How we (liguists) roll.

A parable in several, unlabeled acts.

A zoologist goes out into the field, maybe even a literal field, and finds a brand new species of rabbit. He captures that rabbit and brings it back to his university/zoo (they are often hard to tell apart, universities and zoos).

He then proceeds to skin the rabbit, gut it and put all of it's different inner bits into separate jars. He then sends the carcass, the pelt, and each organ to the respective fur/carcass/organ specialists. He does this in the hope that, some day soon when the results of each specialist's analyses come back, we will understand something about the rabbit, something that we wouldn't be able to understand from observing the living rabbit itself as well as everything that we could. (that last, difficult to comprehend sentence involves what linguists call grammatically questionable ELLIPSIS)

But the zoologist doesn't wait for the results. In fact, there's no one waiting for the results.

The gallbladder expert gets his sample and then analyzes the rabbit's gallbladder (do rabbits have gallbladders?). He publishes his results, which are then read by a small handful of gallbladder experts who use what he learned from the rabbit's gallbladder and apply it to other gallbladders. The heart expert does the same, as does the fur expert, etc. Once in a while, the stomach expert chats with the intestine expert and, together they learn something new about the digestive system of all the animals they've seen. A few people get excited, but they all soon go back to work since the toe-nail, eyeball, and ulna experts aren't quite sure what to make of that exciting new research. The spleen expert hasn't even heard of it.

In the meantime, the zoologist goes back out to the field and gets a mouse and repeats the process.

Certainly, to some extent, real world biology works this way, or at least it does in my twisted mind. But the critical difference is that zoologists exist not to feed anatomical biologists' grisly need for carcasses (although it would be fun to picture Dr. Frankenstein's Igor as a zoologist). There are several scientists in the field of biology who study whole, living rabbits: their diets, environments, sexual habits (perverts), etc.

The problem in linguistics is that no linguists are studying the sexual habits of the Ob-Ugric language family. And what I mean by that is, as hard as it might seem, more linguists need to attempt to make a career out of designing clever ways to put all that shit together, or fuckin' stop tearing up rabbits.

This hyperbole was brought to you by Coffee and viewers like you.

language and the brain

This old woman suffering from dementia was having trouble remembering words for actions (verbs). She didn't seem to have trouble remembering names for items or locations (nouns). Scientists were a little stumped so they did tests and sure enough this old lady seemed clearly to have trouble with verbs but not nouns. This looked like a new form of aphasia... pretty crazy stuff.

Then these other researchers did another test, using a different methodology, with the woman. they showed her a video of an action (instead of a picture of an action, like the other researchers were doing) and she was able to remember the names for the verbs she saw performed.

So it turns out, this woman can only remember verbs when she actually sees them performed, but she cannot if she sees them drawn as in a comic book.

Yet another reason why it's absolutely ridiculous that there are linguists still out there who are doing linguistics while ignoring all other aspects of cognition...

I speak about 150 languages.

When I tell someone I study Linguistics the first question I get (95% of the time) is "How many languages do you speak?".

The answer is 2 fluently, 2 barely. But I know the characteristics of dozens of languages, I just can't speak them. But linguists don't need to speak more than one or two languages. And the only reason why they're expected to know more than one has to do with historical accident. A linguist just has to know things about languages.

The thing that interests me most about linguistics is that there's so much interesting stuff happening when we talk (in any language) and we typically never think about it.

But none of that really matters because the average joe the plumber knows little about Linguistics. So they'll keep asking "How many languages do you speak?" when I tell them I study Linguistics. From now on, I'm going to answer "About 150"

Sarah Palin

I got this before the crew at language log!

Languages other than English

There is no good reason for English-Only legislation in the United States. The data just doesn't back up the claim that, in the absence of such legislation, English would cease to be the dominant language OR that it's too expensive to maintain more than one language.

Anyone who supports legislation to ban other languages in any way, or prevent them from being spoken and doesn't know the facts is being xenophobic.

