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| Ryan's linguistics blog Updated : Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:28:51 +0000 In Oregon I'm in Eugene, OR for the meetings of the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium, Athapaskan/Dene Languages Conference, International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages, and Hokan-Penutian Languages Conference. It's been a pretty good weekend, with some good presentations, and I've gotten to meet some fun and interesting people. I just got out of Leanne Hinton's keynote address, and soon it will be time for the conference dinner. A minor note of displeasure has to do with my native language. My native language is English. I love the English language, and as much as I want to teach my children to speak another language, I know that it's not going to happen, both because I'm not fluent in any other language, and because English is a big part of my own heritage and that of my parents and grandparents, and I want my children to share in that heritage. I recognize that English speakers often exert an oppressive force on speakers of other languages, especially in the U.S. Even so, it annoys me to hear my language denigrated, insulted, and vilified. I do not think that English is inferior, and I do not think it is stultifying. What English speakers do is not a reflection on the language itself. A similar effect can be seen in anthropologists, most of whom argue passionately for religious diversity, as long as the religion isn't Christianity. I think we need to remember that no matter what terrible things English speakers have done to speakers of other languages, viz., boarding schools for Native American children, the language itself is just as valuable and just as beautiful as the languages I am, quite honestly, more interested in: Navajo, Lillooet, Karuk, Cherokee. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:36:00 +0000 Structural ambiguity A competitor in a Food Network show I watched recently was described as an "award-winning cake and sugar artist". Fairly straightforward, but my language faculty at first wanted to parse this is [[award-winning cake] and [sugar artist]] rather than [award-winning [cake and sugar] artist]. This is essentially the opposite of low attachment, so I'm not sure what was going on. Perhaps a desire for coordinated phrases to be coordinated as high as possible in the syntactic structure of the phrase. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sun, 04 Oct 2009 01:59:00 +0000 Linguistics 101 I'll be embarking on my first official foray into linguistics teaching on Tuesday, with a summer section of LING 101 here at Rutgers. As opposed to 201, which is more focused on analysis, 101 is essentially an introduction to the kinds of things people talk about in linguistics; students are expected to come out of it knowing what assimilation is, but not necessarily how to write a rule describing it. I plan on focusing in part on why I think linguistics is interesting, and what kinds of things linguists do. For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of language (with a lowercase People are also sometimes intrigued by how different languages can be. As speakers of Indo-European languages we often assume that our way of doing things is the right way, or even the only way. But then you come across the Algonquian languages, where the ordering of person-marking affixes on the verb indicates not grammatical role, but simply the presence of that person in the action. The order of the affixes is fixed, and their person hierarchy combined with a large set of thematic verbal prefixes indicates which person is acting on whom. Many linguists still think every languages has nasals, because they haven't heard of Chemakum, Makah, Nitinaht, Lushootseed, or Twana (don't let the spelling fool you; pronounce all those as if you had a bad cold). In short, I'm looking forward to six weeks of showing a group of students that not everything is like English, and that there are more languages in the world than are dreamt of in most naive conceptions of it. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 29 May 2010 21:23:00 +0000 Lather, rinse, repeat There was recently quite a bit of interesting discussion about a Language Log post on the semantics of "this page intentionally left blank". Levi Montgomery posted that it reminded him of "the instructions to 'Lather, rinse, and repeat,' apparently ad infinitum." I was struck by this comment, because historically and upon careful thought, I don't find anything recursive about this statement. Levi apparenty interprets this injunction as being of the form (A --> B --> return to A). This would indeed lead to infinite hair washing, with the user lathering and rinsing until the eschaton. But I rather have always interpreted the instruction as having the form ((1: A --> B); repeat 1). Thus there's no recursive loop, merely a second execution of the two events A and B. Or to phrase it another way, for me there is no way of deriving wide scope of repeat so that it includes lather, rinse, and itself. For me it can only apply to lather and rinse. I'd be interested to find out if more people get Levi's interpretation or mine, and why. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:44:00 +0000 In Baltimore This weekend I am in Baltimore for the Linguistic Society of America Conference, as well as the sister societies that meet concurrently. My primary reason for being here is to present a paper for the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of America session tomorrow morning. Being at a conference like this one brings to mind the primary things it means to be an academic, things that a lot of people seem not to understand. During this time of year, when fall classes have ended and spring classes haven't yet begun, I get a lot of comments from friends and family to the gist of "Well what are you going to DO with yourself?" Most of the general public seems to think that what academics do is limited to the classroom, and that when we're not taking or teaching classes we're relaxing, going for long walks on the beach, and spending time with friends and family. I'd like to say nothing is further from the truth, but certainly there are things further from the truth. Obviously we like to try to do these things when our schedules are more flexible (i.e., we don't have many scheduled activities from day to day). However, people in academia do much, much, much more than just deal with coursework. In fact, coursework is often the easiest and least time-consuming part of being an academic. As a graduate student, I of course have my classes to worry about, but I also have outside engagements, some more social, such as department parties, potlucks, and coffee hours (which, while enjoyable, are nonetheless required), and some more professional, such as conference presentations, paper writing, and colloquia. Since I finished up with my fall classes (turning in my last assignment no earlier than December 21st, so not that long ago), my plate has still been filled with the following items: reading a lengthy paper for my phonology class that starts a week from Monday (yes, homework even over the break), finishing revisions for a paper to appear in conference proceedings, preparing my presentation for the SSILA conference this weekend (and of course attending the conference, etc.), submitting an abstract for a conference in March (which I may or may not have the money to actually attend), and writing an initial draft of