Idealizations gone wild

Generative grammar and information theory are products of the US post-war defense science funding boom, and it is no surprise that the former attempted to incorporate insights from the latter. Many early ideas in generative phonology—segment structure and morpheme structure rules and constraints (Stanley 1967), the notion of the evaluation metric (Aspects, §6), early debates on opacities, conspiracies, and the alternation condition—are clearly influenced by information theory. It is interesting to note that as early as 1975, Morris Halle regarded his substantial efforts in this area to have been a failure.

In the 1950’s I spent considerable time and energy on attempts to apply concepts of information theory to phonology. In retrospect, these efforts appear to me to have come to naught. For instance, my elaborate computations of the information content in bits of the different phonemes of Russian (Cherry, Halle & Jakobson 1953) have been, as far as I know, of absolutely no use to anyone working on problems in linguistics. And today the same negative conclusion appears to be to be warranted about all my other efforts to make use of information theory in linguistics. (Halle 1975: 532)

Thus, the mania for information theory in early generative grammar—was exactly the sort of bandwagon effect of the sort Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory, warned about decades earlier.

In the first place, workers in other fields should realize that the basic results of the subject are aimed at a very specific direction, a direction that is not necessarily relevant to such fields as psychology, economics, and other social sciences. (Shannon 1956)

Today, however, information theory is not exactly in disrepute in linguistics. First off, perplexity, a metric derived from information theory, is used as an intrinsic metric in certain natural language processing tasks, particularly language modeling.1 Secondly, there have been attempts to revive information theory notions as an explanatory factor in the study of phonology (e.g., Goldsmith & Riggle 2012) and human morphological processing (e.g., Moscoso del Prado Martı́n et al. 2004). And recently, Mollica & Piantadosi (2019; henceforth M&P) dare to use information theory to measure the size of the grammar of English.

M&P’s program is fundamentally one of idealization. Now, I don’t have any problem per se with idealization. Idealization is an important part of the epistemic process in science, one without which there can be no scientific observation at all. Critics of idealizations (and of idealization itself) are usually concerned with the things an idealization abstracts away from; for instance, critics of Chomsky’s famous “ideal speaker-listener” (Aspects, p. 3f) note correctly that it ignores bilingual interference, working memory limitations, and random errors. But idealizations are not merely the infinitude of variables they choose to ignore (and when the object of study is an enormously complex polysensory, multifactorial system like the human capacity for language, one is simply not going to be able to study the entire system all at once); they are just as much defined by the factors they foreground and the affordances they create, and the constraints they impose on scientific inquiry.

In this case, an information theoretic characterization of grammars constrains us to conceive of our knowledge of language in terms of probability distributions. This is a step I am often uncomfortable with. It is, for example, certainly possible to conceive of speakers’s lexical knowledge as a sort of probability distribution over lexical items, but I am not sure that P(word) has much grammatical work to do except act as a model of the readily apparent observation that more frequent words can be recalled and recognized more rapidly than rare words. To be sure, studies like the aforementioned one by Moscoso del Prado Martı́n et al. attempt to connect information theoretic characterizations of the lexicon to behavioral results, but these studies are correlational and provide little in the way of mechanistic-causal explanation.

However, for sake of argument, let us assume that the probabilistic characterization of grammatical knowledge is coherent. Why then should it be undertaken? M&P claim that the measurements they will allow—grammar sizes, measured in bits—weigh on an familiar debate. As they frame it:

…is the amount of information about language that is learned substantial (empiricism) or minimal (nativism)?

I don’t accept the terms of this debate. While I consider myself a nativist, I have formed no opinions about how many bits it takes to represent the grammar of English, which is by all accounts a rather complex object. The tradeoff between what is to be learned and what is innate is something that has been given extensive consideration in the nativist literature. Nativists recognize that the less there is to be learned, the more that has to have evolved in the rather short amount of time (in evolutionary terms) since we humans split off from our language-lacking primate cousins. But this tradeoff is strictly qualitative; were it possible to satisfactorily measure both evolutionary plausibility and grammar size, they would still be incommensurate quantities.

