French Verbs Research Articles

Combining formal concept analysis and translation to assign frames and semantic role sets to French verbs

In Natural Language Processing, verb classifications have been shown to be useful both theoretically (to capture syntactic and semantic generalisations about verbs) and practically (to support factorisation and the supervised learning of shallow semantic parsers). Acquiring such classifications manually is both costly and errror prone however. In this paper, we present a novel approach for automatically acquiring verb classifications. The approach uses FCA to build a concept lattice from existing linguistic resources; and stability and separation indices to extract from this lattice those concepts that most closely capture verb classes. The approach is evaluated on an established benchmark and shown to differ from previous approaches and in particular, from clustering approaches, in two main ways. First, it supports polysemy (because a verb may belong to several classes). Second, it naturally provides a syntactic and semantic characterisation of the verb classes produced (by creating concepts which systematically associate verbs with their syntactic and semantic attributes).

Semantic variations of the French verb voir and the discourse system in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Rigodon

Using Culioli’s Theory of Enunciative Operations and Notional Domains as its starting point, this paper presents a unified characterisation of the French verb voir and its variations. These variations are then related to its enunciative nuances. I argue that voir is used profusely by Céline in his last novel Rigodon and plays a significant role in the book’s discourse system. From the beginning of the narrative, voir appears as the core of a brilliant meta-narrative metaphor setting the tone and tying together the entire story. I conclude that, throughout the novel, different forms of this verb are either attributed to the narrator or to the main character (which are in fact both incarnations of the author himself). This strategy helps to enhance the sense of immediate presence in the narration and results in a permanent dialogue with the reader.

French–Dutch bilinguals do not maintain obligatory semantic distinctions: Evidence from placement verbs

It is often said that bilinguals are not the sum of two monolinguals but that bilingual systems represent a third pattern. This study explores the exact nature of this pattern. We ask whether there is evidence of a merged system when one language makes an obligatory distinction that the other one does not, namely in the case of placement verbs in French and Dutch, and whether such a merged system is realised as a more general or a more specific system. The results show that in elicited descriptions Belgian French–Dutch bilinguals do not maintain two distinct categories in one of the languages, resulting in a more general semantic system in comparison with the non-contact variety. They do not uphold the obligatory distinction in the verb nor elsewhere despite its communicative relevance. This raises important questions regarding how widespread these differences are and what drives these patterns.

Have you seen what I mean?

The aim of this contribution is to investigate, by means of a diachronic multi-genre corpus-based approach (Academic, Narrative, and Present-day Spoken French), whether the historical functional shift from the propositional domain to the causal/pragmatic domain of linguistic expressions correlates with their semantic shift from primarily conceptual to primarily procedural content. Our analysis concentrates on two discourse markers derived from the French verb voir (‘to see’), namely vu que (‘since’), and on a/nous avons vu que (‘we have seen that’). Our initial hypothesis was that both markers result from an (ongoing) “proceduralisation” process which found its source in the polysemous conceptual meaning of the verb voir, viz. perceptive and cognitive meaning. Our results show that this hypothesis needs a more qualified perspective on linguistic change leading us to approach the “proceduralisation” process in terms of gradualness rather than polarity, and to broaden the field of grammaticalisation to non-linguistic criteria such as the “stylistic” parameter.

