[225001200010] |Bacon Strength
[225001200020] |Having only just recently taken the NetFlix plunge, I had been ignoring the flurry of interest amongst computational linguists about Recommender Systems.
[225001200030] |I am now fully aware of the profound need and utility of improving said systems.
[225001200040] |Somehow, NetFlix got from the set [Blue Velvet, Chinatown, Midnight Cowboy] to the recommendation The Wild Bunch.
[225001200050] |There must be a sub-culture growing around the absurdity and humor derivable from such recommendations.
[225001200060] |Imagine you decided to follow such recommendation religiously.
[225001200070] |Honestly, how long would it take you to get to Glitter?
[225001200080] |Scary thought, huh?
[225001200090] |Now you realize how crucial Recommender Systems are to the survival of humankind.
[225001200100] |It seems to me that an automated version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon ought to work AT LEAST this well, right?
[225001200110] |You simply recommend any movie that shares a cast member with a rated movie.
[225001200120] |The closer two movies are in a Kevin Bacon network, the more strongly you recommend it.
[225001200130] |Let's call this Bacon Strength.
[225001200140] |Hmmmmm, wait a second, I might be on to something ... this could be bigger than Google ... why am I telling YOU people about this ... the idea is mine, do you hear!
[225001200150] |MINE!!!!
[225001200160] |Plus, I'm completely amazed that at least four Chuck Norris movies are available for immediate online viewing, but only the first season of the new Dr. Who. wtf?
[225001210010] |On Jobs and NLP Degrees...
[225001210020] |Thomas posted an interesting quandary recently.
[225001210030] |I'll summarize it this way: How does a person choose which M.S. program in NLP to attend?
[225001210040] |As far as Thomas and I are aware, there are no rankings for computational linguistics/NLP programs; so, is word of mouth all anyone has to go on?
[225001210050] |Does anyone out there know of any resources for helping someone like Thomas?
[225001210060] |Does the NLP community out there care to contribute words of wisdom to the next generation of CL/NLP newbies?
[225001210070] |You may wish to read my own discussion of what I perceive to be the difference between CL and NLP here.
[225001210080] |Here was my advice to Thomas.
[225001210090] |You're free to attack it viciously.
[225001210100] |I think the crucial question is about your goals: do you want to be an academic working on high level problems like parsing and discourse (in which case you're looking at getting a PhD), or do you want to get a job in industry (a PhD is good in industry, but there are plenty of NLP jobs for Master's level, even some for Bachelors)?
[225001210110] |If industry is your answer, the school you choose won't really matter that much; it's the skills you develop.
[225001210120] |I'd strongly advise you to develop competency with machine learning, if you haven't already.
[225001210130] |You don't have to be great at it, just competent.
[225001210140] |That's a highly marketable skill set now, and will be for the foreseeable future.
[225001210150] |General competence with statistics and corpus linguistics is highly valued.
[225001210160] |So, I'd ask each program where stats and ML fit into their programs (or how much flexibility they give you for taking electives).
[225001210170] |And, just for the record, SUNY Buffalo has an M.S. in CL too.
[225001210180] |Not too late to apply.
[225001210190] |You can kinda surf Lake Erie (gotta be better than Georgia surfing).
[225001210200] |(pssst, context for the surfing reference can be found on Thomas’ profile).
[225001210210] |I scanned the last 10 or so NLP related non-academic job postings on The Linguist List and found a fair bit of consistency in the skills they were asking for.
[225001210220] |Above all else, they all wanted good programming skills.
[225001210230] |If you search Monster.com for "computational linguistics" I think you'll see an even greater emphasis on programming skills.
[225001210240] |Here's a representative sample of the "requirements" from those Linguist List job postings.
[225001210250] |Taken all together, they may look intimidating, but this is a mash-up of ten+ postings.
[225001210260] |It's just meant to sketch what industry is looking for.
[225001210270] |Experience in one or more of the following: MS SQL Database Server; Internet Information Services/Apache Tomcat; Windows operating systems;.NET; Java.
[225001210280] |Strong programming skills in at least two of the following programming languages: Python, C++, Java and Perl
[225001210290] |Multimodal statistical algorithms for language processing and modeling in both speech and handwriting applications
[225001210300] |Develop tools for efficiently processing corpora of speech and/or sketch/handwriting data;
[225001210310] |Work with a team of researchers and developers to successfully integrate research components and validate functionality;
[225001210320] |Experience desired with statistical language modeling for either speech or handwriting applications (e.g., familiarity with CMU-Cambridge LM toolkit, SRILM toolkit, ATT FST toolkit, MALLET, Libbow, etc.);
[225001210330] |Strong algorithmic skills and analytical background;
[225001210340] |Demonstrated success in working in a fast-paced environment;
[225001210350] |Ability to work effectively and successfully either independently and/or in a collaborative team environment.
[225001210360] |Experience in the creation and exploitation of domain and task ontologies in text analytics
[225001210370] |Strong background in statistical modelling required.