M&P proceed by computing the number of bits for various linguistic subsystems. They compute the information associated with phonemes (really, the acoustic cues to various features), the phonemic representation of wordforms, lexical semantics (mappings from words to meanings, here represented as a vector space as is the fashion), word frequency, and finally syntax. For each of these they provide lower bounds and upper bounds, though the upper bounds are in some cases constructed by adding an ad-hoc factor-of-two error to the lower bound. Finally, they sum these quantities, giving an estimate of roughly 1.5 megabytes. This M&P consider to be substantial. It is not at all clear why they feel this is the case, or how small a grammar would have to be to be “minimal”.

There is a lot to complain about in the details of M&P’s operationalizations. First, I am not certain that the systems they have identified are well-defined modules that would be recognizable to working linguists; for instance their phonemes module has next to nothing to do with my conception of phonological grammar. Secondly, it seems to me that by summing the bits needed to characterize each module, they are assuming a sort of “feed-forward”, non-interactive relationship between these components, and it is not clear that this is correct; for example, there are well-understood lexico-semantic constraints on verbs’ argument structure.

While I do not wish to go too far afield, it may be useful to consider in more detail their operationalization of syntax. For this module, they use a corpus of textbook example sentences, then compute the number of possible unlabeled binary branching trees that would cover each example. (This quantity is the same as the nth Catalan number.) To turn this into a probability, they assume that one correct parse has been sampled from a uniform distribution over all possible binary trees for the given sentence. First, this assumption of uniformitivity is completely unmotivated. Secondly, since they assume there’s exactly one possible bracketing, and do not provide labels to non-terminals, they have no way of representing the ambiguity of sentences like Call John an ambulance. (Thanks to Brooke Larson for suggesting this example.) Anyone familiar with syntax will have no problem finding gaping faults with this operationalization.2

M&P justify all this hastiness by comparing their work to the informal estimation approach known as a Fermi problem (they call them “Fermi calculations”). In the original framing, the quantity being estimated is the product of many terms, so assuming errors in estimation of each term are independent, the final estimate’s error is expected to grow logarithmically as the number of terms increases (roughly, this is because the logarithm of a product is equal to the sum of the logarithms of its terms). But in M&P’s case, the quantity being estimated is a sum, so the error will grow much faster, i.e., linearly as a function of the number of terms. Perhaps, as one reviewer writes, “you have to start somewhere”. But do we? If something is not worth doing well—and I would submit that measuring grammars, in all their richness, by comparing them to the storage capacity of obsolete magnetic storage media is one such thing—it seems to me to be not worth doing at all.

Footnotes

  1. Though not without criticism; in speech recognition, probably the most important application of language modeling, it is well-known that decreases in perplexity don’t necessarily give rise to decreases in word error rate.
  2. Why do M&P choose such a degenerate version of syntax? Because syntactic theory is “experimentally under-determined”, so they want to be “independent as possible from the specific syntactic formalism.”

References

Cherry, E. C., Halle, M., and Jakobson, R. 1953. Towards the logical description of languages in their phonemic aspect. Language 29(1): 34-46.
Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects in the theory of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Goldsmith, J. and Riggle, J. 2012. Information theoretic approaches to phonology: the case of Finnish vowel harmony. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30(3): 859-896.
Halle, M. 1975. Confessio grammatici. Language 51(3): 525-535.
Mollica, F. and Piantadosi, S. P. 2019. Humans store about 1.5 megabytes of information during language acquisition. Royal Society Open Science 6: 181393.
Moscoso del Prado Martı́n, F., Kostić, A., and Baayen, R. H. 2004. Putting the bits together: an information theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition 94(1): 1-18.
Shannon, C. E. 1956. The bandwagon. IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2(1): 3.
Stanley, R. 1967. Redundancy rules in phonology. Language 43(2): 393-436.

Elizabeth Warren and the morality of the professional class

I am surprised by the outpouring of grief engendered by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the presidential primary among my professional friends and colleagues. I dare not tell them how they ought to feel, but the spectacle of grief makes me wonder whether my friends are selling themselves short: virtually all of them have lived, in my opinion, far more virtuous lives than the senator from Massachusetts.

First off, none of them have spent most of their professional lives as right-wing activists, as did Warren, a proud Republican until the late ’90s. As recently as 1991, Warren gave a keynote at a meeting of the Federalist Society, the shadowy anti-choice legal organization that gave us Justice Brett Kavanaugh and so many other young ultra-conservative judicial appointees.