The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330

This groundbreaking book develops medieval musicology from the perspective of historical cultural studies. Plucking medieval song from its traditional disciplinary shrine, Emma Dillon inserts it into a medieval soundscape reconstructed from literary and art-historical sources. Music is situated rather than haloed; and while its sonority may be intensified in the process, it can also be complicated and contested by dissonant or distracting noises. Indeed, song becomes its own source of dissonance and distraction as the sense of the sung text(s) is subordinated to the sonority of a pre- or non-linguistic surge of sound. Characteristic of the musical period on which Dillon focuses is the polyphonic motet, instances of which are discussed regularly throughout her exposition. Motets have been the object of exquisite dissection, but (following the work of Christopher Page) Dillon encourages us to see them not only as complexly performed texts, or sets of texts in meaningful tension, but also as soundscapes that make competing and sometimes incompatible claims on the listener's ear. This superabundance of musical sound into which individual melody and text both fold she felicitously calls ‘supermusicality’, a term that is reiterated and refined as her study advances from vernacular works that evoke the sounds of the city or court (Chapters 1–4) through to works of private devotion and prayer (5–9). One of the strengths of this book is the way it shows how complex sonorities bind together realms traditionally thought of as distinct. In the main her listening is guided by a kind of homespun phenomenology (‘Let's walk’, ‘Let's listen’, ‘Imagine … ’) and by faith in the many ‘witnesses’ that the past provides to its practices, but a theoretical steer to the resources of supermusicality is imparted by Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, or ‘the primacy of context over text’ (p. 46). The exuberance of Bakhtinian discursivity readily translates into the hubbub of medieval street cries, the ruckus of charivari, or the ravings of the dervé in Adam de la Halle's Jeu de la feuillée, and helps capture the subversive energy of marginal images in devotional books. Despite this being an illuminating study of an important period of French culture, the book's main weakness is its French. Although Dillon references some francophone critical writings, she is much more reliant on anglophone scholarship, and, except when the medieval texts she quotes have been reliably translated by others, her renderings are at best approximate, at worst plain wrong. Especially in Chapters 2 and 3, Middle French verb forms are translated seemingly at random, and expressions are misconstrued to an extent that is hair-raising in a work that OUP has presumably subjected to rigorous external and internal vetting. Dillon's engaging subordination of sense to sound is impressive; her book's cavalier treatment of the sense of French texts is not.

Three Verbs in a Boat: Conflation in Anglo-Norman Lexis and Lexicography

The cluster of medieval French and Anglo-Norman verbs vaguer, vagrer, and waucrer, all with a tie to sea-faring, are disambiguated semantically and discrete etymologies are identified. Literary passage where they figure, including a key scene in the Tristan romance, are reinterpreted in the light of these findings.

Relevance verbs in English and French: Synonymy and its structural properties

This study deals with a particular group of predicates called predicates/verbs of or predicates/verbs of indifference in the literature. Its purpose is to investigate to what extent verbs of this particular group present common structural properties. It therefore seeks to establish the structural manifestations of synonymy. These structural manifestations are not to be found in argument-function mapping a la Levin (1993), but rather in polarity, decategorialization and sentence structure. Corpus data reveal that syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact in particular ways in the field of relevance. This interaction appears to be grounded in pragmatic constraints arising from the principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986). The basic idea is that, as relevance is presupposed in human communication and need not be expressed, verbs of relevance are more likely to be used with negative than with positive polarity. Used with positive polarity, they tend to occur in sentence forms that present them as strongly presupposed. Used with negative polarity, they are more likely to occur in the focal area of the sentence. As statements about relevance express speaker's points of view, relevance verbs are also markers of intersubjectivity and are therefore subject to grammaticalization phenomena, such as the omission of prepositions.

Using the French Tutor Multimedia Package or a Textbook to Teach Two French Past Tense Verbs

This paper examines the difference in learning outcomes between two groups of students, one of which used the French Tutor, a multimedia package, and the other a textbook to learn the formation and use of two French past tense verbs: the perfect and the imperfect. Unlike the textbook, the French Tutor included visual effects, intelligent feedback, drag-and-drop exercises, a variety of exercises of graduated difficulty, and the game "Who wants to be a millionaire?" Both groups of students were administered a pre- and posttest on the formation and use of these two verb tenses. The French Tutor group performed significantly better than the textbook group. A questionnaire asking for comments on the effectiveness of the French Tutor software was also given to the French Tutor group. All students acknowledged that the French Tutor software helped them acquire a better understanding of these two tenses and reported that the features that contributed most to their understanding were the exercises and the "Who wants to be a millionaire?" game. Discussion of the results follows, and suggestions are made for further research.

FRENCH VERBS IN CONTEXT

This article describes an intermediate level verb program for IBM compatibles. The content of the program is based on the most common difficulties encountered by students in third semester college French courses. It is not text-specific. The exercises are designed to encourage both reflection on appropriate verb forms, and precision in typing-in forms required. The introductions to each of the five lessons are based on recent research in French verb morphosyntax. "Little Red Riding Hood" is the context for most of the exercises, and each lesson provides a version of the story that focuses on the structures of that lesson. The basic storyline is a composite of three recordings made in France by native speakers between 1980 and 11981. Lesson one deals with the present tense of 16 morphologically and syntactically interesting verbs, lesson two with the prepositions preceding an infinitival complement, lesson three with hypothetical structures, lesson four with the past tense in narration and discourse, and lesson five with the future — as viewed from the past or the present. The goal of the program is to provide students with verb practice within a familiar and interesting context.

