Every Linguistics 101 student knows about HP Grice and his famous Maxims. They state that dialogue is usually cooperative — and when it doesn’t appear to be, they explain how we manage to work out meaning anyway.
But linguists are questioning the applicability and universality of these rules. Is it time for a reappraisal of Grice? We’re joined by Rikker Dockum on this episode of Because Language.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Hedvig | Urban Dictionary
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hedvig
Ben | Urban Dictionary
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ben
Semantle
https://semantle.novalis.org/
A Beginner’s Guide to Word2Vec and Neural Word Embeddings
https://wiki.pathmind.com/word2vec
Quordle
https://www.quordle.com
Absurdle
https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html
Lewdle
https://www.lewdlegame.com/
Letterle
https://edjefferson.com/letterle/
Wordle Unlimited
https://www.wordleunlimited.com/
8 Wordle word game alternatives you need to play
https://www.vg247.com/seven-wordle-alternatives
[PDF] Frederking: Grice’s Maxims: “Do the Right Thing”
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/grice-final.pdf
Implicature | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/archives/sum2010/entries/implicature/
Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.624628/full
High-pitch sounds small for domestic dogs: abstract crossmodal correspondences between auditory pitch and visual size
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211647
Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.1717
Sound symbolic congruency detection in humans but not in great apes
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49101-4
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Daniel: And Hedvig, what is your beverage for this episode?
Hedvig: Chamomile tea because I had so much coffee today.
Daniel: [chuckles] Very nice.
Hedvig: [chuckles] I need to. And I also have a cup of coffee.
Daniel: [laughs] Wait. I have the antidote to the poison, and I’m also drinking…
Daniel and Hedvig: The poison.
Hedvig: Yeah, now, because of this, I can drink more of this!
Daniel: Imagine how bad off you’d be if you only drink the coffee.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this special bonus patron episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. Last time, I asked our listeners for ideas for intros and we got some.
Ben: This is genuinely new to me. I want everyone listening to understand that whatever reaction I give is an authentic reaction because I’ve not seen what these are.
Daniel: It’s always an authentic reaction from you, Ben. This idea came from Sonic Snejhog on our Discord server who suggested looking up our names in Urban Dictionary and reading what it says.
Ben: Oh, okay, fair enough. This has been done to me by many a student, but I look forward to the inevitable burns.
Daniel: Okay, here we go. “Hedvig is the coolest person ever. She is the best friend you could ever imagine. And when you meet her, you will love her forever. Hedvig is a best friend for life.” And that was written by UglyBitch666.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: Wait.
Daniel: It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: Ah, okay. Sorry, I was just stunned. So, I’m in in like an example sentence in Urban Dictionary.
Daniel: You are well defined.
Ben: I don’t know if you’re familiar with this headers, but the way Urban Dictionary names work is, there are basically two types of name definitions. One where someone who has your name has clearly gone on and given just like the most ridiculously laudatory definition as you just experienced. Or, what I suspect I’m about to experience, which is someone who really hates on Ben jumps on Urban Dictionary, and [chuckles] just lays it out.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: I had no idea about this. Interesting. I’m keen to hear yours.
Daniel: You should look up your own name. It’s really fun. Okay. “Ben, the duck overlord. He can perform mind control on ducks of all kinds.” And that was written by creamerr. It’s Ben Ainslie.
Ben: I will take it in all of the D&D like skills and feats that I could have landed with. I feel like I could take some really interesting directions with duck telepathy. Duck telepathy I have, and I enjoy. They call me “The Drake.”
Hedvig: Ooh.
Daniel: I just like how you can perform mind control on all kinds of ducks, not just one kind.
Ben: Yeah. Muscovies, Indian Runners, the whole gamut.
Hedvig: What do they call, Wood Ducks?
Daniel: Decoys.
Ben: Wood Ducks. Yep, even fake ones.
Daniel: Yeah. What’s your secret? Is it bread? [giggles]
Ben: No, my secret is… now I can’t think of a good joke for that. The only thing I know about ducks is the horrendous sexual practices that they engage in-
Daniel: Oh, yes.
Ben: -and I think that was not a good direction to take that particular joke. So, I offer counseling services to ducks that want to behave better, and they take me up on it. I’m like the Gottman Institute for ducks.
Hedvig: Hmm. Also, you should not feed birds bread if you can avoid it.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: I’ve read conflicting reports on this because I’ve read that, if times were hard, a little bit of, not too much bread, but a little bit of bread can fill their tummies up a little bit.
Ben: That’s not what we want though. Nature decides. You’ve got to be all Ian Malcolm on it.
Hedvig: There’s got to be more nutritional values as well.
Daniel: You didn’t know that ducks have a corkscrew penis.
Hedvig: Yeah, I think that’s what Ben referring to, but not only do they have a corkscrew penis, I think they have it because… don’t the female ducks have decoy vagina ends?
Ben: I feel like we can move on.
Hedvig: Yeah, probably.
Ben: Maybe we should introduce our guest.
Hedvig: Yes, we should introduce our guest. This is a good idea.
Ben: That’s something that I’m feeling.
Hedvig: Yes, I also concur.
Daniel: Thanks, Sonic Snejhog, for that idea. Everybody else, you know what to do. Write us some intros, hop on to Discord or send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. We have a very special guest cohost. It’s Dr. Rikker Dockum of Swarthmore College. Hello.
Rikker: Howdy. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Daniel: Thanks for joining us. Now, on Twitter, you are @thai10. Is there a story there?
Rikker: Yeah. [chuckles] Actually, it’s podcast related. I read a newspaper column way back in the early days of when I was on Twitter for a defunct newspaper. And then that turned into podcast appearances under that same name, and so it just kind of stuck. So, it was Thai101. The newspaper was the Phuket Gazette in Phuket, Thailand. And yeah, I wrote a second-language, learner-oriented column for that small English language newspaper, teaching people various tips and tricks about learning Thai as a foreigner living in Thailand.
Ben: We also should acknowledge that on this most auspicious of days that you have joined us when we are recording this, it’s actually your birthday. Happy birthday.
Daniel: Yay.
Rikker: Thank you.
Hedvig: I would like to know how to say “happy birthday” in Thai, please.
Rikker: Sure. Yeah, it’s “suk̄hs̄ạnt̒ wạn keid.”
Hedvig: S̄uphs̄ạ.
Rikker: S̄uk̄h, so it’s an unreleased velar stop, suk̄hs̄ạnt̒.
Ben and Hedvig: Suk̄hs̄ạnt̒.
Rikker: Is the happy part. And wạn keid.
Ben and Hedvig: Wạn keid.
Rikker: Wạn and then Keid with an unaspirated K.
Hedvig: Is it D a retroflex?
Daniel: Gah.
Rikker: No, it’s not. There’s an unaspirated K. So, it’s like unaspirated K, then something sort of centrally like a ram’s horn. And then unreleased T at the end. So, wạn keid.
Hedvig: Wạn keid.
Daniel: Far out.
Rikker: What you’re hearing is the K. Anyway, I’m probably overemphasizing… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Suk̄hs̄ạnt̒ wạn keid.
Rikker: Wạn keid. There’s an unreleased T. That’s hard to get.
Hedvig: Argh.
Daniel: Keid.
Rikker: I’ll send you the IPA. I should have prepped.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Oh, that’s okay. Thank you so much… [crosstalk]
Ben: Because you should just be on business cards, “By the way, on the one day a year, it’s my birthday. Here’s the IPA for how to say happy birthday in a language you don’t know, and I do. Thank you.”
Daniel: [laughs]
Rikker: Well, if you if you have any Thai friends on Facebook, whatever, the most common way for people to say it besides that is just HBD, the English letters. There’s a lot of these kind of like the BBQ principle, except it gets extended to things that a lot of English speakers may not have seen before. So, HBD.
Ben: Oh, I like that. HBD.
Rikker: There will be a lot of HBDs on my Facebook wall today. [chuckles]
Hedvig: Nice.
Ben: There we go.
Daniel: What kind of research do you do? What’s your work in these days?
Rikker: I work in a variety of things related to Southeast Asia. So, historical linguistics, particularly historical phonology. I study how tone systems evolve and develop. I’m particularly interested in both the specific scenario for the language family that Thai belongs to, which most specialists call Kra-Dai but also known as Tai-Kadai. I’m also interested in the regional typological, like, what exactly happens, how do we get tone as an aerial feature.
