Talk:Comparative illusion

A fact from Comparative illusion appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 17 December 2018 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Escher sentences such as "More people have been to Russia than I have" may initially be perceived as meaningful despite being ungrammatical nonsense?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2018/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Comparative illusion.

Wikipedia

Other refs

These are refs which discuss the phenomenon briefly. They might be useful the history of interest in this phenomenon, an overview of people's analyses of the phenomenon, explanations why people care about this, etc, but probably shouldn't be added to the Further Reading section. If they don't use the standard Russia or Berlin sentence I'm noting their example as well to make it easier to find other sources which cite their examples and hence which might be relevent.

Fitzgerald, Gareth (2010). "Linguistic Intuitions". The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 61 (1): 123–160 [139]. doi:10.1093/bjps/axp014. Many more people have been to France than I have.
Hinzen, Wolfram (2006). "Prior to Function". Mind Design and Minimal Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 117–149 [131]. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199289257.001.0001/acprof-9780199289257-chapter-4. ISBN 978-0-19-928925-7. More people have read books by Marquez than I have.
Myers, James (2009). "Syntactic Judgment Experiments". Language and Linguistics Compass. 3 (1): 406–423 [412]. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00113.x.
Saddy, Douglas; Uriagereka, Juan (2004). "Measuring Language". International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos. 14 (2): 383–404 [384]. doi:10.1142/S0218127404009296. More people have visited Berlin than I have.
Schütze, Carson T. (2011). "Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory". Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science. 2 (2): 206–221 [212]. doi:10.1002/wcs.102.
Smith, Neil (2005). "Introduction: What Everyone Should Know about Language and Linguistics". Language, Frogs and Savants: More Linguistic Problems, Puzzles and Polemics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 1–36 [10]. doi:10.1002/9780470775059.ch. ISBN 978-1-4051-3037-0. More people have visited Moscow than I have.
Sprouse, Jon (2011). "A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory". Behavior Research Methods. 43 (1): 155–167 [158]. doi:10.3758/s13428-010-0039-7.

Umimmak (talk) 09:20, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Another ref I ended up not using:

Barrios, Edison (2012). "Linguistic Knowledge and Cognitive Integration". Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía. 44 (130): 35–67. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Umimmak (talk) 22:34, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And: Nussbaum, Miriam Claire. Subset comparatives as comparative quantifiers (MS). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/113771.

Umimmak (talk) 23:30, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Correct 'form' of the sentence.

So, what is the correct form/wording of the example sentence mentioned in the first paragraph?

It should be given right after, or as part of, the sentence that mentions a "bare plural" in the following paragraph.

Just a thought. 2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D (talk) 00:39, 17 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean? There is no "correct" form because the sentence is meaningless. And if you ask people what their initial thoughts are on what it means they might say different things, each of which would correspond to a different sentence. Umimmak (talk) 09:26, 17 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

But what do people actually mean when they utter such a sentence? Because clearly they sometimes do utter such sentences, and they mean something by them. Maybe it should just be treated as a grammatical construction that is conventionalised to some extent, or as an idiom, even if it might literally be nonsensical, similar to "I could care less" (instead of "I couldn't care less"). My understanding is that this type of sentence has a well-formed meaning, namely: "Other people except me have been to Russia", and linguists are just being pedantic, just when grammatical sticklers complain about double negatives in English dialect, dialect-influenced, or nonstandard speech. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:22, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

More linguists understand this sentence than I do.

I'm a linguist myself, but I don't get this at all. The sentence "More people have been to Russia than I have" seems perfectly grammatical and logical to me. (If I'm being picky I might shorten it to "More people have been to Russia than I"). If at least two people have been to Russia, then the sentence is true. End of. No?

Sorry if I'm showing my limited intelligence here, but I don't see the problem. Can someone help? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.92.153.10 (talk) 09:28, 17 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If you undo the VP-ellipsis in the second clause you get: "More people have been to Russia than I have ~~been to Russia~~". Note that doesn't say "More people have been to Russia than (just) me", which would be an additive reading not a comparative reading. You can't compare how many people have been to Russia to *how many I have been to Russia. The effect should still work with "Fewer people have been to Russia than I have", which avoids the ambiguity "more" can have. Umimmak (talk) 01:12, 18 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! That's very clear. Makes me wonder how many ungrammatical sentences we utter/parse every day without problems. Also, I wonder what Michael Halliday would have to say about it? Just wondering out loud - that's not a real question I'm expecting an answer to. 93.92.153.10 (talk) 09:42, 27 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

