We went to see Steven Pinker at the Seattle Town Hall. He is promoting his new book - The Stuff of Thought. I have read several of his books, so I was pleased to have a chance to hear him speak.
One of the focus points of his talk was how English uses prepositions to designate space and time. For example, he asked why do we say something is under water when the object is truly surrounded by water, and why do we say after dark when we really mean a time period surrounded by darkness. His proposition is that the mind simplifies its perspective when possible (Occam’s Razor?). The surface of water become a 2-D boundary which then an object can be above or under. Similarly, the boundary of nighttime (darkness) becomes a point in time after which we say ‘after dark’. As further illustration of the dimensional reduction, he pointed out that we don’t say, “an ant walks along a plate”, because the preposition along requires a one dimensional object, and that we do say, “an ant walks along the edge of a plate” because in one sense, the edge can be tought of as a one dimensional object.
The most entertaining portion of his talk was about how swearing is used. I suspect the reason it was so funny was the contrast between his clinical descriptions (formal register) of swearing and the familiar register that is used when someone is swearing. He gave the example of someone accepting an award for popular music saying “this is really f***ing brilliant” and saying how in this case “f***ing” is used as an adverb.
Another example he gave that was astonishing was the case of the world trade center disaster. Apparently, the insurance contract has a phrase of “3.5 billion dollars per event”. The court case was held up on interpretting whether the 9/11 incident was one event, as in one master plan of destruction was executed, or if it was two events, as in two airplanes were used to destroy two buildings. The effect of this distinction was whether the insurance should pay $3.5 billion or $7 billion. Quite a substantial difference that is based on the judgement of a linguist.
Overall, Dr. Pinker’s presentation was very entertaining and enlightening. If you have a chance to hear him speak, I recommend that you go.