Hedvig: Tone is really interesting, because it’s notoriously people say, at least, that is hard to reconstruct backwards into a tree, and that it is doing a lot of things that are more like contactee and horizontal, but we don’t really know. We don’t know how these things work. So, it’s very choleric research.
Rikker: Yeah, that’s literally my jam. You’re making me grin here [chuckles] because I wrote a whole dissertation about exactly what you just said, which is not to imply anything. Why has it been so tricky and what can we do to overcome the historical trickiness of using tone and reconstructing tone?
Daniel: We are going to be talking about the latest news stories and the latest work in language. And we’ll be addressing a recent controversy as linguists are considering the work of one Herbert Paul Grice. His work in pragmatics is well known to every linguistics 101 student, but there’s some question about how useful or how applicable it is. So, we are going to report the controversy, and you can draw your own inferences.
Ben: I don’t know why is… is the person we’re talking about, does he talk about inferences? Is that what’s going on here?
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: Oh, you absolute wanker. Look at you. You’re the person who laughs at a Shakespeare show. Not because things are funny, but because you want other people to see you understood the joke.
Daniel: I want everybody to know that I understood the joke. Yes.
Rikker: Does the microphone pick up my knowing dad jokes smirk or not?
[laughter]
Daniel: It’s all going on Zoom. You’re listening to this now because you’re a patron. So, thank you for being a patron. You’re helping us keep the show ad-free for everybody else and just keeping it going. If you’re not a patron and you’re listening later, go ahead and sign up, support the show. There are some great rewards depending on your level, like bonus episodes, hanging out with us on Discord, and listening to me cracking esoteric linguistic jokes.
Ben: Yeah. There’s tears to the prizes.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah. I should say about the Discord that I’m not always as active on Discord as maybe I think I should be but it’s because we have time zone issues and then a lot of people say a lot at the same time, so I don’t know what to respond to. But if you actually tag me, if you say like, “Hedvig, you said a very bad thing in the recent episode,” or like, “I agree with you on that,” then, I’ll make sure to pay attention to that. We have so many people and they’re all so lovely, and they start talking to each other, and then I lose track of what’s going on. But it’s really nice.
Ben: Conversely, if you would like to tag me and then just lavish me with praise, I would also be receptive to that.
Daniel: He would.
Hedvig: You would, would you? Yeah, okay.
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: How unique, how humble of you.
[chuckles]
Daniel: All right, enough of that. Let’s talk about something going on lately. The popular social game, Wordle, which we have mentioned.
Ben: We have.
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: I’ve tried a few rounds with Ayesha now. We got a two.
Daniel: Oh. Two is not luck.
Ben: Yeah, I know. [crosstalk] Two is luck according to Hedvig.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Three or four is skill.
Ben: I’ve got to also say we were stumped today. We were really struggling. We got to our second guess. And we’ve got like a lot of yellow and one green, but we are thoroughly stumped.
Daniel: Oh, okay. Interesting.
Hedvig: I haven’t done today’s. I’m stumped at least in the Swedish one because it’s not a noun or a verb, that you should [crosstalk] up. One is like a greeting or something, like in Swedish, it was “Hello” once, and I was like, “What’s the word with two L’s that doesn’t have an S?” I was like, “I can’t understand.”
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: So, what’s going on with Wordle? Why are we talking about it again?
Daniel: It’s been acquired by the New York Times, and while it will stay free for a while, you might want to be exploring your other word game options. So, we’re going to take a minute and give out our favorite Wordle derivatives.
Ben: Oh, yeah. There’s been some puntastic shenanigans going on.
Daniel: All right. Well, Rikker, start us off. What’s your favorite?
Rikker: The one that I’m addicted to is called Semantle. [chuckles] I like how the ‘le’ has become the productive part of this.
Daniel: Yeah, it is.
Rikker: The names get really bizarre, but we have Semantle, which is apparently a reference to a a semantics Wordle. It’s quite different. It’s not a guessing game that’s based on letters. You feed it guesses. Unlike Wordle, it doesn’t have a limit of six. You have an unlimited number of guesses to guess a word and what it gives you as feedback, is the similarity score, according to Word2vec, which is a natural language processing semantic similarity score tool.
Ben: Like when natural language processes try and do their thing, they basically have an inner network of stuff, like words that are like other words, and they give it an arbitrary score. And so, you’re trying to get down to zero, basically.
Rikker: Well, up to 100, but yes.
Ben: Oh, okay.
Rikker: What Word2vec does is the data comes from Google, and so they use a neural net and feed it impossibly large amounts of text. And then, it just determines what words are near other words, and what words can slot into the same place as other words in similar sentences, and it develops a relationship between any two possible words. What you’re doing is, it’s telling you the score between whatever you entered, and whatever the word is that day. It’s extremely difficult. [chuckles] I think the best I’ve ever done was 27 guesses. [laughs]
Daniel: Oh, that is good. I got 34 once.
Hedvig: That is really good.
Daniel: That’s good.
Rikker: Yesterday took me 50. I’ve definitely given up after 100 or more. [laughs] It’s not so cruel, it lets you click a ‘give up’ button if you want.
Ben: Oh, that’s nice.
Hedvig: I did it the other day, and the target word was “display.” And I got to 47 guesses, and I somehow managed to get to “exhibit.”
Ben and Daniel: Oh.
Ben: That’s close but you couldn’t get there?
Hedvig: And then I was like, “exhibition,” “exhibitionist,” “exhibits”.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: I was just like, “It’s somewhere here. It’s somewhere here.” Because I had gotten that museum was close as well. And then finally, I was like, “What’s another word for an exhibit?” I was like, “What about display?” And I got it, but it was…
Daniel: That was it.
Ben: It sounds like playing I spy with a child under five.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: Where clearly their brain has just been like, “I spy with my little eye something beginning with B,” and it’s like, “beetle fur” or something. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: You never going to get it.
Daniel: My big problem with “I spy” is that we play it in the car, and the child has picked a stationary object that we passed several minutes ago.
Ben: Man with a red hat.
Daniel: [laughs] I’m not guessing that.
Rikker: One thing that I like about it is that… so this happened to me. I didn’t realize what time it switched over, and so I played it once at like 8:00 PM. And then I woke up the next morning, my time, thinking it was a new word. I played it again, made a different starting guess. And so, I got it the first time in 27, and the second time in 81. And it wasn’t until about word 77, that I said, “Wait a minute, is this the same word?”
[laughter]
Hedvig: Oh, my god. That is so funny.
Ben: Right.
Rikker: I don’t think that would be possible with a Wordle six-letter thing. So, that’s part of the charm to me.
Ben: Semantle sounds like a very rageful alternative. Do we have others?
Daniel: Yes. There is Quordle. You have to figure out four words at once. But otherwise, it’s just like Wordle.
Hedvig: Oh, my god. Yeah, I heard about that one. I haven’t tried it yet.
Daniel: When you put down a word, it charts your guesses for all four words. So, basically you find yourself either running from word to word. Or, trying to run one down to ground and then trying to go one by one, like John Wick or something.
Ben: That was a very oblique John Wick reference, but I’ll allow it.
Daniel: How about you, Hedvig?
Hedvig: Yes. One that I really like was called Worldle. It’s the World-le.
Daniel: Worldle. [chuckles] Yeah.
Hedvig: So, World… someone else can have a go with this. I don’t know. But instead of words, it’s geography. You get the outline of a territory or a country, and you make guesses for territories or countries, and you get told how close in kilometers you are.
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: It’s really fun. I can really recommend it.
Rikker: That does sound fun.
Daniel: It reminds me of that game where you just get an image from Google Maps.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Street View. Ah.
Hedvig: I played that.
Daniel: That was fun.
Ben: GeoGuessr is great.
Daniel: Yes. GeoGuessr.
Hedvig: One of my student assistants is insanely good. She has just played us so much, she knows all this weird stuff. She knows particular things about the Google Street View car. She’s like, “Oh, if you see these kinds of shadows and things, then it’s this car, and they only use this one in Nigeria. So, it must be Nigeria.”
Daniel: That’s nuts. Oh, my gosh.
Hedvig: Yeah. She also knows a lot about signage.
Daniel: I get a lot of information about signage. My next favorite one is Absurdle.
Ben: What’s the hook in Absurdle?
Daniel: It’s adversarial Wordle. It tries to make you as wrong as possible. It’s Wordle but it hates you.
