Word Count

Way back in 1972, Robert Fiengo and Howard Lasnik published a scientific paper in a journal called Linguistic Inquiry. The title: "On nonrecoverable deletion in syntax."

"Nonrecoverable deletion" is a kind of gap in communication that can't be figured out by the context of what's being said. The article at Real Clear Science's Newton Blog explains how a lot of our communication involves gaps or incompletions, but we understand what's being said because the statement comes in a recognizable context. That context makes the unspoken or unwritten words implicitly there even if they aren't explicit.

The previous sentence has an example of a recoverable deletion. The full sentence would have ended with "explicitly there" in order to match the information given in the phrase "implicitly there," but most people reading it fill in that blank. The missing information is "recoverable" from earlier in the sentence. Fiengo and Lasnik's paper argued in favor of what linguists called the "Recoverability Condition" by means of a very simple but profound argument: Their paper is completely blank. They use no words at all.

You can see where this leads. By leaving out everything, they have made it impossible to deduce implicit communication from context, because there is no context. If there's nothing there to start with, then nothing's there to be left out and consequently there's nothing to figure out.

This is opposed to most modern political speeches and opinions given on television and the internet, which mean nothing or even less but use a great many words to say it.