a paper for another conference volume. But wait! There's more! Those are just things that have a firm due date during the winter break. I also submitted a book review to a journal, and I'm continuing to work on two major projects: a journal article and the foundational research for a book. During the spring semester I will doubtless tackle new projects, some with deadlines, some just long-term research, mostly based on conference papers I haven't yet had time to expand into publishable material. Professors have all these same things to do, except instead of attending classes they're teaching them, which involves a lot more work. They also have to attend department meetings, review papers and grant applications for professional organizations, meet with students, serve as members or chairs of qualifying paper and dissertation defense committees, and seek to secure funding for their research. Don't get me wrong, I love academic life. I've worked 9-5 and (7-3) before, and it doesn't agree with me. Any salaried job tends to take up your entire life, so I'm glad mine is one that I'm passionate about and lets me be a little more flexible about when I do my work, even if that ends up being days, nights, and weekends. But it makes me sigh a little when people think we spend the summer tanning and the winter skiing. We don't. We spend the summer researching, and the winter researching. And the fall and spring researching. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:34:00 +0000 Ejectives I gave my students a brief introduction to IPA last week, and this coming week we're spending every class on a different aspect of phonetics, including IPA transcription. So I'm getting ready for a fun week of making silly sounds and writing with symbols that most people have never seen. One sound class that people seem to enjoy encountering for the first time is ejectives. They occur only in about 15% of languages, and most of those languages are minority languages that mainstream people never hear. In fact, they're exotic enough that Paul Frommer chose them as an element of the Na'vi language used in the movie Avatar. Most inexpert descriptions of ejectives are mindbogglingly useless. If I tell you to pronounce /t'/ by pronouncing a more forceful "t" sound, I'll wager just about any amount of money or hat-eating that you're not going to come up with an ejective. The best way I've found to describe ejectives is to pronounce a consonant while holding your breath. After all, this is essentially what distinguishes ejective stops from regular stops: regular stops use the pulmonary airstream, while ejective stops use the glottalic airstream, without accessing air from the lungs. Ejective stops are the most common ejectives, but languages also have ejective fricatives such as /f'/ and /s'/, and Tlingit even has an ejective lateral fricative (it's a pretty tough one the first couple times). Though no language has ever come up with one of my favorite possible sounds: an ejective alevolar trill. Give it a try and see how many contacts you get before your tongue runs out of air. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sun, 06 Jun 2010 02:25:00 +0000 Extended break I'm not planning on doing any more updates until probably early next month, since I've started classes now, in addition to developing ESL materials for PronouncePro and working on some abstracts, papers, and a book review. Check back on October 3. If there are topics you're interested in hearing about this semester, feel free to post them in the comments section. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:35:00 +0000 Enamored I was musing the other day about the PP (prepositional phrase) complement to "enamored". My intuition is that "enamored with" is more common in modern times, but that "enamored of" is the original and prescriptively "correct" usage. Checking with the OED more or less confirms this, though the original usage, unbeknownst to me, is "enamored (up)on". "Enamored of" was the next oldest usage, and "enamored with", though listed as a possibility, didn't have any examples. Now to check modern frequency: enamored upon: 833 ghits enamored on: 6380 ghits enamored of: 644,000 ghits enamored with: 667,000 ghits So it appears that my intuition was marginally correct, though with the inaccuracy of google results counting, there may be no significant difference between "of" and "with". More unexpected was the auto suggestion "enamored by", which gets 128,000 hits, less than the two recent usages, but far more than the original Middle English preposition. More surprising still is "enamored for", which gets a respectable 20,100 hits (though google enjoins me to correct it to "enamored of"). Many of these look to be merely a sequence, e.g., "names that mean enamored for girls", but there are some legitimate usages: "Armored and enamored for obama in DC". As a check I ran a couple other prepositions (under, from, beside) to see if in fact all are attested, but none of these three seemed to have any legitimate hits. So people using "enamored by" and "enamored for" seem to have that as the phrase. What does it all mean? I don't know. But based on the auto suggestions from google, people are pretty unsure of which preposition to use, though "with" and "of" are by far the most frequent. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:14:00 +0000 Movement I was watching an old episode of Seinfeld the other night, and a line of dialogue caught my attention: "That's the guy I told where the elevator was." It's not ungrammatical for me, but it's marked in some way that made my analytical skills perk up. According to current syntactic theory, this type of sentence is created by movement from one original, underlying position to a different surface position. You don't have to take this literally as movement; many syntacticians take "movement" as a relation rather than an actual move from one position to another. But the key is that a clause like "where the elevator was" is assumed to be in some way structurally the same as "the elevator was there". In some analyses of relative clauses, the same thing is true for nouns described by relative clauses, so that the DP "the guy" comes out of the CP "I told <the guy> where the elevator was". So the so-called D-structure (don't read any theoretical assumptions into that, I'm just using it as a convenient label) of "That's the guy I told where the elevator was" would be something like "That's I told the guy the elevator was where", changed by movement into "That's the guy I told <t> where the elevator was <t>". But why did I find this remarkable? I'm fairly certain I use such structures. Before I analyzed the sentence, I thought it might involve some sort of movement where one constituent crosses over the trace of another (which, at least in Relativized Minimality, wouldn't necessarily involve a violation, but might be more marked in some way), but this isn't the case. The "the guy" movement occurs entirely in the matrix clause, and the "where" movement is entirely limited to the subordinate clause. So there's no crossing involved, just regular movement in two separate clauses. I tested out some similar, simpler examples, and found out that I find "I told him where the elevator was" completely unremarkable, but "That's the guy I told to clean up the mess" (very) slightly remarkable. (Side note: can we really have judgments about such minute differences? Maybe not everyone, but I've been dubbed "most sensitive speaker of English" at Rutgers, so I claim the right to make such judgments. I'll happily give different numerical scores to subtly different subjacency violations.) So what, I don't like relative clauses? It's not that, because "That's the guy I told" is also completely unremarkable. I think it's some very slight underlying preference for traces to be at the end of a clause. This would make questions unremarkable ("Who did you talk to <t>?"), as well as simple relative clauses ("That's the man I talked to <t>"). But more complex relative clauses with material after the trace make some small part of my language faculty slightly uncomfortable. