The volatility in foreign stock markets seems to have rattled the reporters and editors at the New York Times. Consider this passage from Heather Timmons and Wayne Arnold, "Asia Stocks Extend Losses", 3/5/2007:
Analysts in Europe said that the sale of risky assets will continue for some days but do not see this sell-off being the beginning of a recession.
There is still enough liquidity in the market and companies are still reporting higher profits for this to be more than a market correction, said one fund manager.
Unless I'm undercaffeinated this morning, what they wrote is the opposite of what the anonymous fund manager meant.
What they wrote (focusing on the first conjunct only) is that there's still enough liquidity in the market for this to be more than a market correction. That's backwards. What they should have written is that there's still too much liquidity in the market for this to be more than a market correction. Or, less hopefully, that there's still enough liquidity in the market for this to be less than a recession.
The logic here, as I understand it, goes like this: investors borrow investment funds by using their securities as collateral; when the prices of those securities fall, the collateral value is reduced, which reduces the amount of money available for investment and forces further sales; this may spiral into a negative feedback loop if it leads to further market decline and calls for higher lending margins, so that there's not enough money available to buy the securities offered for sale. The fund manager was trying to reassure us that this process isn't underway.
I expect that Timmons and Arnold know this better than I do. I certainly hope they do, given that I'm learning what little I know about the world's markets from people like them.
The amazing thing, I guess, is that hairless apes can even frame complicated distinctions like this one, and manage to express them correctly much of the time. We've often discussed the failures that involve overnegation. This morning's example doesn't involve any overt negatives, but it's an example of another kind of braino often also involved in over- and under-negations: misdirection in the interplay of scalar predications.
[Yes, there's another problem with the second conjunct -- extracted from the original, it says that "companies are still reporting higher profits for this to be more than a market correction". This obviously is supposed to mean something like "reported profits are still too high" (or maybe "too many companies are reported increased profits") for the market activity to be a recession rather than a correction. This isn't backwards, but it's ungrammatical as written, suggesting that the whole sentence was somehow mangled in the editing process.]
[Update -- either someone at the NYT read Language Log, or (more likely) re-read the article, because the cited sentence now reads:
There is still enough liquidity in the market, and companies are still reporting higher profits, so the stock slump is not likely to be more than a market correction, one fund manager said.
And just to keep things clear here, the point was not to play "grammar gotcha" with the NYT, but to add an example to the category of sentences involving confused relationships among scalar predicates.]
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 5, 2007 09:54 AM