"I never said she stole my money" has 7 different meanings depending on the stressed word

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583555

by sama • 17 years ago

154 62 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Just thought that was interesting.

cperciva• 17 years ago

You get different implied meanings by stressing different words in the famous (Buffalo)+ sentences, too.

norimaki• 17 years ago

THE buffalo FROM Buffalo WHO ARE buffaloed BY buffalo FROM Buffalo ALSO buffalo THE buffalo FROM Buffalo.

mixmax• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...

;-)

badger72• 17 years ago

Just had to spell this out to a colleague, so thought I may as well post it. It should be "didn't say", rather than "never said", but the gist is the same ;)

I didn't say she stole my money - someone else said it

I didn't say she stole my money - I didn't say it

I didn't say she stole my money - I only implied it

I didn't say she stole my money - I said someone did, not necessarily her

I didn't say she stole my money - I considered it borrowed, even though she didn't ask

I didn't say she stole my money - only that she stole money

I didn't say she stole my money - she stole stuff which cost me money to replace

jlees• 17 years ago

Re: #7 - She could have stolen your heart :'(

dschobel• 17 years ago

that sounds painful

graemep• 17 years ago

The stress adds information. #2 is the basic meaning (it is true for all of the others as well), a stress on any other word adds information about what you did way/imply.

Incidentally, some still bear alternative interpretations: e.g., #3 could be interpreted as "I only thought it".

gabrielroth• 17 years ago

#2 has a more specific meaning: it implies that someone else has claimed that you did say she stole your money.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

According to training I got as a volunteer in Washington, this drives native Vietnamese speakers crazy. I think it may confuse older Koreans as well. My grandma didn't get it at all.

I think this is a part of what makes English one of the best languages to tell a lie in.

Pauses can similarly change the meaning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves

ii• 17 years ago

This applies to many other languages. I can translate all this to Russian and this phenomenon will hold: "Я не говорил что она украла у меня деньги" -- the same 7 meanings depending on stress.

te_platt• 17 years ago

So what does it mean if you don't put emphasis on any of the words? Or more than one? Also, I can't stop reading the comments without putting emphasis on random words now. I can almost make any sentence say what I want it to, or at least distort the intended meaning.

knowtheory5• 17 years ago

That's known as "neutral stress" and can just be an assertion of fact. The topic/question under discussion may be undefined, for example.

Sentences can also have multiple stresses, and you may have multiple topics under discussion. Sentences still have a primary stress, but can have secondary stresses as well.

Who sang what to whom?

Pat sang "I feel pretty" to Jackie!

Implicit here are three stresses, which may indicate the following: Pat sang, can you believe it? I didn't know pat could sing! Pat sang "i feel pretty", who would have know that Pat likes show tunes? Pat sang "i feel pretty" to Jackie. Jackie was the wrong person to sing to, because Jackie hates the music from West Side Story.

knowtheory5• 17 years ago

YARGH. Okay so this is one of the primary areas of research that one of my professors from university studies ( http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~croberts/ ).

None of the explanations that people have written here are entirely correct or reflect what's actually going on.

The phenomenon that's being discussed here is something called Contrastive Stress. It is a part of an interesting area of research on Linguistic Focus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)) that sits at the juncture of Semantics (meaning in abstract), Pragmatics (meaning in context), and Autosemgental Phonology (mental representation of sounds and their production of non-phoneme related stuff).

So, contrastive stress ties directly into the notion that sentences are stated in response to either explicit or implicit questions. In fact the location of the emphatic stress is directly related to what question the speaker is trying to answer.

So, you can actually do this with nearly any sentence, simply by placing the stress on a different word.

Badger's account is mostly correct, but it's tied in a little closer with grammar than his examples actually intimate. I'd say that there's a much wider range of possible candidates for say:

Did you say she stole your money? I didn't say she stole my money, i know/saw/heard/thought/wrote/hinted/testified/dreamed it!

"It" in this context is the entire grammatical structure "she stole my money". The reason why this is important is because of the notion of what can be stressed and what the stress is actually applied/scoped to.

=========================================

You can do this with other sentences as well:

George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Is jeb bush the 43rd president of the united states?"

No, George Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Is George Washington the 43rd President of the United States?"

No, George Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"George Bush isn't the 43rd President of the United States, right?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was there more than one 43rd president of the united states?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was George W. Bush the 44th President of the United States?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was George W. Bush the 43rd Vice President of the United States?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

(okay, so "of" is a function word that we can't contrast against anything else)

"Was George W. Bush the 43rd President of the United Arab Emerates?"

No George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

etc.

So this really is a general phenomenon that you not only see every day, but really use on a constant basis. Every sentence has grammatical stress, it's how we know what other people are focusing on when they speak.

bdr• 17 years ago

I can see how your explanation is more complete, but is there anything wrong in badger7's post?

