Tidbit: “Semantic over-achievers”

kpreid

[I'd put this in an open thread, but those don’t seem to happen these days, and while this is a quote it isn't a Rationality Quote.]

You know, one of the really weird things about us human beings […] is that we have somehow created for ourselves languages that are just a bit too flexible and expressive for our brains to handle. We have managed to build languages in which arbitrarily deep nesting of negation and quantification is possible, when we ourselves have major difficulties handling the semantics of anything beyond about depth 1 or 2. That is so weird. But that's how we are: semantic over-achievers, trying to use languages that are quite a bit beyond our intellectual powers.

— Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log, “Never fails: semantic over-achievers”, December 1, 2011

This seems like it might lead to something interesting to say about the design of minds and the usefulness of generalization/abstraction, or perhaps just a good sound bite.

[I'd put this in an open thread, but those don’t seem to happen these days, and while this is a quote it isn't a Rationality Quote.]

You know, one of the really weird things about us human beings […] is that we have somehow created for ourselves languages that are just a bit too flexible and expressive for our brains to handle. We have managed to build languages in which arbitrarily deep nesting of negation and quantification is possible, when we ourselves have major difficulties handling the semantics of anything beyond about depth 1 or 2. That is so weird. But that's how we are: semantic over-achievers, trying to use languages that are quite a bit beyond our intellectual powers.

— Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log, “Never fails: semantic over-achievers”, December 1, 2011

This seems like it might lead to something interesting to say about the design of minds and the usefulness of generalization/abstraction, or perhaps just a good sound bite.

Well, the extra "that" before "that it actually" really doesn't help matters. I've tried to make it slightly better but it still seems to be a bit convoluted.

Thiss?

There's a related problem: Once they have terms for something, humans have a tendency to take for granted that anything that appears to make superficial syntactic sense actually has semantics behind it.

Or just use a bunch of commas?

There's a related problem; Humans have a tendency, once they have terms for something, to take for granted that something that looks, at a glance, to make rough syntactic sense actually has semantics behind it.

2arundelo15y

I have nothing against splitting infinitives, but "to once they have terms for something take for granted" is pretty extreme. It's likely to overflow the reader's stack. After fixing that, running an iteration of the "omit needless words" algorithm, and doing a bit of rephrasing, here's what I came up with: There's a related problem: If they have terms for something, humans tend to think things that make syntactic sense actually have semantics behind them. (Ninja edit: Some more needless words omitted, including a nominalization.) (Edit 2: Here's a better nominalization link because it gives examples of when to use nominalizations, not just when not to use them.)

10

Tidbit: “Semantic over-achievers”

10

10

10

Tidbit: “Semantic over-achievers”

10

10