“I can tell people the score of any football game before it starts.”
Can you figure out how?
Hint #1: The speaker’s not psychic.
Hint #2: Lots of riddles depend on grammatical ambiguity.
Spoiler: Before any game starts, the score is always 0-0.
Scientifically speaking, the riddle works like this: the listener presumably aligns the prepositional phrase “before it starts” as a sister to the verb phrase “tell people the score of any football game.”
The trick, of course, is that the speaker aligns the PP “before it starts” as a sister to the NP “score of any football game.”
Thanks to literalminded for the joke and the charts.
This stupid riddle raises an important question: why does the riddle work?
Why do people invariably attach the PP in the same place, yielding a sentence with a surprising meaning? Why is it so much less likely for listeners to place the PP in such a way that the sentence makes perfect sense?
The answer to this question reveals an extremely important point about the way we process language: Our expectations color our grammatical processing.
Of course, utterances often have non-literal meanings. We all understand what a speaker means when he asks “Do you want to come upstairs for a drink?”, but it’s socially uncouth to say “I’m pretty sure I want to have sex with you.” So we use indirect language that’s somehow layered on top of our literal language.
You may have heard of the Gricean Maxims. Paul Grice came up with four conversational maxims that link utterances to what we mean by these utterances in a given context.
One of these maxims is the “Maxim of Quantity.”
- Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
- Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
This riddle plays on part I of this maxim. When someone tells us something, we expect it to be non-trivial. Everyone knows that a football game is 0-0 before kickoff. So we expect the speaker not to mention something so obvious.
This riddle shows two things:
Firstly, that we can actually re-arrange our tacit grammatical structures based on conversational assumptions. We expect people to tell us certain sorts of things, and this effects how we process the informational logically.
Secondly, the Maxim of Quantity hold so strongly that we’re more likely to interpret a utterance as supernatural (in the above riddle, that the speaker is psychic) than that the utterance is trivial.
I want your riddles. Give me some more riddles that depend on ambiguity of language. What good riddles do you know?