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:04:00 +0000 Copula contraction I ran across an interesting instance of contraction on the Moviefone web site a while back, in the headline of a feature about some group of 80's stars or another: "Where They're Now". I found this interesting because you can't do this in English. Generally speaking, you can contract a copula onto the subject in English in an existential construction ("He is a good guitarist", "She is at the hospital") or when be is acting as an auxiliary verb ("They are going to the store"). This is reflected by a google search of "where they're now", which turns up millions of examples of constructions like "where they're now inside the city", but none of the Moviefone type. This seems to be a function of wh-movement in this case. Note that the corresponding declarative "they are __ now" is perfectly happy to contract to "they're __ now". So why can't we do it after wh-movement? After all, we can say "they're happy" and "where they're happy". In all likelihood, this isn't a syntactic issue, but a phonological one, since contraction doesn't affect the syntactic status of the verb, only the phonological status. In a phrase like "He is a good guitarist", "is" is unstressed. Out of the blue, I have primary stress on "guiTARist", and secondary stress probably on "good". In "where they are now", on the other hand, "are" received some kind of secondary stress. I place primary stress on "now", but "where" and "are" both received secondary stress. It's for this reason that we (nominally) can't contract the copula onto the subject, because we can't get rid of secondary stress in that fashion. When there isn't stress on the copula, it can contract (or delete in ICE). I'm not sure if the Moviefone headline was written by a non-native speaker or just an overly efficient copy editor, but it's not well-formed in English, at least in my dialect. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:31:00 +0000 Anglicizations I did a double take when I saw that my last post was over a month ago, but I guess I have been that busy. At any rate, but got me thinking today was a Language Log post on the myriad (mis)pronunciations of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano (properly pronounced [ejafjatłajøkʰʏtł]). Obviously English speakers are going to have a hard time with the rounded front vowels and lateral affricates, so it seems worthwhile to have a general Anglicization. Or does it? I guess I'm generally in favor of Anglicizations. I find it obnoxious when people pronounce Chile [tʃile] rather than the more standard [tʃɪli]. On the other hand, I routinely say Tlingit [łɪŋlɪt] and Nahuatl [naxʷatł] with the original laterals. I think the key issue is one of faithfulness to the original form versus creating an easily pronounceable form in the target language. In the case of Chile, only the vowels are changing, and the vowel changes are fairly minor: laxing of the /i/ and raising of the /e/ (the latter being part of the Great Vowel Shift in English). On the other hand, changing a consonant sound strikes me as more major. In cases where a spelling pronunciation of the foreign term is just too different, as in Eyjafjallajökull, I think it's best to simply pronounce the word as in the original language. This might not be possible or useful for the average person, but I don't think it's too high a standard to hold newscasters to. It's there job to report on things, and I think it should also be their job to say things right. Sure, foreign words are a bit tongue-twisting at first, but a little practice and Eyjafjallajökull will be rolling off your tongue. And the more someone practices foreign sounds and foreign words, the easier it is not only to pronounce words in that language, but in other languages as well. The conflict of faithfulness and ease of pronunciation of course shows up in much more unconscious speech as well. I'm in the midst of a project with James Crippen on exactly this type of conflict in Tlingit, a Dene language spoken in Alaska. Since Tlingit doesn't have the sounds /b/ or /p/, it's interesting to see how words are adapted when they are borrowed from languages that do have them. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:32:00 +0000 Na'vi I feel like I have to comment at least a little on Na'vi, the language of the Na'vi people in the new movie Avatar. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm quite interested to do so soon, though I'm assured it does not revolutionize cinema as much of the press seems to claim. Paul Frommer was in charge of creating the language, and recently did a guest post on Language Log about some linguistic aspects of Na'vi. Since he's the creator, I see no reason to give a summary of the language (his description is well worth reading), but there are a couple things I can comment on. One thing I like about Na'vi is that it uses ejectives. I don't like it for some scientific reason like "most languages have ejectives" (only about 15% do); I just like ejectives. They're fun to pronounce. I'm a bit nonplussed as to why Frommer chose to represent the glottalization with an "x", though: /p'/ is represented as px, /t'/ as tx, and /k'/ as kx. My guess would be that it makes the language look alien, which is as important a consideration as any when you're coming up with an alien language for Hollywood. Clearly Frommer has put a lot of thought into Na'vi; he even goes into restrictions on syllable structure. And these aren't just any random restrictions, but logical ones actually utilized in many natural languages. He remarks that only /f/, /s/, and /ts/ can appear as the first member of a consonant cluster. Now, I'm a bit dubious about the naturalness of this class in terms of actual occurrence, but at least theoretically it makes good sense; it's an exhaustive collection of the language's voiceless fricative phonemes (of course, /ts/ is not a fricative, but we can lump it under an ad hoc collection of "fricative phonemes" if we assume that affricates display edge effects, and since these sounds are the first members of clusters, the relevant edge of /ts/ would be the /s/ part). On the other hand, I don't think there really are any languages that do this. Some languages do allow only fricatives as the first members of complex clusters, but usually this is a class like /s/ and /hl/ (the lateral fricative; don't make me dig up my Unicode chart, I'm using Haida practical orthography), as in Haida. This is perhaps a more natural class because these are both coronal fricatives. Frommer's generalization is certainly theoretically warranted by some assumptions, because there seems to be something special about voiceless fricatives and clusters. But (as I argued in my M.A. thesis) it seems to be something special about coronal voiceless fricatives; I don't think we should expect to find, e.g., an extrasyllabic /f/ at the beginning of a complex cluster as we find extrasyllabic /s/ (claimed for English by Roca & Johnson, claimed for Blackfoot by me). On the other hand, for those who don't aspirate the /t/ in "fifteen", there's always the question of whether they syllabify it as fif.teen or fi.fteen. Hopefully none of this seems like criticism of Frommer's language, because I certainly don't mean it as such. In a world populated by underdeveloped, Indo-European-influenced conlangs, it's nice to see someone as knowledgeable and dedicated as Frommer take the time to give us an artificial language that's interesting. I'd be interested in finding out a bit more about Frommer himself. All I can find is that he's in the business school as USC, and that he's referred to as a "linguist", but I haven't been able to dig up what linguistic research he's done, or what he looked at for his Ph.D. or M.A. (both from USC), if indeed either of those degrees were in linguistics. There are a lot more interesting things about Na'vi that you should read about in his Language Log guest post, but I've already run on for a while, so I'll end it here. