What Can Be Stirred?

[honestrosewater]

My judgement as a native speaker has been tainted. This is a homework question, but it's not necessarily a definite answer type of question. The sentence I'm having trouble with:

1) !The witches stirred the tree.

The part of my answer that I'm happy with: (1) is semantically anomalous because it violates a semantic selectional restriction that stirred places on its patient argument, the tree. IOW, it doesn't make sense because you can't stir a tree. The problem: I have to define/describe this restriction and produce a grammatical sentence that obeys it. IOW, I just need to figure out what kinds of things can be stirred -- what they all must have in common -- excluding rhetorical uses. Being fluid was the first thing that came to mind... but you can, for example, stir a box of blocks, so refined a little: the patient argument of stir must refer to an entity that consists of smaller units that can be rearranged. That seemed to cover everything. But isn't

2) The witches stirred the pot.

just fine and dandy? It sounds fine to me, and google turned up plenty of examples of it. Actually, I think I'm figuring it out as I'm typing this, but I'd love to hear your ideas and opinions! Should I change my description or is it understood in (2) that they stirred the contents of the pot?

 

[0rthodontist]

Obviously the tree was asleep and the witches were thoughtlessly making too much noise while making the batter for their marijuana brownies.

 

[Bystander]

... or, they stirred the family tree to hide the horsethieves in the candidates geneology.

 

[honestrosewater]

You guys make a good point: I do need to find a linguistics forum ASAP.

 

[selfAdjoint]

The problem lies in your unwarranted assumption that "You can't stir a tree". This might be a good theme for a fantasy short story; authors I know could have fun with it! Before you run looking for authority, try this: Assume that although YOU can't stir a tree, maybe WITCHES can. See what falls out.

 

[arildno]

Obviously, if the tree was inhabited by a dryad, then "stirring the tree" might mean "awakening the dryad within".

 

[honestrosewater]

Yes, yes, I see that my questions have fallen on deft ears.

Seriously, you genii do see the problem here, yes? I need to fill in the blank in

3) The patient argument of stir must refer to [blank].

i) an entity that consists of smaller units that can be rearranged

doesn't seem to include (2), but expanding (i) to

i) an entity that consists of smaller units that can be rearranged or
ii) an entity that contains (i)

allows, for example

1) !The witches stirred the tree.

since trees contain fluids and a fluid is (i). I think it's just that, for some containers, it's understood that the container's contents are being stirred and not the container itself. What do you guys think of

4) The witches stirred the empty pot.

 

[arildno]

4) The pot has to have some content in it in order to stir it.
They could, of course, make stirring motions with a ladle in an empty pot, but that looks rather stupid.

 

[honestrosewater]

They could, of course, make stirring motions with a ladle in an empty pot, but that looks rather stupid.

Well, I guess you would know. Thanks.

 

[0rthodontist]

You could say that the word "pot" includes not only the metal, but also its contents, as in "a pot of stew."

 

[0rthodontist]

... in fact, on dictionary.com, this meaning is one of the definitions of "pot."

 

[Jameker]

Yes, yes, I see that my questions have fallen on deft ears.

Seriously, you genii do see the problem here, yes? I need to fill in the blank in

3) The patient argument of stir must refer to [blank].

i) an entity that consists of smaller units that can be rearranged

doesn't seem to include (2), but expanding (i) to

i) an entity that consists of smaller units that can be rearranged or
ii) an entity that contains (i)

allows, for example

1) !The witches stirred the tree.

since trees contain fluids and a fluid is (i). I think it's just that, for some containers, it's understood that the container's contents are being stirred and not the container itself. What do you guys think of

4) The witches stirred the empty pot.

Hi honestrosewater, the term stir in this case is weird but if you say,

'I stir the pot'

then i see the fluids in the pot do you see stir is lasting or completed ? Also suppose the pot is an object then how strong the force applied to stir it ?
I think its easy to stir, long lasting action, and only average force is applied. How bout you?