[225001210380] |Knowledge of machine translation or natural language processing techniques
[225001210390] |Ability to perform linguistic data analysis.
[225001210400] |Proficiency in one or more scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby) or programming languages, particularly C++, is a plus.
[225001210410] |MS or PhD in Computational Linguistics or related field.
[225001210420] |Work experience in production-quality NLP systems.
[225001210430] |Familiarity with Unix/Linux operating system environment is a plus.
[225001210440] |Experience in machine learning, information retrieval, or data mining are all pluses.
[225001210450] |Experience in the building of domain-specific ontologies is useful
[225001210460] |Experience in statistical analysis and machine learning
[225001210470] |Development, analysis, and support of grammar engine rules for English
[225001210480] |Experience in corpus or text analysis, conversation analysis, or computational linguistics
[225001210490] |Experienced architect/developer to design scalable enterprise application friendly implementations of spell checking, sentiment, named entity extraction
[225001220010] |"LingPipe, I hate you"
[225001220020] |Actually, no, I do not hate LingPipe.
[225001220030] |But someone does.
[225001220040] |It is the entertaining aspect of Sitemeter that led me to this discovery.
[225001220050] |Occasionally I check my Sitemeter page view details because it's comforting to see that people actually do read my blog (even if y'all don't comment, thpppt!) .
[225001220060] |But far more entertainment value is gained from the information about how someone came to my site.
[225001220070] |I can see what search words brought someone here.
[225001220080] |I've been collecting some of the more amusing ones and I've been meaning to post about it, but today I discovered someone had gotten to my blog by searching Google for, and I quote, "lingpipe ihate you".
[225001220090] |I don't know what deviltry the evil duo at LingPipe is up to, but they appear to have made an enemy.
[225001240010] |"Bollywood Bistro"
[225001240020] |UB's campus cuisine took a massive step forward this semester when we finally got an on-campus Indian restaurant (more than a decade after the great influx of Indian grad students would have made it an obvious trend).
[225001240030] |It's classic UB to finally allow a restaurant that caters to vegetarians only when I'm finishing, never to be a student here again.
[225001240040] |But it's the name that really caught my eye: Bollywood Bistro.
[225001240050] |It's a great multi-cultural blend of the classic French bistro, paragon of 20th century Euro-cuisine (where bland is a compliment), refashioned by the post-colonial vibrance of the 21st century's most diverse culture/s.
[225001240060] |The term "Bollywood" itself screams to be unpacked (a blend of "Bombay" and "Hollywood").
[225001240070] |How could I not make this a regular lunch spot, even as the University's lungs spew its breathy deadline down my neck.
[225001260010] |The Perils of Planning
[225001260020] |I just can’t get this construction to work for me:
[225001260030] |“Such a decision would give Clinton an estimated 55 or more delegates than Obama, according to Clinton campaign operatives.”
[225001260040] |This comes from Huffington Post contributer Thomas B. Edsall.
[225001260050] |To me, the construction “or more” must always be optional.
[225001260060] |In other words, you should always be able to delete “or more” and the sentence should mean roughly the same thing.
[225001260070] |But in this case, deleting “or more” would cause clear ungrammaticality to ensue:
[225001260080] |*Such a decision would give Clinton an estimated 55 delegates than Obama…
[225001260090] |Ugh!
[225001260100] |My guess is that Edsall had a “X more Y than Z” construction planned, then decided to throw in a little “or more” for flavor, but he was faced with the catastrophic prospect of TWO more’s in ONE sentence, right next to each other!
[225001260110] |Gasp!
[225001260120] |That can’t be right, right?
[225001260130] |*Such a decision would give Clinton an estimated 55 or more more delegates than Obama…
[225001260140] |Well, for this speaker of Northern California English (truly, the finest of all the Englishes, as well you may know), “or more more” sounds better than the original.
[225001270010] |"Love Means Never Having to Say ..."
[225001270020] |There is a talented Cuban blogger named Yoani Sánchez at Generation Y. She's a wonderful writer and thoughtful blogger.
[225001270030] |The fact that she's managed to maintain her blogging life while explicitly repressed by her government (they've taken away her passport, amongst other things) is inspiring.
[225001270040] |(HT Daily Dish)
[225001270050] |But I'm a linguist, so let's get down to business.
[225001270060] |As far as I can tell, she blogs in THREE languages!!
[225001270070] |Spanish, German, and English.
[225001270080] |Her most up-to-date posts appear to be in Spanish, so I presume this is her blog language of choice.
[225001270090] |However, as the weeks and months go by, some of her older posts appear in either English or German translations.
[225001270100] |I'm curious to know if she is translating these herself, or getting someone to translate for her?
[225001270110] |Some of the English is quite good and enjoyable (with occasional stutters, of course).
[225001270120] |The current English post (from March 5) is on apologies.
[225001270130] |Linguist have long been interested in the apology as a speech act, of course.
[225001270140] |There are whole subfields of Sociolinguistics and discourse pragmatics devoted it.
