Hermeneutic Heretic

Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME
Brooks’s distinction is between two different conceptions of the word “political.� Or rather, like most nice clear distinctions, there actually is a spectrum of meaning. US Attorneys are supposed to be political in the sense that in performing their duties they reflect the policies of the president who appointed them. If the president believes strongly in prosecuting pornographers, he is not just within his rights but within his duties to fire a prosecutor who ignores those cases. If, at the other extreme, he wants a prosecutor to drop a case against a large contributor, that is political in the bad sense. And as Brooks says, the eight US Attorneys in the present controversy seem to offer a mixed bag. Yes, of course, even one overt attempt to suppress a legitimate prosecution for corruption is one too many—it doesn’t have to be a majority of the eight to be an outrage.
And I remain astounded that people find the Clinton analogy not merely wrong but preposterous. There are plenty of differences, but it’s important to try the shoe on the other foot. Sure, I see the argument that a clean sweep is less suspicious than selective defenestration.

This is an example of how meanings of words and logical causalities are not straightforward implicit consequences of language. Rather, they are negotiated (sometimes in minute detail) both in public and private discourse.

Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME
David Brooks has an excellent column today, and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks (and he drives conservatives crazy): because he comes halfway toward us. It’s because, in discussing the US Attorneys story, he nails a distinction that I, at least, was struggling with.

This is a fascinating stretch of text that shouldn’t be possible if all we had was transformational/GB grammar. The gaps, while clear, make little sense. The second clause should have been “and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks for (and that drive conservatives crazy)”. But it isn’t. What the author is doing is very straightforward. He’s building a text world or mental space in which conceptual blending takes space. The grammatical substratum is simply a vehicle that helps build the mental space and parsing it is what happens in the moments of reflection (hypostasis). In this case, the normally backward facing anaphora is actually pointing sideways to other texts and thus building a mental space.
This misalignment of constituent roles in contexts of ellipsis is extremely common (sometimes even named by philologists e.g. zeugma). Here’s another example I just heard: “People who don’t usually talk about this, are.” (MP3 Insider, Veronica Belmont on the subject of internet radio licensing). This suggests that syntactic structures enter into the blending process bringing their symbolic meaning and form rather than governing the construction of sentences.

In many ways, we could then compare the syntax as hypostesized by linguists to a spandrel in biology (or an epiphenomenon). It’s just there as a logistical vehicle for words but doesn’t necessarily always have a primary purpose of controlling the construction of grammatical sentences.

This shows blogs to be very useful to the study of language combining the skills of often accomplished writers with the lack of an editorial filter.

Golden Arches Wants ‘McJob’ Removed: McDonald’s Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News
McDonald’s Corp. on Tuesday restarted its push to get the word “McJob” removed from dictionaries — and has set its sights on the gold standard of lexicons, the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Dictionaries are supposed to be paragons of accuracy. And it this case, they got it completely wrong,” Walt Riker, a Mickey D’s McSpokesman complained to the Associated Press. “It’s a complete disservice and incredibly demeaning to a terrific work force and a company that’s been a jobs and opportunity machine for 50 years.”

Boing Boing: McDonald’s: take “McJob” out of the dictionary
McDonald’s is taking action to get the word “McJob” taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary. Let’s be clear: the job of a dictionary is to record language as it is spoken, and people clearly say “McJob” to mean a crummy job.

Trying to change dictionary definitions for political and image reasons is not an uncommon and something lexicographers are exposed to all the time. The nice thing about this particular exchange is that it illustrates how folk theories of language practice and reference influence both public debate and usage. Both Boing Boing and McDs have the same propositional frame of a dictionary: it records true meanings of words. However, BoingBoing relies on a usage-based theory of meaning (much more realistic linguistically and psychologically) whereas McDonalds evoke the objective reference theory of meaning whereby the dictionary’s job is to record the accurate referent of all lexical entries (which, of course, is linguistically untenable).

However, whatever the theoretical merits of either position, they are an example of a legitimate debate in which meanings are negotiated. Clearly, the dictionaries describe the usage of the Mc prefix (an interesting construction in itself) more or less accurately but McDonalds see their action as not purely descriptive but also evaluative. In that they are not completely unjustified. The word is rarely used descriptively outside certain evaluative contexts. A quick Google search reveals almost no unreflected usage in the top results (paradoxically triggering an ad from the McD personnel department). An inclusion in the dictionary can be used to legitimize the word and also its negative semantic prosody so that someone with the same theory of meaning as McD could later come and say: McDonald’s job conditions are awful - look even the dictionary says so.