 

[Emieno]

Well, I guess you mean it is about imagination. I myself don't imagine that much about what people are doing. I agree that "stir" sounds like a long lasting and repeated action, but about force I have no idea. You may look it up in a language dictionary

 

[selfAdjoint]

Frankly I don't think the attempt to reduce the sentence to some kind of one-outcome computer program is well taken. Noam Chomsky famously used the Marx Brothers quip "Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana" to conclude that our understanding of language is more complex than that. Somehow we do equivalence classes and categorize at that level.

 

[Gokul43201]

But isn't

2) The witches stirred the pot.

just fine and dandy? It sounds fine to me, and google turned up plenty of examples of it. Actually, I think I'm figuring it out as I'm typing this, but I'd love to hear your ideas and opinions! Should I change my description or is it understood in (2) that they stirred the contents of the pot?

It's only fine because it is an elliptic usage.

The witches stirred [the contents of] the pot.

3) The patient argument of stir must refer to [blank].

Are you restricted to the same connotation of 'stir' as that which applies to the given incorrect statement ?

 

[honestrosewater]

Hi honestrosewater, the term stir in this case is weird but if you say,

'I stir the pot'

then i see the fluids in the pot do you see stir is lasting or completed ?

I stir the pot is a simple present construction, which in this case means to me that you stir the pot on a regular basis or that it is in some way your job to stir the pot. Is that what you're asking about? I don't see anything special about stir in this regard. One instance of stirring could take any length of time, as far as I'm concerned. It's the tense construction of the example that determines the time and duration of the action.

Also suppose the pot is an object then how strong the force applied to stir it ?

I think that's a good point and am going to change my description to account for it, e.g., to rule out crushing. I'm not sure exactly what the limits are though -- somewhere between crushing it and not changing it at all. I guess I have to be more specific about the types of changes that something undergoes when it is stirred.

 

[honestrosewater]

Frankly I don't think the attempt to reduce the sentence to some kind of one-outcome computer program is well taken. Noam Chomsky famously used the Marx Brothers quip "Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana" to conclude that our understanding of language is more complex than that. Somehow we do equivalence classes and categorize at that level.

I don't mean this in a bad way, but I can't think of a better way to say it: I'm not stupid. I'm not really sure what reducing the sentence to some kind of one-outcome computer program means, but I'm aware that language is complex and I don't see that sentence posing any special problems for me or any theories I'm learning. Another famous sentence of his is Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, which is (syntactically) grammatical but semantically anomalous.

5) The witches touched the tree.

has the same structure, to the greatest degree of detail that I'm currently aware of, as (1). (That is, I am not aware of any rule or constraint, morphological or syntactic, that distinguishes between (1) and (5).) But there is something wrong with (1) that isn't wrong with (5). Obviously, there are lots of ways that (1) could be acceptable (maybe the speaker is using a secret code, and by stirred, they really meant saw), but I'm interested in the thing that makes it unacceptable. According to the theory that I'm supposed to base my answer on, (1) is unacceptable because it violates a semantic selectional restriction that the verb places on its patient argument.

Also, though I don't always say so explicitly, I'm only dealing with one interpretation at a time. I am aware that a construction can have more than one interpretation. And if there's something else that I didn't mention that's fairly obvious even to someone who isn't studying linguistics, I probably already know it and just didn't mention it.

Bah, this post isn't coming out right. I really do appreciate everyone trying to help me.

I don't actually like semantic restrictions, or semantic anything that I've seen yet, because the concepts aren't precise or specific enough to be very useful at all. It might be that semantic matters are too complicated to be worth trying to delve into in an introductory course. Or it might be that the authors, as it seems lots of linguists do, view studying semantics as rather pointless, hopeless, or such. Whatever the reason, they just gloss over the semantic aspects.

 

[honestrosewater]

Are you restricted to the same connotation of 'stir' as that which applies to the given incorrect statement ?

Well, I'm working on my own, so I'm not really restricted to anything. What did you have in mind? I'm interested only in the meaning associated with stir as it usually applies to fluids, as in

6a) I used a spoon to stir my coffee.
6b) The celing fan stirred the air.

 

[pineapples]

Just wondering,
maybe it does make sense to say "stir the tree", because if the tree was standing completely still and the witches shook it or something and it moved, wouldn't that also be "stirring" the tree?

 

[Mk]

Yeah that's what I thought.

Then I thought about spacetime warping around the tree in away akin to cream and coffee being stirred together.