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:02:00 +0000 Steven Menefee 1981-2010 I just found out today that Steven Menefee has passed away. I only just learned that he had cancer last weekend, though I gather he had been fighting it for a while. I first met Steven at the Workshop for American Indigenous Languages at UC Santa Barbara in 2008. He and a couple colleagues from University of New Mexico had come to present on creating linguistics terminology in Navajo. After the talk I went up and introduced myself, told them how much I was interested in what they were doing, etc. That probably would have been the end of our contact, but Steven was such a friendly guy that when he saw that we were staying at the same hotel he shouted across the courtyard at the Super 8 to see if I and my University of Montana colleagues wanted to join them for dinner. Steven knew the area, so he was our guide to a rather wild night that summer weekend in 2008. The only other time I had the pleasure of his company was in Albuquerque at the High Desert Linguistics Conference that fall. I saw his name on a presentation at SILS last weekend, so it was an unpleasant surprise that when I got there and asked his UNM friends if he was there, the answer was crestfallen faces and an explanation about Steven's cancer. Steven was one of the most caring, friendly people I have met, and a linguist who cared deeply about the people who spoke the languages he studied. He was a man of strong convictions and above all open, warm-hearted compassion. He laughed easily and always created a positive atmosphere with those around him. He struck me as the kind of person whose goal in life was to make the world a better place, and I can say without a doubt that it is indeed a better place because of him. We'll miss you Steven. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 03 Jul 2010 15:36:00 +0000 Mary, merry, and marry For many speakers, including myself, "Mary", "merry", and "marry" are homonyms: meɹi. For other speakers, including my father, there is a threeway difference reflecting the underlying forms: me(j)ɹi, 'Mary', mɛɹi, 'merry', mæɹi, 'marry'. Generally, the distinctive forms belong to non-rhotic dialects, and the neutralized forms to rhotic dialects. This is because in rhotic dialects, intervocalic resonants tend to be ambisyllabic, i.e., they are attached both to the syllable that precedes them (as a coda) and the syllable that follows them (as an onset). An /r/ in coda position tends to neutralize many if not all vowel quality distinctions in the syllable it closes, and thus in rhotic dialects, where these syllables are closed by an /r/, we get all three front vowels neutralized to the [-hi][-lo][+ATR] vowel /e/. For non-rhotic speakers, /r/ can never be in coda position, and thus this neutralization does not occur. Because of this, rhotic speakers tend not to be able to identify which form is which, even on hearing them produced by non-rhotic speakers (or rhotic speakers who happened to have picked up the distinction in careful speech). I occupy some sort of no man's land in between, since I understand the distinction, and can produce it, but I never use it in normal speech. I probably inherited this from my father, who, while a rhotic speaker, comes from family in New York, and probably heard many non-rhotic speakers (in addition to being a careful and conservative speaker himself). I recently encountered this difficulty on two fronts. The first was in the TV show "Frasier". The character Niles, a rhotic but very careful speaker, played by David Hyde Pierce, also a rhotic speaker is discussing some former patients with commitment issues who overcame their disorder and were getting mɛɹid, which for a non-rhotic speaker would be "merried". This error seems a bit odd to me, since Pierce was born and raised in New York, was a camp counselour in New Hampshire, and went to school in Connecticut, so he surely was exposed to non-rhotic accents throughout his life. However, if he never acquired the distinction, it would be exceedingly difficult for him to recreate it. Though he didn't make the distinction, he knew that Niles likely would, and thus made a guess at one of the forms. The second was my wife Amanda, discussing a coworker, with a New Jersey accent, who wished her a mæɹi Christmas. What the coworker actually said was almost certainly mɛɹi, but to a rhotic speaker like Amanda there is little, if any, perceivable difference between to two. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:46:00 +0000 Tongue twisters (I'm using Lucida Sans Unicode for the phonetic transcriptions in this post; I think most people have this on their computer, but if something's not rendering properly, you probably don't.) As a phonologist, I'm always interested in tongue twisters. One of the classics in English is "She sells seashells by the seashore": ʃi sɛlz siʃɛlz baj ðə siʃɔɹ. Especially in the IPA version, it's easy to see the proliferation of alveolar and postalveolar fricatives, which is the source of difficulty in pronunciation. For English speakers, even simple words in other languages can be tongue twisters, especially if they contain sounds that aren't present in English, such as lateral fricatives or uvulars. The Kiksht word for 'eight' is a great example of this: ɢutɬqt. My recent facebook post about the Okanagan word for 'thistles' (sntkwlkwall'iw'stn' -- don't worry, there are some epenthetic schwas in there) led to some discussion of some of our favorite-sounding words in other languages. Bill Poser mentioned the Shuswap word for 'juniper': punllp (where ll is a lateral fricative), and I mentioned Bella Coola lhk'w-, 'tiny' (where hl is again a lateral fricative). Mithun (1999) gives a great one in Gitksan: nagáksdiː gáʔaɬ ɬagaχgáːkxʷɬ ɬagaxʷɢákʷɬ ɬagaχq’áːχɬ ɢáːqʰ, 'I have just seen for the very first time the toughness of the sinews of the wings of the raven.' Here the difficulty is in the combinations of lateral fricatives, velars, and uvulars, where velars and uvulars contrast within a syllable, and voicing varies. Adding to the difficulty is the similarity of the words. Also included is one from Choctaw: ʃɔ̃ʃi ʃwa ʃwakã iʃowã, 'Do you smell a stinking worm?' Besides the fact that people like to have fun with language, tongue twisters are probably common because people who speak disfluently are seen as less prestigious than those who are able to speak naturally and without error. Obviously nobody is capable of flawless speech 100% of the time, but we definitely judge those who make noticeable errors. Case in point: the Bushisms industry. