The Dynamic Evolution of Word Meanings

The Dynamic Lexicon
Peter Ludlow
peterjludlow@gmail.com

The Dynamic Lexicon
 Minting new coins.
 Common coins placed in and out of circulation.
 Common coins are thin.
 Assigning meanings to common coins by
jurisdiction.
 Assigning meanings to common coins by
deference
 Word meaning litigation

Common Coins are Thin
“If I seem unduly clear to you, then you must have
misunderstood what I said.”
--Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan
 Meanings are underdetermined, and that’s O.K.
 Can be precisified as needed.

Some Practical Applications
 Human-Computer Interaction
 Translation
 Language Instruction
 Power Relations in Lexical Choice

Human-Computer Interaction
 Furnas et al. (1987): the likelihood that any two
people would produce the same term for the
same function ranged from only 7 to 18%. For
example, when wishing to remove a file, persons
used a broad range of terms including remove,
delete, erase, expunge, kill, omit, destroy, lose, change,
rid, and trash.

Human-Computer Interaction
(cont.)
 Furnas et al.: even with as many as 20 synonyms for a
single function, the likelihood of people generating
terms from the synonym set for a given function was
only about 80%.
 When two people do use the same term, more likely
than not they don’t mean the same thing by the term.
Even in a text editor with only 25 commands, if two
people use the same verbal command, the chances that
they intend same function by it is only 15%

Translation
Some examples:
 Translating The Color Purple into Serbian.
(what to do about BEV)
 Translating The Hobbit into Serbian.
(what to do about Elvish)

Language Instruction
[Sir Nigel] was mistakenly proud of his linguistic
ability, professing to speak fluent French, Italian
and German: in fact it was his personality and
confidence rather than his knowledge of
languages which enabled him to converse with
his many friends abroad.
Obituary for Sir Nigel Strutt, Times of London
10th February 2004

Language Instruction (cont.)
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them
in French; I never did succeed in making those
idiots understand their language.
--Mark Twain

The Dynamic Lexicon (cont.)
The Basic Ingredients:
 Automatic Lexical Coordination Mechanisms.
 Deference and Power Relations in Lexical
Choice.
 Litigated Word Meanings.

How do Automatic Lexical
Coordination Mechanisms Work?
An Illustration: entrainment.
Another Illustration: The Evolution of Gricean
Cooperative Principles.

Grice's Cooperative Principle and the
Conversational Maxims (1975)
Maxims of quantity
 Make your contribution as informative as required.
 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxims of quality
 Do not say what your believe to be false.
 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of relation
 Be relevant.
Maxims of manner
 Avoid obscurity of expression.
 Avoid ambiguity.
 Be brief.
 Be orderly.

1
3
5
7
9
11
13
15
17
19
Clarity
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
GriceIII, 35 rounds
Clarity
Total Info

Assigning Meanings by Deference
“‘The question is’, said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is
to be master – that’s all.’”
-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Deferenceworthyness Established by…
 Partial Knowledge Proofs (of domain expertise
and semantic reach of expertise)
 Credentials
 Power Relations

Another strategy:
Word meaning litigation
 There is no language to imprison us.
 We CAN control and defend word meanings
 There are norms of word meaning litigation

1992 Jane Luu and David Jewitt
discover first Kuiper Belt object

And then they found a lot more.

Debate atat American
Museum of Natural
History
May 24, 1999

Luu:
“If Pluto continues to be referred to as the
ninth planet, it would only be due to tradition
and sentimental reasons…
So in the end, the question goes back to this:
Should science be a democratic process, or
should logic have something to do with it.

Luu cont.
 “We are continuing to try to find more Kuiper
belt objects, and the search is going pretty well.
What if we find other objects fairly close in size
to Pluto—maybe even bigger, or maybe just a
bit smaller—will these objects be called planets
or what?”