 

[honestrosewater]

Welcome to PF, pineapples!

Just wondering,
maybe it does make sense to say "stir the tree", because if the tree was standing completely still and the witches shook it or something and it moved, wouldn't that also be "stirring" the tree?

Perhaps, as I've granted, (1) might be a perfectly acceptable expression under some interpretations. However,

(1) !The witches stirred the tree.

being an acceptable expression is not an option for this exercise, as the exercise's instructions tell us that (1) is unacceptable. Expressions being judged as unacceptable is a real phenomenon, one which linguistic science seeks to explain. (When we start working on our own as scientists, it will be a language's speakers telling us that a given expression is unacceptable.) It's not the point of the exercise to dismiss the data that we are given and propose our own interpretations under which (1) might be acceptable; the point of the exercise is to explain the data that we are given, i.e., to explain why some expressions are unacceptable under some interpretations.

 

[honestrosewater]

I think it's also worth noting that the alternative interpretations being suggested still seem consistent with stir placing semantic selectional restrictions on its arguments, as it seems to me that you guys are still suggesting that the witches are causing some kind of fluid-like motion in some part of the tree. Indeed, you guys seem to be re-evaluating the meaning of the tree, rather than the meaning of stir, in order to make the tree refer to something capable of fluid-like motion. That is, instead of sticking with what I think is the 'default' meaning of the tree (a plant) and suggesting that stir meant something else (e.g., crush, hollow, chop down, burn), you have changed the meaning of the tree so that it meets the (supposed) requirements that stir places on its arguments. The event that your alternative interpretations are describing is still an instance of stirring, though not the stirring of the tree, the whole tree, and nothing but the tree. In that case, the selectional restrictions would seem to have asserted themselves anyway. No?

 

[Kenneth Mann]

Maybe I don't understand something here, but I always understood a valid definition of "stir" was to move or to disturb, such as " -- not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse". Thus the wind could easily "stir" a tree by my reckoning ---why not a witch?

KM

 

[honestrosewater]

Maybe I don't understand something here, but I always understood a valid definition of "stir" was to move or to disturb, such as " -- not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse". Thus the wind could easily "stir" a tree by my reckoning ---why not a witch?

KM

Okay, but by your interpretation, (1) is no longer semantically anomalous. The homework problem states that the sentence has been declared semantically anomalous. Our task is to explain why the rules that the speaker used to assign meaning to (1) have assigned it an odd or unacceptable meaning.

 

[George Jones]

I'm with Kenneth Mann, and it's not just his interpretation, it's a standard dictionary definition.

From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

"1 a : to cause an especially slight movement or change of position of b : to disturb the quiet of : AGITATE -- often used with up <the bear stirred up the bees>

2 a : to disturb the relative position of the particles or parts of especially by a continued circular movement <stir the pudding> <stir the fire> -- often used with up <stirred up mud from the lake bottom> b : to mix by or as if by stirring -- often used with in <stir in the spices>"

I plan to look up the definition in the OED later today, but I'm certain that it will say much the same thing.

 

[honestrosewater]

I'm with Kenneth Mann, and it's not just his interpretation, it's a standard dictionary definition.

Thanks, but that is not the problem.

An interpretation is a map between structures. He is mapping the syntactic structure to a semantic structure. As a simpler and possibly more familiar example, think of non-Euclidean geometries, replacing (1) with the parallel postulate.

I know that there are structures where (1) can be true. I know.

I am given that (1) is false. I have to find a structure M and an interpretation that makes M model some other set of expressions (Euclid's first four postulates / a set of acceptable English expressions) but not model (1).

So I might take M to be a circle in the Euclidean plane and take 'point' to mean a point on the interior of the circle and 'line' to mean an open chord and so on so that for every line L and point P not on L, there exists more than one line through P that is parallel to L.

I need to say something about an interpretation under which (1) is an unacceptable English sentence. If under your interpretation, (1) is an acceptable English sentence, your interpretation doesn't meet the very first requirement.

 

[George Jones]

I am a little (and I mean little) familiar with syntax and semantics in formal systems in mathematics.

I am probably way off base, but, for me, the problem with (1) is the cause of "stir," not "stir" itself. For example, I would say that (1) in a factual report in the New York Times is false, but (1) in many fictional settings is true.