Apercevoir, perceptio i perception: Декарт перед проблемою самоперекладу

The paper explains the contextual discrepancy between the grammatically related terms apercevoir/percevoir/percipere, aperception/perception, as well as perceptio/perception in French philosophical vocabulary of the mid-17th century. Bilingual Descartes’s philosophy is a peculiar testing area for changing the traditional meanings of these terms. In the Latin texts of Cartesius the word percipere and the noun perceptio denote, correspondingly, the process and the result of perception. However, the difficulty appeared during the preparation of the French texts of Descartes’s Latin works, since percevoir/perception, the natural French corres-pondents for percipere/perceptio, did not have the epistemological connotations and denoted «getting, collecting» (money, taxes etc.). Therefore Descartes chose for situational correspondents of percipere a number of French verbs with similar meaning (concevoir, connaitre etc), sometimes apercevoir («notice») and never percevoir. For the noun perceptio he selected no-tion, connaissance and very rarely perception in the new epistemological meaning «percep-tion», which was pretty difficult to comprehend for the French-speaking milieu of those days. As to the term aperception, it is totally artificial, and it was suggested by Leibniz in 1714 in order to denote the act of conscious perception. References AUGUSTIN, Saint Les Confessions / introd. et notes par Joseph Trabucco; texte latin et trad. fr., Garnier freres, 1938, 2 vol. DESCARTES Rene, OEuvres, ed. C. Adam et P. Tannery, 11 vol., reed. Vrin, 1996. LEIBNIZ Gottfried Wilhelm, Discours de metaphysique, suivi de Monadologie et autres textes, ed. etablie, presentee et annotee par Michel Fichant, Gallimard, 2004.

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject

This essay introduces the reader to Jean-Luc Nancy's writing on listening, by focusing on his use of two French verbs that both mean ‘to listen’, namely entendre and écouter. By playing close attention to way that Nancy differentiates these verbs, and the historical context in which they have played a role, one discovers an entryway into Nancy's challenging thinking about sound, sense, and subjectivity. Écouter and entendre are discussed in relation to the phenomenological theories of listening of Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer emphasizes entendre, which is etymologically related to word intentionality, as the privileged mode of listening to the sound object, an intentional object, whose sense is grounded on the closed reference back to the listening subject. Nancy critiques this mode of listening—and the implicit subject posited—by emphasizing écouter, which holds open the threshold between sense and signification. Listening reveals sound as a structure of resonance—an infinite sending and resending. Nancy's analyses also reveal that resonance is the structure of the subject and of sense.

The temporal dynamics of inflected word recognition: A masked ERP priming study of French verbs

Morphological aspects of human language processing have been suggested by some to be reducible to the combination of orthographic and semantic effects, while others propose that morphological structure is represented separately from semantics and orthography and involves distinct neuro-cognitive processing mechanisms. Here we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate semantic, morphological and formal (orthographic) processing conjointly in a masked priming paradigm. We directly compared morphological to both semantic and formal/orthographic priming (shared letters) on verbs. Masked priming was used to reduce strategic effects related to prime perception and to suppress semantic priming effects. The three types of priming led to distinct ERP and behavioral patterns: semantic priming was not found, while formal and morphological priming resulted in diverging ERP patterns. These results are consistent with models of lexical processing that make reference to morphological structure. We discuss how they fit in with the existing literature and how unresolved issues could be addressed in further studies.

Une analyse en miroir de deux semi-copules évidentielles : s’avérer et se révéler

This paper offers a corpus-based study of two evidential (semi-)copular verbs in French. It deals with their degree of synonymy and the extent to which they are grammaticalized as semi-copulas. First, the study of subcategorization and semantic restrictions of both the direct and indirect (marked) construction with comme, completed by the careful scrutiny of contextual elements, shows that both verbs exhibit slight meaning differences with respect to the inferential process involved in the encoding of indirect inferential evidentiality (Willet 1988) : “results” (se révéler) vs “reasoning” (s’avérer). Second, both verbs fit quite well in the paradigm of copular verbs, although s’avérer seems slightly more ‘transparent’, that means less selective. Crucially, the uses of se révéler with nominal predicates quite often exhibit lexical persistence, while in the adjectival domain both verbs are almost twins as shown by a distinctive collexeme analysis.

