President Donald Trump says he’s replacing his embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and will nominate in her place Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin.
It’s not arbitrary - it’s ambiguous. Context clues, world knowledge, and the entire attached article are more than enough to resolve the ambiguity.
All natural human languages show structural ambiguity like this, especially when it comes to headlines which famously favor brevity over clarity, and the built in feature of human language to solve it is pragmatics.
You’re right that “ambiguous” would have been a better word.
Anyway, the title is too ambiguous and could have been better worded like the other dozen articles I’ve seen about the exact same thing, which was my singular point the entire time.
Going back and reading the thread it doesn’t look like you were the one to point out the ambiguity, champ. Reads more like you were initially confused and then got defensive about it.
Probably could have been written a bit more clearly so that it was less ambiguous, champ.
Also, Jesus dude. I initially only wanted to drop some knowledge about agentives vs. anticausatives, not have a huge snarky slapfight just because you chose an incredibly odd and incorrect hill to die on elsewhere in the thread.
Maybe try to have less of a hair trigger in response to innocuous comments in the future.
Because of your additional normative position that that’s somehow a bad thing, instead of being a perfectly normal part of language that you have the faculties to easily resolve, as mentioned above.
It’s not arbitrary - it’s ambiguous. Context clues, world knowledge, and the entire attached article are more than enough to resolve the ambiguity.
All natural human languages show structural ambiguity like this, especially when it comes to headlines which famously favor brevity over clarity, and the built in feature of human language to solve it is pragmatics.
You’re right that “ambiguous” would have been a better word.
Anyway, the title is too ambiguous and could have been better worded like the other dozen articles I’ve seen about the exact same thing, which was my singular point the entire time.
Use your pragmatics module! Find those context clues! You can do it! I believe in you!
How else do you think I could point out its ambiguity, champ?
Going back and reading the thread it doesn’t look like you were the one to point out the ambiguity, champ. Reads more like you were initially confused and then got defensive about it.
Probably could have been written a bit more clearly so that it was less ambiguous, champ.
My original comment was clearly a humorous take on the ambiguity, sport.
Sorry about you sense of humor, li’l guy.
Maybe not as clearly as you thought, champ.
Also, Jesus dude. I initially only wanted to drop some knowledge about agentives vs. anticausatives, not have a huge snarky slapfight just because you chose an incredibly odd and incorrect hill to die on elsewhere in the thread.
Maybe try to have less of a hair trigger in response to innocuous comments in the future.
Sure, sweet thing. You literally agreed that the title was ambiguous. How was it “incorrect” of me to point that out?
Because of your additional normative position that that’s somehow a bad thing, instead of being a perfectly normal part of language that you have the faculties to easily resolve, as mentioned above.