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:15:00 +0000 Vowels and consonants I'm constantly struck by how many people seemingly refuse to believe in syllabic consonants. For instance, in my dialect (Standard American, or very close to it) there is absolutely no hint of a vowel in words like "word" or "bird". Yet many phonologists transcribe these words either as having a sequence of schwa plus /r/, or as the "r-colored schwa". I see no reason to posit any difference between the /r/ in the nucleus of "bird" and the /r/ in the onset of "rib". There surely must be a slight phonetic difference, but this is to be expected, because one is in onset position, while the other is in nucleus position. This is analogous to the slight difference between /u/ and /w/, or /i/ and /j/. One clue that it really is an /r/, and not a schwa plus /r/ sequence, or even an r-colored schwa: we get orthographic minimal pairs like "fur" and "fir" that are pronounced identically. This would be fine if they were clitics or unstressed syllables, where vowel reduction could neutralize both to schwa, but stressed "fur" and "fir" even in immaculate careful speech, are to my knowledge phonetically identical (I welcome any evidence to the contrary). One reason people cling to the belief that syllables must have vowels is doubtless English orthography. Except for "rhythm", I can't off the top of my head think of any words that orthographically have a supposedly syllabic consonant (unless you want to count words like "icicle" that end with an orthographic vowel; feel free to post other examples in the comments if you find them). So in words like "butter", "bottle", and "button", where the second syllables contain a syllabic consonant, we still see a vowel in the written form (and presumably there was a vowel in the historical pronunciation). Another reason is that we are taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that vowels are in some way the defining characteristic of a syllable. Many people are taught this in school, and become so dependent on orthography that some (native) speakers will even claim that the "th" sound in English (an interdental fricative) is a sequence of /t/ and /h/ (I swear I'm not making this up). However, orthography is always an imperfect clue to pronunciation, and English orthography is far from perfect, since its focus is on preserving the historical source of a word rather than transparently showing the pronunciation (NB: unlike many, I don't necessarily think that makes English orthography "worse" than a phonetically transparent orthography). In English we have a limited number of syllabic consonants, viz., /n/, /m/, /l/, and /r/, i.e., sonorants. However, many other languages even use obstruents as syllabic. Berber and Bella Coola both utilize almost any consonant as a syllable nucleus; Bella Coola has entire vowelless sentences. What it comes down to is that there is no binary distinction between consonants and vowels; there is only the gradient sonority hierarchy, where sounds higher on the scale are more likely to be syllable nuclei, and sounds lower down are more likely to be syllable margins. For instance, within the five most common vowel quality distinctions, /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, and /u/, /i/ and /u/ are classified as least sonorous, and are widely used (as /j/ and /w/) in syllabe margins, whereas /e/ and /o/ are more sonorous and rarely used as glides (as far as I know only in a few Papuan languages, and /o/ probably in Blackfoot), and /a/ is never a glide (unless perhaps /h/ is the consonantal version, an intriguing but questionable claim). For some languages, only the most sonorous sounds (vowels) are used as syllable nuclei, but other languages allow also the most sonorous consonants (sonorants) and others consonants lower yet (fricatives or even stops). Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:59:00 +0000 Xenolinguistics Driving home from the LSA conference in Baltimore last weekend, I got to thinking about xenolinguistics, i.e., the study of alien languages. Obviously this isn't something we've encountered in reality, but it's often taken up in science fiction books and movies (most recently the movie Avatar). But of course in fiction the languages are always exactly like ours, and in many cases they even are ours, just slightly modified (e.g., Star Wars, The Dark Tower series). I think it would be endlessly fascinating to write a detailed treatise on what to actually do when confronted by an alien being, though I doubt any professional journal would be interested in the results. And the steps involved would not simply be "learn the language". First you'd have to discover if they even had a language. This might not be as simple as it sounds, because they might communicate in a way that humans could not perceive (telepathy, chemical signals, EM emission with wavelengths below 380nm or above 760nm), or their communication might not immediately be recognizable as such. We make a lot of assumptions about universality, and many of these assumptions are not necessarily founded even for human languages, much less valid for Language in the abstract. Even in the simple case of a lifeform emitting some type of sound, you'd have to figure out whether or not it was communication, and then whether or not it was language. Noise emission could be unintentional, as humans radiate heat, or it could be an response to the environment or the lifeform's internal state. And if it does have a repeating pattern of some sort, the question would still remain as to whether or not it was limited to a finite series of fixed calls, as in monkeys and dogs, or whether it was an infinitely variable system of communication, as in human language. Once language has been established, there's still the question of perceiving and reproducing the sounds in that language. An alien lifeform would doubtless have an acoustic production tract significantly different from humans, and thus it's not a given that humans would be even physically able to distinguish the sounds it produced, much less reproduce them. Certainly there would be ways around this. If the language is spoken in the 40k-80k Hz range, you could simply pitch shift a recording down to the human hearing range. More difficult might be a case in which the language was spoken in a very narrow range, say 300-350 Hz, with 10 or 15 tonal distinctions within that range. And there's no reason to think that the facts on phonology, syntax, or semantics would be anything like human language. Even if we admit all the tenets of Universal Grammar (which I find charitable), even a diehard UGer can't expect alien languages to be the same, since they'd have evolved a different Language Acquisition Device that could have different grammar rules in it, rules that might make no sense from a human language standpoint, or even from a human cognition standpoint. I think it would be an interesting endeavor to write out a manual for the intrepid explorer encountering an alien lifeform for the first time, instructing him (or her) how to proceed in determing the presence of a language, and if it exists, documented and learning that language. But it doesn't seem like an endeavor that would appear very impressive to hiring committees or tenure review boards. Maybe I'll take it up in another fifty years or so, when I'm old and distinguished and I don't have to care what anyone thinks of me. