the most natural and sensible answers to questions like those in (1) tend to be different in different languages. Furthermore, a decision that may have only a small effect on the results in language X, may turn out to change things by an order of magnitude or more in language Y. Again, this doesn’t make it impossible to answer the questions, it just increases yet again the range of sensible values that answers might have.

Yes, it does increase the range of possible values, and I would add these two points: The degree to which two languages can be compared is very strongly affected by the data collection. Comparing English Lexicon to Central Sudanic languages is impossible because the English dictionaries have hundreds or thousands of authors and centuries of development (if you count the whole written source), while the Central Sudanic language lexicons have between zero and three authors each, decades of study, and were carried out mainly for the purposes of bible translation. (Mostly, zero written lexicon).

Laden is radically impatient with all this talk about how it all depends and it’s hard to tell, but his impatience doesn’t change the facts. Nor does it change the fact that there are plenty of attempts to answer such questions…

Actually, that was not the point of the post. I was speaking specifically of a certain meme on the Internet, not linguistics in general.

Laden seems to be aware of these issues — for example, he found the Nagy and Anderson reference — but his goal in the cited post seems to be to make fun of people rather than to clarify the questions and answers. (He suggests, towards the start of his post, that he wants to evaluate claims about the rate of word learning by children — but I couldn’t see any connection between this issue and the rest of his hyper-kinetic complaining about the difficulty of getting a simple answer to the word-counting question.)

Oh dear, I stepped on your field of study and you got all icky about it. I didn’t “find” the reference. It is part of the literature of which I became aware while studying for my PhD in anthropology. And your statement about my goal is essentially correct. It is not true that my goal is what you later imagined it could have been. I’m not sure how I would have managed to write the post you were expecting!

Mark, I appreciate your comments, but you are mostly constructing and attacking a straw man.

Response to comment by Nick Lamb(here):

I presumed from the fact that almost every other word in the “rant” is made up that he’s very conscious of what the problem is with counting words, and is actually using this opportunity to show the reader why this is all very tricky, but has chosen the form of a rant which pretends to assert the contrary. … Excuse me if that was so obvious that everyone already knows it and I missed some hint that Mark dropped.

Nick: No excuses. It was utterly obvious and some people certainly missed it. Glad you didn’t.

I’d like to add it is probably helpful to understand the commentary in the broader context of the “falsehoods” writing of which it is a small part. My blog is bit dangerous that way: My posts often do not stand alone but require context. To get the context, you click on the tags near the top of the post and read everything.

So here we go.

The tail does not wag the dog

The primary finding of the Pagel et al. study is this: When comparing lexicons from different languages, meanings that shared a common word in an ancestral language change over time more slowly if the word in question is used more often in day to day speech. This finding was found to be consistent enough that the authors call this a “law-like” property of language.
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Greek speakers say ”oura”, Germans ”schwanz” and the French ”queue” to describe what English speakers call a ‘tail’, but all of these languages use a related form of ‘two’ to describe the number after one.

You can do this yourself. Here is the English “horse” translated into two closely related and one more distantly related Indo European languages:

Dutch: paard
German: Pferd
French: cheval

Not a lot of overlap, though a linguist would see the Dutch and German as similar, I suspect. Here, in contrast, is the English word “hand”

Dutch: hand
German: hand
French: main

The three Germanic languages are identical, and maybe that French word is not so different. Now let’s try for some more anatomy, with the English word “penis.”

Dutch: penis
German: penis
French: penis

Wow. According the purported law like properties of language change … oh never mind, no way to draw any hard and fast conclusions at this point I suspect. (I’ve left off the accents and the pronunciations are more different than they look here.)

(Above results all obtained using Google Translate.)

Pagel et al. estimated the rates of change among vocabulary words for 200 different meanings across 87 Indo-European languages. The number of different cognates (words that are linguistically the same) ranged from one to 46. From this analysis they calculated that the half life of a word, on average, was probably a bit over five thousand years, with a very skewed distribution.

Our findings, based on a sample of fundamental vocabulary items, identify a general mechanism of linguistic evolution, which is expected to operate across all languages and timescales and makes predictions about rates associated with specific meanings. To the extent that the structure and everyday functions of human verbal communication mean that some words will tend to be used more frequently in all languages, we expect these words to evolve slowly, and vice versa for infrequently used words. Combined with parts of speech, this simple factor allows us to account for about 50% of the variance in rates of lexical replacement throughout the 6,000- to 10,000-year history of Indo-European languages. Given the many social, cultural and cognitive factors that can influence language, it is striking that word-use frequency alone can explain such a large proportion of the historical variation in rates of evolution. The generality of this influence is suggested in the finding that estimates of the rate of lexical replacement in Indo-European languages are correlated with rate estimates in Bantu10, Cushitic and Malayo- Polynesian.