Michael A’Hearn (UMD)
 The reasons we do the classifications is to try to
find patterns that will help us to understand how
things work or how they came to be. So they
way we classify Pluto should be something
which helps us to understand how it works or
how it came to be…

A’Hearn cont.
if … you want to understand how the interiors
of solid bodies work, then you should probably
be thinking of Pluto as a planet. If, of the other
hand, you want to know how things got to
where they are in the solar system, there is no
question Pluto got to where it is in exactly the
same way as a large fraction of the other trans-
Neptunian objects.

Neil Tyson, director of Hayden
Planetarium

Feb. 19, 2000 The fateful
demotion
 Five classes of objects orbit our Sun. The inner
terrestrial planets are separated from the outer
gas giant planets by the asteroid belt.
Beyond the outer planets is the Kuiper Belt of
comets, a disk of small icy worlds including
Pluto. Much more distant, reaching a thousand
times farther than Pluto, lives the Oort Cloud
of comets.

NY Times, Jan. 22, 2001
“Quietly, and apparently uniquely among major
scientific institutions, the American Museum of
Natural History cast Pluto out of the pantheon of
planets when it opened the Rose Center last
February.
…the move is surprising, because the museum
appears to have unilaterally demoted Pluto,
reassigning it as one of more than 300 icy bodies
orbiting beyond Neptune, in a region called the
Kuiper Belt.”

Alan Stern: Southwest Research
Institute (now at NASA)
They are a minority viewpoint… It’s absurd.
The astronomical community has settled this
issue. There is no issue.

NY Times, Oct. 15 2002
Astronomers predict that they will find up to 10
similar objects in the Kuiper Belt that are as
large as or larger than Pluto. So unless we want
to add 10 more planets to the elementary-school
curriculum, we would be wise to downgrade
Pluto to the distant iceball it is.

Tyson vs Mark Sykes, U of AZ
Sykes: If Pluto were 10 times its size, how would
you treat it?
Tyson: I think if it were still ice, we’d still say,
orbiting with the icy objects
Sykes: Pluto is thought of as a planet. So why not
icy planets. Pluto
Tyson: With a class of one?
Sykes: Class of one. Sure. Why not?

Phil Plait, Sonoma State
 At the heart of the debate is our very definition
of the word ‘planet’. Currently, there isn’t one.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU), a
worldwide body of astronomers, is the offical
keeper of names. It has no strict definition of
planet, but has decreed that there are nine major
planets, including Pluto. This, however, is not
very satisfying. If the IAD doesn’t really know
what a planet is, how can it know there are nine?

Planetary Definition Committee of
the International Astronomical
Union

Aug. 16, 2006 recommendation
 A planet is an object that
1) Is in orbit around a star but not around another
planet.
2)Is large enough for gravity to form it into a
sphere but not so large as to cause as to trigger
fusion.

Aug. 24, 2006. General Assembly
says no!

In discussion a new criterion is
proposed
 The round object has cleared its orbit of debris
Tyson (2009): “The criterion is subtle because
without a quantitative account of a clean orbit
the criterion can be arbitrarily invoked.”

But wait: What is a clean orbit?
 Tyson: “…Earth continues to plow through
hundreds of tons of meteroids every day…So
have we cleaned our orbit? Clearly not.”

So what is a “clean” orbit?
 Tyson: “The objective is to assess the total mass
of cleanable debris and compare it with the
mass of the planet in question. If the debris
does not amount to much, then you can claim to
have cleaned or dominated your orbit.”

Tyson: last word
 We looked across the solar system and asked
ourselves what physical features about planets
and other objects could be taken together and
discussed as common properties of phenomena,
allowing us to compare and contrast objects in
whatever way those families would naturally
deliniate…. Pluto was displayed with other
Kuiper belt objects but we neither counted these
objects nor made a list of who is or is not a
planet.

Sharpening vs. Narrowing
 Often we can narrow word meaning without
sharpening it. Example: we can stipulate that I’m
not bald, but this doesn’t sharpen the meaning
because it doesn’t tell us where the edges are – only
that ‘bald’ does not apply to people with more hair
than me. It doesn’t fix the edge for people with less
hair
 We can also sharpen the meaning without
narrowing it. Cf some definitions of ‘planet’ that
preserve Pluto.