So Close and Other Essays: On Hélène Cixous’s writing

So Close and Other EssaysOn Hélène Cixous’s writing Joana Masó ce n’est jamaispar l’intérieurni par le centreque je passe —Antonin Artaud, Cahiers d’Ivry, (1947–1948) At the end of the sixteenth century, the genre of the essay transformed the relationship between the subject and object of writing, since the essay emerged as a reaction against other literary forms—such as the commentary, the gloss or the treatise—in which the object of study is not problematized. The gloss, the commentary, or the treatise deal with disciplines or thematic topics—astronomy, agronomy, theology, physics, history—in the proper sense, whereas the essay tends to focus on the approach to those issues. To put it differently, the essay is not strictly concerned with these issues or topics in themselves, but with the approach to them by means of writing. With Michel de Montaigne, specifically in his Essays published between 1580 and 1595, we are faced with writing where the knowledge of the object is no longer the sole center of the text. Despite being actually concerned with the Greek philosophical tradition, sixteenth-century religious wars, and, among many other topics, European colonialism in America, Montaigne’s Essays try to contest the privilege of the object, the privilege of the referent of writing, in [End Page 131] favor of its subject: the subject of writing and the writing itself, what we call in French une écriture de soi. As is well known, in his Essays Montaigne’s writing conveys neither message nor knowledge regarding things and topics, but what he calls “la continuelle mutation et branle” des êtres [“nostre estre”] et des objects [“ des objects”]: “the continual and perpetual mutation” of “beings” and “objects” (257). This epistemological crisis of the essay—abandoning the privilege of the object or theme for an emphasis on questioning the subject of writing and the modalities of the approach to the object—is explicit in the etymology of the word essay. Beyond the notion of attempt—in French, essayer means “to try,” “to attempt to do something”—essayer, from the Latin verb ex-agere, is a compound word of the verb agere, “to act,” in French agir. In Latin, the meaning of agere—“to act”—differs from facere, as agir does in French from faire, “to do”; it is in this way that these two verbs designate a different relationship between the subject and the object of the action. Although agere and facere both refer to action, the verb agere at the origin of the word essay designates an action accomplished by a subject, whereas facere is a transitive verb whose emphasis is placed on the object. While, on the one hand, facere is to be read in the register of transitivity—as is explicit in the following Latin phrases: facere litteram, “to write a letter,” or facere furtum, “to commit theft”—on the other hand, agere, although a transitive verb in Latin, underscores and anticipates the kind of intransitivity of action we will later find in Roman languages. In these Latin phrases, one can see that in Latin, at the same time that, the syntactic construction of agere requires an object, this object is not, strictly speaking, the real object produced by the verb, because in the phrases agere vitam, agere aetatem, or agere aevum, “to spend time or to live,” time is not the real object produced by the verb “to spend.” In Latin, “life,” vitam, “age,” aetatem, or “lifetime,” aevum, are not the real objects produced by the verb agere. This perhaps explains the evolution of the verb in French, or in English, where “to act” and agir have become intransitive verbs, reinforcing the idea that the essay appears to be a genre where whatever has to be done or said is not simply presented as an object. Moreover, instead of the conclusive verb facere, which designates the action as a result or an achievement—the letter is already written, or the theft is already commited—the temporality of agere, in Latin, is a durative one, as in the phrases agere vitam, aetatem, or aevum, “to live.” By its emphasis, not on the object...

Phonological aspects of the integration of Romance loans in English

English lexemes containing intrusive nasal consonants mostly have a difficult origin in common. In what follows (part I), the relevant word material will be ordered according to its phonological structure. In principle we follow the ordering of Gustav Muthmann’s Reverse English Dictionary. Based on Phonological and Morphological Principles of 2002. In cases such as jig v. and its frequentative jiggle v., paralleled by most probably related and nearly synonymous jog v. and its frequentative joggle v., the attested forms are not only rare but also late. Therefore, we have been constrained to base some etymologies on roots, mostly of imitative origin. In part II, some French loan verbs, which show unusual retention of Old French -er/-re in Middle English, will be examined.