Secondly, Warren spent decades lying about her Cherokee heritage, presumably for nothing more than professional gain. This is a stunningly racist personal behavior, one that greatly reinforces white supremacy by equating the almost-unimaginable struggles of indigenous peoples with plagiarized recipes and “high cheekbones”. Were any of my friends or colleagues caught lying so blatantly on a job application, they would likely be subject to immediate termination. It is shocking that Warren has not faced greater  professional repercussions for this lapse in judgment.

Warren’s more recent history of regulatory tinkering around the most predatory elements of US capitalism, while important, are hardly an appropriate penance for these two monumental personal-professional sins.

On the not-exactly-libfixes

In an early post I noted the existence of libfix-like elements where the newly liberated affix mirrors existing—though possibly semantically opaque—morphological boundaries. The example I gave was that of -giving, as in Spanksgiving and Friendsgiving. Clearly, this comes from Thanksgiving, which is etymologically (if not also synchronically) a compound of the plural noun Thanks and the gerund/progressive giving. It seems some morphological innovation has occurred because this gives rise to new coinages and the semantics of -giving is more circumscribed than the free stem giving: it necessarily refers to a harvest-time holiday, not merely to “giving”.

At the time I speculated that it was no accident that the morphological boundaries of the new libfix mimic those of the compound. Other examples I have since collected include –mare (< nightmare; e.g., writemare, editmare); –core (< hardcore; e.g., nerdcore, speedcore) and –step (< two-step; e.g., breakstep, dubstep), both of which refer to musical genres (Zimmer & Carson 2012); –gate (< Watergate; e.g., Climategate, Nipplegate, Troopergate) and –stock (< Woodstock; e.g., Madstock, Calstock), extracted from familiar toponyms, and –position (< exposition; e.g., sexposition, craposition), for which the most likely source can be analyzed as a Latinate “level 1” prefix attached to a bound stem. So, what do we think? Are these libfixes too? Does it matter that recutting mirrors the etymological—or even synchronic—segmentation of the source word?

References

B. Zimmer and C. E. Carson. 2012. Among the new words. American Speech 87(3): 350-368.

tfw it’s not prescriptivism

I think it would be nice to have a term that allowed us to distinguish between politely asking that we preserve existing useful lexical distinctions (such as between terrorism ‘non-state violence against civilians intended to delegitimize the state’ and terms like atrocities or war crimes, between selfie ‘photo self-portrait’ and photo portrait), and full-blown ideologically-driven prescriptivism. I do not have a proposal for what this term ought to be.

Libfix report for December 2019

A while ago I acquired a dictionary of English blends (Thurner 1993), and today I went through it looking for candidate libfixes I hadn’t yet recorded. Here are a few I found. From burlesque, we have –lesque, used to form both boylesque and girlesque. The kumquat gives rise to –quat. This is used in two (literal) hybrid fruits: citrangequat and limequat. From melancholy comes –choly, used to build solemncholy ‘a solemn or serious mood’ and the unglossable lemoncholy. From safari there is –fari, used to build seafari, surfari, and even snowfari. Documentary has given rise to –mentary, as in mockumentary and rockumentary.

An interesting case is that of –stache. While stache is a common clipping of mustache, it is commonly used as an affix as well, as in liquid-based beerstache and milkstache and the pejorative fuckstache and fuzzstache.

I also found a number of libfix-like elements that can plausibly be analyzed as affixes rather than cases of “liberation”. Some examples are –eteer (blacketeer, stocketeer), –legger (booklegger, meatlegger), and –logue (duologue, pianologue, travelogue). I do not think these are properly defined as libfixes (they are a bit like -giving) but I could be wrong.

References

D. Thurner (1993). The Portmanteau Dictionary: Blend Words in the English Language, Including Trademarks and Brand Names. MacFarland & Co.