We have events like THIS happening in our country and its embarrassing.

exciting moments in the pathetic little lives of graduate students

I discovered this morning that a paper I co-authored with the wonderful Adele Goldberg has been cited 5 times. Two of those don't count because they come from the same journal that the paper was published in. 2 come from the same author in different papers (Gregory Ward, a man I could have had a chance to meet, but didn't, while he was visiting San Diego for a conference last year). The last was from a Korean author in a paper written in Korean. I'm very much interested to find out in what context I was cited in this paper, but I don't read Korean. I suppose it couldn't have been good since the author is proposing an analysis using a theoretical framework which is in direct contrast to the theoretical framework the paper I co-authored was using.

Anyway, I guess the good news is that a paper I was instrumental in putting into the world has been read by at least 4 people other than its two authors, one of which is from another country!

Fantastic!

monkeys have a grammar

If the researchers mentioned in these three articles are correct in their analysis, then these putty-nosed monkeys actually combine morphemes to make different meanings. According to conventional thinking about "language," this is not supposed to be attested.

However, if you intuit, like me, that there's nothing special about language vis a vis the Human brain, then this is not really exciting news (unless you plan to use it as a piece of evidence to change non-believers' minds).

saving endagered languages

Here is a time condensed version of a thought process that has gone on within me over the past several years:
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Endangered languages why should we save them and how should we (as linguists) argue our case for the grant money necessary to do so?

Typically I'm PRO doing our best to revitalize languages that are on the verge of extinction. But this hardly ever works, so at the very least, I would hope that we can document/record/study in detail the moribund language for posterity. But why?

When I was a naive undergrad I felt that the biggest reason for doing our best to save or document these languages was because they are the best medium for transmitting the corresponding culture. It seems to me that this is the best argument to make if you want to get funding for such a project.

But then I thought: "should we force a minority population to keep their language alive if there is greater economic benefit for them to adopt the regionally dominant tongue?" And of course, the answer is no. So if there is a demand in the culture for learning materials, that demand should be met. But if there is no demand, then all the funds should go toward creating the very best linguistic database the remaining speakers can provide.

But then I thought: let's assume someone goes ahead and records a bunch of interesting data from such a language. Who actually goes back and looks at that data? Not many people... Sometimes you get news stories of grandchildren of speakers of some language reconnecting with their ancestors via the use of recordings of the old language (this generally leads to tears with a mixed bag of proud feelings and guilt over being so disconnected from your past - which all makes for good radio or tv programming). And that's a great use for them. But do linguists make use of the tapes?

Where am I going with this? Well, I think the real important reason to document these dying languages is so that we have records of the types of languages that exist - a more complete typology of the world's languages. I think this is important because I think that languages are the best window to the inner-workings of the brain, and the more such windows you have, the better you can see what's going on in there. I thought maybe, when we ask for money to document languages, we should mention this as being important. It turns out that nobody in charge of giving away money really cares about that. It's a stronger argument to say that you want to preserve the culture.

And then I thought, although the role of window-to-the-brain seems like it would ultimately be more useful, those long extinct languages for which we do have records are never really used for that purpose. Some syntactitians would have you believe that they are using them for that purpose, but I'm not convinced. But that's probably because I strongly disagree with the dominant views (in linguistics, if there are any) of what the brain is doing.

So what should we do about these endangered languages? I have no idea.

The last (fluent?) speaker of the language Eyak has passed away. That's linguistically relevant in itself. But the reason I'm discussing it is that the article I read about this event has the following paragraph:

Jones [the last speaker] died peacefully in her sleep Monday. Her mother was found by a friend, said Bernice Galloway, a daughter who lives in Albuquerque, N.M.

It took me a while to figure out what this paragraph was saying. On my first read I understood that Jones died, but her mother, who was apparently lost somewhere, was found by a friend of Jones'. Then I thought her mother also died and she was found dead along with Jones. That made me construct a scenario where both women died due to some kind of gas leak in their home. Eventually I made it to the "said Bernice Galloway, a daughter..." which cleared things up a bit.