[225001270150] |I've long felt that my use of the casual apology has little to do with any attempt on my part to ask for forgiveness.
[225001270160] |The most common situation in which I use "I'm sorry" or "excuse me" is one where someone else has made a mistake of some sort.
[225001270170] |Imagine I'm walking in to a store and someone has mistaken used the entrance as the exit and he bumps into me.
[225001270180] |I would most likely mumble lightly, "oops, sorry".
[225001270190] |Clearly, I am not at fault, yet I issue the apology.
[225001270200] |Why?
[225001270210] |Here is my I-haven't-read-Grice-in-years analysis: by taking blame, so to speak, I am able to quickly signal to the offender that I am not issuing blame to them.
[225001270220] |Since they know they are to blame and not me (and they know that I know, blah blah blah), they can infer via the Maxim of Quality that I must be saying something else, like an indirect speech act. Using some chain of Gricean inference, they can probably construct the interpretation that I'm really saying "no apology is necessary".
[225001270230] |It is an easy way for me to diffuse their trepidation about MY reaction.
[225001270240] |At around 6 foot 4 inches and 260lbs, I know I'm an intimidating presence.
[225001270250] |I don't want the other person to feel that their small mistake will be turned into a big one by the overreaction of some lumbering giant (actually, I'm quite quick on my feet, I was a helluva wrestler once, ya know).
[225001270260] |So, here's 11 ways to say you're sorry (HT SenseList)
[225001270270] |Catalan: Ho sentoCroatian: Žao mi jeCzech: PromiňteDanish: UndskyldFinnish: AnteeksiFlemish: Het spijt meHungarian: SajnosLuxembourgish: Et deet mer leedMaltese: Ma nitkellimx bil-MaltiNorwegian: BeklagerPolish: Przepraszam
[225001270280] |Cheers.
[225001280010] |“hypercompetent”
[225001280020] |In a recent article on Slate here, I ran across the following sentence:
[225001280030] |“One of the most important figures in the presidential campaign this fall is a controversial, hypercompetent blonde.” (my emphasis)
[225001280040] |I find the term “hypercompetent” to be a bit oxymoronic.
[225001280050] |It’s like saying hypermediocre.
[225001280060] |Is it really a compliment?
[225001280070] |Is this ultimately sexist?
[225001280080] |Was the author trying to avoid using some male-oriented word to describe an ambitious, successful woman?
[225001280090] |Why reference her hair color?
[225001280100] |Recently, polyglot conspiracy has posted about the sexism in the current political media coverage, and this may be an example
[225001290010] |On the strengths and weaknesses of “theoretically”
[225001290020] |Do scientists use the word “theoretically” the opposite of the way non-scientists do?
[225001290030] |Let’s see.
[225001290040] |Below, I walk through a cheap and dirty corpus linguistics method for investigating distributional differences.
[225001290050] |This week a colleague of mine brought up an interesting point about the lay person’s use of the word “theoretically” and I thought it merited some investigation and a post.
[225001290060] |My colleague’s point sprang from a quote that a political pundit made regarding the West Virginia primary and the impact of racism.
[225001290070] |The pundit was making what is now a rather conventional observation: roughly 20% of white Clinton voters in West Virginia were willing to publicly admit that race was a factor in their voting decision (I don’t know if this is true or not, but it has been repeated in the mainstream media many times, here’s one AP example); if we assume that most people who are at least slightly racist are also at least slightly private in their racism, then we can derive the deduction that more than 20% actually considered the race of the candidates when making their decisions, but some of them refused to admit it.
[225001290080] |The pundit chose to express this reasoning by saying something like this (I don’t have a direct quote): ‘In WV, 20% of white Clinton voters admitted that race was a factor; theoretically, this means it’s possible that more than 20% actually considered race important’.
[225001290090] |My colleague’s point was that this use of theoretically does not really mean the speaker is referencing some specific scientific theory which predicts a particular outcome.
[225001290100] |It means something closer to arguably or probably.
[225001290110] |I agreed and proposed that it might be acting like an inferential evidential, couching the claim in the guise of a fact derived by deductive reasoning.
[225001290120] |This got me to wondering about how the word theoretically patterns in common usage.
[225001290130] |I decided to conduct a brief experiment comparing the words theoretically, arguably, and probably.
[225001290140] |In order to do this efficiently, I chose to use the freely available and wholly online Collins Cobuild Concordance and Collocations Sampler.
[225001290150] |This handy dandy online tool allows anyone to extract distributional facts about words quickly from a corpus of 56 million words composed of three subcorpora:
[225001290160] |British books, ephemera, radio, newspapers, magazines (36m words)American books, ephemera and radio (10m words)British transcribed speech (10m words)
[225001290170] |There are two basic tools available:
[225001290180] |1) Corpus Concordance Sampler: provides the search word and the sentence it occurred in (well, not quite the sentence, but close enough for Saturday afternoon)
[225001290190] |2) Collocation Sampler: provides the words that are statistically significantly associated with the search words (Mutual Information Score plus t-score of significance)
[225001290200] |Let’s start with collocates.
