Diver Snaps First Photo of Fish Using Tools | Hacker News Reader

Diver Snaps First Photo of Fish Using Tools

news.sciencemag.org

62 pointspwg18 comments

Off topic: the heading is one of those sentences in English that can have different parse trees[1] and it got me confused for a moment as to why this is news! It was a late realisation and I had to read the article to understand.

Any thoughts on how such sentences can be written in a better way?

    (wrong) Diver snaps first photo of fish, using tools
    Diver snaps first photo of (fish using tools)
    Diver snaps first photo of "fish using tools"
    Diver snaps first photo of a fish that uses tools

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_fruit...

This is a tough one. I think your last option is the best of your list, but still, it could be the photo that uses the tools.

I thought of "First photo of fish using tools snapped by diver". Then I realized that could be about tools that were snapped by the diver, and then used by the fish. Or maybe the photo used the tools.

I think what we really need to do, is add more words to make it clearer:

A fish using tools was snapped by a diver. This is the first such photo ever taken.

But even then, the correct parsing relies on the fact that "fish" is singular, while "tools" is plural. If it had been multiple fish, then, really, I'm not sure how we could say it.

Perhaps we need fewer words to make it clearer. I feel that "First" photo in the original title is a red herring. And not really something you can prove with ease. Maybe somebody else has taken just such a photo but never released it? Or has never realized it was a photo of a fish using a tool?

I suggest: "Tool-using fish photograped by diver."

Or that we find a new language to work in.

All good points.

Note, however, that, while "tool-using fish" is clear in writing, if you say it, you might mean that the tool uses the fish.

Another effort:

Fish uses tool. Diver photographs the fish.

Diver photographs fish, while fish uses tool.

And your efforts might imply that the photographs depict only the fish and not the tool or the tool use.

Diver photographs tool-use by fish?

The real source of the ambiguity here is the lack of what’s known as a complementizer [1]—such as the relative pronoun that—to delineate the relative clause boundary, as @xtacy implies with his last option. English happens to allow this slot in the syntactic tree to have no overt realization [2] [3], but when it goes unfilled with anything but trivial relative clauses it can introduce ambiguity.

As an aside, this particular sort of syntactic ambiguity happens to largely arise in the context of newspaper headlines—just as has happened here—since complementizers are generally dropped in telegraphese. These ambiguous sentences are so common that they have their own term: ‘crash blossoms’ [4].

Here are the two potential parse trees with an empty complementizer:

  1)   [Diver snaps [first photo [of [fish using [tools]]]]]
  2)   [Diver snaps [first photo [of [fish]]] using [tools]]

The incorrect parse is (2). In any event, disambiguating it is simple—just add an overt complementizer: ‘Diver snaps first photo of fish that’s using tools’. You can see why this disambiguates:

  3)   [Diver snaps [first photo [of [fish [that is [using [tools]]]]]]]
  4) * [Diver snaps [first photo [of [fish]]] that is using [tools]]

Here (4) is ungrammatical because in English snap isn’t a verb that accepts a clausal complement (unlike a verb such as, say, think or persuade), thus you don’t parse the sentence that way and (3) is the only possible interpretation. Cf. (5, 6): there’s nothing I can come up with to put in the relative clause that would make the sentence even remotely grammatical. My interpretation of (7) is that it’s marginally acceptable (perhaps in a specific context: ‘What do you snap with your camera?’ ‘Oh, I snap that flowers bloom.’) but snap in (7) is intransitive whereas the snap we’re discussing is transitive.

  5)   I think that Hiroki Narimiya is awesome.
  6) * I snap photos that flowers bloom.
  7) ? I snap that flowers bloom.

@ggchappell: The parse where the photo is the one using the tools (shown as (8) below) may from a purely tree-parsing standpoint be theoretically possible, but from an actual linguistic point of view I doubt you could typically elicit such an interpretation from an actual speaker. An actual syntactic distinction is often made in language between animacy and inanimacy [5]. In traditional syntactic theory, the verb use has an argument structure [6] requiring an agent; but since a photo is inanimate it’s not marked as an agent and thus cannot provide the verb with a subject, violating various hypothesized syntactic rules and making the parse unacceptable.

Compare (9) below, which is acceptable. The relative clause is passivized, and thus the subject of the clause (the photo) is the theme rather than the agent and there’s no problem.