The outcome of this will be very straightforward, the word will stay in the dictionaries and McDonald’s won’t be able to do much about it. However, it would be interesting to see whether they could subvert the meaning to over time change either its definition or at least semantic prosody.

The metaphoric mappings that structure most of our frames are usually seen as automatic. However, more often than not, they are negotiated through discourse prior to becoming fully blended (entrenched). This image is a great example of one such mapping negotiation done almost entirely visually. This Apple Lisa ad from the 1970s has two functions: 1. To frame the Apple computer in the business setting in general; 2. to provide a pathway to structuring the frame through a metaphor of the computer desktop and an office desk. That is done through the image where the mapping is actually graphically represented.

Coincidentally, this is not a bad illustration of the fact that the idea of metaphoric mapping as mooted by Lakoff and Johnson (although later modified) does have at least some amount of psychological realism.

The Mothership Apple Advertising and Brochure Gallery 2

MyDD :: Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics
Roger Ailes: “And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’”

[…]Obama is a terrorist. Ha ha ha. Ailes is clearly upset that his brand is being ruined and Democrats are catching on.

…

I hope Barack Obama and Senator Clinton drop out of the Nevada debate. I mean, if the head of a news network is openly making jokes about a candidate being a terrorist or bringing up catty and frivolously painful gossip meant to damage the last successful Democratic President and his wife, and then obliquely threatens a candidate who refuses to show at that same debate, that it’s not in fact a news network.

This is a very interesting exchange demonstrating the “opportunism” of conceptual blending and the malleability of semantic prosody. First, the remark by Fox’s Ailes could be easily read in two ways: 1. Barak Obama is like a terrorist. or 2. Obama’s name sounds like Osama. Bush is prone to confuse words. On the face of it (and given the previous two jokes) 2. is much more like it. However, it was the first interpretation that won over in this blog post and was so influential that it swayed the Nevada Democratic party to back out of their agreement to use Fox News for their presidential debates (here).

What are the conclusions to be drawn? 1. The process of blending has a social dimension to it. It is a deliberative process that happens over time. 2. As Fauconnier and Turner point out, blending (applied framing) is opportunistic. It will use any contingent features of language that are made available to it. In that way it is very similar to semantic prosody from corpus linguistics. However, in this case the prosody is activated even is the word is mediated via a frame - and a very complex frame at that. Nowhere in the speech is the word terrorist used, nor is the word Osama. The only way we know what the speaker meant is by knowing what the interaction between Musharraf and Bush can be about. The institutional identity of the speaker also plays a role. Fox News is seen as being likely to imply that Democratic candidates support terrorism - also a frame that is well-negotiated.

And Eli Pariser, Executive Director of MoveOn.org Civic Action, said he hoped the decision would “set a precedent within the party that Fox should be treated as a right-wing mis-information network, not legitimized as a neutral source of news.” (Huffignton Post)

An even more interesting example was recorded in On The Media’s discussion of Luis Farrakhan:

On The Media: Transcript of “The Charmer” (March 2, 2007)
SALIM MUWAKKIL: And he’s done it by occasionally being outrageous in the press and alternately, conciliatory and contrite. He’s managed to calibrate his message in a way that maintains his credibility with his hardcore followers, and flirts with mainstream respectability but doesn’t quite get it. But I think that’s by design.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Farrakhan played the media like a violin, literally. As a child, he trained as a violinist. His first national exposure was as a prodigy on Ted Mack’s famous Amateur Hour.

But the media paid a lot more attention when he picked up his fiddle in April 1993.

[VIOLIN MUSIC]

SALIM MUWAKKIL: That all started with an invitation for Farrakhan to play Mendelssohn I believe in North Carolina, with a small orchestra.

ARTHUR MAGIDA: When word got out that he was playing Mendelssohn—Mendelssohn was born Jewish. He converted out of Judaism [LAUGHS]when he was eight, nine, ten years old. That part, though, was overlooked–it was received as Farrakhan’s musical overture towards the Jewish community.