From IGT to precision grammar: French verbal morphology

No abstract.

Plant → animal → book: Magnifying a microhistory of media circuits

In his Anatomy of Plants (1682), Royal Society Fellow Nehemiah Grew writes: ‘So that a Plant is, as it were, an Animal in Quires; as an Animal is a Plant, or rather several Plants bound up into one Volume.’ Zooming in on the circuit of metaphors packed into this sentence, this essay explores: (a) how medieval zoophytes – marvels like the vegetable lamb and the barnacle goose tree – spurred early modern experiments in comparative anatomy (‘a Plant is, as it were, an Animal … as an Animal is a Plant’), and (b) how bibliographic tropes came to mediate these plant–animal comparisons (‘an Animal in Quires … or rather several Plants bound up into one Volume’). As I argue, not only the affordances of print culture but the book as a material object gave structure to the study of life in the seventeenth century, transforming the medieval ‘book of nature’ device into an actual printed book.‘Plant → animal → book’ has an accompanying ‘digital essay’ ( www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v3/n1/plantanimalbook/ ). The noun ‘essay’ derives from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt and to experiment. First used in English by Francis Bacon – and fittingly so, given the subject of this project – early modern ‘essays’ tested the limits of genre by gathering aphorisms culled from commonplace books into thematically cohesive writing. By adventuring into the digital realm, ‘Plant → animal → book’ moves to reclaim this earlier, more experimental sense of the essay's potential as a form. It is primarily a work of history (histories, more likely), and as such attempts to excavate concepts – such as ‘plant,’ ‘animal’ and ‘book’ – which have fossilized with the passing of time. Yet it also essays an awareness of its own mediation, inviting readers to share in the exegetical fever of archival discovery that inspired it.

Enchantment in an Age of Occupy

Occupy Wall Street enchants. It preoccupies one's attention. occupy is dwell in something, inhabit it. I am absorbed by question of how inhabit enchantingly this planet one calls home in an age of occupy everything.To enchant, as Jane Bennett (2001) reminds one, has a French connection verb ckanttr, to (OED [www.oed.com.ezproxy.hws. edu:2048]). Singing sounds may move one, whether in poetry or music; sing out is also cry out about something (to sing differently) or tell of something. The stream along which one may be carried, borrow Bennett's phrase, points in other directions as well: an appeal, for example, as in singing for one's supper, and assemblages of people, as in chant, a musical repetition, an embodying and occupying gesture. Chants are often measured, unhurried, recitative and rhythmic performances. Chants are resonant dwelling spaces.But how think through enchanting effects of sonorous streams, what one might call, invoke William James, varieties of enchanting experiences? How does enchantment relate protest? occupy movements and practices? matters of being, becoming, and bemingling? These questions prove struggle. colleagues and friends alike, question of enchantment circles back without delay need for some form of enchantment in today's need for, as one colleague put it, vocabularies of enchantment.1 This essay concerns itself with enchantment's range of expressive forms and techniques in today's preoccupation with dwelling and inhabiting spaces and places, with forms and articulations of being and becoming, of a resonant ontology.To inquire into enchantment's expressive forms is raise what Arundhati Roy (201 1 ) said of Occupy Wall Street at People's University's having, in span of a few months in fall of 201 1, introduce [d] ... a new political language into heart of empire - the dream in a system that tried turn everybody into zombies . . . mesmerized into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfillment. Talk of right dream, of activist resonances across globe, of, borrow Landy and Saler s words, for re- discovering at-homeness in world, inclusive of wonder and infinite is talk of enchantment (2009, 11). In a curious resound with occupy movements, first chapter of their edited book on reenchantment opens by asking, Where and how do we dwell?To dwell or inhabit world finds a parallel place of inquiry in Robert Pogue Harrison's turn gardens' effect reenchant present (2008, 39). strategies of reenchantment, then, Harrison adds the gardener's vocation of care, or practices of cultivation. Gardens, he writes, give order our relation nature. It is our relation nature that defines tension at center of which stands not only garden but human polis as such (48). He continues: To say that transitory gardens of New York are speech acts means that they speak, in a public nonverbal mode, of human need make ourselves at home on earth that does not necessarily make room for (48).To make room is a political act, as Virginia Woolf reminds us. Conjuring up Judith Shakespeare - sister William Shakespeare - who dies young, poor, and without writing a word, Woolf puts before readers power of imaginary as a power of history making. grant Judith a continuing presence in need only of the opportunity walk among us in flesh, is possible, says Woolf, if we have habit of freedom and courage write, draw life lives of unknown who were her fore-runners ([1925] 2005, 1 12). Woolf s writing is all about movement - physical and mental - made apparent, transits of body and mind traced as a practice of street haunting (see Woolf [1930] 1942); that is, act of walking is one course of expression egging along other sonorous streams liberate ordinary worlds from convention's hold. …