 

[honestrosewater]

I am a little (and I mean little) familiar with syntax and semantics in formal systems in mathematics.

I guess I'm pretty familiar with formal languages if there's something you are interested in knowing more about.

I was kind of just throwing some ideas together earlier. At a high level, you think of syntax as 'form' and of semantics as 'meaning', and these correspond in a way to theories and models, respectively, from logic, model theory, etc.. But I was actually using model and interpretation in different ways, which I should clarify.

An interpretation, in the usual model-theoretic sense, consists of an underlying set and a collection of maps. And it's an interpretation, rather than a lone structure, that can model a theory (i.e., that can make a theory make true statements about some structure). But instead of having two pieces, theory and interpretation, I want to break up the interpretation so that I can think of them as three pieces related like domain, codomain, and function. So I want to pull out just the interpretation's collection of maps, say, the I-map, and just the interpretation's implicitly-included structure, say, the I-structure. So now theory, I-structure, and I-map correspond respectively to domain, codomain, and function.

I also want a way to note that, in a given case, the interpretation is, or is expected to be, a model of the given theory, say, by calling I-maps and I-structures M-maps and M-structures. It seems perfectly natural and sensical to call M-maps interpretations and call M-structures models, though from outside of this context, it's probably quite confusing. (Especially since the model-theoretic use of model is already in a way the opposite of another use in science and elsewhere, where model means theory rather than meaning an interpretation that bears a certain relation to a theory, and theories model structures rather than interpretations modeling theories. So I could end up saying the model's model models the model, and since a theory is itself a structure, a model can model a model in both senses... each. Haha. Okay, let me stop before I confuse myself... further.)

I am probably way off base, but, for me, the problem with (1) is the cause of "stir," not "stir" itself. For example, I would say that (1) in a factual report in the New York Times is false, but (1) in many fictional settings is true.

Well, we can let the original question go anyway. It's from last March, and I was only looking for some feedback about my actual description of the selectional restriction.

(By the bye, I assume these are the witches from Macbeth. The book takes examples from Shakespeare throughout. )

Perhaps it makes sense to think of the situation in the following way. In those contexts, you expect to use different types of I-maps and I-structures. For example, I presume you expect a NY Times news article to be about the real world, as opposed to a fictional world, and you expect it to speak literally, as opposed to figuratively or in secret code, so when you interpret the article, you try to make a literal M-map and a real-world M-structure work. In the context of a math textbook, you might expect to use a literal M-map and a completely abstract M-structure (i.e., a mathematical structure). In the context of a Shakespearean play, you might expect to use a figurative M-map and a fictional-world M-structure, or because Shakespeare rocks like that, to be able to interpret it coherently in several ways. And when things don't work as expected, semantic anomalies are one thing that can result.

It's true that a semantic anomaly, some more examples of which are

(2) !Macbeth murdered Duncan illegally.
(3) !Duncan was slightly dead.
(4) !The poison drank Romeo.
(5) !The noiseless typewriter-blasts squirmed faithfully.

might make sense to varying degrees, i.e., you might be able to 'recover' a normal meaning from them, but they are odd under some interpretation, e.g., using the I-map and I-structure that the context makes you expect (along with some other contextual things like, in normal conversations, expecting people not to be painfully redundant as in (2)).

Also, I noticed something funny about the stir in not a creature was stirring: it took only one argument (a creature). The stir that I was thinking of is a 2-ary relation and doesn't seem to have a related 1-ary version. (Using one set of criteria for determining the arity of a relation, at least. There are several ways to slice things up.) A closer look at this leads to some interesting things, but it requires quite a bit of linguistic theory to explain, and I'm not sure how much you already know. If you're interested, here are some sentences to think about.

(6
a) The woman stirred the coffee with the spoon. (Meaning that the woman used the spoon to stir the coffee.)
b) The woman stirred the spoon.
c) The spoon stirred the coffee.
d) The woman stirred.
e) The coffee stirred.
f) The spoon stirred.
g) The woman was stirred.
h) The coffee was stirred.
i) The spoon was stirred.
j) The woman stirred herself.

You might also compare stir with move.