[225001290210] |Below I’ve pasted the ten most significant collocates for the three words under investigation.
[225001290220] |You could interpret this table as saying something like this: the pronoun it is 3.5 times more likely to occur within 8 words of theoretically than you would assume from random co-occurrence.
[225001290230] |It is standard within corpus linguistics to interpret this non-random co-occurrence to mean that these two words have some semantically meaningful association (pssst, we should be careful not to over-interpret the meaning of the co-occurrence behavior of pronouns).
[225001290240] |theoretically: Collins t-score
[225001290250] |arguably: Collins t-score
[225001290260] |probably: Collins t-score
[225001290270] |Note that “d” is likely the contraction for “would” and “ll” is the contraction for “will”.
[225001290280] |Analysis: the fact that jumps out at me is the pervasiveness of modal verbs on the lists for theoretically and probably.
[225001290290] |They both have four modals in their top ten.
[225001290300] |In all cases, they seem to be expressing epistemic modality in order to hedge the certainty of whatever is being claimed.
[225001290310] |On the other hand, the word arguably has zero modals in its top ten, but it does have four superlatives, while theoretically has zero superlatives and probably has only one.
[225001290320] |A picture appears to be emerging.
[225001290330] |First Pass Interpretation: All three words appear to be used as hedges.
[225001290340] |But theoretically and probably appear to pattern closely together as generic hedges, while arguably seems to be a hedge that is strongly associated with superlative claims.
[225001290350] |It seems to me that this use of theoretically as a hedge in lay discourse is in contrast with its use in scientific discourse.
[225001290360] |I would assume scientists are more likely to use theoretically in a sentence to strengthen their claim, not weaken it.
[225001290370] |However, in non-scientific circles I would guess that scientific theory is regarded with some suspicion.
[225001290380] |When a claim is based on a theory, non-scientist are more likely than not to consider it not really true.
[225001290390] |Using the word theoretically, for the lay person, is a way to say “I’m not sure…maybe not.”
[225001290400] |Now let’s looks at the concordance.
[225001290410] |I took the concordance output and performed a little judgment task.
[225001290420] |For each output set, I created two alternative documents by replacing the target word with one of its alternatives.
[225001290430] |So the theoretically document had a theoretically_into_probably alternative and a theoretically_into_arguably alternative.
[225001290440] |I used a five point scale to judge the synonymy of each substitution (i.e., I asked myself ‘does this sentence mean the same thing with the substitution?’):
[225001290450] |1. clearly the same meaning2. kind of the same meaning3. can’t decide4. kind of different meaning5. clearly different meaning
[225001290460] |The winner, so to speak, of the most similar prize seems to be arguably into probably.
[225001290470] |This is to say that I find it generally synonymous to replace the word arguably with probably.
[225001290480] |Although the reverse, probably into arguably, was pretty good too.
[225001290490] |The cases where the theoretically into probably substitution works best seems to be the sentence initial cases where the word is acting as an adverbial hedge over the proposition encoded by the whole clause.
[225001290500] |But these cases are few.
[225001290510] |Although these two words seemed to have similar collocates, they do not seem very similar in their actual distributions.
[225001290520] |This is driven, I think, by the existence of the semantically dissimilar technical use for theoretically.
[225001290530] |Neither probably nor arguably have this sort of clearly technical usage.
[225001290540] |Statisticians would likely use the noun probability rather than the adverb probably.
[225001290550] |I doubt logicians use arguably at all.
[225001290560] |theoretically into probably
[225001290570] |theoretically into arguably
[225001290580] |arguably into probably
[225001290590] |arguably into theoretically
[225001290600] |probably into arguably
[225001290610] |probably into theoretically
[225001300010] |Globalization and Language
[225001300020] |Freakonomics has a nice post asking the question "What Will Globalization Do to Languages?".
[225001300030] |They ask four language professionals (including Language Log's Mark Liberman) to respond.
[225001300040] |They have interesting views well worth the read (Liberman gives the most nuanced and linguistically savvy response, no surprise), but they all seem to agree that globalization and internet technologies are NOT going to allow English to "take over".
[225001300050] |Liberman offers this nugget of wisdom:
[225001300060] |It’s obvious that globalized communications and popular culture will tend to homogenize local language varieties —but some varieties of English seem to be diverging more rapidly than ever.
[225001300070] |I like John Hayden's point too:
[225001300080] |English is a tool, just like a piece of technology.
[225001300090] |Much of the world’s economy is tied up in English-speaking countries and for that reason, English is like a cell phone provider offering the best plan.
[225001300100] |But if the dollar continues to drop, the most viable option could shift.
[225001300110] |Mexico and Korea don’t need English to communicate if Korea begins to find it profitable to learn Spanish.
[225001300120] |Languages evolve via as-yet-unknown cognitive mechanisms.
