Edward Gibson: belief

Transcript context

…I have some theories. Our best theory at the moment is that there’s actually some kind of a performative meaning in the center embedding and the style, which tells you it’s legalese. We think that that’s the kind of a style which tells you it’s legalese, it’s a reasonable guess. And maybe it’s just, so for instance, it’s like a magic spell. We kind of call this the magic spell hypothesis. When you tell someone to put a magic spell on someone, what do you do? People know what a magic spell is and they do a lot of rhyming. That’s kind of what people will tend to do. They’ll do rhyming and they’ll do some kind of poetry kind of thing. Abracadabra type of thing.…

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