A theory of error analysis

Manual error analyses can help to identify the strengths and weaknesses of computational systems, ultimately suggesting future improvements and guiding development. However, they are often treated as an afterthought or neglected altogether. In three of my recent papers, we have been slowly developing what might be called a theory of error analysis. The systems evaluated include:

  • number normalization (Gorman & Sproat 2016); e.g., mapping 97000 onto quatre vingt dix sept mille,
  • inflection generation (Gorman et al. 2019); e.g., mapping pairs citation form and inflectional specification like (aufbauen, V;IND;PRS;2) onto inflected forms like baust auf, and
  • grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (Lee et al. 2020); e.g., mapping orthographic forms like almohadilla onto phonemic or phonetic forms like /almoaˈdiʎa/ and [almoaˈðiʎa].

While these are rather different types of problems, the systems all have one thing in common: they generate linguistic representations. I discern three major classes of error such systems might make.

  • Target errors are only apparent errors; they arise when the gold data, the data to be predicted, is linguistically incorrect. This is particularly likely to arise with crowd-sourced data though such errors are also present in professionally annotated resources.
  • Linguistic errors are caused by misapplication of independently attested linguistic behaviors to the wrong input representations.
    • In the case of number normalization, these include using the wrong agreement affixes in Russian numbers; e.g., nom.sg. *семьдесят миллион for gen.sg. семьдесят миллионов ‘nine hundred million’ (Gorman & Sproat 2016:516)
    • In inflection generation, these are what Gorman et al. 2019 call allomorphy errors; e.g., for instance, overapplying ablaut to the Dutch weak verb printen ‘to print’ to produce a preterite *pront instead of printte (Gorman et al. 2019:144).
    • In grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, these include failures to apply allophonic rules; e,g, in Korean, 익명 ‘anonymity’ is incorrectly transcribed as [ikmjʌ̹ŋ] instead of [iŋmjʌ̹ŋ], reflecting a failure to apply a rule of obstruent nasalization not indicated in the highly abstract hangul orthography (Lee et al. under review).
  • Silly errors are those errors which cannot be analyzed as either target errors or linguistic errors. These have long been noted as a feature of neural network models (e.g., Pinker & Prince 1988, Sproat 1992:216f. for discussion of *membled) and occur even with modern neural network models.

I propose that this tripartite distinction is a natural starting point when building an error taxonomy for many other language technology tasks, namely those that can be understood as generating linguistic sequences.

References

K. Gorman, A. D. McCarthy, R. Cotterell, E. Vylomova, M. Silfverberg, and M. Markowska (2019). Weird inflects but OK: making sense of morphological generation errors. In CoNLL, 140-151.
K. Gorman and R. Sproat (2016). Minimally supervised number normalization. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 4: 507-519.
J. L. Lee, L. F.E. Ashby, M. E. Garza, Y. Lee-Sikka, S. Miller, A. Wong, A. D. McCarthy, and K. Gorman (under review). Massively multilingual pronunciation mining with WikiPron.
S. Pinker and A. Prince (1988). On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 28(1–2):73–193.
R. Sproat (1992). Morphology and computation. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Action, not ritual

It is achingly apparent that an overwhelming amount of research in speech and language technologies considers exactly one human language: English. This is done so unthinkingly that some researchers seem to see the use of English data (and only English) as obvious, so obvious as to require no comment. This is unfortunate in part because English is, typologically speaking, a bit of an outlier. For instance, it has uncommonly impoverished inflectional morphology, a particularly rigid word order, and rather large vowel inventory. It is not hard to imagine how lessons learned designing for—or evaluating on—English data might not generalize to the rest of the world’s languages. In an influential paper, Bender (2009) encourages researchers to be more explicit about the languages studied, and this, framed as an imperative, is has come to be called the Bender Rule.

This “rule”, and the aforementioned observations underlying it, have taken on an almost mythical interpretation. They can easily be seen as a ritual granting the authors a dispensation to continue their monolingual English research. But this is a mistake. English hegemony is not merely bad science, nor is it a mere scientific inconvenience—a threat to validity.

It is no accident of history that the scientific world is in some sense an English colony. Perhaps you live in a country that owes an enormous debt to a foreign bank, and the bankers are demanding cuts to social services or reduction of tariffs: then there’s an excellent chance the bankers’ first language is English and that your first language is something else. Or maybe, fleeing the chaos of austerity and intervention, you find yourself and your children in cages in a foreign land: chances are you in Yankee hands. And, it is no accident that the first large-scale treebank is a corpus of English rather than of Delaware or Nahuatl or Powhatan or even Spanish, nor that the entire boondoggle was paid for by the largest military apparatus the world has ever known.

