The following is from the second chapter ("Language processing: speed and flexibility") of Ewa Dabrowska's Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar (Edinburgh University Press, 2004):
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>>>Watson and Reich (1979) found that nearly all the people they tested misinterpreted the sentence No head injury is too trivial to ignore to mean 'No head injury should be ignored, however trivial it may be'. But according to the rules of English grammar, the sentence cannot possibly mean this: it can only mean the exact opposite. Consider the following:
(3) a. No child is too obnoxious to look after.
'Every child should be looked after, no matter how obnoxious.'
b. No question is too stupid to answer.
'Every question should be answered, no matter how stupid.'
c. No mistake is too trivial to correct.
'Every mistake should be corrected, no matter how trivial.'
Therefore:
(4) No head injury is too trivial to ignore.
'Every head injury should be ignored, no matter how trivial.'
Why is it that people systematically misunderstand the last sentence, but not the other three? The problematic sentence is quite complex, both syntactically and semantically. The noun phrase no head injury, which functions as the theme of ignore, does not appear in its usual direct object position (as in We ignored the head injury) but at the beginning of the sentence, as the subject of the main verb, which makes it difficult to establish the relationship between them. The sentence also contains three negatives: the particle no and two logically negative expressions, too trivial (i.e. 'not serious enough') and ignore ('take no notice'). Furthermore, it is very odd from a pragmatic point of view, since it presupposes that serious matters should be ignored and trivial things attended to (cf. This is too trivial to ignore), as well as enjoining the addressee to ignore head injuries, which are widely known to be potentially dangerous. It is not particularly surprising, then, that many people misinterpret the sentence. What is interesting, however, is that they are so confident about their erroneous interpretation and find it extremely difficult to 'see' the correct one, even when they are told what it is.
(Watson, P.C and Reich, S.S (1979), 'A verbal illusion', Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 31, 591-7).<<<
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Call me stupid, but shouldn't Dabrowska have put scare quotes around (thus:) "correct" in her last sentence there? And call me confident too, because I think she has ironically overlooked the fact she herself has stated - that ignore is "logically negative" (compared to look after, answer and correct). (Then, there is also the paraphrase that Watson and Reich themselves offered of the generally held interpretation, to clue us in to what the oroginal sentence could well mean (despite what Darowska is saying to the contrary): 'No head injury should be ignored, however trivial it may be').
To my mind, then, sentence (4) can stand as it is and offers no problems interpretation-wise. If explanation/reinterpretation is considered necessary, surely (3) a-c should be glossed simply as:
'No child is too obnoxious to NOT look after (=that we cannot look after them)' etc., and (4) as:
'No head injury is too trivial to NOT take notice of.'
Any thoughts or opinions (one way or the other) would be appreciated (to help me evaluate the book, I guess).
I generally found it strange that although Dabrowska had just spent some time showing that people tend to only process things "shallowly", and are thus liable to reinterpret pragmatically anomalous sentences "correctly" (i.e. to "hear" or "read" what they expected to hear or read e.g. Clean up the mess or I won't report you becomes in paraphrases something like If you don't clean up the mess I will report you "54% of the time"), she is here getting a bit too "Chomskyan" for my liking, telling me what things should mean "according to the rules of English grammar" (what about the "complex" semantics she mentioned!), when I (along with probably "nearly all the people", "many people") just don't see it the "correct" (logical?!) way.
A similar kind of thing happened with a "garden path" sentence earlier in the chapter (put the book on the shelf: "prepositional phrase as complement to the verb", right? > She put the book on the shelf in the box: Oh no, our brains shreik! A modified noun/reduced relative clause!! As for my brain, it just chugged along like, "OK, she put the book...on the shelf...nice shelf...OK, so that book then...in(to) a box", without once thinking or even really imagining that shelves (at least not the sort one can put books on) are found inside boxes (unless one means the DIY self-assembly sort of shelves that one buys or gets delivered in cardboard boxes LOL).
Finally, and following on from the "trivial" sentences in the chapter, there is a section on "Frequency", and how the statistical properties of a language make its users prefer certain interpretations over others:
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>>>People are also sensitive to frequency information at more abstract levels. For example, when confronted with an ambiguous expression such as Someone stabbed the wife of the football star who was outside the house, where the relative clause (who was outside the house) can modify either the 'upstairs' or the 'downstairs' NP (the wife or the football star, respectively), English speakers usually prefer the latter interpretation - that is to say, in the absence of contextual information supporting the other reading, they interpret the sentence to mean that it was the football star, not the wife, who was outside the house. However, speakers of many other languages, including Spanish, normally choose the other interpretation when they hear or read the corresponding sentence in their own language. * This reflects the statistics of the language: corpus counts show that in English, a sequence consisting of a noun followed by a prepositional phrase and a relative clause is usually associated with the 'downstairs' interpretation, whereas the opposite is true in Spanish (Mitchell 1994: 398).
* I first became aware of this ambiguity, and the fact that there may be language-specific preferences in interpretation, when I was doing a Spanish language course as an undergraduate. One day, during a discussion about whether there was such a thing as true love, my teacher declared that El unico amor verdadero es el amor del dinero, y el amor del perro, que se compra ('The only true love is the love of money, and the love of a dog, which one buys'). I interpreted the relative clause as modifying the word dog, and dismissed the argument as completely irrelevant ('It doesn't matter whether you buy it or not, the important thing is that the dog loves you'), whereas my teacher obviously intended the other interpretation and insisted that you can't talk about true love if it (love, not the dog) is bought. It wasn't until after I left the class that I realised what he meant.
(Mitchell, D.C. (1994), 'Sentence parsing', in M.A. Gernsbacher (ed.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics, New York: Academic Press, pp.357-409).<<<
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Any Spanish speakers care to comment on the veracity of Dabrowska's comments? (Or, for that matter, any English speakers into relative clauses - e.g. I just noticed that the English example is "defining", but the Spanish one and its translation "non-defining"...).
Overall, though, I generally like the look of her book, and think it will be useful. She's considered a Cognitive linguist, and her interest in corpora, attested examples and frequency bodes well.
), you might like to compare your performance with "the least educated participants" in one of Dabrowska's own studies:
Louise persuaded her boss to be interviewed by Margaret, right?
); semanticists agonize over how words like "dog" actually mean dog in relation to, say, hamsters; and generative semanticists ended up being ignored by everybody. 