[225001300130] |I suspect that "globalized communications and popular culture" will not change the way languages evolve.
[225001300140] |At best they will simply speed up the existing process.
[225001310010] |Linguists and The Semantic Web
[225001310020] |Via Sitemeter, I discovered that someone from Chrahnoh ('Toronto') stumbled onto my blog by Googling "How would a linguist respond to the semantic web".
[225001310030] |Having never actually posted on the topic, I nonetheless found it an intriguing question worth some follow-up.
[225001310040] |As a primer, the semantic web is a movement, of sorts.
[225001310050] |It's goal is to make data on the web more easily processed by computers by categorizing it better.
[225001310060] |The point is to make humans do less and computers do more.
[225001310070] |This should make the web more efficient for humans because it will make finding things and doing things online easier and faster.
[225001310080] |There are several semantic web strategies, but they mostly involve categorization, as far as I can tell.
[225001310090] |The idea being that a pre-categorized set of web pages is easier to automatically sort and process than non-categorized pages.
[225001310100] |Just like a library.
[225001310110] |If a library is composed of a pile of books on a floor, it will be difficult to find what you want.
[225001310120] |But, if that library is organized alphabetically and cross referenced every which way, it is much easier to use.
[225001310130] |So, the semantic web is an attempt by humans to über-categorize web pages.
[225001310140] |This can be done by enforcing mark-up standards like HTML which already requires web page source code to look a certain way.
[225001310150] |It could also be accomplished by post-processing.
[225001310160] |After someone has put up a web page, a bot comes along, processes it, and then assigns some categorization/indexing (this is Google-like).
[225001310170] |We're getting into heavy philosophical territory here, the kind that befuddled the greatest minds in history including Wittgenstein, Russell, and Aristotle.
[225001310180] |There is a long and difficult history behind the idea of trying to categorize the way the world is -- ontology.
[225001310190] |My first impression is that linguists would love this.
[225001310200] |Linguists love ontologies and rules and categorization.
[225001310210] |Yippie!
[225001310220] |Linguists would insist on a certain cognitively natural ontology, but the basic idea fits nicely into the zeitgeist of traditional linguistics.
[225001310230] |Having said that, this lone lousy linguist has trepidations.
[225001310240] |It seems ass-backwards.
[225001310250] |Imagine I started a movement to make the world an easier place to live in, so my strategy was to walk around sticking post-it notes onto EVERYTHING.
[225001310260] |If we could just put all the necessary post-it notes onto everything in the whole world, then everyone would know what everything is just by looking at the notes.
[225001310270] |Cool idea, huh!
[225001310280] |No, bad idea.
[225001310290] |It's a classic fool's errand.
[225001310300] |While there may be a universal ontology, no one knows what it is.
[225001310310] |More to the point, it puts effort in the wrong place.
[225001310320] |We humans don't have post-it notes on everything to look at.
[225001310330] |We have a cognitive capacity that helps us look at new things and figure out what to do with them.
[225001310340] |We all have a super-Google in our heads, developed by evolution over a million years.
[225001310350] |It's not clear how much categorization information we store, but we clearly store associations between things.
[225001310360] |But I think it is the strategies for dealing with new things that makes human cognition so powerful, not a reliance on fitting things into an ontology.
[225001310370] |I think that's the right model for the web.
[225001310380] |Let everyone put everything online.
[225001310390] |Develop smart search technologies that can look at new, uncategorized things and figure out what to do with them right now, on the fly.
[225001320010] |"What exactly is the metaphor?"
[225001320020] |The folks over at Freakonomics posted a damned interesting question:
[225001320030] |Here’s the most recent guest bleg from Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations...
[225001320040] |For years I have been posing a question about the term “bargaining chip” that no one has yet answered.
[225001320050] |This is widely assumed to be a poker metaphor, but I do not know of chips being used for bargaining or trading in poker or any other game.
[225001320060] |What exactly is the metaphor?
[225001320070] |Any guesses?
[225001320080] |Post them at Freakonomics.
[225001320090] |The current crop of 17 comments cover the role of chips in poker and various other games, but they fail to adequately explain the role of bargaining in the metaphor.
[225001320100] |One does not use chips to bargain in poker.
[225001330010] |Fucking fuck fuck
[225001330020] |Thanks to my new favorite obsession, StumbleUpon, I discovered that The Big Lebowski, one of the greatest fucking films ever fucking made, is even fucking better in it's fucking short version.
[225001340010] |Spontaneous Synchronization
[225001340020] |While not immediately having anything at all to do with linguistics, this awesome video demonstrating spontaneous synchronization nonetheless demonstrates a critical idea behind complex emergent phenomenon in linguistics.
[225001340030] |The video shows five metronomes lined up on a thin plank, pulsing asynchronously.
[225001340040] |The plank is then lifted onto two soda cans and gradually the five metronomes begin to sync up and pulse in time with each other, taking just under one minute.
[225001340050] |The question is, would they have synced up had they not been lifted onto the cans?