Example:
 When the IAU defined ‘planet’ by adding the
third condition that it cleaned its orbit, it
narrowed the definition of ‘planet’ by excluding
Pluto, but it did not sharpen the definition,
because “clean orbit” is still vague.

As described by Neil Tyson
Tyson (2009; 118): “The criterion is subtle because
without a quantitative account of a clean orbit the
criterion can be arbitrarily invoked. …Earth
continues to plow through hundreds of tons of
meteroids every day…So have we cleaned our
orbit? Clearly not.”
“The objective is to assess the total mass of
cleanable debris and compare it with the mass of
the planet in question. If the debris does not
amount to much, then you can claim to have
cleaned or dominated your orbit.”

Also applies to the large enough for
fusion cases:
“Distinguish between a planet and a star by
deuterium burning. There will be borderline
cases, but so what? Some day, when we
understand formulation of these bodies much
better, finer distinctions can be made...” G.
Wetherill “Common Usage is Compatible with
Scientific Value”, 2001.

More Preliminaries
 Microlanguages: built on the fly by discourse
participants.

Mechanics of Litigating Word
Meaning
 Take undisputed cases and argue analogically for
new cases (or against familiar cases).
 Example: argue analogically from traditional
planets to inclusion of Earth (and exclusion of
Sun). Argue analogically for or against Pluto.

Reasoning analogically about
Pluto
 It is *like* undisputed planets, in that it is (i) too
small for fusion, (ii) large enough to be a ball, (iii)
orbits the sun.
 It is *unlike* undisputed planets, in that it is (i)
mostly made of ice, (ii) not on the same plane as
the undisputed planets, (iii) hasn’t clear its orbit.
 It is *more* like other Kuiper belt objects.

Litigating Meaning: Best
Practices?
1) Definition should respect canonical cases.
2) Definition Should track (not cross-cut)
important properties.
3) Definition should minimize potential
borderline cases.
4) Definition should not be too taxonomically
disruptive.

1. Definition should respect
canonical cases
Example: Definition of ‘planet’ should try to
preserve planets originally ostended. Obviously
we give up some: The Sun, The Moon, and we
add some (The Earth) as science advances.

Canonical cases must also be
“safe”
“Can we assert that a planet must have a moon?
… This “must have a moon” requirement would
drop Mercury and Venus from the list of planets
and make Mars questionable. Did Mars become
a planet only after it captured its moons from
the asteroid belt a few hundred million years
ago?” [Weintraub, p. 203]

2. Definition Should track (not cross-
cut) important properties.
 Important properties are *discovered* (cf our
previous discussion of planets. We discover that
they are not wandering stars, but most of them
are bodies orbiting the sun, so The Sun and
Moon are out and the Earth is in.
 We discover that not everything diagnosed as
Polio was caused by the Polio Virus, so it is
something else, caused by a NPEV.

Michael A’Hearn (UMD)
 “Why do we, as scientists, care how Pluto (or anything else) is
classified? … Scientists put things into groups, the members
of which share common properties, in order to find patterns
that will enable us to better understand how the bodies work
or how they became what they are. If we are interested in
origins, then it is clear with our present understanding (which
might change in the future) that free-floating bodies of mass
comparable to Jupiter are not in the same class as Jupiter itself.
Similarly, it is clear that Pluto is not a planet like Jupiter but is
rather a planet like the numerous Plutinos that live in the 3-2
libration with Neptune. Thus Pluto should be classified as the
largest Plutino.” ‘Classification Finds Patterns” Science
Magazine, March 1, 2001.

Neil Tyson, Director of Hayden
Planetarium
 “We looked across the solar system and asked
ourselves what physical features about planets
and other objects could be taken together and
discussed as common properties of phenomena,
allowing us to compare and contrast objects in
whatever way those families would naturally
delineate…. Pluto was displayed with other
Kuiper belt objects but we neither counted these
objects nor made a list of who is or is not a
planet.”