The article can be found on the website for the seattle post/intelligencier. And I suspect their copy editors don't care much for the online version of their paper.

lip reading

Some researchers at the University of East Anglia are hoping to create a 'lip reading' machine -- in essance: a computer which uses only video of a person's face, as she is talking, to decipher what is being said.

First off - lip reading is, at best, unreliable. This is because the vast majority of contrastive sounds are not visible (or barely visible) at the lips (or the front of the oral cavity). For example: to the average speaker of American-English, the words "do" and "to/two/too" look almost identical to each other when being pronounced. This is because the major difference between them is whether the vocal folds are vibrating during the pronunciation of the first consonant. However, the way the lips are shaped during the pronunciation of these words varies a lot, as it is dependent on the words preceding and following. This is basically because of the grammatical function and the shortness of these words.

Furthermore - even tiny visible differences which you might expect can differ drastically from speaker to speaker. It is surprisingly common, for example, for young American-English speakers of certain regions to pronounce some 'l' sounds with the tongue placed prominently between the teeth. This could actually help lip readers, but because it is not applicable to all speakers, it is not something a computer will be able to apply all that well.

There are many more reasons why lip reading is difficult, and why no one can lipread as reliably as a hearing individual can hear. In a paper linked to the bottom of this article, it seems that the researchers have some understanding of these problems. However, they still think they can overcome them.

Presumably, the researchers are motivated by the fact that there exist a few people who have become quite good at lip reading. But here is the real kicker - the way that those people become good is that they use cues from syntax and semantics to make good educated guesses about what the words might be.

For example the following two sentences (when I pronounce them) look identical at the lips:
I tread the path to success
I dread the path to success

If I'm having a conversation with an expert lip reader, she will use many non-lip cues to figure out which of these sentences I've said: cues like what kind of person I am, or what my previous sentence meant, or what our conversation has been about.

So, for example, if I had said "I want to be successful but I [d/t]read the path to success" then one of those words is going to make a lot more sense than the other. As far as I know, no English parsing software exists which can reliably use such semantic cues to help make sense of a sentence.

Good Luck, British researchers...

To smile...

Now that academic obligations are completed (for the quarter) I feel like I can relax and maybe smile a little.

This link here made me smile.

to approach

For some reason I was taken aback today by the use of 'near' as a verb with a human agent.

I've heard sentences like this in the news before (and they sound OK to me):
"The australian dollar neared 89 american cents today..."

But today I read this online and I had to read it a couple of times because something seemed odd about it:
"As I neared them I began to better hear their conversation"

Maybe I'm just going crazy, but is this a common use of a verbed 'near'? And if so, why does it sound so weird to me?

WTF?

I've never before used the acronym WTF in print: Never in IM chat, never on IRC, never on my own websites. I may have once used it ironically in speech... maybe.

The reason I am using it today: Politician bans a morpheme.

Linguistics in the wild

Mixed Metaphor overheard yesterday:
Undergrad looking Girl to Undergrad looking Boy: "It's going to be awesome! I think you guys are going to be head over heels in girls."

I was kind of surprised at how good it sounded for a mixed metaphor. I think Lakoff calls these "impermissible" mixed metaphors. I think Lakoff was wrong. Because it didn't seem to interrupt their conversation at all and it took me a few seconds to figure out what was wrong with it...

Imagine a Wikipedia constantly patrolled by academics. Can you do it? Well, someone has, and they've made it look like this.

Scholarpedia, a peer-reviewed version of wikipedia (whatever the hell that means... isn't wikipedia, in a sense, peer-reviewed?). Currently, the Linguistics section seems to be written by Mark Arnoff and "peer-reviewed" by his longtime collaborator Wendy Sandler, both of whom I have respect for but hardly what I would call a balanced peer-review process.

Where are all the linguists at? It's not like we have anything better to do...

(I remembered to use the 'linguistics' tag for the first time on this blog... lame)