[VIOLIN MUSIC]

That episode I think was misinterpreted and Louis Farrakhan, being a really smart, savvy guy, allowed it to be misinterpreted.

SALIM MUWAKKIL: In some ways I think the media wants him to reform, and they’re pulling for him to make this transition.

Aside from the typical but always fun cohesive strategies using framing (”he played the media like a violin, literally”) there is the example of targeted, negotiated and opportunistic blending of Mendelssohn’s Jewishness with Farrakhan previous ‘anti-semitic’ statements and also the action of playing music with linguistic expression. This is as good an example of frame negotiation and blending opportunism as we’re ever going to get.

And for the third time’s charm, here’s one more. An editor’s description of how the process of negotiation of opportunistic framings happens both qualitatively and quantitatively. (Fauconnier and Turner liken the process to that of evolution by natural selection and this description seems to bear it out.)

On The Media: Transcript of “Blood Stains” (March 9, 2007)
When Rep. John Murtha proposed new limits on the deployment of troops to Iraq, his plan was criticized by Republicans and their media allies as a �slow bleed strategy.� It turns out that phrase wasn’t the spawn of politicians, but of a prominent newsman. Politico.com editor John Harris comes clean.

An Editor’s Confession: I’m the Source of ‘Slow Bleed’ - Politico.com
In retrospect, it probably has already occurred to Murtha and his supporters that from a public relations perspective, “slow-bleed” was not the most winning description. How could they have been so stupid?

That’s where I come in. “Slow bleed” is my phrase. Murtha had nothing to do with it. Neither did John Bresnahan, the reporter whose name was on the Politico story in which the “slow-bleed strategy” made its debut.

If you Google “slow bleed” and “Murtha,” you get nearly 200,000 hits. Nexis recorded more than a hundred stories in the days after Bresnahan’s article that used the phrase “slow bleed.”

“Slow bleed” was featured on CNN and on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. My former newspaper, The Washington Post, used the phrase the other day as if it were an established part of Washington lexicon, needing neither attribution nor explanation. “Slow bleed” also played a starring role in a parade of House floor speeches by Republicans denouncing Democrats, and in a fundraising letter from Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan. “Slow-bleed is exactly the right name for this incredibly irresponsible and dangerous strategy,” he wrote.

Like many others who weighed in, Duncan incorrectly stated that “slow-bleed” was the name that Democrats were using to describe their strategy.

Here is where remorse kicks in. As happens all the time in journalism, this was a decision — made on the fly and under deadline — that I would have taken back in the morning. It is Murtha’s job to defend his own policies. But I’d prefer not to hand his opponents ammunition in the form of evocative but loaded language.

So that is the process of social negotiation of the framing. However, there’s an even juicier description of a reflected cognitive process of blending. The author contrasts two texts - submitted and edited (for clarity and snappiness) and the newsrooms’ reactions to them:

[Originally submitted text:] “Even as the House begins debate on a resolution opposing President Bush’s plan to send 21,500 more U.S. combat troops to Iraq, leading anti-war groups are preparing a multi-million dollar TV ad campaign and grassroots lobbying blitz designed to pressure vulnerable incumbent lawmakers to end their support for the war.”

VandeHei and I read the article and were impressed by the detail of Bresnahan’s reporting. But, as editors always do, we had our quibbles. Like the lead paragraph: Too bulky, and too bland. The story was a good bit better than the introduction.

We rushed the patient to the operating table for emergency surgery. With VandeHei hovering over my shoulder, this is what I came up with:

“Top House Democrats, working in concert with anti-war groups, have decided against using congressional power to force a quick end to U.S. involvement in Iraq, and instead will pursue a slow-bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration’s options.”

But here’s the really exiting stuff where the complex negotiation of the metaphoric structuring of the frame really happens. The editor reflects and defends:

That is not exactly prize-winning prose, but it seemed a little snappier to us — and more on point. Please note the context: What is slowly bleeding away is the administration’s political support to keep fighting the war. Republicans pounced on the phrase because of the ease with which that context could be shorn away, to give the impression that what Democrats were slow-bleeding were the bodies of troops in Iraq.

The simultaneous mapping between bleeding bodies and bleeding support is allowed by the underspecification of mappings which is a central feature of the process of blending (I must have mentioned the code switching or Necker cube analogies elsewhere).