Ben: Oh, I kind of feel like Wordle already hates me, to be honest.
Daniel: [laughs] So, you make a guess, and if you guessed the right word, it’ll change to a different one. But one where all the information you got from your previous guesses is still correct.
Ben: Oh, okay, so like anagramy-type stuff.
Daniel: So, if you know that the word ends in O-L-A-R, you’ll be like, “Is it solar?” And it’ll be like, “Nope, not anymore. I changed it.” “Is it polar?” “Nope, you’re now wrong on that one too.” So, it has to be ‘molar’. You’ve basically got to exhaust every possibility.
Ben: Fun.
Daniel: What it’s really doing is it tries to make you as wrong as possible. When you do your first word, it takes its word list and knocks off all the words that have any of those letters. Today, I started with ‘quant’ and then I went to ‘using’, and it said, “Nope, nope, no good.” And then, I said, “Well, what about ‘beers’?” Well, there were no words that didn’t have E by that point.
Ben: Uh-huh. [crosstalk]
Daniel: It excluded all the rest, because it couldn’t knock out the E, it just picked a word where E was in the wrong place. [laughs]
Hedvig: Oh, god, I don’t want to play this.
Daniel: It is terrible. It’s great.
Ben: That sounds bad.
Hedvig: I’ll give it to Steve, because he keeps sending me various ones and they end up taking up too much of my time. Don’t tell my bosses and superiors [chuckles] how much time I spent on Semantle.
Rikker: One of the remarkable things about the Wordle phenomenon is just how many… they’re not quite clones, but spinoffs or variants, or Wordle-inspired things have popped up in such a short time. Most people probably only discovered Wordle right around New Year’s or early January. Only a month later, it’s been acquired for a million plus dollars. But also, it just created all this interesting morphological creativity in the naming, but everyone thinking of every possible combination they could. My sister, I’ve been telling her I will be talking about this topic today, sent me one that apparently there are custom ones where you could just give it a word list now and it’ll generate a custom version based on a semantic domain. [crosstalk] She does like lab pathology, and so there’s like a lab path Wordle sort of thing that someone made. Anything as specific as you want. So, pretty cool.
Hedvig: That’s really cool.
Ben: I think it’s at the perfect crossroads of scratching an itch no one knew we had. So, whenever something comes along that does that, we all love it. But then, the other thing that it intersects with is being, for the right kind of person, an incredibly easy thing to make. I’m not trying to detract from the people who originally made Wordle, but I would imagine, a first-year computer science coding student could probably knock up a Wordle in some pretty simple Python or something like that. It’s just ripe for experimentation, because anyone who wants to sit in front of a computer for, I don’t know, maybe two weeks and learn basic code could probably knock one out.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Rikker: Funny you mention that because I googled Thai Wordle to see who had done it. Languages like Thai presents special problems for any kind of linear word game because it’s not a left to right linear system. It’s left to right, but it also has vowel diacritics and tone marks above and below and sometimes a vowel to the left is still pronounced to the right. So, it’s tricky, but I found videos of someone just doing either a Twitch account, I can’t remember, it was a Twitch broadcast or YouTube broadcast of themselves coding Thai Wordle. I don’t know if it got finished yet, but I watched several minutes of them working on it.
Ben: I love that.
Daniel: That’s cool.
Hedvig: That’s nice. I really like that.
Ben: It’s so great.
Daniel: The only other ones that I could think of were Lewdle, where it’s only dirty words.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Classic. Everyone’s favorite.
Daniel: Letterle. Where you have to guess the letter. Is it B? No. Is it L? No. What about P? No.
[laughter]
Ben: Hey, look, I guess in traditional Chinese, probably a far more comprehensive game.
Daniel: Hmm. And you know what? I still love Letterpress, which is an old game, but I still love it. So, in letterpress, there’s a five-by-five grid of letters. And let’s say I’m the blue player, so when I use a letter in a big long word, it turns blue. Then, it’s your opponent’s turn, and they can turn the letters red when they use it in a word. But, but, but if one of my blue letters is also completely surrounded with my other blue letters, then that letter turns dark blue and it can’t be switched.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: So, you’re building up territory and trying to make the longest words possible. And it’s really fun, and it’s called Letterpress.
Hedvig: It sounds like [crosstalk] and Go, yeah.
Ben: So, Go and scrabble.
Daniel: Yeah. It is, it’s a lot like those.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Awesome. All right, well, you have now enough to play. And if you still don’t have enough to play, there will be Wordle Unlimited, which will let you play as much as you want anytime and that will probably still stay free.
Hedvig: But it’s so much fun. One of the things that’s fun about all of these, is the fact that it’s one per 24-hour cycle, and everyone’s guessing the same one.
Ben: Yeah, definitely.
Hedvig: I had some friends who didn’t I understand that. In the group chat, they like, “Oh, I solved it,” and send like a screenshot of the solution. And we were all like, “Shut up.”
Daniel: “Shut up.”
Ben: “You’re ruining it for everyone else.”
Hedvig: “Oh, it’s the same for you?” “Yes. Argh.”
Daniel: “You jerk.”
[music]
Daniel: Let’s move on to the Grice discourse. So, I noticed this popping up, and it’s one of those things that I kind of look at and say, “Do I need to know about this? Is this okay for me to know about? Or shall I just absorb it through osmosis?” Who noticed the Grice discourse?
Ben: I didn’t because I’m not on linguistics anything. I’m not on the linguistic side of TikTok or Twitter or any of the other places. So, this is always news to me.
Daniel: You should, it’s fun.
Hedvig: So, maybe we should start with just what Grice is all about.
Daniel: Okay.
Ben: And no dumb linguist in-jokes, Daniel, all right? You’re on notice.
Daniel: I don’t think that’s a reasonable request, Ben.
Ben: [chuckles]
Hedvig: Grice was a philosopher, pragmatist, linguisty type guy. Some people call him a linguist, some people call him a philosopher or other things. And he said that in conversation, there are four basic rules that are at work. Either by following the rules or intentionally breaking them, you can transmit information.
Daniel: Could we take it back one step first before we get to the four maxims? Because the four maxims are awesome, but they are bounded by an overarching principle, and that is the cooperative principle. Grice phrased it like this. He phrased it in the form of something that you should do. It says, “Make your contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” Basically, what it says is do the right thing in the way that you’re supposed to and when you’re supposed to. The reason I wanted to start with that was because we have this expectation that people are cooperating. When we’re having a conversation, we’re engaged in a thing that is of benefit to both of us, and so we try to help it along and not be weird.
Hedvig: Right. That is the basic thing, but I also think that you can understand what they’re talking about as like, there are uncooperative conversations, and you can identify them as uncooperative because they break these maxims. It’s not saying that all conversations are necessarily cooperative. We know that isn’t true. But when they are uncooperative, we can identify them as such, because they’re breaking these, because not every interaction is actually cooperative. [chuckles]
Hedvig: Yeah. Like today, the children were playing hide and seek and the littlest one hid right near where I was. Pretty soon, her mom comes in and says, “Have you seen any puppies around here?” because they were being puppies. I didn’t want to let on that she was nearby. I guess it was kind of obvious, but I didn’t want to let on because, of course, you don’t want to be the snitch.
Ben: They get stitches.
Daniel: They do. I didn’t say yes or no, because I wanted to be truthful. But what I did was I said, “I’ve just been concentrating on this computer.”
Ben: You did an Aes Sedai lie.
Daniel: A what?
Ben: It’s a Wheel of Time reference there. A group of people who in the world of this fantasy series who can’t tell lies, so they have become masters of making people believe that they have told them something when they have actually not said that thing at all.
Daniel: [chuckles] That is exactly what I did. I was hoping that my partner would draw an inference that I didn’t know when in fact, I jolly well did know. That was me being uncooperative.
Hedvig: So, wait. I don’t know, Ben, you’re also a parent. I’ve babysat children and been around children. I lie to them and their caretakers all the time.
[laughter]
Daniel: Constantly.
Ben: Look, I know normally, I would joke here about how ferociously I lie about… I’d be really, really sort of dismissive of my parenting. But I will admit that I actually try really, really, really hard to never, ever, ever lie to Ellis. I practice more or less completely transparent parenting. If he’s like, “Why can’t we do this thing?”, I don’t know, maybe I’ve made the wrong parenting choice, because I’ll say, “Okay, buddy, let’s sit down, and I’ll explain to you why… ” [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No, that’s nice.
