OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.

Michelle Malkin: Obama: Soldier deaths = “Wasted” lives I could go on, but it would be a waste of breath trying to get Sen. Obama to acknowledge the existence of countless soldiers and their families who reject his patronizing, infantilizing, and insulting view of all American troops as dupes/victims who have squandered their lives.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Video: Obama says lives of troops killed in Iraq were “wastedâ€? Of course he thinks their lives were wasted. Everyone on the anti-war side does; that’s one of the reasons they want to end the war. But they can’t say that because it dishonors the dead so they’re forced into rhetorical pretzels like the one Pelosi tied herself into a few weeks ago with Diane Sawyer. Army Lawyer summed up her position at the time thusly: “They didn’t die for nothing, they died for something stupid.â€?

Semantic prosody is a great concept introduced to provide a new perspective on what is otherwise known as connotation of words. All semantic prosody does is color the surrounding text with whatever affective charge the word carries. (Stubbs writes about this extensively.) However, what does that charge look like and how does it behave in actual discourse (that may be a bit difficult to find in a corpus). Framing and conceptual integration to the rescue. One of the strengths of the concept of ‘prosody’ (itself a case of blending) is that it carries with it notion of suprasegmentality, i.e. not applying to any particular segment of the text (words, endings, sentences). Conceptual integration, however, has an interesting ambivalence on segmentality. On the one hand, it is usually looked at in segmental ways but on the other hand it has many of these suprasegmental (neuralnet-like) features that are talked about in the context of semantic prosody.

What does that have to do with poor misunderstood Obama? Well, semantic prosody basically makes it impossible to say what he wants to say. The Hot Air blog was describing the underlying propositional structure: the Iraq war is a misguided venture, investing any resources into it is waste, money is resources so it is wasted, people can also be thought of as resources so their lives can be wasted. However, using the word wasted anywhere near the word soldier is ill-advised in the American political context. Michelle Malking shows that by (mis)paraphrasing Obama as meaning that the dead soldiers are “dupes/victims who have squandered their lives”.

Now, it is possible to say that any person with an spoonful of brain cells in their head can see that that’s not what Obama meant. That, however, brings the problem of further prosodies. Because accusing conservatives of weak mindedness is a trope frequently employed by liberals, so that defense would only dig Obama deeper. (The strangely unaware condescension behind this Top Gear clip is an example of that) But there is even the more legitimate question. Is it really that wrong-minded or even illogical to refuse to accept the interpretation of Obama’s sentence stripped of its prosody or at least where the propositional (logical) content is profiled (brought to the fore) in a such a way that the effect of prosody is dissipated? And furthermore, is there a difference between an individual speaker’s ability to make this distinction and the possibility of maintaining this distinction across a large body of texts that constitutes the related discourse.

This is a fascinating theoretical question that, as far as I know, had not been addressed. Mostly, the assumption is that these things happen unconsciously (outside our volition) [Lakoff] and that individual utterances have a cumulative effect [van Dijk - explicitly, Fauconnier on entrenchment implicitly]. While this is probably broadly correct (or at least it is intuitively very appealing) it glosses over the complex interplay between automatic and negotiated frame integration and what role it plays in the cumulative effects of entrenchment.

PS: Here’s an example of how intelligence is invoked in the context of negotiating irony:

YouTube comment on Randy Newman - A Few Words in Defense of Our Country "Great stuff. Only a dummy wouldn't get this song."