[225001340060] |I believe the answer is no, they would not have.
[225001340070] |The energy being transferred between the metronomes was probably too dissipated, too weakly distributed when sitting on the table.
[225001340080] |When placed atop the cans, the energy was focused in some particularly salient way as to facilitate synchronization (I'm no physicist, this is just my naïve hunch).
[225001340090] |I believe a parallel can be drawn with language evolution (and really, language learning in general).
[225001340100] |There is the notion in language learning theories of matching up internal hypotheses about grammatical structure with evidence from a community of speakers.
[225001340110] |Eventually, all speakers of "the same language" must form some sort of agreement or synchronization in order to communicate.
[225001340120] |But that agreement needs proper focal points to be salient.
[225001340130] |It is not the case that all language patterns get passed along.
[225001340140] |Some die off.
[225001340150] |The language patterns that succeed are the ones that have the right focal points to get distributed in the optimal way across a community of speakers.
[225001340160] |The mechanism of distribution is inter-speaker agreement.
[225001340170] |This agreement is implicit and emergent.
[225001340180] |In other words, a language could be defined as the synchronized patterns that speakers have settled on.
[225001340190] |But why do speakers agree to adopt pattern A but not pattern B?
[225001340200] |This is a not entirely well understood, but I think it is clear that some patterns succeed because that were distributed in the right way. good old lucky accident.
[225001340210] |I'm thinking of the sort of work that Partha Niyogi has done in has done in his book The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution.
[225001340220] |So, what are the soda cans of language evolution?
[225001350010] |How Does Language Work?
[225001350020] |I have asked this question before here.
[225001350030] |My answer now, as it was then, is this: I dunno.
[225001350040] |But Michael Gasser, Indiana University Associate Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, thinks he does so he wrote this freely available book: "how language works".
[225001350050] |I like free books, but I haven't read it yet (I just got myself deep into Kundera's Laughable Loves.
[225001350060] |I've always been a sucker for Kundera).
[225001350070] |I like Gasser's background.
[225001350080] |His work has focused on "computational models of human language acquisition and language behavior."
[225001350090] |Cool stuff.
[225001350100] |His recent work involves finding ways to use technology to help gather training data for statistical machine translation and then to integrate symbolic knowledge of grammar rules with statistical knowledge of training data.
[225001350110] |Cool boots.
[225001360010] |"Historical Vegetarian"
[225001360020] |This summer I will be celebrating my 30th year as a vegetarian.
[225001360030] |Yippy for me.
[225001360040] |There are many ways to be a vegetarian and I'm often asked "what kind of vegetarian are you?".
[225001360050] |There are many ways of answering this question.
[225001360060] |1) I could use one of the names that have emerged as labels for "dietary practices commonly associated with vegetarianism" (as this Wikipedia page explains ... it lists more than ten names).
[225001360070] |2) I could list the things I eat, so I could say something like "I don't eat fish or meat.
[225001360080] |I'm not opposed to dairy, but it's a small part of my diet (mostly cheese).
[225001360090] |I'm not opposed to eggs, but I rarely eat them".
[225001360100] |I rarely say either of the above.
[225001360110] |Instead, I typically say "I'm an historical vegetarian".
[225001360120] |I coined this term decades ago in order sum up my answer, which has nothing to do with what I eat, but everything to do with when and why I became a vegetarian.
[225001360130] |I chose to became a vegetarian in the late 1970s when I was seven years old for one reason and one reason only: My oldest brother Rob decided to become one.
[225001360140] |Rob was around 16 at the time, and if my understanding of the late 70s is accurate, every 16 year old was becoming a vegetarian.
[225001360150] |It was a fad.
[225001360160] |They all wore bell-bottoms (oh my, did Rob ever have the bell-bottoms!), listened to disco, and became vegetarians.
[225001360170] |As a seven year old, I knew full well that Rob was the coolest person on the planet, so I followed him around and did whatever he did.
[225001360180] |He became a vegetarian, so I became a vegetarian and so did my brother Don.
[225001360190] |My mother didn't seem to mind (she probably rolled her eyes a few times, knowing the fad would pass, and decided to wait it out).
[225001360200] |I remember the first day remarkably well because my mother informed us that we were going to have hamburgers that night, and we all decided it would be wise to postpone our veggie inauguration by a day.
[225001360210] |But the next day, we stuck by our word and renounced meat (we allowed fish and foul and dairy).
[225001360220] |My mother patiently cooked multiple dishes as was needed and waited.
[225001360230] |Within a year, Rob was munching on hamburgers again.
[225001360240] |Within two years, Don fell off the wagon and dove into hotdogs with relish (frikkin sweeeeeeeet ambiguity!
[225001360250] |Both semantic AND syntactic.
[225001360260] |Parse THAT, LKB!).
[225001360270] |And I was the last man standing.
[225001360280] |At ten years old, I renounced fish and foul and dug in for the long haul.
[225001360290] |Somewhere along the line, my sister Lori became a vegetarian, but I think that was later.