Ben: And he will literally just be like, “Never mind, I don’t care.” [laughs] When he can see a long explanation coming. He’s like, “It’s cool. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I don’t mind.” I think I’ve turned him off from connecting to human beings a little bit which is… [chuckles]
Hedvig: To be fair, I lie to children about inconsequential stuff. Not…
Ben: Yes, I have a close, close friend who makes a game of lying to her child in a very fun, gamey sort of way. Like you’ll point at a bird sitting on a power line and go, “Oh, no, watch out, birdies, you’ll get zapped.” And she’ll be like, “No, no, buddy. They’re recharging. That’s how birds recharge because they’ve got to get power somehow. So, that’s how they recharge.”
Daniel: [laughs] Really?
Ben: Whereas I don’t. I don’t do anything like that with my son, which I assume makes me like a really boring bank teller of a dad. But I don’t know, that’s just the parenting philosophy that I arbitrarily chose.
Daniel: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No, I do that. When I had fully bleached hair, and it started to grow out a bit, my nieces and nephews were like, “What’s your hair color?” I was like, “It’s blonde.” They’re like, “But it’s brown.” “Yeah, I’ve colored it.” And they’re [chuckles] just trying to understand.
Rikker: That’s like the Calvin’s dad principle. Maybe the reference gets more and more dated. But the classic Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, which every child should know, and I have so far failed to introduce my children in. But whenever Calvin would ask his dad something, Calvin sort of prototypically terrible child but in an endearing way, and his dad would tell him these elaborate lies. Anyway, that’s part of the charm of the strip, is being a Calvin’s dad.
Ben: I 100% believe that Calvin’s dad was just Watterson. He clearly just drew himself in that comic. I feel it in my bones.
Daniel: Dad looks like Watterson, actually. He does.
Ben: Yeah. An interest in cycling in the 80s when nothing could be less endearing or pulling in of viewers like that, only a cyclist would do that about themselves.
Daniel: Okay, so let’s get to the maxims. There are four.
Hedvig: There are four. What they’re trying to say is that when someone is abiding by this or not abiding by this, you can infer things about the information besides the informational content that they’re transferring. So, the first one is, “You shouldn’t be difficult. You shouldn’t be obscure. You should be clear.” The second one is, “You shouldn’t be ambiguous.”
Daniel: Can we use the actual names? Can we use the names? I think that’s going to be helpful to listeners.
Hedvig: I don’t know because obscurity, I think, is a bit of a bullshit name.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: It’s actually obscure.
Daniel: One of them is the Maxim of Quality.
Hedvig: Oh, you mean the…
Daniel: Yeah, those. Say what you believe to be true and well supported by evidence. The Maxim of Quantity, give enough information and not too much, not too little. The Maxim of Relation which means, make sure that what you say pertains to what’s going on in the conversation. And then, the Maxim of Manner, how would you describe that?
Hedvig: Well, that’s the clarity one, be clear. Don’t be obscure. Yeah, you’re right. They’re called Maxim of Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner. But when you hear those words, I actually don’t find them that informative, like…
Ben: Yeah, like Manners to me sounds like someone from the 1850s being like, “Oh, make sure that the manner of the, tenor of the conversation is always up tempo.” It’s like, “What is it? I don’t know what that means.”
Daniel: [chuckles]
Hedvig: For example, with relevance, you assume that when you talk to someone and you ask them, if you ask something like, “Oh, do you know where the puppy is?” And the other person says, “I’ve been concentrating on the computer.” You’re assuming they’re saying, “I have been concentrated on the computer,” because it’s relevant to them knowing where the puppy is.
Ben: Right, gotcha. So, if you’re trying to lie without lying, you’re using that.
Hedvig: You’re using that inference. If someone says something entirely… I have a bit of networky. association brain, and my mum does as well. Sometimes, other people think that we are breaking the Maxim of Relevance because they don’t know the jumps we’re doing.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Oh, right.
Ben: My partner does this as well. It can be very frustrating for those of us without network hive minds.
Hedvig: Yeah, I bet.
Daniel: But you know what, if somebody does seem to break that maxim, you go, “Ah, I wonder why they did that.” Or, at least on some level, our brains say they’re probably cooperating, so what they’re saying probably is relevant if I can just look for it. And then, you find it.
Ben: Is this the No Country for Old Men gas station same thing? Is that really what we’re talking about here?
Daniel: That’s more adjacency pairs.
Ben: Because wasn’t the thing in that scene was the Anton Chigurh and the gas station attendant, Anton Chigurh was not allowing any of these rules to fly, because the gas station attendant was basically trying to talk about the weather and all these other things which, if you follow these rules of like association and clarity and all those sorts of stuff, then it would work. But Anton Chigurh was just like, “What? No. What? What are you talking about?”
Hedvig: Well, that’s more like the phatic small talk conversation, which serves a different kind of purpose and is relevant in this way that isn’t information as necessarily relevant.
Daniel: I think what’s happening with Chigurh is the proprietor makes a bid to close, and then Chigurh will ask another question, like, “When do you close?” “Now.” “Now is not a time. What time do you close?”
Ben: He goes literal on a lot of stuff. But then, when the other guy goes literal, then he goes figurative, and it’s just… yeah, he doesn’t let him out.
Daniel: That’s a good point. Let me give you another example about what happened. This happened with my adult son, he’s 27 or something.
Ben: [chuckles] Or something? Don’t leave that in. That’s not a good thing to leave in.
Daniel: I have to subtract. He said, “I went to the zoo yesterday.” I thought that was kind of a funny thing to do, because he lives here in town. There must be a special reason why he had to go to the zoo.
Ben: Right. It’s not a thing that a person just does on a whim, usually.
Daniel: Right. I said, “Why did you go to the zoo yesterday?” And he said, “To look at the animals.”
[laughter]
Ben: Your son was Anton Chigurhing you.
Daniel: He was. What happened was that I was expecting a certain amount of information, I was expecting the special reason. Instead, he didn’t give me that much information. He gave me less information. A boringly obvious reason for going to the zoo.
Ben: Right.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: All I can say is the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Daniel: Yeah, true.
Rikker: Well, one of the things you could pick up from Grice’s maxims is you could then read into why he was giving you that answer, potentially. You have a framework for… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah. What’s the implication?
Rikker: What’s the implication. It could be that he just doesn’t want to end. He wants to end the conversation. With a 20-something son, that’s maybe a different thing. But like with a teen, that is a very frequent thing. So, I actually use this example a lot when I talk about it with students. Kids come from school, “What did you do today?” “Stuff.” “What did you learn?” “Things.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Stuff. [chuckles]
Rikker: They’re giving these intentionally uncooperative answers as a way to say, “I don’t want to talk about this,” or, I don’t want to talk with you about this. [chuckles] So, yeah, there’s a sort of framework there.
Daniel: Oh, if you want to do No Country for Old Men, you have… what’s the guy’s… Ugh, the guy who finds the money, what’s his name?
Ben: Oh, I can’t remember. Yeah, I’m out.
Daniel: Ah, it’s not Cole. What is it?
Ben: No.
Daniel: Anyway, he brings home the money, and she says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, “The gettin’ place.”
[laughter]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Which is a way of being vague.
Hedvig: Yeah. When you have a conversation and things go awry, you can sometimes think, “Oh, it’s because one of these maxims weren’t abided by,” or, the person, like Rikker, says is uncooperative and for a reason, and you can imply things by that. So, you can also flaunt them in a funny way intentionally to produce comedy. So, if you listen to comedy, you can sometimes see that the jokes are built on flaunting these maxims in some sort of way and getting you to make an inference that then turns out to not be true and blah, blah, blah. So, yeah. If you like comedy, then I can really recommend trying to see how the jokes work in terms of these maxims.
Ben: I would imagine Who’s on First is probably a benchmark example of this.
Hedvig: I don’t know all of your guesses. I don’t know. [crosstalk]
Rikker: I literally played Who’s on First for students [crosstalk] linguistics.
Hedvig: Cool.
Rikker: I either show it to them or have send it to them as a clip. But, yes, it’s a case, I think, which is… It’s maybe not an accessible pop culture reference anymore for the last 70 years.
Ben: I will maintain, I’ve played it for a lot of teenagers. They were geniuses. They made a thing that will stand the test of time because I still have young people genuinely laughing at that recording.
Rikker: Agreed.
Hedvig: Wow, that’s impressive for old comedy stuff. That’s really a feat.
