Here’s an article by Guy Deutscher on language and how it influences thinking. Mercifully, Deutscher discusses this fascinating topic without trying to further inflate its public appeal by vague claims on how it all devalidates generative linguistics and most of all Chomsky (it sure sounds cool to argue against a big name, and why not an entire field?)–as Lera Boroditsky unfortunately did here. As if this research was only interesting if it also showed that someone else’s research is worthless. Daniel Harbour has some insightful comments on the latter article on his blog, and points out that it’s unclear just how this is supposed to invalidate the kinds of assumptions many generative linguists make these days. If you are (as most linguists) mostly interested in the nuts-and-bolts of how language works in all its beautiful intricacy it can be exasperating to watch how far the level of argumentation often drops when people start debating universal grammar (in my experience that tendency exists on both sides of the debate). A lot of linguistic research is interesting independent of whether one believes in universal grammar, and it seems to me that a lot of the work and the results don’t bear on this question at all, and don’t even rely on the assumptions that Daniel lists.
Besides, it’s much more fun (at least if you’re a linguist) to read about the exciting research on how cross-linguistic differences influence how we think that is conducted in Boroditsky’s lab and elsewhere without the unnecessary swipes. Another Daniel, Daniel Casasanto, a recent graduate from Boroditsky’s lab, wrote an interesting article a while ago on linguistic relativity and the debates it has generated, which does a nice job at clarifying what this renaissance in linguistic relativity research is about and what it is not about, aptly titled Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Whorf?
In case anyone is still worried that texting abbreviations are a sign that the English language is deteriorating they should have a look at the article in the Guardian a few days ago about an upcoming exhibition on language at the British Library in London, which provides evidence that these abbreviations are actually a time-honored tradition of playful language/orthography use. Among other things the exhibition revisits the history of language peevery, it seems, with such landmarks as Jonathan Swift’s A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. One of the many grievances Jonathan Swift had with his fellow English users was that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words. Swift would surely not have been amused by the poetic use of things like “I wrote 2U B4” in an 19th century poem the exhibition features. Anatol Stefanowitsch, whose blog post pointed me to this, dug up the complete poem referred to in the article, Essay to Miss Catharine Jay, as it was published in 1847. Some of the ‘emblems’ are not easy to resolve, have a look… The one that Anatol is wondering about in his post is ‘The girl without a parallel’ as a girl without a parallel pointed out to me.
Radiolab’s interesting current podcast is about language. Radiolab is a great radio show about science, and it differs from your typical media outlet on science in that its topics are often drawn from cognitive science. I can think of a bunch of questions relating to the strong claims made in the show about how relevant language is to perform various cognitive tasks, but the research the show reports on is fascinating. See also the additional video that comes with the podcast, also featured on the language log, including some nice footage of Taughannock Falls:
Something everyone seems to have intuitions about is: What types of rhyme sound good? What types of rhyme sound bad? One particular type of rhyme, called ‘identity rhyme’ (write/right, to bear, a bear), is licit in French but quite poor in English (So poor indeed that King James proscribed the use of identity rhymes in a treatise in 1584.) See an earlier post on the topic here.
We present evidence that this difference in rhyming between French (and other Romance languages) and English (and other Germanic languages) can be explained by a seemingly unrelated difference between them: English uses emphasis to foreground new and contrastive information and to background old and repeated information, much like one uses a highlighter to emphasize important information in a text. French (and other Romance languages) does not use acoustic prominence in this way, or at least does so to a much smaller degree and under a much narrower set of circumstances. An admittedly quirky but illustrative example: the name of the band AC/DC has less prominence on the two ‘C’s in English and other Germanic language, but not in French and other Romance languages. This difference becomes very salient in french-accented English and English-accented French, a fact one can experience every day in a bilingual city like Montreal. We argue that the mechanics of how this ‘highlighter’ works in English has the effect that identity rhymes sound odd.
[completely unrelated side note: i was wondering what the right agreement is in the sentence above, and ‘the mechanics of … has’ and ‘the mechanics of … have’ and i let the google vote. both seem to be equally used (same for is/are)]
Title and Abstract of the Paper:
Michael Wagner (McGill University) & Kate McCurdy (Harvard University)
Poetic Rhyme Reflects Cross-Linguistic Differences in Information Structure
Identity rhymes (to bear/a bear, right/write) are considered satisfactory and even artistic in French poetry but are considered unsatisfactory in English. This has been a consistent generalization over the course of centuries, a surprising fact given that other aspects of poetic form in French were happily applied in English. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that this difference is not merely one of poetic tradition, but is grounded in the distinct ways in which information structure affects prosody in the two languages. A study of rhyme usage in poetry and a perception experiment confirm that native speakers’ intuitions about rhyming in the two languages indeed differ, and a further perception experiment supports the hypothesis that this fact is due to a constraint on prosody that is active in English but not in French. The findings suggest that certain forms of artistic expression in poetry are influenced, and even constrained, by more general properties of a language.
Angelika Kratzer and Lisa Selkirk will be visiting at McGill. The schedule of the presentations is posted here. This visit is part of the mcsirg interface group at McGill. They will also present as invited speakers at the Mosaic workshop on June 1st.
This looks like it’s going to be an interesting event, conveniently scheduled right before AMLaP at York University:
The School of Psychology at The University of Dundee and the Department of Psychology at The University of Edinburgh are pleased to announce the 6th International Workshop on Language Production. The workshop is dedicated to fostering an interdisciplinary approach to language production research by including work in areas such as psycholinguistics, cognitive neuropsychology, linguistics, computational modelling, and neuroimaging. It will be organized around tutorial-like talks intended to provide a review of research questions and stimulate discussion. The workshop program also includes poster sessions to offer graduate students and others the opportunity to showcase their most recent findings.
Another reminder about the Cornell Workshop on Grammar Induction, which is coming closer. The workshop features quite an amazing line up of talks:
Cornell Workshop on Grammar Induction will bring together researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology, and computer science who work on issues of learning and learnability in language. Our goal is to facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers approaching similar problems with the perspectives and methodologies of diverse fields.
Florian Jaeger will give an invited lecture for the CRLMB consisting of two mini-talks this Monday, May 3rd, as part of the WOMM! Statistics workshop on logit mixed models. Titles: “Efficiency in production: How speakers design their utterances to distribute information uniformly” and “Syntax in flux: Syntactic adaptation in adults.” The lecture is open to all and will take place on Monday, May 3rd at 2 p.m. in Room 501 of the Goodman Cancer Research Centre, 1160 Pine Ave. West.
Dave Embick will give a talk this Wednesday, May 5 2010, 3 p.m. in Room Arts 160, as part of the McSirg team grant. The title of the talk is “Towards a theory of stem alternations.”
