{"id":789,"date":"2018-10-26T23:30:48","date_gmt":"2018-10-27T03:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=789"},"modified":"2018-11-09T09:45:25","modified_gmt":"2018-11-09T14:45:25","slug":"humorous-hedging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=789","title":{"rendered":"Humorous Hedging"},"content":{"rendered":"

Building on the spirit of whimsy that has been lurking in these columns of late, I thought I would devote one last post to the ambiguities and philosophical twists in natural language.\u00a0 Not only do these curiosities shed light on the nature of human thought and speech, they also set a standard for any candidate trying to pass the Turing test.\u00a0 After all, a human response to certain phrases should sometimes be blank confusion or a dumbfounded response like \u201cSorry, but I don\u2019t have a clue what you mean.\u201d\u00a0 Other times, subtlety, irony, or humor \u2013 all decidedly human expressions \u2013 should result when a nuance in language, pointing to an elusive connection, a peculiarity of ideas, or an absurd notion present in a phrase we all take for granted, comes to the front.<\/p>\n

The linguistic hedge will be our starting point.\u00a0 The concept of a linguistic hedge<\/a> (caution: this Wikipedia link, while containing some useful examples, is full of modern mangling of the language such as using \u201cthey” instead of \u201che\u201d and using passive instead of active voice) is a commonplace and useful component of language that we all use, even if the phrase is unfamiliar.\u00a0 Suppose you pose the question, \u201cHow hungry are you?\u201d to a friend, and his response is, \u201cVery hungry!\u201d; you know that he wants some food fairly badly.\u00a0 The word \u201cvery\u201d is one of the most basic hedges and fuzzy logic often employees it as a mathematical modifier to set membership (maybe more on this in a later post).<\/p>\n

People use hedging in a variety of ways, to emphasize degree (as in \u201cvery hungry\u201d, or \u201cvery, very hungry\u201d), to dodge the truth (as in \u201cto the best of my knowledge\u201d), and to be sarcastic (\u201cshe is very<\/em> good\u201d).\u00a0 But few uses are as amusing as the use of the word \u201cpretty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ordinarily, English speakers use \u201cpretty\u201d as an adjective, with the typical practice being exemplified by sentences such as \u201cShe looks pretty,\u201d or \u201cShe looks very pretty.\u201d\u00a0 However, it is fairly common, in more slang-oriented speech, to say something like \u201cJohn asked, \u2018How big was the rock that you hit with your car?\u2019\u00a0 Steve answered \u2018It was pretty big.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s dictionary defines pretty<\/a> (adverb) as:<\/p>\n

\n

adverb INFORMAL<\/p>\n

adverb: pretty<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. to a moderately high degree; fairly.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    “he looked pretty fit for his age”<\/p>\n

    synonyms:\u00a0\u00a0 quite, rather, somewhat, fairly, reasonably, comparatively, relatively<\/p>\n

    “a pretty large sum”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

    Just how does \u201cpretty\u201d turn into a linguistic hedge is a mystery (at least to me) but its use can lead to some very awkward and very funny constructions.\u00a0 One construction, filled with cleverness and mirth, is the use of pretty to modify words that common speech would normally consider antithetical to the adjectival use of pretty.<\/p>\n

    For example, there is a comic book published by Image comics called Pretty Deadly<\/em>.\u00a0 The book centers on Jenny, the daughter of the embodiment of Death, who is both beautiful and a nearly unstoppable assassin.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    An artificial intelligence capable of human-like responses would have to appreciate and, perhaps savor, the double meaning contained in the title, to allow itself to move back and forth between the two separate meanings, to imagine and possibly construct new associations inspired by the juxtaposition of two otherwise dissimilar words.<\/p>\n

    Likewise, to match its biological counterparts, it would have to enjoy the most humorous use of pretty when it modifies adjectives that are exactly opposite to its adjectival form, such as hideous, grotesque, repulsive, and so on.\u00a0 \u00a0Consider the following set of man\u2019s best friends<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    and the fully natural way in which they are labeled.\u00a0 \u00a0Imagine an artificial intelligence trying to properly understand why \u201cpretty ugly” or \u201cpretty repulsive” is linguistically intelligible but why \u201cpretty pretty” is just plain wrong.\u00a0 Of course, one can always program the AI to work around \u201cpretty pretty” as a corner case but take a moment to reflect on who programmed us to recognize just how bad it sounds.\u00a0 Your answer should have been no one, because we just innately recognize just how stupid that phrase is.<\/p>\n

    Somehow, a true AI would need to learn and know and imagine how to use linguistic hedges to sound clever or funny or poetic without some vast if-then-else loop or training on large amounts of data that someone else blessed as proper speech.\u00a0 It should know when to honor the rules and when to break them and when to invent new ones.\u00a0 But such an AI is nowhere to be seen on the horizon, and that\u2019s pretty sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Building on the spirit of whimsy that has been lurking in these columns of late, I thought I would devote one last post to the ambiguities and philosophical twists in… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}