Ben: Yeah, definitely. Like Bob Hope, not funny anymore, not to new audiences. But that stuff, still gold.
Daniel: Okay, so we’ve talked a bit about Grice and what it allows us to do. The Gricean maxims are pretty powerful. But there’s been a discussion on Twitter this week.
Ben: People hating on him.
Daniel: A little bit, kinda. There’s a tweet thread that you can find, if you look. To the effect that the Gricean maxims are for white, cis, western, able-bodied, neurotypical people, and that these maxims are not really important or special.
Ben: Is that true, linguists in the room?
Hedvig: I think there are places where some of these maxims don’t really work the way you expect them to. I wouldn’t say that people don’t discuss this. If you go to the Wikipedia page for this, there’s actually a section called “Criticism” that you can read and that you should read. I think you teach it in undergrad, because it is an analytical way of thinking about conversation and getting linguist undergrads to think about conversation as information-transferring things. But to say that it’s universal rules that every rational person do and then if you don’t do them, you’re irrational, maybe that’s a bit much.
Rikker: That’s definitely a strong way of putting it. I didn’t see the discourse as it happened. But I went back and browsed some of the things, and I’ve forgotten now who made the comment, but various things along the lines of it’s not that they’re normative, you’re using them as a framework for understanding how people interact. But that said, they are analyzing the framework of a specific culture. I try to give counterexamples from other cultures when I teach them too, but I can understand this criticism.
Daniel: What’s an example from a different culture, Rikker?
Rikker: The first one that always comes to mind is when I first moved to Thailand, a really common criticism which can be… it’s certainly sort of Eurocentric or ethnocentric, is if you ask someone directions in Thailand and they don’t know where you’re going, they’ll give you wrong directions. [Ben laughs] So, the Maxim of Quality is in a different social place. It’s more important that you cooperate in the sense of be a cooperative interlocutor. What you do is you learn that you need to pick up from the way that they give you the information, their degree of confidence in that information. And so, you might turn around and immediately ask someone else for directions to the same place. This is really jarring. So, you see a lot of, unfortunately, insulting… I would not recommend forums where white foreigners discuss Thailand in general. I’m not a fan of those kind of places.
Hedvig: Uh-oh. I can imagine.
Rikker: Yeah. Before the advent of Twitter as a place to find friends that cut across all kinds of different social strata, I spent some time on those, and they’re pretty negative and pretty pessimistic. That’s a great example of one where they would be saying, like, “Oh, look at these idiots who just tell lies all day long to you. How are they lying to my face?”, when, of course, that’s an extremely incorrect and wrong way of looking at it. And so, yeah, I just use this as an example to say, “Well, that’s a different balancing of social values,” and Grice is a way that we can analyze why that’s different.
Ben: That’s one of the highest context examples of a high context culture I have ever heard. When I try and explain high and low context cultures to people, I am now going to use that because, oh, that blows all of my other examples out of the water.
Hedvig: I was actually going to make the exact same example, but from when I went to China once where I had the same experience. I was vaguely aware of this. I knew that when you ask people for help on the street, no one was going to say no. So, I was asking for directions, and people kept being like, “Oh, yeah, it’s further down that alley that way.” I was like, “Hmm.” And then, yeah, I did that thing of asking more and more and more people until I got somewhere. But I found it a bit jarring because I was desperate to find this place and it was disorienting to get wrong information. But I was vaguely aware that this could happen. So, I didn’t get too uncomfortable. Yeah, no, that’s definitely a thing.
Ben: You’ve just got to go of that white Europeanness and just throw yourself into the mix.
Hedvig: I’ve also had students from nonwestern countries where I’ve had problems with assigning people tasks, and people say, “Yes, I will do that on that time.” And then, that not happening and me being, “I don’t think that they are being rude. I think there was some sort of miscommunication problem about how they can tell me that they can’t do it and how to get feedback.” This was someone from a specific country and I had a senior colleague from that country. I asked if we could get a coffee and be like, “How can I communicate so that this works?” Because my basic management style is to be very subtle and nice.
Ben: Well, you’re Swedish.
Hedvig: [chuckles] So, I try to be like…
Ben: But also, you’re Swedish. You come from the land where people will just be like, “Do the thing now in an email,” and that’s just communication.
Hedvig: No, that’s more Dutch people. Swedish people are a little bit more like…
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: Sorry, Rikker. [crosstalk]
Ben: Never, never underestimate the Swedes. The only way that could have been better is if you took a swipe at the Danes.
Rikker: I am 400 years removed from being offended by that.
Hedvig: Yeah. But still maybe there’s something.
Rikker: [crosstalk] -far too long ago. All I have is the name left.
[laughter]
Hedvig: I have undergraduate student assistants now and when they do something a little bit wrong or something, I’d be like, “I understand why you did it. And it’s okay, and we’ll take care of it. For future reference, let me help you.” I try to cushion it a lot. Sometimes in intercultural communication, that means that I don’t want them to do it almost. It just doesn’t work.
Rikker: I love that example though. Not just conversation, but that’s why businesses in Thailand, you have these clueless foreign bosses who don’t understand cultures can be different. Language is one example of ways in which culture can be different, but it’s kind of the same thing. It’s more important you tell the boss, “Yes, I will get right on that,” even if you have no plans of doing it, because you have to find a better place where you’re not in front of your colleagues, or they’re not in front of your coworkers to tell them no, you can’t say no when someone else might expect you to.
Daniel: We have mentioned white and western, but there’s also neurotypical. I know someone who’s neuroatypical who does not get sarcasm. When you do sarcasm, what you’re doing is you are breaking the Maxim of Quality. You’re not telling the truth, but you’re doing it so obviously, that most people would figure out that you’re saying the opposite of what you mean, and that’s sarcasm. He wasn’t able to pick up on those cues, and he hated sarcasm. He said, “Don’t do it around me. I can’t stand it,” because he didn’t get those cues. So, how applicable is this Maxim of Quality when there are a whole [unintelligible 00:42:13] of people, they’re not wired that way, they’re not good at picking up inferences that relate to the flouting of that maxim?
Hedvig: Sarcasm is hard even with people who aren’t neuroatypical, because in order for sarcasm to work, you need to have an understanding of what is reasonable. If someone is saying…
Ben: It’s a fairly nuanced thing.
Hedvig: Yeah. I have that thing that I’ve told before where I misheard my ex-boyfriend saying that he was going to go downtown and meet his mom at their submarine. He said boat but I heard U-boat. When I said, “Oh, a submarine. Wow.” And then, he sarcastically said, “Yeah, of course. I’m meeting my mom at a submarine.” I was like, “Oh, wow, that’s really cool.” Because in my world, people could own submarines.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: So, the sarcasm doesn’t work if I think it’s reasonable. As far as I know…
Daniel: Yeah, you’re making guesses about what’s likely. For you, that was likely.
Hedvig: Exactly.
Ben: So, it’s global navies, Latin drug cartels, and your boyfriend’s family. Those are the three groups of people who own submarines.
Hedvig: Well, my uncle had his 60th party on a submarine.
Ben: Did it go out underwater? Did it dive?
Hedvig: No, we were just on top. I don’t know.
Ben: Fair enough.
Hedvig: I don’t know. Maybe there’s some reason but I’m just saying.
Ben: [laughs] Fair enough.
Hedvig: You have to have a lot of common ground in order for sarcasm to work. That’s why people, especially Australians, use it as a way of bonding.
Ben: Yeah, we do. It’s quite exclusionary in a lot of ways, and we should probably work on that.
Daniel: Okay. We’ve mentioned a few problems. They’re framed like commandments, “Do this,” when in fact, that’s not really how it is. They sometimes don’t take culture into account where people do try to cooperate, but cooperation looks different in different ways. Also, they need to take neurodivergence into account. For example, we talked about give the right amount of information or do things in the right manner, when understandings between people of what is the right amount can be widely divergent.
Ben: I have a couple of students at the moment for whom the right amount of dinosaur information is somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes.
[laughter]
Rikker: That’s an amazing example.
Ben: You know what? I roll up. I straight up roll up for that. I will talk about the ankylosaurus for a good 8 to 9 of those 25 minutes. I’m there. I’m there for that, but it is not an amount that other neurotypical people would think is normal appropriate amount.
Daniel: Okay, so what do we do? Here are some suggestions, stop teaching Grice and teach something else instead maybe relevance theory, which puts everything into relevance. No, not a fan?