A Tale of Two Disciplines

This research is partly based on, and partly demonstrates the validity of, the assumption that language change over time can be modeled as a tree-like pattern, much like genetic change over time is modeled to create species (or population) trees. (I hasten to add: I will be using terminology here that may annoy hard core cladists. I love annoying hard core cladists.) However, linguists have come to believe in recent decades that such research, beyond relatively simplistic grouping of very closely related languages that have diverged recently, is not worthwhile. Most linguists active today simply believe that the idea that time-deep language phylogenies can be built with any degree of reliability is utterly discredited.

The work by Pagel et al. seems to prove these linguists wrong, but the culture of incredulity is strong and seemingly unshakable. But I’d like to ask you to imagine what it might be like if things were just a little different in recent history.

( … harp music as everything becomes blurry, and the scene changes to a 1960s era lab with the large and furry figure of Charles Sibley holding four liquid filled test tubes in one hand, up to the light, gazing at them… Nearby, Jon Ahlquist is re-ordering a series of IBM punch cards that just got scrambled when they fell out of the box on the way back from the Batch Window at the computer center … )

“This is never going to work,” says Sibley. “This whole idea of using DNA to make a family tree of living species has too many problems. True, we came up with a number of plausible phylogenies, but the quick work of our colleagues in the fields of biogeography and morphology sure made quick work of our quick work!”

“I wish you would stop with the stupid puns,” intoned Ahlquist. “But as usual you’re right. This hybridization stuff kinda works but the results are not sufficiently resolved to sort out either really closely related species or very distant relationships. As for this in between scale of relationships, we can SEE those. We don’t need this extra expense. What are you doing with those colored liquids in those test tubes, anyway?”

“New martini. I call it “The Sarich,” replied Sibley.

“Meh.”

( …. scene becomes blurry again, with harp music, and refocuses on a group of graduate students and a junior prof type sitting around a table in Nick’s Beef and Brew on Mass Avenue in Cambridge. These researchers are attached to Harvard’s Phylolinguistic Research Center, a new facility just built on the foundation of the recently torn down Peabody Museum…)

“So what if they don’t think it works!” said the one named Merritt. “We’ve been using Pagel’s phylogenetic method on languages for decades, and no one has questioned our ability to make deep phylogenies going back more than half way to the origin of human speech! All we’re trying to do here is to apply the same exact methods to the phylogeny of the mammals, using genes instead of words. Of course it will work!”

The group was interrupted as the waiter, Irv, came by with a large tray and efficaciously dealt out a half dozen Double Cheeseburger Specials as though they were mere playing cards. “Which one of you gets double tops….” he said as he glanced around. Then he noticed Big Tim, and remembered ….. right, double tops…. “Here you go. Enjoy.”

After a few minutes of passing around of the ketchup and adjusting the French fries, the conversation resumed. Just then, the door opened and in came Mark, the group’s statistician. Whenever the door opens in this place, a mighty wind blows across all the tables in the general direction of cook’s grill, where a 93,000 BTU open flame is constantly in use making more and more hamburgers, converting several cubic meters of oxygen into oxidized beef per minute.

(One day, a few years after this conversation, it just happened to occur that no one went in or out of Nick’s for a full hour and ten minutes. All of the oxygen was burned up at the grill and the entire retinue of diners, employees, and Nick himself suffocated, in what would later become known as the Great Snuffing Out on Mass Ave.” But I digress…..)

Pagel sat down with the group and they started to talk again about the application of proven phylolinguistic methods to genetics.

“The problem with genetics,” someone said, “is that the are under selection, unlike words.”

“Another problem,” someone else said, “is that we’re looking at genetic change across vastly different animals, with different metabolic rates and generation times.”

“… and in some cases” someone else jumped in, “Different systems of reproduction…”

“… right, and not even the same number of chromosomes across species, so linkage effects may be different….”

“Don’t worry.” Pagel spoke those words and took a bite of his meal. “Oh, did someone order beer by the way?”

Someone handed Pagel a beer to wash down his cheeseburger.

