the politics of america

a compilation of poll results summarizing what attentive people already know: liberal values enjoy strong majority support in the united states; and many people who subscribe to these values describe themselves as "moderates" rather than "liberals." probably makes sense, because liberalism is basically a compromise approach between the semi-fascist views that pass as "conservative" in this country, and socialism, a sensible political position.

funny video of the month

this schoolhouse rock-style version of pirates and emperors is really well-done. i have just one complaint, and that's that they use "thug" too much.

R.I.P. raul hilberg

raul hilberg, who pioneered the academic study of the nazi holocaust, has died of lung cancer at 81.

hilberg, whose family fled vienna in advance of the nazis, was studying the holocaust before it became cool in the late '60's - before Holocaust studies became an ideology and an industry. hilberg always supported norman finkelstein, the best-known and hardest-hitting critic of the holocaust industry, against his extraordinarily nasty opposition.

hilberg was legit.

exceptives: the mystery deepens

larry horn points out a further problem for the hypothesis that exceptives are licensed by universals, from imperative sentences with free choice any.

pick any card from the deck, except the joker.

it is hard to see how this sentence can be paraphrased as a universal. the best that i can come up with is:

for every x, x a card, x is such that i give you the option of picking it, except for x = the joker.

this interpretation seems forced. it interprets the imperative as giving options rather than giving an order, and moreover it involves a quantifier (any, no less) taking wide scope over the imperative force, which is generally seen as a no-no.

the tentative conclusion: exceptives appear to be licenseable by any any, regardless of its universality.

first crack at the exceptives problem

i suggested in a previous blog post that my earlier view that only universals license exceptives may be wrong, because a range of determiners and combinations of determiners and either cardinals or certain adjectives appear to license exceptives as well. now i'm going to suggest once again that it may just be universals. i will suggest that every construction that licenses exceptives falls into one of the following categories:

1. a quantifier that is a universal on its face (ex. every)
2. a quantifier that is not universal on its face, but is logically equivalent to a universal quantifier (ex. no)
3. a non-quantificational construction that can nonetheless assert a universal (ex. the tallest)
4. a construction that admits of a presupposed partition, with (implied) universal quantification over the partition's elements.

the first category is mostly obvious. what i take it to include which may be not obvious is generics, which are arguably not universal on their face because they have no face - i.e. they are invisible. i am talking about sentences like the following:

bears are godless killing machines
mary takes aspirin in the morning

i take these to be universal statements over typical instances of bears, in the first example, and mary's mornings, in the second. i won't defend this view here; i may defend it elsewhere.

the second category - of quantifiers logically equivalent to universals - is mostly there to capture negation. negative quantifiers are usually translated as negated existential quantifiers, but they are logically equivalent to universally negated sentences. for example, nobody loves you is typically translated as it is not the case that for some x, x loves you. but it can also be translated as for every x, it is not the case that x loves you. given this translation, we have a universal for the exceptive to leech off of.

sentential negation also admits exceptives, as in mary hasn't kissed john, except last new year's. in davidsonian semantics and its neo- and semi- varieties, sentential negation can be seen as negative quantification over the sentence's event argument. so the last sentence can be translated for every past event e, e is not an event of mary kissing john, except event e' last new year's. so sentential negation falls in this category too. negative polarity any falls in this category as well. free choice any can fall in this category or the last one, depending on how you look at it - you can consider it facially a universal or just translatable as one, as you fancy.

the third category consists of non-quantificational structures that can carry quantificational meanings, like the five, the tallest, and the only. i will suggest that this is where zamparelli's analysis starts to become relevant. it's also where i start to go out on a limb. what i'm going to claim here is that unlike ordinary the, the in these cases includes a universal component. zamparelli's analysis makes this somewhat plausible, because it allows us to associate universal quantification with the strong DP syntax rather than making it a purely lexical phenomenon. what i'll suppose is that inherently quantificational determiners like every are necessarily found in SDP, the strong determiner phrase; some determiners, like some, can never be universal for semantic reasons, and they must appear in the predicative determiner phrase, PDP; and others, like the and perhaps few and many, can appear either in SDP or PDP, and receive an interpretation accordingly.

zamparelli noted that the possessive can be predicative or non-predicative, depending on whether it is followed by a cardinal or not:

these are my toys. those are my toys too.
*these are my three toys. those are my three toys too.