Such material facts respond to just one thing: concrete actions. Rituals, indulgences, or dispensations will not do. We must not confuse the act of perceiving and naming the hegemon with the far more challenging act of actually combating it. It is tempting to see the material conditions dualistically, as a sin we can never fully cleanse ourselves of. But they are the past and a more equitable world is only to be found in the future, a future of our own creation. It is imperative that we—as a community of scientists—take  steps to build the future we want.

References

Bender, Emily M. 2009. Linguistically naïve != language independent: why NLP needs linguistic typology. In EACL Workshop on the Interaction Between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, pages 26-32.

Is formal phonology in trouble?

I recently attended the 50th meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS), which is not much of a society as a prestigious generative linguistics conference. In recognition of the golden jubilee, Paul Kiparsky gave a keynote in which he managed to reconstruct nearly all of the NELS 1 schedule, complete with at least one handout, from a talk by Anthony Kroch and Howard Lasnik. Back then, apparently, handouts were just examples: no prose.

In his talk, Paul showed a graph showing that phonology accounts for an increasingly small number of paper at NELS, and in fact the gap has actually gotten worse over the last few decades. Paul proposed something of an explanation: that the introduction of Optimality Theory (OT) and its rejection of “derivational” explanations has forever introduced a schism between phonology and other subareas, and that syntacticians and semanticists are simply uncomfortable with the non-derivational nature of modern phonological theorizing.

With all due respect, I do not find this explanation probable. As he admits, most OT theorizing (including his own) now actually rejects the earlier rejection of derivational explanations. And on the other hand, modern syntactic theories are a heady brew of derivational (phases, copy theory, etc.) and non-derivational (move α, uninterpretable feature matching, etc.) thinking. And finally it’s not really clear why the aesthetic preferences of syntacticians (if that’s all they are) should produce the data, i.e., fewer phonology papers at NELS.

But I do agree that OT is the elephant in the room, responsible for an enormous amount of fragmentation in phonological theorizing.

I would liken Prince & Smolensky’s “founding document” (1993) to Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Scholars believe that Luther wished to start a scholarly theological debate rather than a popular revolution, and I suspect the founders of OT were similarly surprised with the enormous impact their proposal had on the field. Luther’s magnificient heresy may have failed to move the Church in the directions he wished, but he is the father of hundreds if not thousands of Protestant sects, each with their own new and vibrant “heresies”. The founders of OT, I think, are similarly unable to put the cat back into the bag (if they wish to at all).

In my opinion, OT’s early rejection of derivationalism has been an enormous empirical failure, and the full-blown functionalistic-externalist thinking—one of the first post-OT heresies (let’s liken it to Calvinism)—is, in my opinion, ontologically incoherent. That said, I would encourage OT believers to try more theory-comparison. The article on “Christian denominations” in Diderot’s & d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie begins with the obviously insincere suggestion that someone ought to study which of the various Protestant sects is most likely to lead to salvation. But I would sincerely love to find out which variant of OT is in fact most optimal.

[Thanks to Charles Reiss for discussion.]

Should Noam Chomsky retire?

Somebody said he should. I don’t want to put them on blast. I don’t know who they are, really. Their bio says they’re faculty at a public university in the States, so they probably know how things go around here about as well as me. Why should he retire? They suggested that were he to retire his position at the University of Arizona, that it would open up a tenure line for “ECRs”.1

Let me begin by saying I do not have a particularly strong emotional connection to Noam. Like many linguists, my academic family tree has many roots at MIT, where Noam taught until quite recently. I have met him in person once or twice, and I found him polite and unassuming. This is a surprise to me. The Times once wrote that Noam is “arguably the most important intellectual alive today”, and important people are mostly assholes.

But I do have very strong intellectual commitments to Noam’s ideas. I think that the first chapter of his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) is the best statement of the problem of language acquisition. I believe that those who have taken issue with the Aspects idealization of the “ideal speaker-listener” betray a profound ignorance of the role that idealizations play in the history of science.

I think The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), which Noam cowrote with Morris Halle, is the most important work in the theory of phonology and morphology. I believe that the critics who took issue with the “abstract” and “decompositional” nature of SPE have largely been proven wrong.

