T-Rex: Does "Betty put butter on the bread" mean the same thing as "Betty buttered the bread"?
T-Rex: I would argue: no!
T-Rex: In the second example, there is an implication that the bread is wholly buttered, while in the first, this is not necessarily the case! And this applies not just to butter: there are many other examples. For instance, “Gary wrote for many TV shows” leaves open the possibility of a co-author on the scripts, a possibility that “Gary wrote many TV shows” does not!
Utahraptor: Wow! These small changes in semantics (the meaning of a word or phrase) are quite interesting!
T-Rex: Yes!
Utahraptor: But hard, too.
T-Rex: Agreed.
Narrator: Thanks to chapter three of Steven Pinker’s 1989 book "Learnability and Cognition", upon which most of this comic was based.