[225001360300] |She held out for a good long while, but alas, she too has fallen off the wagon as well.
[225001360310] |I've never quite understood my motivations for sticking it out, except perhaps the stubborness of a youngest child.
[225001360320] |But I have never been comfortable with any of the silly labels that people have concocted for cutting up the vegetarian space.
[225001360330] |I'm most happy with vegetarian.
[225001360340] |Nice and basic level.
[225001360350] |But I find other people are not happy when I call myself a vegetarian.
[225001360360] |They seem to feel I've misled them somehow when I re-tell the little story.
[225001360370] |So I coined historical vegetarian to label the tiny little space in veggie-land that I occupy.
[225001360380] |It may be the case that I alone am properly labeled by this term (god I love my syntax sometimes!).
[225001380010] |When Conferences Meant Something
[225001380020] |One of my all time favorite pictures, this comes from what may have been the most valuable academic conference in history, the Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons held in Brussels, Belgium 1927.
[225001380030] |Rarely has a single conference involved such critical debate about a new theory (I'm no physicist, of course).
[225001380040] |From Wikipedia's page: "Perhaps the most famous conference was the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, where the world's most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory.
[225001380050] |The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr.
[225001380060] |Einstein, disenchanted with Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle," remarked "God does not play dice."
[225001380070] |Bohr replied, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do."
[225001380080] |(See Bohr-Einstein debates.)
[225001380090] |Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners, including Marie Curie, who alone among them, had won Nobel Prizes in two separate scientific disciplines."
[225001380100] |The picture includes (by row):A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, Ed. Herzen, Th.
[225001380110] |De Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli, W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin;
[225001380120] |P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr;
[225001380130] |I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch. E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson
[225001390010] |Online Psycholinguistics Experiments
[225001390020] |Experimental psycholinguists requires experimental subjects like any other empirical cognitive science.
[225001390030] |Unfortunately, researches are often constrained by limited resources.
[225001390040] |Typically, psycholinguists use college students bribed with money or extra credit as subjects.
[225001390050] |It's not unheard of for a published psycholinguistics study to have involved as few as 12 subjects.
[225001390060] |This has been a necessary evil because there has never been a good way to collect large numbers of subjects together and provide them with a coherent experimental design.
[225001390070] |Lately, however, researchers are turning to the web as a place to conduct experiments with large groups of subjects.
[225001390080] |Yes, there are issues regarding control (e.g., if you need native speakers of English, how can you ensure that a subject really is a native speaker?), but these issues come up in all types of experimental paradigms.
[225001390090] |I believe that good standards and practices to ensure quality online psycholinguistic experiments will emerge over time.
[225001390100] |So, I'm all for moving ahead.
[225001390110] |With that in mind, here are a set of sites offering online psycholinguistic experiments:
[225001390120] |The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics -- Online experiments
[225001390130] |The Portal for Psychological Experiments on Language (largest selection of experiments, that's a modified screen grab of some of their experiments above)
[225001390140] |Cognition and Language Laboratory (they have a blog too!)
[225001390150] |University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, Blizzard Challenge 2008 (this is actually an evaluation of speech synthesis, but good enough for starters).
[225001420010] |Syntactico-Semantic Blends
[225001420020] |Just read a sentence on The Daily Dish that contained a use of "on" that I find odd:
[225001420030] |"Steve Clemons infers on who the Chinese would vote for:"
[225001420040] |To me, the verb infer does not use any preposition to mark its object.
[225001420050] |So, I would say "X infers Y", not "X infers on Y".
[225001420060] |My guess is that Sullivan was trying to evoke the semantics of speculates on and transferred the syntax to infer.
[225001420070] |Just a guess.
[225001420080] |[pssst, btw, I used to be able to cut-and-past from Word into Blogger to get formatted text like colors and highlighting (the quote above was green and shaded), but now I get an error because of all the crud code that Word includes.
[225001420090] |The crud code has always been there and Blogger used to handle it, now it don't.
[225001420100] |Is this part of Google's war on Microsoft?]
[225001430010] |Yiddish Schmiddish
[225001430020] |I just completed the online Survey of American Jewish Language (HT polyglot conspiracy).
[225001430030] |No, I'm not Jewish, but the survey is about the use of language with no special requirements on who is doing the using.
[225001430040] |To be honest, I was not impressed with the survey design.
[225001430050] |There is ambiguity in many of the response choices, making the results difficult to interpret.
[225001430060] |But, true to my word, I'm all for moving forward with using the interwebs as a tool for linguistic research.
[225001430070] |We gotta start somewhere, right?
[225001430080] |We'll tinker with the methodology as we move forward.
[225001430090] |So, what do we learn out from this?
[225001440010] |Selena's Salacious Sass
[225001440020] |Having nothing to do with linguistics, I am nonetheless daring to recommend a blogger I only recently stumbled onto: Selena Dreamy's The Moonshine Memoranda.