But… if the final ”have” in the sentence is interpreted as “to possess” then “More people have been to Russia than I own” is perfectly sensible (albeit concerning). Unless I’m confused about the grammatically of that sentence, then all of the language about “no possible interpretation” is either confusing or just plain wrong without some caveat about which sense of the word “have” we’re permitted to consider. Right? Nathan McKnight -- Aelffin (talk) 06:31, 17 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

example A

The example in the history section "In Michigan and Minnesota.." seems misplaced. Following the source, it seems people (myself included) easily and instinctively arrive at a single meaning. The intended meaning is not considered ambiguous, the question is how people are processing the sentence.73.192.36.165 (talk) 17:53, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

~~I also don't understand this example, it seems totally unambiguous to me. I've tentatively deleted it.~~ Scratch that, all of a sudden the problem became apparent to me. This one is really subtle, but I'm in favor of keeping it. BalinKingOfMoria (talk) 20:05, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Difficulty understanding example

One of the examples given is:

   I think there are more candidates on stage who speak Spanish more fluently than our president speaks English.

Is the problem here with the first 'more' or the second 'more'? The way understand this sentence is that there are candidates on stage who speak Spanish more fluently than how fluently our president speaks English. The first 'more' in the original sentence cannot be interpreted without context (more than where?), but it's not, strictly speaking, grammatically incorrect, is it?

70.104.167.92 (talk) 17:04, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

[Missing-VP Illusion]

Sorry! I'm new to wikipedia, I just wanted to talk about this. I found the most authentic source (go to #60, intro button has all files). It's still github though, it comes from an organization that describes itself as, "an international conference which has established itself as the premier European venue for interdisciplinary psycholinguistic research." It appears to me, at the very least, to be a legitimate source.

I, also, thought that it would fit in the comparative illusion wiki. They are both similar in that they are grammatically incorrect sentences that are believed to be grammatically correct. To me, the missing-vp illusion is more fitting than "depth charge" sentences so it belongs too. I am new to editing wikipedia, and you clearly have a lot of experience - especially with the comparative illusion wiki - which is why I wanted to bring my thoughts to you. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Superiorglitchcuba (talk • contribs) 18:01, 5 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

FYI

– Moved from User talk:Umimmak

Heads up, Superiorglitchcuba, new talk page messages should go on the bottom and you should sign your posts with four tildes. Also the talk pages of individual articles is generally a good place for this so all interested editors/page walkers can respond. You're citing the abstract of poster at a conference (so the date and name of the conference should have be in your citation, and this clarified as being an abstract), but to me doesn't seem particularly useful as a source: Conference abstracts present incomplete and unpublished data and undergo varying levels of review; they are often unreviewed and their initial conclusions may have changed dramatically if and when the data are finally ready for publication. Consequently, they are usually poor sources and should always be used with caution, never used to support surprising claims, and carefully identified in the text as preliminary work. This is from Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine)#Other sources so I realize it doesn't technically apply to a non-medical article, but the same caveats hold. Also other sources have explicitly connected depth charge statements to comparative illusions; this is an interesting grammatical illusion and I can see why it might be includes, especially given the statement on Phillips. But it's bordering on WP:SYNTHESIS for you as an editor to say it's a related construction rather than citing a reliable source saying it's related. Hope my reasoning makes sense! Umimmak (talk) 18:22, 5 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Update: The following source does make a connection, so it could be used to add a similar sentence or two to what you originally had:

de-Dios-Flores, Iria (2019). "Processing Sentences With Multiple Negations: Grammatical Structures That Are Perceived as Unacceptable". Frontiers in Psychology. 10. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02346.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)

Umimmak (talk) 18:34, 5 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Don't fail to miss it"

My sister used to say this about things (e.g. movies) as a kind of non-recommendation. I don't know if it's an example of this phenomenon (can one fail to not do something, when "failure" implies not doing something?), but some of you wags may find it useful. – AndyFielding (talk) 14:14, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There’s definitely a lot of work on “don’t fail to miss”, if there are reliable sources explicitly saying there’s a similarity between that and this phenomenon it might worth work a mention in the Similar constructions, but I also wonder if there’s enough for a dedicated article for this overnegation. Umimmak (talk) 23:43, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That's a deliberately sarcastic phrasing, as I understand it, so it's not quite comparable. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:19, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"60% of the time, it works every time"

From the movie Anchorman. is this a good example? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 51.37.138.148 (talk) 15:46, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]