Hedvig: I think if you’re going to be in pragmatics or linguistics, it’s good to know Grice maxims for no other reason that they are commonly referred to. Just like how you should know a bit of Chomsky even if he’s wrong.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: But you could do like Rikker said that he does, you could introduce them and say, “People thought this. Here are some cases where that doesn’t work out.”
Ben: That does still present them as a normative framework though. If you present it and then you say, “Oh, and here’s an example of how it doesn’t apply. It still kind of makes it seem like this is the thing, and sometimes it’s not a thing, but mostly, it’s the thing.”
Rikker: When I teach this, I have people look for the maxim around them. And it’s not like there’s a right or a wrong answer. It’s really just saying, look for examples of cooperation and places where your expectation was either met or subverted, or you intentionally subverted, one of things I tell them they can do is you can intentionally flout a maxim and report the results, see what happens. By avoiding… not starting any fights. Avoiding starting fights.
Ben: [crosstalk] -to look at the animals.
Rikker: [chuckles] I don’t know. I’m definitely not a pragmatist. So, I should preface by saying that, but there’s a whole lot more. Grice maybe lived in an era where he wouldn’t have called himself a linguist, but people certainly do sometimes call him a linguist. But a lot of the reason why we know about or talk about Grice in modern linguistics, which I realize “modern” need scare quotes around it. But in current day linguistics, is because of like the work of Larry Horn, who is the outgoing LSA president this year, the Linguistic Society of America, gave the talk this year. Larry Horn further does exactly… one of the suggestions that Daniel made was, was reduce it down to other things. And so, people have sense argued about, are there actually only two principles at work? Are there actually three principles? If you’re only teaching it, like, Grice is the only thing you need to know about this, that’s definitely bad. I think you can certainly avoid teaching it as a normative thing.
Daniel: There was one tweet by @MaureenKosse that I really liked. They say, “Your lang program has failed you, if they don’t teach basic critiques like. Historically, most theory is centered around the practices attitudes of white, cis headmen from the US and UK. Presenting them as a default state of humanity from which we can derive universal claims.” I think that’s a good thing to keep in mind. We need to teach that these notions are heavily cultural. Sometimes, they break down and they don’t include everyone, and then go from there.
Ben: And linguistics is far from the only discipline that… you could write that statement about so many different fields of knowledge.
Daniel: I still think Grice is useful, but I really appreciated this pushback.
Hedvig: I’m trying to remember my undergrad if we talked about criticisms. I don’t remember doing it but I remember thinking that you can imagine cases like in sarcasm where it doesn’t necessarily work. We were all taught these three things at the same time. I think, Grice, Hockett, and Jakobson’s functions of language. And they came to us as these packages with things we had to memorize for a test. That’s how I perceived them. But all of them are quite old and could be improved upon. I think they’re still relevant to discuss and know about. It’s good that you know that Grice had four maxims and they’re there. But, I think, Rikker has a really good point that you can’t[?] nuance it,
Ben: Maybe you could just make it Grice’s five maxims. You talk about the four, and if this is so fundamental, and everyone encounters it in lang 101 or whatever, like super early in their undergraduate degree. You can also use it as the springboard to introduce the critique of the white eurocentrism of so much of linguistics. The four maxims are the four maxims and then the fifth maxim is, “By the way, this is a really crusty old white dude, and so much other stuff you’re going to learn. It’s all been written by crusty old white dudes. So, we should really, really interrogate all the crusty old white dudes who wrote this stuff and see if it is really as relevant as it used to be.”
Daniel: And that one is phrased like a commandment.
[laughter]
Ben: Thou shalt always question crusty white doodery.
Daniel: Amen.
Hedvig: We didn’t do that for Grice, but for Hockett’s rules of how language is defined, we had a little chart and then did, how many of these boxes to sign language tick? How many of these boxes does Alex the grey parrot tick? How many of them does singing in a choir we have? It’s just fun to see, ah, this is such a good idea, but I wish maybe we had done that four Grice’s maxims as well.
Rikker: This definitely made me think about ways I can push back or at least make it maxim a little more clear that…
Hedvig: [chuckles]
Daniel: [chuckles] That wasn’t me.
[crosstalk]
Rikker: [crosstalk] -tip your waitresses, anyway.
Ben: I still blame you, Daniel. You’re [crosstalk] by establishing a norm, it’s still Daniel’s fault.
Rikker: We can make it more clear to students and to anyone we talked to about it that this is not something we’re trying to lay down as a commandment. I am actively looking for ways to do exactly that. So, one of the things that I do on the regular is complain about the IPA chart as being Eurocentric, but this gives me a new area to like, “Okay, I need to look for additional new places to define those criticisms.”
[music]
Daniel: We’re now to some more of our stories, and this one comes from Anna Korzeniowska and a team published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences. We’ve been having a lot of stories. We had a story last week about dogs and language and how they understand… what was it about? I’ve totally forgotten what the story was now.
Ben: Oh, god.
Daniel: So many shows.
Ben: Yes.
Hedvig: So, we talked about dogs so many times. Dogs, we had the thing about the implants in the guinea pigs, that was gross. Dogs, because this one is the one I was thinking of the pitch size crossmodal correspondence.
Daniel: You posted on our Discord actually. So, this is really good. When I am doing sock puppets, or when I’m making animal speak, or when I’m making objects speak around the house, let’s say that I have a couple of pairs of scissors and one is tiny and one is huge. I’m using my two daughters by making them talk. The big pair of scissors will be like, “Hello, little scissors. How are you doing today?” And the little scissors will be like, “Oh, I’m very good. Thanks.” And that just makes sense, because we think of big things as having big deep voices, being low in pitch.
Ben: Oh, no. It’s happening.
Daniel: Hedvig’s got the scissors. All right, come on, do it, Hedvig.
Hedvig: Hello.
[laughter]
Hedvig: There you go. Is that it? [chuckles] Is that what I needed to do?
Ben: Yep, I’m glad.
Daniel: Thank you. Lots of personality. We associate those sounds that way, but do dogs? And if they do, that suggests that there’s something about this language thing that relies on hardware that a lot of animals have access to. If not, then we can say maybe not.
Ben: I guess it would make sense if they did or if a lot of… I’m going to go with just mammals, first of all did, because bigger animals do make deeper sounds.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: If they don’t, then it’s weird.
Ben: Yeah. I guess you’ve got the odd exception, like an elephant can blast a high-pitched note, but they also make heaps of really deep rumbly bellows and other things like that. So yeah, I would be surprised if dogs weren’t able to make that association a little bit.
Hedvig: You can just think about the physics of an orchestra. A piccolo makes higher pitch sounds.
Ben: Yeah. You just look at the pipes in a pipe organ, right?
Hedvig: Yeah. Or, a violin can make higher notes than a cello. That’s how physics work and soundwaves in tubes.
Daniel: Well, this team investigated whether dogs had that association. So, they showed dogs an object and the object played a sound. When the object played a sound, the dogs were trained to go up to the object and poke it with their nose or with a paw. Very well, that was the training phase. But then, for the test phase, the dogs were presented with two objects, one smaller, one bigger, and then one of the objects would either play a deep note or a high pitch note, a low pitch note or a high pitch note. Sometimes, it was what you’d expect. The big object played a low pitch sound, and then the dog would go to it. Sometimes, the small object would play a high-pitched sound and the dog would go to it. But what happens when it’s incongruence? When a high pitch comes from a big object or vice versa? Did the dogs pick the right object or did they mess up?
Ben: Well, hang on, is the sound emanating from the object itself?
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: Well, obviously, they’re going to go to wherever the sound’s coming from. That doesn’t sound like a very good test.
Daniel: You’d be surprised because what they found was the dogs did a fine job when it was congruent, but they didn’t do a great job when it was incongruent.
Ben: So, they were confused suggesting they do detect a pitch congruency?
Daniel: Yep, just like a human would.
Ben: Oh.
Hedvig: But they were also trained on the mapping, right?
Ben: Like, was it a medium-sized doll and a medium-toned note for the training phase?
Daniel: The training object was a medium-sized thing.
Ben: [chuckles] What is that?
Hedvig: You want to guess?
Daniel: Oh, I’ve seen that. It’s a cat keyboard. I love that toy. I actually wanted that one. It’s really good.
Ben: [crosstalk] doesn’t it?