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:43:00 +0000 Apostrophe's It's become quite common recently (unless this is the recency illusion striking again) for people to get confused and use apostrophes in plural forms, e.g., dog's for dogs. I'm not usually one to criticize non-standard usages, but this one has me puzzled. How do people get confused about this? 's is essentially never used in the plural, except for capitalized acronyms which haven't been lexicalized, and even then I think only MLA recommends using 's. So it's not a case of people being unsure when to use it for plurals and when not to; the rule is never use them. So why is everyone so confused? The nature of this error makes it extremely difficult to research, since you have to hand pick the true instances, as opposed to the (still) more common genetive 's. I did find this gem through a google search: Hey guy's. I was wondaring do you love dog's or cat's? I like dog's!!! Please say dog's. Dog's rock! (Keep in mind that this was on what appears to be a forum for pre-adolescents and younger people in general.) In this case it seems the poster has internalized the rule as being that plural morphology in English is always 's. But as I said before, since this is never true, how to people get confused? My guess is simply interference from the genitive. I know from experience that people have trouble figuring out the difference between guy's and guys' (or guys's). Thus the confusion is not a grammatical one based on what plural marker to use, but a typographic one, in that people often see 's after a noun, and somehow they generalized it to plural marking. I'd be interested in researching this further, but I'm at a loss for how to do a search for forms. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:58:00 +0000 Review of "The Life and Death of Texas German" by Hans C. Boas When I was asked to review this book on my blog, I was unsure what I would find. Far from an expert on Texas German, I had in fact never heard of Texas German before received it in the mail this summer. However, as I've been slowly reading through it for the past few months, I've come to learn a great deal about Texas German and the rise and fall of this dialect. Overall, Boas' book is well-organized and extensively researched. His writing conveys a profound familiarity not only with the literature on Texas German, citing probably every major study undertaken of the dialecct, but also a keen interest in the process of language death, and the possibilities of language maintenance and revitalization. The only criticism I can offer is the rather clinical attitude he attempts to adopt in light of the death of Texas German, an attitude he clearly does not espouse, as evidenced by occasional glimpses of the author's true passion for the language and its continued survival. I found "The Life and Death of Texas German" to be an interesting work on three levels: (i) the analysis of Texas German as a language/dialect in its own right, (ii) the similarities of Texas German to many indigenous languages of North America in its current decline, and (iii) the origins and persistence of distinct American dialects of German, which is my own heritage language through my mother's bloodline. The book is perhaps most obviously a useful resource for any researcher working on Texas German, or more generally on American dialects of German. More useful still is the Texas German Dialect Project, of which this publication is a product. The TGDP is a project undertaken by Boas with the help of a few research assistants to document Texas German before it becomes extinct. It has as one of its more important products the Texas German Dialect Archive. For his research, Boas developed several questionnaires ranging from translation tasks of words and sentences from English to questions about the informant's attitudes toward Texas German. (I should note here that Boas' use of the word "informant" is dated from my own Americanist perspective; generally we prefer to use the term "consultant".) Boas first gives sociohistorical context for the formation of the Texas German dialect, giving an overview of German immigration to Texas and the settlement patterns of the German settlers in central Texas, specifically around New Braunsfels, where Boas did his fieldwork for the TGDP. He then comments on new-dialect formation in Texas German, especially as regards Trudgill's (2004) model of new-dialect formation. Latter chapters give examples of specific developments in Texas German phonology and morphosyntax. Throughout, Boas argues that Texas German never underwent the final "focusing" stage of Trudgill's model, in which a dialect settles on a consistent pattern of phenomena (which is distinct from early stages which display significant interspeaker variability). In his final chapter, Boas comments on the impending death of Texas German and the possibility of language maintenance. The parallels between the moribund Texas German dialect and the many languages of North America undergoing language death are striking. While the impact of the death of a dialect of a major language like German may not be as severe as the death of a unique language such as, e.g., Cayuse, the processes that languages undergo as they fall into disuse are fairly universal, as discussed in Fishman (1991). However, Boas does note that Texas German seems to retain its morphosyntactic features to a greater degree than is usual among dying languages. The reasons behind the decline of Texas German are all too common: status as a minority language, discrimination, lack of official legal status, disuse due to perceived economic and social advantages of the majority language. In the case of Texas German, the language enjoyed considerable prestige in its early days, when significant parts of Texas were entirely German speaking. This situation declined as roads better connected different areas of the country, causing an influx of English-only speakers into the New Braunfels area and an exodus of native Texas German speakers to bigger cities in order to find jobs. World War II played a large role in the branding of German as an "un-American" language, not only in the passing of English-only laws for schools and even some public spaces, but a decline in even private use by native speakers, who considered themselves Americans and did not want to engage in activities that were perceived as unpatriotic. On a personal note, this book held my interest as a non-speaker of German, in that it is my heritage language yet I have inherited only three phrases from my German-speaking ancestors: was machst du, 'what are you doing?', nicht so laut, 'not so loud!', and gesundheit, 'bless you!' Both my maternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother were of German stock, the latter more recently than the former. However, none of my German-speaking ancestors passed their native tongue on to their children. Even my grandfather's great-grandfather Valentine Denzer, who was born in Germany, spoke English for most of his life, even keeping his personal diary in English during the Civil War. I think I too inherited this tendency: before I became a linguist, I was of the mind that if I had children in a foreign country, I would see no reason to teach them English, and that while I would continue speaking English to my family back home, I would use the local language during the rest of my life. Clearly this tendency stems from the desire for your children to have a better life than you had, and the belief that any deviation from the norm results in social difficulty