Une approche syntaxique et lexicale des verbes pronominaux

This Construction grammar approach to French refl exive verbs describes the formal and semantic constraints at work in the different refl exive constructions, points out at their different branches of inheritance and shows cases of fusion with other argument structures. The article suggests a family tree of French reflexive constructions which appear to be derived from different transitive constructions. It also deals with how the reflexive argument structure modifies the semantics of the transitive verb used in reflexive construction.

Unfunny

Unfunny David Susman (bio) I was, for much of my life, funny. More than funny. I was a card, a hoot. I could genuinely crack people up. And it wasn’t a desperate kind of humor, either. I didn’t urge my funniness on others the way some people do, constantly nagging their friends with jokes like a party host who insists that you try the clam dip. No, I was low-key, patient. But whenever a situation called for humor, I could absolutely deliver. I had wit and precision and timing—the whole package. I had moments of excellence. Once, at a social event, I found myself cornered by a financial-services professional, a real windbag, who had a theory that the world’s great thinkers were all crypto-capitalists. Socrates, Descartes, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Emerson—they all believed in the supremacy of money, he insisted. “Do you know what Thoreau would say if he were alive today?” he asked. And with no forethought whatsoever, I arched an eyebrow and responded, “‘Most men lead lives of quiet depreciation’?” The delivery, you understand, was perfect—dry and restrained. It was one of those moments that matter, if you’re someone who likes being funny. At such moments, everything is effortless and right. Being funny feels easier than not being funny. Your swing is as pure as DiMaggio’s. I’m not very funny lately, which is not to say that I won’t be funny again one day. But right now I’m experiencing what Saint John of the Cross, if he’d had a different set of priorities, might have called the Unfunny Night of the Soul. Funniness won’t come. I can offer up a clever remark every now and then, but it feels too deliberate, too methodical. It requires effort, like conjugating French verbs. And since humor has everything to do with spontaneity—since a genuinely funny moment is always created suddenly, miraculously, like a [End Page 23] particle of antimatter—it’s not fair to count the carefully practiced lines. The fact is, I’m empty. The cause of my drought, or at least the thing that inaugurated it, is The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest. I don’t know whether other funny people have been undone by this weekly feature, but its effect on me has been devastating. Every Tuesday, I turn to the back of the magazine, survey the new cartoon-sans-caption, and try to fill in the blank; that is, I try, like thousands of other readers, to create the line that belongs there, the quip that seems not just funny but inevitable, a kind of Platonic reconciliation of picture and words. The cartoons are usually wacky—say, a man walks into a bar with a duck on his head, or a defendant stands before a courtroom judge wearing only scuba gear—but the challenge is to create a caption that is as urbane as the magazine itself. (Other publications, like the un-urbane Parade magazine, have cribbed the fill-in-the-caption idea, but they seem to be looking for lines that are merely funny, not celebratory of what’s funny, not rooted in an ideology of funniness. In other words, they’ll settle for gags.) I approach each week’s cartoon carefully, reverently, marshalling my wittiest energies; I stare at the cartoon for tens of minutes, almost without blinking, like a superhero trying to engage his X-ray vision. But alarmingly—absurdly!—I come up with nothing. Or worse: I create great heaps of unfunniness, captions that might be described as humor byproduct, the spent fuel rods of humor. I become convinced, finally, of the impossibility of the whole project. Really, what can a bartender say to a man with a duck on his head? The question starts to seem more like a Zen koan than an actual problem to be solved. Desperate to salvage the experience, I offer the poor bartender the only words I can think of (“Wow—you have a duck on your head!”), submit them, and mourn my lost talent. I have, of course, spent time trying to understand my failings. At one point, I gave...