  8) * [Diver snaps [first photo [of [fish]] [that is [using [tools]]]]]
  9)   [Diver snaps [first photo [of [fish]] [that can be developed]]]

See, I always knew that graduate degree in linguistics would come in handy for something!

###

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementizer

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_relative_clause

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta_role

You could 'cheat' and use passive voice. "First photo of fish using tools taken (snapped??) by diver" perhaps.

I took a high school journalism class (like 500 million years ago) and my recollection is that there are certain "rules" about how to write headlines that, unfortunately, tend to encourage these types of sentences. IIRC: The headlines need to be short, they are supposed to be in active voice to grab your attention, they are supposed to lead with a particular thing, they are supposed to be the shortest possible summary of what is important about the story....etc. And that's part of why these types of confusing headlines occur: Because grabbing your attention is more important than clear communication.

The last line you suggested is the one I would be inclined to write but it's too long, basically. And headlines generally want to avoid words like "a" and "that".

Anyone with journalism knowledge fresher than 500 million years ago who wants to update/correct my info? :-D

Thanks.

I think it would have been clearer without the first:

Diver snaps photo of fish using tools.

And/or

Diver snaps photo of tool-using fish.

(snap-photo diver, (use-tools fish))

> Tool use, once thought to be the distinctive hallmark of human intelligence, has been identified in a wide variety of animals in recent decades.

I don't get this. What would prompt a scientist to make such a claim, especially when something as simple as smashing an animal against a rock counts as tool use?

I was at the zoo watching a gorilla for 5 minutes and saw it repeatedly throw a stick into a tree to knock down leaves and eat them. I find it hard to believe that in the millennia of recorded observations of animals, that no one observed a single instance of rock-bashing or stick-throwing.

Edit: I can't find much information on wikipedia, but the article on tools ends with

> Now the unique relationship of humans with tools is considered to be that we are the only species that uses tools to make other tools

I guess until we find out we're not?

>I find it hard to believe that in the millennia of recorded observations of animals, that no one observed a single instance of rock-bashing or stick-throwing.

Pliny's Natural History, which every natural philosopher and biologist in the west up until the 18th century likely read, is full of observations of interesting and apparently more than instinctual animal behavior, including the use of stones by ravens to raise water level in a jug (the observation at the root of the well-known fable by Aesop).

Against the long tradition of seeing humans as in some essential way distinct from animals (by virtue of tool use, or speech, or reason, or compassion, and so on) there is a counter-tradition (from Empiricus to Montaigne) of denying the distinction, and that tradition has collected gobs of anecdotes and observations of apparent reason, communication and tool use).

That's awesome. Thanks for the background.

Perhaps 'once thought' here should be understood as meaning, 'once thought by children and laypeople, based on the simplifying just-so stories traditionally told them'.

For example, I 'once thought' tool use was uniquely human, having had that bit of folklore orally passed to me by some authority figure – or maybe even just another child; the provenance of one's first coarse understandings of the world is not always clear. The details get filled in later, if you're paying attention.

A popular/journalistic account can very easily confuse 'new to me' or 'new to laypeople' as if it indicated fresh discoveries.

Maybe it’s because humans are better at dealing with absolutes than matters of degree?

It’s true, tool use is a special property of humans. It’s not unique but it is special. Animals don’t commonly use tools, certainly not with the sophistication of humans. Tool use is one of those things that makes us different – combined with all the other things that make us different.

If you were to write a list of human properties you would definitely include tool use and it would even be pretty high up the list, as opposed to other properties that are much more common and boring (like, for example, live birth).

It’s easy to misinterpret what those properties actually mean, to turn them into unique properties. Sure, humans wouldn’t be humans without tool use, but that doesn’t mean that they must be the only ones using tools.

Does the fish have a 'tool'?? Definition of tool 'A device or implement, esp. one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function'. I'll give the fish a break because it doesn't have hands. But is a rock a 'device used to carry out a particular function'?

I'd argue that in this case, the rock isn't a tool. Lots of animals use their natural environment to their benefit. But I would think the fish would have to use the rock in an original way for it to be considered a 'tool'.

Since when did banging something against a rock count as tool use? Surely by that measurement any creature that scratches itself against a post or takes refuge under a tree is a tool user. Many creatures make nests - is that a tool?

If a fish was dropping a stone onto a clam I would accept it as a very primitive form of tool use. Just.

I think the most reasonable cutoff of what is tool-use is that tool-use must be learned, and not just instinctive. I think that excludes nest-making but includes all of the interesting things ravens do with rocks and sticks.

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