and financial loss. It doesn't help any that this belief is at least somewhat accurate; while speaking another language is never a handicap, identifying first and foremost with a language or culture other than English can be a stumbling block in the United States. This same attitude has contributed not only to the decline of Texas German, but almost every indigenous language. In the case of indigenous languages, mandatory boarding schools, where children were beaten for speaking their native languages, certainly had an enormous impact as well, but in modern times, it is primarily the belief that identifying as English-speakers will help their children which keeps native speakers from passing on the language they grew up speaking. "The Life and Death of Texas German" is a valuable resource for researchers in many areas of linguistics and anthropology. The Texas German Dialect Archive is likewise an incredibly valuable resource, especially since it may soon represent the last data available on Texas German. Boas offers a wealth of data on Texas German, not only on phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena that distinguish Texas German from Standard German, but also on speaker attitudes toward Texas German, including how often speakers used Texas German historically and in modern times. In many ways Texas German parallels the plight of indigenous languages of Americas, coming from a proud tradition of vigorous use, and falling into decline as English gained ground as the majority language associated with social status and economic advantage. Given the large percentage of readers who come from a Germanic background, Boas' book will no doubt also be of interest on a more personal level, with German as a heritage language which has been lost in many families. Boas' book is eminently readable and clearly written, presenting a valuable introduction to Texas German for the non-expert, as well as giving useful commentary on language death in general. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:17:00 +0000 Could I get some binding indices, please? This is actually a rather old news article, but I've only just now got around to blogging about it. The lede read "In an emotional interview, Whitney Houston opened up to talk-show host Oprah Winfrey about the pivotal role her mother played in getting the singer back on track." Wait, what? Whose mother? What singer? It's pretty unreasonable to expect that someone wouldn't be able to parse this sentence, but it still strikes me as very odd. First, there's the inevitable ambiguity in "her mother". This is resolved by pragmatics, since we assume that since Whitney Houston is the topic of the passage, "her mother" naturally refers to Houston's mother. However, syntactically this could just as easily be Winfrey's mother. (This is why I maintain we need a proximate/obviative distinction in English: "Whitney Houstonwa opened up to talk-show host Oprah Winfreyi about the pivotal role omotherwa played in getting oma singerwa back on track". When I mix Blackfoot and English I like to call it Blinglish.) But the most serious "hey wait a minute" moment for me is the use of "the singer" toward the end of the sentence to refer to Whitney Houston. I would think that strictly speaking, this sentence should be ungrammatical by pretty much any version of the binding theory you adopt (classic GB, R&R, or Ken Safir's FTIP). This has to to with reference, which I think is captured nicely by Ken Safir's version of binding. Once we've established the context with an R-expression (referring expression, i.e., any noun phrase that's not a pronoun or an anaphor), we need to use the most dependent form for each successive instance of a coreferent NP. "Her mother" is fine, but it would be weird to say "Whitney Houston's mother"; that's why we have pronouncs. And "the singer" just seems really odd to me. I would expect "in getting her back on track". I assume they reverted back to an R-expression for Houston because it had been so long since the initial mention, but it's still very marked for me, perhaps even ungrammatical. This is because you can't have an R-expression coindexed with a previous R-expression. If we say "Whitney Houston picked up the singer's clothes at the dry cleaner's", we want to ask "Wait, whose clothes did she pick up?" This violates whatever theory of binding you subscribe to, unequivocally. Luckily, actual language use is much more fluid, and clearly that was an acceptable sentence to someone, again, probably because of the distance between the two expressions, but I don't have to like it. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:52:00 +0000 Plurals In linguistics we often use the term "marked" to mean a structure or sound that is in some sense more difficult or less common across languages. The "unmarked" structure is the one that is default, typically in a cross-linguistic perspective. Thus you (to my knowledge) never find languages in which the present tense is derived from the past, or in which all obstruents are voiced and all sonorants are voiceless; the "default" tense is past, and the default voicing for obstruents is [-voice]. The term "marked" comes from literal morphological marking, i.e., past tense is literally marked in English by the suffix -ed, whereas the present tense is unmarked (in the first and second person singular). Likewise, singular is unmarked and plural is marked, in that languages add something to signify the plural, or don't change anything, but there aren't any languages (again, to my knowledge) that have an unmarked plural and then add an affix to derive the singular. This should correlate with frequency: unmarked forms and more common and marked forms are less common. Thus in doing a corpus based search for singulars and plurals, you should find more hits for singular forms of a word than plural forms, with a few exceptions for special cases like "pants" and "scissors". So I wondered the other day why I kept adding -s to things while I typing. I noticed especially that I was doing it on the word "consonant" -- I kept typing "consonants" even when I meant the singular. So I decided to check out COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) to see if I was just weird. (Since this is a blog post and not a research paper, I haven't gone through the effort of determining the percentage of forms that are exactly what I'm looking for; thus the numbers for "consonant" below could include adjective usages as well as singular noun usages.)
Just for fun, let's see some other COCA counts for singular and plural.
Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:25:00 +0000 Words for 'cat' Frédéric Dichtel wrote me to ask about my research on words for 'cat', so I thought I would devote this week's blog entry to a summary of what I've done. I got interested specifically in words for 'cat' while researching neologisms in American languages (which I was researching in order to publicly support my private opinion that American languages more often create new words for new things rather than borrowing a word from another language). I noticed that, contra most other types of words, animal words were usually borrowed, often from English, but also other European languages. The word for 'cat' is a prime example of this, and displays probably more similarity cross-linguistically than any other word I looked at. My paperon the topic makes the claim that these similarities are due to a small set of widely diffused borrowings, rather than many separate instances of borrowing. Similar words in different languages can be similar for four primary reasons: (i) the similarity is due to chance, (ii) the languages are genetically related, (iii) the form is borrowed, either from one language to the other or both from the same external source, or (iv) the words are similar due to some language universal. If languages are unrelated and in contact, the most likely scenario is usually (iii). Some examples are included below.