in the first sentence, the possessor my is in PDP, which allows an empty SDP (or allows SDP not to project), so there is no uniqueness requirement on the possessive. in the second sentence, the possessor is forced to SDP by the presence of the cardinal, which imposes the uniqueness requirement, shown by the unacceptability of adding the second sentence. the same would be true if "three" was replaced by "only" or any superlative.

i'm suggesting that the same happens with the. it is located in PDP unless there is something like a cardinal, a superlative or only to force it into SDP. as a consequence, the is not universal in the boys, but is universal in the three boys or the tallest boys, allowing these phrases to license exceptives.

two problems arise: first, what is the if not universal? presumably it is a group. the collective/distributive analysis of definites is well known. i suggest that when the is in PDP, it has a collective, group, interpretation, which does not require asserting something of all the members of the group. in PDP, the has a distributive, universal, interpretation. i wish i could say i have independent evidence for this analysis. maybe i'll get some for christmas.

second, there's the fact that the in SDP is not downward entailing in its first argument, casting doubt on the analysis that it is universal.

the five high schoolers helped out
--/-->
the five tenth graders helped out

this might be rescued by a von fintel-style strawsonian condition on entailment; or maybe we'll have to refine how we talk about universals and entailment in order to make this work.

what about few and many? if we follow partee's 1986 paper many quantifiers, these are ambiguous between a cardinal interpretation and a quantificational one. maybe the cardinals are in PDP and the quantifiers in SDP; or maybe paolo acquaviva's breakdown of quantifiers like few into negation + many engages the SDP layer through negation. it seems like i'm grasping at straws here, but ultimately i don't think these analyses are as implausible as they seem from my presentation. i'm a little ill and i've been writing all day, so give me a break.

the last category is of quantifiers that admit of presupposed partitions with implied universal quantification over the partition's elements. if you don't know what i'm talking about, refer to my previous posts here and here. what i suggest is that SDP licenses such presuppositions, so that quantifiers that appear in SDP can admit of these interpretations, and license exceptives, even though their semantics are not universal. this applies to most, as well as many and few when these are interpreted with non-cardinal meaning. cardinals, some, and a(n) can't appear in SDP so they never admit the presupposition interpretation.

this approach predicts that many and few can only allow the presupposed meaning on their proportional interpretations and not the cardinal ones. i contend this is true. care to contradict me?

many scandinavians have won the nobel prize, except finns

this should mean that for every scandinavian country, relatively many, but not necessarily absolutely many, nationals of that country won the nobel prize.

this approach raises the question of why the presupposition interpretation is not available with universals. i claim that it is, but you'd never notice it because it's logically entailed by the universal interpretation. for example, every high schooler helped out logically entails [presupposing a partition P of the set of high schoolers, for every element Q of P,] every x, x an element of Q, helped out. this is true for every partition P, so the presupposition is always utterly redundant, hence undetectable.

actually, i wonder if the universal interpretation of the can be brought in under this category, thereby eliminating the problems mentioned above. maybe the best interpretation of the tallest boys helped out is [given a partition P on the tallest boys, for every element Q of P] the boys x, x an element of Q, helped out. this seems to get the semantics right.

also, now that i think of it, aren't exceptives pretty okay with the when the sentence's predicate is highly distributive, but not when when it tends to admit of a collective reading?

the boys have blue eyes, except jimmy
*the boys lifted the table, except jimmy

having blue eyes is very individual, which highly favors the distributive reading which i'm arguing is associated with the universal interpretation and SDP, while lifting the table strongly suggests a collective reading, which is associated with a non-universal interpretation and PDP. maybe this whole analysis can be made plausible yet.

now what accounts for the Det friend that i have pattern? i hope it's not restrictions on movement, cause goddamn, i don't understand that stuff.

humiliating work and the law

i'm trying to think through some issues raised by wilson v. monarch paper co., 939 f.2d 1138 (5th cir. 1991) and similar cases. in this case, a jury found, and the court system upheld, that a vice president of a company was entitled to millions of dollars in compensation for intentional infliction of emotional distress after being demoted to warehouse janitor. this raises many questions and thoughts that i'd like to explore in this post, and presumably return to as i think about it more. i guess for now i'll put things in point form, since my thoughts are scattered.