Hedvig: [cat keyboard meowing] Meow, meow.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Go, Hedvig, bringing the props.
Hedvig: It does other [keyboard playing] like other sounds. It’s what parents hate. You can push and then it plays some melodies.
Ben: Yeah. Okay.
Hedvig: You get that.
Ben: That’s very interesting. I appreciate you sharing that with us.
Hedvig: Yeah. So, the idea is, [keyboard playing] this is a high pitch sound. Daniel, what did they do?
Daniel: They did use a mid-sized object and I think they used a mid-sized tone as well.
[keyboard meowing]
Ben: Okay.
[laughter]
Daniel: Something in the middle.
Ben: Jesus.
Hedvig: And then, they got to see a big object and a small object and they heard a high pitch sound coming from the big object and they were confused.
Daniel: That’s right. They took longer to respond, and they would often respond wrongly.
Ben: Okay. So, they can detect pitch. Yeah, it makes sense. Dogs, like many other animals, probably heard big things making deep noises and little things making high-pitched noises and they’ve kind of got that hardwired in somewhere.
Daniel: They say, “Our results suggest that non-human animals show abstract pitch sound correspondences, indicating these correspondences may not be uniquely human, but rather a sensory processing feature shared by other species.” What do you think?
Ben: Checks out to me. I don’t see why that wouldn’t be true.
Rikker: Seems very reasonable.
Daniel: Hmm.
Ben: Can we acknowledge for a second how insane DNA is just as a concept? Just these four molecules bundled together in weird ways can leave it so that like an animal will have an association with a big animal or a small animal. What? How?
Hedvig: To be fair, this could be learned behavior from exposure as puppies.
Daniel: Yeah, these dogs were alive before the experiment. So, they were… –
Ben: Fair enough. But I think we can all agree that it wouldn’t be a stretch for this to be true.
Daniel: It’s not a stretch. But you know what? Also, we spend a lot of time thinking about, “Why is language is the way it is? Why do we process language the way it is?” Well, because of physical realities like the size of your vocal tract, the size of the apparatus.
Hedvig: I wanted to hear Rikker’s opinion maybe about pitch and tone and semantics. Is that the case in tone languages that high pitch things are smaller?
Rikker: There’s a lot of research on the sound symbolism of vowels and how high front vowels tend to be associated with small or high pitch things, and low back vowels tend to be associated with large things. This is crosslinguistically robust. So, I think tonal languages also fall into that. The words for teeny, itsy-bitsy, and like [in high pitch] large, huge, enormous, etc. But as far as how that plays into lexical tone, that’s a great question.
The thing that we can reconstruct about how tones change is the categories. If you think of them as bags of words that we can put different semantic things into, we can reconstruct what the bags were like. But the part that’s actually the trickiest to reconstruct is what were the pitches? How do pitch contours change over time? But there’s some really interesting… there’s a great paper out in Diachronica, just this week or last week about another… basically, we’re trying to figure out what are the mechanisms for how pitches change over time. I don’t think we actually necessarily know how this ties in yet. This was Catherine Laing’s work. People are sort of saying, “Well, how even do these tones change over time as far as their pitch phonetics, as opposed to the categories of what words are included in them?” But I would love to learn more about this.
You’ve tapped into the trickiest part of historical tones, which is, “What the heck do pitches do?” But there are some really interesting things where of all of the historical pitches in the family I work on, the only one that’s robust where we actually think we know what the phonetics might have been hundreds of years ago, is the high pitch is like a high or higher rising pitch. So, it makes you wonder if is there something salient about why that would be a more stable category over time. I don’t know, you’ve just given me an interesting idea. I have to think a lot more deeply about it.
Hedvig: Regardless of reconstruction, I’d be interested to now just from your experience of learning tonal languages, regardless of the history, is there an association between high tones and in case of nouns, concrete nouns and small objects, and low tones and big objects?
Rikker: That’s a good question. One that I don’t know the answer to, but I could speculate, but I feel someone might have worked on it. I wonder if they have, but I have not noticed that. Yet another thing that I’m going to look into.
Daniel: [chuckles]
Hedvig: That’d be fun.
Daniel: Well, this one is work from Konstantina Margiotoudi and her team published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. We know that big things make big sounds and small things make small sounds, but we’re also aware of the kiki/bouba effect. Woo-woo. We know that if you have to made-up words kiki and bouba, and you have to choose which word represents a spiky shape and which one is the blobby shape. Kiki’s the spiky one, and this is a robust result across a number of languages. But earlier in 2019, this team headed up by Konstantina Margiotoudi of Freie Universität Berlin. They found that if you give the kiki/bouba test to great apes, and you get them to choose to associate sounds of made up words with objects on a screen, they don’t do it. They don’t do very well.
Hedvig: Huh.
Ben: Hmm.
Daniel: But then, they wondered, “What if we used an ape, a primate, that knew something about human language?” Well, there’s only one that we’re talking about.
Ben: Is this Coco?
Daniel: No, Coco passed away a number of years ago. Who’s left?
Hedvig: Coco’s child?
Ben: Bubbles? Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee?
Daniel: It’s not. No. It’s a bonobo.
Hedvig: And Nim Chimpsky is chimp, not have a bonobo.
Daniel: Sadly passed.
Hedvig: Wait? What are all of them called?
Ben: Okay, lay it on us.
Hedvig: We don’t know.
Daniel: It’s Kanzi.
Hedvig: Oh, I did know that. I did know Kanzi existed.
Daniel: Kanzi is like 40. Here’s the thing, Kanzi started research ages and ages go by pressing buttons that were arbitrary, but he’s really good at understanding spoken language now after so many years. He’s able to pick out the correct object on the screen, boop, if he knows the object 87% of the time, which is really good, so he can do this. Then, they took Kanzi with all of his familiarity with language, and gave him round shapes, spiky shapes on the screen at the same time, you can touch either one. And then, nonwords that sounded either spiky or blobby, no good. Wasn’t able to associate kiki-bouba. Now, what do you make of that?
Rikker: N equals one?
Hedvig: Yeah,
Daniel: Possibly.
Rikker: [laughs] We just need more.
Hedvig: Didn’t we cover that paper a while ago also finding that kiki-bouba was still robust regardless of script? So, it’s not-
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: -a thing. It is something about the sound.
Daniel: It’s not that the letter K looks very sharp and spiky. So, that’s… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: And also, Kanzi was hearing the thing.
Daniel: Yes, that’s right.
Hedvig: So, can’t be anything with that. I don’t know. Yeah, maybe N equals one. And we have exceptions, like Rikker was talking earlier about big things having low open vowels, but we also have the word ‘big,’ which has a high front vowel, and small.
Daniel: And small which has… Yeah.
Hedvig: It’s a general pattern, so maybe you need more datapoints and more primates to test on to find something. Maybe there’s so many exceptions that individuals can… I don’t know.
Daniel: Maybe we found the line. Maybe we found the line. So, maybe the pitch thing… Yeah, animals can totally do that. But when it comes to picking out associations with sounds, not as easy, that’s just a step beyond their ability. Maybe.
Hedvig: Isn’t it also the case that different animals… I know that children when they’re small, they have a differently shaped vocal tract than adults. Their whole larynx, I think, is like higher up, so they don’t make sounds… They can sound like adults, but they don’t make them in the same way as adults, and there are sounds that they can’t fully make, I think.
Daniel: Yeah, your larynx drops and then you sound like an adult.
Hedvig: Yeah. One of my phonetic] teachers one time spoofed us by playing a sound and asked us to transcribe it, and we found it really hard. It turned out it was a dog.
Daniel: How was it a dog?
Hedvig: It was a very short sound clip. Dogs make a lot of noises. It sounded like speech.
Daniel: [laughs] [mimics dog speech] I love you.
Ben: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of TikToks like that.
Hedvig: It sounded like a foreign language, it didn’t sound like English.
Daniel: Wow. Okay.
Hedvig: He was giving us foreign languages all the time with people had creaky voices who had smoked for 40 years. Again, it was totally within the realm of possibility that what we heard was a human, but we couldn’t transcribe it because the dog has a very different vocal tract, so it can make different sounds. So, Kanzi, maybe there’s something about that. I don’t know. I’m grasping at straws. Someone help me.
Daniel: Yeah, me too. I don’t know what to think. Rikker, what do you reckon?
Rikker: I’m just still reeling from the fact that people pronounce it booba, not bouba, which is how I learned it and I’ll never get used to it. And in fact, the pun in the title relies on it being pronounced bouba… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Variation is everywhere. What was the title?
