
"I never said she stole my money" has 7 different meanings depending on the stressed word - sama
Just thought that was interesting.
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andreyf
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!

~~~
jpwagner
" _They_ gave the monkeys the bananas because they were [adjective]"

now it can describe a third noun...

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

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

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frankus
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."

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

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ambulatorybird
_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.

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enomar
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
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.

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GMWeinberg
Nice discussion, but doesn't explore nearly enough. As Don Gause and I showed
in
[http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Exploring_Requirements.h...](http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Exploring_Requirements.html),
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>I</i> <i>didn't</i> say she stole my money. That is, I was one of the few
who didn't.

I didn't <i>say</i> she <i>stole</i> 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).

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

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

~~~
mixmax
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

;-)

~~~
castis
The word "buffalo" has officially lost its meaning after reading that article.

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sown
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."

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

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ashot
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")

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

~~~
ashot
thanks!

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

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

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tdonia
Creative creatives create creative creations, with language!

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

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

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

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badger7
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

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

~~~
knowtheory
No, i'm not saying that Badger's post is incorrect (it correctly defines the
phenomenon). Some of the other posts on this thread are all over the place,
and don't describe the phenomenon or what underlies it.

So sorry if i gave the impression that Badger7 is wrong, he's not, he just
doesn't explain what's going on, or what the full scope of the phenomenon is
:)

~~~
sgentle
The similarity between this response and the sample ones made me laugh.

"Is there anything wrong in badger7's post?" "No, I'm not saying _Badger's_
post is incorrect"

The double-negative makes alternative emphases difficult, but I'm tempted.