- intentional infliction of emotional distress is not an easy kind of case to win, because the standards for abuse are pretty high. in wilson, the required standard was that the offending conduct be so outrageous that civilized society should not tolerate it.

- how widespread is the attitude that it is humiliating to be a janitor? do janitors think so? if not, are they simply in denial, or was the jury wrong?

- or is it a situation where the jury believed that the former vice president would have mistakenly believed that it is humiliating to be a janitor, either because of his idiosyncratic personal beliefs or because of the beliefs prevalent in his social class? it seems unlikely that a jury would find IIED and a judge would uphold it based on beliefs particular to an individual or class, unless it is a class belief shared by the judge and the majority of the jury.

- just what is it, anyway, that makes it humiliating for someone to be a janitor? are the factors purely social or is there something innate to humans that makes such work inherently humiliating?

- if, as i assume, the humiliation of being a janitor is entirely or primarily a social fact, why is such a social fact constructed? and why is a remedy for this humiliation offered in the narrow circumstances of executive demotion, but not in the broader setting of a society that assigns some people humiliating jobs on a career basis? in other words, how does the view that civilized society cannot tolerate the demotion of an executive to janitor reconcile with the fact that the same (presumably) civilized society assigns many people to be career janitors? what does this tell us about the relationship between law and society?

- all this assumes that what the jury found to be humiliating was the job itself, not, say, the fact that the person was forcibly transferred from one job to another, or the fact that someone was removed from a lucrative job. this seems to be borne out: we can safely assume that no jury would find emotional distress for someone who was transferred from janitor to VP, if the judge even allowed the case to proceed to a jury; and the law makes it perfectly permissible to fire a high-level employee for no good reason - certainly it's not considered outrageous conduct.

- one conclusion that can be drawn is that in the eyes of the law, it is much better for a vice president to be fired than to be forced to choose between working as a janitor and quitting, which is always an option. can the conclusion also be drawn that it is better for people in general to not work at all than to work as a janitor? advocates of "welfare reform" suggest that it is more dignified to do any work than to do no work at all. but if this is true, why is it abusive to make a vice president choose between working as a janitor or quitting, but not abusive to simply fire him?

- one possible answer is that we believe in meritocracy: it is not unconscionable to have a society in which some people are forced to have humiliating jobs, because our society allows the individual some agency in determining his or her ultimate circumstances: people who are meritorious (by some definition that we need not look into right now) are rewarded with non-humiliating jobs, while those who are not meritorious must accept humiliating jobs. what is abusive is to improperly assign a meritorious person like wilson to a humiliating job.

- the problem with this is that it is very widely recognized that whatever role merit plays in determining one's job prospects, it is far from the only factor, and circumstances of birth are a major determinant of whether or not one will end up in a humiliating job. and while this fact is lamented among liberals, it is tolerated by them, while illiberals seem to have no problem with it. would such illiberals on a jury not have found for wilson? or is this further confirmation that reactionaries lack analytical and/or moral intelligence?

in praise of cleveland and case

i encourage law-students-to-be to give cleveland, and particularly case western, a good look, on grounds such as the following:

- cleveland is a large legal market that is comparatively underserved by regional law schools; it's also not considered a choice destination by graduates of the national schools. in other words, graduates of cleveland-area law schools face less competition for local jobs than do graduates of comparable schools in comparable legal markets.

- salaries for legal jobs in cleveland are not much lower than in large markets like new york, washington or LA, but the cost of living is much lower.

- scholarships at case western have some of the most generous conditions on renewability that i've encountered. they are typically renewable if your grades are over 2.33 - in other words, if you're not at the very bottom of the class. this is on a curve with a roughly 3.10 median and 2.70 75% percentile in 1st year (and presumably somewhat higher in upper years).

this article talks about how cleveland is an awesome city to live in. the basic arguments are valid, but it overstates the case by not including some of cleveland's drawbacks, such as: it's the poorest big city in the U.S. by one popular measure.

this other article supports my case too.

funny/cute video of the month #2

here.

music: outkast
animation: charles schultz

check it out - it's pretty cute.

the reason i'm posting so much i that i'm kind of sick, and bedridden.

test your linguistic acuity (or vacuity)

... with a problem from last year's linguistics olympiad, here.

the racism of the wizard national fund

the magnus zionist does what i surmise is a good parody of racist billionaire ronald "esteeseon" lauder here.