3. Definitions should minimize
potential borderline cases.
 “We are continuing to try to find more Kuiper
belt objects, and the search is going pretty well.
What if we find other objects fairly close in size
to Pluto—maybe even bigger, or maybe just a
bit smaller—will these objects be called planets
or what?”
 [Jane Luu, cited in Tyson, p. 71]

5. Definition should not be too
taxonomically disruptive.
“Some astronomers have rather desperately
attempted to concoct solutions which keep
Pluto a planet, but none of these are at all
satisfactory, as they also require calling dozens
of other objects planets.”[Michael Brown,
Planetary Sciences at Caletch, quoted in
Weintraub, 2007, p. 227]

Are Multiple Definitions
Possible?
“if … you want to understand how the interiors of
solid bodies work, then you should probably be
thinking of Pluto as a planet. If, of the other hand,
you want to know how things got to where they are
in the solar system, there is no question Pluto got to
where it is in exactly the same way as a large
fraction of the other trans-Neptunian objects…So,
if that’s the question you’re interested in, you
absolutely have to classify Pluto as a trans-
Neptunian planet. Now, this basically means that
you have a dual classification.” [A’Hearn, quoted in
Tyson, p. 74.]

An Example from Law
Q: What is a person?

In US: “Rowe v. Wade”
 The Court: Yes. But I’m just asking you, under the Federal
Constitution, is the fetus a person, for the protection of due
process?
 Mrs. Weddington: All of the cases—the prior history of this
statute—the common law history would indicate that it is not.
 The State has shown no—
 The Court: Well, what about—would you lose your case if the
fetus was a person? …[I]f it were established that an unborn
fetus is a person, with the protection of the Fourteenth
Amendment, you would have almost an impossible case here,
would you not?
 Mrs. Weddington: I would have a very difficult case. (Kurland and
Casper 1975, 813-817)

What kind of question?
 Mr. Flowers: [It]t is the position of the State of Texas
that, upon conception, we have a human being; a
person, within the concept of the Constitution of the
United States, and that of Texas, also.
 The Court: Now how should that question be decided?
Is it a legal question? A constitutional question? A
medical question? A philosophical question? Or, a
religious question? Or what is it? (Kurland and Casper
1975, 818).

State of Texas:
It’s a biological question. Human = person.

Rowe’s attorney:
It’s a sociological question. ‘person’ is defined in terms of
social interactions and institutions.

Modus Tolens vs Modus Ponens 1
 Chemerinsky (1982): if the Court had held that
the fetus is a person, all abortions, even in cases
of rape or incest, would have to be prohibited.
Indeed, Chemerinsky notes that “once it is
assumed that the fetus is a person, then there is
no legal basis for punishing abortion differently
than homicide” (1982, 113).

Modus Tolens vs Modus Ponens2
 Furthermore, “birth control methods such as
the intrauterine device and the ‘morning after
pill’ would also be homicide since they act after
fertilization and thus kill human lives” (114).
 Tribe (1992) suggests that the use of in vitro
fertilization would be prohibited since the
“process inevitably results in the accidental but
foreseeable destruction of at least some of the
ova that have been fertilized”

 Millions of fertilized eggs are spontaneously
aborted every day. Should we view this as a
catastrophic health crisis and immediately invest
in research to prevent it from happening?

 Mills (2008; 332) The sperm and the unfertilized
oocyte ... are roughly equal insofar as they
contribute roughly equally to many salient traits
of the later adult. They're not equal, however, in
surviving conception. The sperm breaches the
egg's cell wall, enters, and dissolves. Its dissolution
is its death. . . .The sperm doesn't literally exist
after conception. Should ALL eggs be
protected?

Conclusion
Because, Soferim Bebel, if it goes to that… every person, place
and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the
gobblydumbed turkey was moving and changing every part of
the time: the traveling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and the
turtle pen and paper, the continually more or less
intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the as
time went on as it will variously inflected, differently
pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable
scriptsigns. No, so help me Petault, it is not a miseffectual
whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and
hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of
speed: it only looks as like it as damn it.
--James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

The Dynamic Evolution of Word Meanings

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