I even admire the so-called “minimalist program” for syntactic theory Noam has outlined since the 1990s.

It is impossible to deny Noam’s influence on linguistics and cognitive science. We who study language are all pro- or anti-Chomskyians, for better or worse. (And I have much more respect for the “true haters” than the reflexive anti-Chomskyians.) I don’t think Noam should apologize for his critiques of “usage-based” linguistics. I don’t think Noam can fairly be called an “arm-chair” theorist. I think generative grammar has made untold contributions to even areas like language documentation and sociolinguistics, which might seem to be excluded by a strict reading of Aspects.

And, I admire Noam’s outspoken critique of US imperialism. While Noam may have some critics from the left, his detractors (including many scientists of language!) are loud defenders of the West’s blood-soaked imperial adventures.

As a colleague said: “I like Noam Chomsky. I think his theories are interesting, and he seems like a decent guy.” He is a great example of what one can, and ought to, do with tenure.

None of this really matters, though. I do not think he “deserves” a job any more than any other academic does. So, could Noam clear up a “tenure line” simply by retiring? The answer is probably not. Please allow me an anecdote, one that will be familiar to many of you. I teach in a rather-large and robust graduate linguistics program at a publicly-funded college in one of the richest cities in the world (“at the end of history”). Two of our senior faculty are retiring this year, and as of yet the administration has not approved our request to begin a search for a replacement for either of them. Declining to replace tenure lines after retirement is one of the primary mechanisms of casualization in the academy.

Even if you disagree with my assessment of Noam’s legacy, the availability of tenure is not directly conditioned on retirements (though perhaps it should be). Noam bears no moral burden for simply not retiring. If you’d like to fight back against casualization of labor, take the fight to the administration (and to the state houses who set the budgets), don’t blame senior faculty for simply continuing to exist in the system.

PS: If you enjoyed this, you should read The Responsibility of Intellectuals.

1: I had to look up this acronym. It stands for “early-career researchers”, though I’m not quite sure when one’s “early career” starts or ends. I find that an unfortunate ambiguity.

A first impression of Rome

Rome is a body, freshly exhumed, straddled on all sides by leering police.

Rome is dominated by ruins: the forum is a boneyard, the colosseum a headstone, the Aurelian walls fence in the hallowed ground. Few visible works predate the emperor Trajan, who lived to see Rome reach its territorial maximum, saw it begin its long decline. The archaelogical mode in Rome is to unearth, to lay out before us whatever can be found, as it was found. Reconstruction is mostly confined to pathetic medieval attempts to extract from the pagan monumenta a bit of glory for Christ. There are the shrines—and later a church—built on the floor of the colosseum, at a time when the inner corridors were turned into barns for sheep—and temples rededicated as shrines or churches—though these lack their fine marble facings and bronze ceilings they had in an earlier era.

The ongoing excavation of the Domus Aurea is the most striking Roman corpse. Nero was not so much a madman as the first disaster capitalist. After the great fire of 64 C—a fire that may have been started by the emperor’s confederates—Nero seized a full third of Rome for a pleasure palace, a ‘golden hall’. Years later, Trajan, by comparison a great liberalizer and homo populi, razed Nero’s colossal artificial lake and set to construct an amphitheatre that later became the colosseum. As for the halls of the Domus, Trajan stripped them of their marble facings and filled them with rubble, and they became the foundations, and the sewers, for a great public bath. The only hint of their one-time splendor are the fine frescoes that can be seen on weekend tours offered while the excavators rest.

Standing over the ancient Roman corpse are a huge mass of police, of which there are both far too many and far too many types. There is the esercito—the army—of whom it is said, “at least they are competent”. There are carabinieri, who use the iconography of musketeers but whose portfolio includes roles played by state troopers and sheriffs, the DEA and the FBI, the Pinkertons and second-world paramilitaries. And there are also polizia and guardia. As far as one can tell, small bands of the various armed forces have been camping at their chosen corners for years, doing little more than smoking cigarettes and talking amongst themselves. The duplication of effort is exquisite, and not without a bit of apparent dispute over turf. One will not uncommonly find an entrance to a church guarded over by the esercito and the exit by polizia. The effect would be chilling were the patient not so long dead, so long in the ground.