Rikker: Bo-NO-bouba-kiki. It’s a pun on bonobo. Anyway, this is a totally irrelevant sidetrack. I know people say booba but I can’t get used to it.
Daniel: Bo-NO-bouba-kiki. That’s unfortunate because the title should obviously have been, are you ready? This will be my last joke. “No bouba/kiki for Bonobo Kanzi”. Thank you.
Rikker: [laughs]
Hedvig: Bonobo-NO-kiki is better.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: What?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Ah, my title was comedy gold. Huh.
Hedvig: I hate this, but it also sounds like “Me, Tarzan. You, Jane.”
Rikker: All I can think about is how disappointed they were that they didn’t get to title it more like Bo-Yes-Bo, am I right?
[laughter]
Rikker: They were recovering from their disappointment with their findings and had to grasp at the right pun in the title.
Daniel: I’m glad that a negative result got published.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, that’s positive.
Ben: It’s always good when that happens.
Daniel: Let’s cut to a track, and this one’s from the new Bonobo album.
Ben: [laughs] I see what you did there.
Daniel: I miss playing tracks. Well, that’s it for our stories. But let’s just get to one comment from Casey on Facebook. Casey says, “Just listening to the new mailbag.” We talked about words and the Words of the Year, and one of the words was “stimi.”
Ben: Dude, I don’t like it.
Daniel: Casey says, “Stimi is pretty solid in neurodivergent communities for a thing that you stim with, like fidget cubes or squeezy balls. I for one have a whole bowl of stimis in my living room for kids and adults who are feeling restless and so on.” Isn’t that nice?
Ben: That’s way less gross.
Daniel: I feel so too.
Ben: I really find that a lot less alarming.
Daniel: Grabbing a stimi, I could do that.
Ben: Nope. No, you ruined it again.
Daniel: I feel better about that.
Ben: It’s bad.
Daniel: Rikker Dockum, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. How can people find out what you’re doing?
Rikker: Well, I’m on linguistics Twitter @thai10, that’s where I like to keep it a little informal. You can also read about my research. I have the blessing or curse, I don’t know, of having a uniquely unhideable name.
Ben: Yeah, true. [laughs]
Rikker: I cannot hide on the internet. I don’t leave reviews of products because even neither R. Dockum nor Rikker D. is anonymous in any way, shape, or form. So, anyway, yeah, you can find my website. You can send me an email if you’re interested in things I work on. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Ben: It was our pleasure.
Hedvig: I just noticed that I don’t follow you. I thought I did because you appear so often in my feed from other people liking or commenting or doing something. So, I thought I was following you.
Ben: Clearly, the algorithm just knows you too well.
Hedvig: Yeah, so now I have…
Rikker: We got a lot of mutuals.
Hedvig: Yeah, so now I have followed. [chuckles]
Rikker: Actually, our paths crossed in person once said when I was in Canberra.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Oh, you’ve met. How cool.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Rikker: Yeah.
Daniel: Huh.
Ben: Well, that puts you one up on me. I’ve never met Hedvig.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Exactly.
[laughter]
Rikker: We can’t all be so cool.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Well, thanks again. This has been awesome. Okay, it’s time for the reads, and I put myself first.
Ben: Yeah, I noticed that. What a bit of a switcheroo.
Daniel: Yay. All right. Everybody, thanks for listening to the show. As always, if you don’t know how to find us, you can find us pretty much everywhere on every conceivable social platform, we’re BecauseLangPod every, every, everywhere. Including TikTok where you’ll find us doing quick videos of show excerpts. If you want to record something for us to play using SpeakPipe, it’s on our website, just go there with your microphone on and start recording something. We’ve got people doing that, that’s really cool. Or a regular old email at hello@becauselanguage.com.
If you want to help the show, you can do stuff. Like, you can send us ideas for your show articles, stories, Words of the Week, whatever, we’ll take them. You can recommend us to friends and even to people who are not friends. Dustin of Sandman stories does that. And by the way, his podcast Sandman Stories, is a really good listen, relaxing, great stories, lots of fun. And you can write us a review in all the places where reviews can be left. Thanks to all of you for doing all that stuff. We really appreciate you making the show what it is.
Hedvig: I realized we never really say this, but we are @becauselangpod on Twitter, but Daniel and I are also on Twitter ourselves. So, you can go and find Rikker, you can find me, @Laserhedvig. You can find Daniel at…
Daniel: You know what? I don’t think @TDanielMidgley is a very good place to find me, but @becauselangpod is better. If you like the language me, go for @becauselangpod. The other one is just like me complaining about politics and talking about Tesla. So, that’s kind of the less worthy me.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: That’s the me where I’m not as nice.
Hedvig: He does talk a lot of about Tesla.
Daniel: I do.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Got to build that brand.
Daniel: I sure do. I’ll say it again. I’m a Tesla stan, I’m not an Elon stan. I just want to make that clear.
Ben: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel: That’s only gotten more true over time.
Hedvig: Okay. But you can also follow @becauselangpod which Daniel uses a lot as well. Anyway, this is a special bonus episode for our patrons. It might come out later for all of our listeners as well when we remember to do that because we’ve tried to set a timeline, but we couldn’t all do it because that’s fine.
Our patrons make it possible for us to do the show without ads, make transcripts so that you can search and find what it was that we talked about Tesla or whatever it is. Shoutout to the entire team of SpeechDocs for doing a great job on our transcripts and also following me on Twitter and like a lot of my tweets, even when they’re in Swedish, which is very cute.
Daniel: Really fast too.
Hedvig: Yeah. We want give a special shoutout to all of our top patrons. They are Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, Elías, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, sneakylemur, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, zo, Kathy, Rachel, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Andy, O Tim, and Kate B who contributed a large amount one time, which we really appreciate it. And our latest people who have boosted is Your Friend, and Laura. And then, our newest patron is Some Sandwich.
Daniel: Yeah, they are at the listener level because they like listening.
Hedvig: That’s lovely.
Ben: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who’s a member of Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Anyone who lives in Perth by the way, Didion’s Bible has a gig coming up. So, if you wanted to check out the people who make the music for the podcast, just go into the internet and find out what that upcoming gig is. I’m sure you’ll be able to. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
Hedvig: Good job.
[BOOP]
Daniel: Hey, Rikker, I like your Abbey Road Zoom background.
Rikker: Indeed. It’s a funny sort of cultural shibboleth about who recognizes this and comments on it. And who doesn’t recognize it or says something like, “Why are you in the middle of a road?”
[laughter]
Daniel: That’s interesting. It’s hard to imagine people not knowing the Abbey Road cover, but that’s…
Hedvig: Yeah, but I saw someone tweet the other day something where they tried to use a meme that was based on the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and the students didn’t know it. And then, I was like, “Right. Okay.”
Ben: So, if that sort of bakes your noodle in a class full of year 10, so 15-year-old kids, I showed the opening sequence to The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie, the second one. [crosstalk] It’s a great opening scene, like the Joker introduced blah, blah, blah. I was just like, “Hey, guys, just out of interest, how many of you have actually seen this movie?” Only I would say about a third of the hands went up. And that movie came out in 2008. Kids these days. Y’all kids these days.
Hedvig: But how old would they have been? They’d have been two three?
Ben: But that… that doesn’t matter.
Daniel: Maybe it speaks to the point that Nolan’s Batman films have left no cultural footprint.
Ben: I…
Hedvig: That is not true.
Ben: You shut your dirty mouth. You shut your dirty mouth. All right?
Daniel: [laughs]
[BOOP]
Hedvig: I have bonobos in my Planet Zoo. I just need to say that.
[laughter]
Daniel: They’re awesome.
Hedvig: They’re awesome.
Daniel: You should.
Ben: Do they have a lot of sex?
Hedvig: Weirdly enough, they have about the same amount of sex, I would say, as my pandas, which doesn’t… [crosstalk]
Ben: Boo. That is not a realistic… clearly, this is an arcade game, not a sim. That’s all I’m willing to say.
Daniel: Puts pressure on the pandas. I’ve got to say they’re…
Hedvig: The pandas are having more sex than I thought and they’re also trying to inbreed. I’m like, “I thought this would not be a problem with you guys.”
Ben: Anyway.
Daniel: Moss, Llewellyn Moss. If you said Llewellyn Moss, you get a point.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]