Most likely these forms are from a combination of diffused borrowings from Dutch poes, the vocative form for 'cat' (i.e., how Dutch people address(ed) cats), English 'puss' and the English vocative 'psspss' used to call a cat. This would explain the prevalence of three types of forms: those that approximate poos, those that approximate pus (including almost all of the Salishan language, which I haven't included above), and those that approximate pispis. One piece of evidence that these are diffused borrowings rather than individual ones is that while Tlingit lacks labials, and thus has a form beginning with /d/ instead of /p/, Tsimshian and Haida have /p/, and thus must have borrowed the form from Tlingit rather than English or Dutch. James Crippen notes that the Tlingit form in turn is a borrowing from Chinook Jargon. It's not clear what's so special about the word 'cat', but many northern languages have almost identical forms for this word, while other animal names are quite different. For example, the word for 'chicken' in the same languages displays remarkable variation, ranging from English borrowings to French borrowings to onomatopoetic terms to descriptive neologisms. Besides the northern languages, southeastern and southwestern languages also have very similar terms for 'cat', though they are from different borrowings (often old Spanish mozo or English 'kitty'). Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sun, 03 Jan 2010 01:43:00 +0000 No update this week I'm just posting this short notice this week because of new computer issues. Check back next weekend for a new post. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:52:00 +0000 deep-end/depend While perusing Not Always Right the other day, I came across a post entitled The Rule Deep-Ends On How Cute You Are. I was nonplussed; deep-ends? Certainly I'm familiar with the deep end of a pool, but as a verb? It took me the entire reading of the post to realize they were playing on the (in my opinion, mostly orthographic) similarity of "deep end" to "depend". I think the main reason for my confusion is that I always, even in careful speech, pronounce "depend" as dǝ.ˈpʰɛnd, rather than di.ˈpʰɛnd. "deep end", on the other hand, is ˈdip.ˌɛnd. Thus, even if we treat both as single phonological words, "deep end" is different in stress, aspiration, and vowel quality. I can't tell if the assumed transparency on the part of the author is due solely to orthographic similarity, or if most people (or at least the author) have the unreduced vowel quality in the first syllable. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:34:00 +0000 Language and place I've been thinking recently about the connection between language and place, not coincidentally because that was the theme of the SILS conference I attended last month. As an English-speaking American of German and Scotch-Irish ancestry, I haven't in the course of my life placed a lot of weight on the relationship between a language and the geographic location where it is spoken. No doubt this is probably partly because of the omnipresence of English, even in countries where it isn't the native language. Certainly there are plenty of dialects, even just in America, but I was born in Florida to parents from New Jersey and California, and went to school in Tennessee and Montana, and I've been speaking the same English the whole time, noticing only slight differences in the English spoken to me in those different places. It is definitely the case that American dialects are fading in younger generations as people acquire more language from standardized sources such as television and the internet, and people move around more and are exposed to people from many different regions. But that's not what I want to talk about today. I think the issue of language and place is a difficult one for Americans because 99.8% of us natively speak a language that was imported within the last 500 years (though in my own family I only have to go back 100 years to find someone born in Germany). On the other hand, Salish peoples have been speaking Salishan languages in British Columbia for around 10,000 years. While there have been changes in the language (10,000 years bp would probably find a single group of people speaking Proto-Salish, whereas today there are more than twenty mutually unintelligible Salishan languages) and migrations (modern Salishan languages stretch south and west in Montana), there is certainly some truth to saying that 10,000 years you would find the same people speaking the same language. This relation with place can be found in the languages spoken there. No, I'm not going to claim some Sapir-Whorfian causality between the geography of British Columbia and the Salishan languages. But the time depth of lexical items and semantic change in cognates can be used as a somewhat reliable method for investigating migrations. (For instance, the time depth of words for certain types of trees can be used to map some Indo-European migrations in and out of areas containing those tree species.) For indigenous peoples, there is typically a strong, often spiritual, connection between language and place. Yes, every people is indigenous to somewhere, but I think the most appropriate use for the term "indigenous" is to mean people who live in the general geographic area of there ancestors. For instance, we could say that the Navajo are indigenous to America, since Na-Dene peoples have been here for tens of millenia, but not necessarily indigenous to the southwest, since Apachean peoples migrated there within the last millenium. Some people talk about the fricatives and labialized consonants of Northwestern languages recalling the lapping of waves on the shore. While I agree that's a beautiful image, it doesn't really have any objective fact to it. On the other hand, the fact that Tsimshianic languages have affixes meaning "upriver" and "downriver" does say something about where the languages are spoken. At the risk of touching on the language/culture debate, we wouldn't expect to find such affixes in a language that's been spoken in a riverless desert for 5000 years. The slogan for the SILS meeting last month was "For every place a language". I like it. Because there is a language for every place, and I think it's something that Americans often forget. People are too quick to say "Learn English if you want to live in America", even though most of our ancestors didn't bother to learn Cherokee or Delaware or Kitsai or Karuk when they came to America. Perhaps we don't like to think about such things because we don't have those ties to our ancestors. My grandmother's grandfather lived all his life in a place I have never seen, and all his life spoke a language I can't understand. Maybe we devalue the connection between language and place because it's something most of us can never hope to have. Author : noreply@blogger.com (linguistlessons) Publ.Date : Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:54:00 +0000 |
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TESOL Certification for teaching english abroad in non-native English speaking countries.