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

(okay, so "of" is a function word that we can't contrast against anything else)

"Was George W. Bush the 43rd President from the United States?"

marchdown• 17 years ago

um, I reckon you can put constrastive stress on function words, as in in the street against on the street and President of the United States against President (of UAE) in the United States.

baddox2• 17 years ago

Actually, I would consider the meaning of all the sentences to be the same. The implications are all different, but that's really not surprising or profound in itself. I mean, you could also say that sentence 10 different times referring to 10 different "she's," but that's not at all surprising, is it?

dasil0032• 17 years ago

Nope, analogy fail. The meaning is absolutely different. If someone says to you "She took how much of your money?", and you reply "I didn't say she stole my money" that means something completely different than "I didn't say she stole my money". Who the pronoun refers to is completely external to the parsing of the sentence.

avocade• 17 years ago

That's so sad.

niyazpk• 17 years ago

This is one reason why NLP is hard.

dws• 17 years ago

Jerry Weinberg uses this technique in "Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design" as a technique for exploring vague requirements. When you get a short verbal requirement thrown at you, repeat it back with different words stressed, and ask whether that's the right meaning or what information might be missing. It's a great technique for flushing out extra information and avoiding misunderstandings.

antiismist• 17 years ago

While we're on the topic of wordsmithing, "verbal" means using words. You probably mean "oral".

Oxryly• 17 years ago

Sounds difficult to pull off without sounding like a jerk.

andreyf• 17 years ago

Yup, another favorite of mine from linguistics is:

    "We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were [adjective]"

What is "they" referring to, and the adjective describing? Well, it depends - "ripe" would describe bananas, "hungry" would describe monkeys. The syntax alone is ambiguous!

serhei• 17 years ago

Well, you could of course change the context. If we glom "We didn't give the rhinoceroces anything because they weren't ripe for a feeding, but ..." onto the front of your sentence then "ripe" starts to apply to the monkeys.

jpwagner• 17 years ago

"They gave the monkeys the bananas because they were [adjective]"

now it can describe a third noun...

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

"They gave the monkeys the bananas in bunches because they were [adjective]"

gwc• 17 years ago

I had an English teacher in high school who was highly attentive to this sort of construct. He would return many a paper with "VPR" marks sprinkled throughout for 'vague pronoun reference' and points deducted accordingly. Certainly a common error.

jedc• 17 years ago

While I hated these teachers when they were doing this, I've grown to appreciate their advice. I wish more did stuff like this.

chanux• 17 years ago

This one has given me problems so many times. Never got an answer.(I'm not a native speaker)

enomar• 17 years ago

This makes me think it might be easier to get humans to speak a language that computers can understand rather than trying to get computers to understand our current languages :)

ricree• 17 years ago

It might be. I'm reminded of a story I read about Palm designing their early PDFs. At that point, they had only experienced marginal success interpreting written text. There were a lot of ambiguities, and the actual style varied a lot from person to person, so it tended to fail outside of carefully controlled tests.

Eventually, someone hit on the idea of forcing the users into a custom set of symbols that was close enough to normal to be usable, but was different enough that it forced everyone into a common style that was easier to parse.

Of course, the tricky part is to come up with a method that is expressive enough to be useful without ending up with one of those "natural" programming languages.

ambulatorybird• 17 years ago

The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs touches upon this. Somewhere in chapter 4, they implement a nondeterministic interpreter with CPS and then use it to (among other things) find all possible parses of sentences such as these.

frankus• 17 years ago

The phrase "Time flies like an arrow" is another example. "Time flies" could be a type of insect with an affinity for a particular arrow (or each for its own arrow), or you might be being instructed to measure a fly's speed in the manner that one measures that of an arrow (or to time only those flies that resemble an arrow), or it could have the conventional metaphorical meaning.

cf. "Fruit flies like a banana."

ALee• 17 years ago

Garden path sentences along with other linguistic puzzles are awesome (and this little puzzle is the reason why Noam Chomsky and other linguists can all be cultural critics):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

yan• 17 years ago

Discussions of garden path sentences deserve a reference to Emo Philips: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emo_Philips

ashot2• 17 years ago

when doing nlp is there a standardized system or practice for encoding this data (which word(s) where emphasized)?

what is the logical framework for this? at first I thought you could only have one emphasized word per statement, but though its a bit more nuanced but you can also have two at a time (ie "my" and "money")

knowtheory5• 17 years ago

Yeah, this stuff is done with what basically amounts to an annotated typed logic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)

ashot2• 17 years ago

thanks!

tdonia• 17 years ago

Creative creatives create creative creations, with language!

jjs• 17 years ago

Unlike the "buffalo" one, this sentence is at least parseable.

raghus• 17 years ago

This is applicable to most sentences. For example: "Make Something People Want"

maw• 17 years ago

More than seven, since you can stress more than one word.

sown• 17 years ago

One of my favorite examples of ambiguity when it comes to punctuation is the following

"When hunting lions, hide in the bushes." vs. "When hunting, lions hide in the bushes."

GMWeinberg• 17 years ago

Nice discussion, but doesn't explore nearly enough. As Don Gause and I showed in http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Exploring_Requirements.h..., you can stress more than one word in a sentence. In fact, you can stress two, three, or any number up to the number of words in the sentence.

This sounds really weird, but if you say these sentences out loud, you can make a different meaning from each variation. Try it:

I didn't say she stole my money. That is, I was one of the few who didn't.

I didn't say she stole my money. I wrote a letter about how she found my money.

See if you can get all the way up to all 7 words stressed. There are lots of cases (which you can computer using the binomial theorem).

tjogin• 17 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something. Does this not apply to just about every sentence in every language?

vilda• 17 years ago

Additionally, in Czech almost any permutation of words in a sentence is allowed. You can then get even more variances of meanings.

kungfujen• 17 years ago

This subject is featured in a Seinfeld episode: "These PRETZELS are making me thirsty!" "These pretzels are making ME thirsty!"

"I never said she stole my money" has 7 different meanings depending on the stressed word

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