“Cheers,” Pagel said, “You don’t have to worry about most of that stuff. Most genes are highly conserved across organisms. The plurality, anyway. And other bits of DNA seem to change fairly quickly. You couldn’t find a better system than genetics to try the phylogenetic methods on. It will work better than with language, and it works pretty well with language.”

“Why didn’t they … the biologists … why didn’t they, I mean, shouldn’t they have… um, how come…” sputtered the one called Greg, just starting on his second cheeseburger and not quite sure if he was ready to speak up yet.

“Why don’t they get it? Why did they give up on this sort of thing fourty years ago?” Pagel clarified. “Because their first few attempts used a technique that sucks, and because they had no idea how the numbers worked statistically. Now, with genetic sequencing we have excellent data, and we understand the numbers. This will be easy. You guys go collect the data and bring it back here. I’ll run it on my Android and we’ll have he paper out by dinner time…”

( … scene goes blurry, ad all six of the scholars crowded into the high-backed wooden booth in Nicks simultaneously chomp on the last bit of their cheeseburgers …. )

Well, I doubt it would have happened quite that way, but my point should be clear. Linguists gave up the ghost on phylogentics when they ran into a number of problems. The method became “discredited” and no further work has been done with it. Meanwhile, in another discipline in which this sort of method can be used (genetics, in the real world) the approach continued to be developed. And now, practitioners of this method will be happy to apply these ideas to language, and teach the old boys a thing or two.

(Clarifications: 1) In “real life” the “phylogenetic method” was invented by Pagel and Harvey, but this is not the method being used to do language phylogenies. It is a wholly different thing. 2) No one ever really died of suffocation in Nick’s. 3) Irv would not have been that good of a waiter.)

Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrew Meade (2007). Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history Nature, 449 (7163), 717-720 DOI: 10.1038/nature06176

It’s like an elephant and a mammoth meeting up in the Twilight Zone. Close enough to know there is a similarity, yet different enough to be a bit freaky.

This is from the work of Mark Pagel, of Reading (England) and his team. And it isn’t quite as simple as I’ve characterized it above. As Pagel told me in a recent interview, “… when I say ‘I’ or ‘two’ are very old, I mean that they derive from cognate (homologous) sounds . Every speaker of every Indo European language uses a homologous form of ‘two’ such as ‘dos,’ ‘due,’ ‘dou,’ ‘do,’ etc. It is an amazing thought because there are billions of Indo European speakers and hundreds of thousands of ‘language-years’ of speaking across all the unique branches of the phylogeny of these languages. In all that time ‘two’ has remained cognate. Cognate does not mean identical … it is a bit like my hand being homologous but not identical to that of a gorilla.”

Pagel acknowledges that may linguists are ‘upset’ with the assertion that there are numerous cognates that share a common ancestor …. which is also a cognate … that must be over 10,000 years old. But he indicates that this dislike for the proposed reconstruction is more of a misunderstanding of this concept of homology than anything else.

Indeed, most linguists reject the idea of even being able to begin to think about maybe planning in the most preliminary way to even maybe consider doing something like what Pagel and his team have done. And these days, the main reason that linguists give for not being able to reconstruct either individual words or linkages between languages and language groups is something like “… You can’t do that because it is long discredited.” But in fact, this is alchemy. Most modern linguists, in my experience, can not provide an actual coherent reason for this discreditation.

Linguists long ago rejected the very methods that were used in the old days (back when linguists thought they could and should reconstruct language phylogenies). There are almost no living linguists trained in this area. The previous generation, which did engage in this activity, were using methods that at the time were cutting edge but today are outdated. So, Pagel is using updated methods for working with words in a similar way that we work with genes, and getting results that are statistically valid.

As with a genetic study, the reconstructed phylogeny is complex. There are meaning-sound links that go back to a certain time period, but not before, because of a change at that node. There are some that are perhaps 40,000 years old (based on an estimate of cultural divergence, which in turn becomes less certain as one goes farther back in time) and others that are only a few thousand years old. As has been demonstrated in other research projects, words that are used frequently are more likely to stay relatively unchanged than are rarely used words. Also, according to Pagel, nouns change more slowly than verbs, and verbs more slowly than adjectives.

So, the phrase “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” uttered in the far distant future might be “blifnork orgonst idears sloop firooslnitch.” According to me, not Pagel. (Pagel refused to comment on that question.)

But seriously, I’m glad to see the linguistic phylogeny challenge taken up again, despite the naysayers, and I’m especially glad that Pagel is doing it because he’s got the methodologies necessary to make this work.

Background.