[225001440030] |She writes carefully, long winded when necessary, but in that proper British style which includes wit and panache and a little naughtiness when appropriate (read this post, in particular).
[225001440040] |I dare say, I might be smitten...move over Mila!
[225001450010] |Obama Linguistics
[225001450020] |In his (disappointingly tepid) Berlin speech Thursday, Barack Obama made the ridiculous claim that "every language is spoken in our country".
[225001450030] |Nein!
[225001450040] |Das ist Falsch!
[225001450050] |There are a variety of ways of proving this false.
[225001450060] |1) There is no such thing as a language.
[225001450070] |We use the word "language" as a convenient label to refer to the behavior of communities of people who seem to be able to understand each other when they move their mouths.
[225001450080] |We say "they speak X".
[225001450090] |But there is no definition of "language" such that X can be described in any scientifically valid/reliable way.
[225001450100] |There is, therefore, no way of counting how many language are spoken anywhere, let alone comparing the numbers between locations.
[225001450110] |2) Assume there is such a thing as language; I have no clue how many languages are spoken in the US, but I'm sure whatever that number is, it's less than the total number of languages in the world (5,000-7,000, depending on whether you think Flemish is really just Dutch with a lisp).
[225001450120] |There are many languages with less than 100 speakers, all of whom are over 60 and live in remote villages.
[225001450130] |Did one of the remaining senior citizens wander into the US, ya know, on a whim?
[225001450140] |I kinda doubt it.
[225001460010] |Word Recognition
[225001460020] |Thomas Tsoi over at his Linglish.net blog created a cool little word recognition experiment.
[225001460030] |Try it out here.
[225001470010] |Is There a Gender Gap in Linguistics?
[225001470020] |(above is the xkcd comic found here)![]()
The interwebs is abuzz with the latest girls can't do science scuttlebutt (Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has a useful overview).
[225001470030] |This got me to wondering why this kind of speculation never seems to be applied to linguistics.
[225001470040] |First, of course, is the fact that linguistics is a small field (I'm near certain that Language Log had a post in the last few months regarding the small size of linguistics compared to other fields, but I've failed miserably to find it).
[225001470050] |There simply aren't enough of us to cause any controversies, except when someone wants us to prove that "X" is not really a word and we refuse (see Zwicky's relevant post here).
[225001470060] |Second, there are many easily recognizable female linguists who have been highly influential.
[225001470070] |Off the top of my head I can easily think of Barbara Partee, Adele Goldberg, Joan Bresnan, Joan Bybee, Eve Sweetser, and Eve Clark , amongst a great many others (hehe, that list TOTALLY marks me as a Buffalo functionalist).
[225001470080] |At least as interestingly, the highly technical sub-field of computational linguistics/NLP is brimming with examples of influential female scholars, such as Ann Copestake, Paola Merlo, Bonnie Dorr, Tanya Reinhart, and Jan Weibe to name a just a small few.
[225001470090] |The only sub-field of linguistics that seems to be male dominated is syntactic theory invention.
[225001470100] |I can think of many males who are strongly associated with the invention of a theory of syntax/grammar (though, in all honesty, no one person truly invents a theory alone), but only Goldberg &Michaelis's construction grammar comes to mind as a theory of grammar designed by female linguists (I happily solicit examples of my ignorance).
[225001470110] |Whereas, a list of male-invented grammatical frameworks/theories is easy to compile:
[225001470120] |N. Chomsky --> Minimalism, GB, Transformational Grammer
[225001470130] |G. Gazdar --> Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar
[225001470140] |Pollard &Sag--> HPSG
[225001470150] |Van Valin &LaPolla --> Role and Reference Grammar
[225001470160] |D. Perlmutter --> Relational Grammar
[225001470170] |C. Fillmore --> Case Grammar
[225001470180] |R. Langacker --> Cognitive Grammar
[225001470190] |Is there a gender gap in grammar theorization?
[225001470200] |UPDATE (Nov 28, 2009): There are many excellent additions in the comments.
[225001480010] |Dissin' Linguists
[225001480020] |(screen shot above from Inside Highered.com)Bastards!
[225001480030] |Oh this is a fitting follow up to my last post.
[225001480040] |Today, Mankiw posted The Cost of Being PC , regarding a ranking of academic disciplines based on how politically correct they are (PC = "the belief that gender gaps in math and science fields are largely due to discrimination..."
[225001480050] |The full ranking is here.
[225001480060] |And the big kicker?
[225001480070] |Linguistics ain't even listed.
[225001480080] |That's right!
[225001480090] |Glossed right over, like we don't exist.
[225001480100] |But they listed Art ... and frikkin Communication!
[225001480110] |Communication!?!
[225001480120] |Frikkin Communication!
[225001490010] |That's a "box"?
[225001490020] |(screenshot from NYT)
[225001490030] |The New York Times today had a nice story about the official introduction of boxed win in Italy.
[225001490040] |Quoting Bloomberg, the NYT rerported "Italy’s Agriculture Ministry said that some fine Italian wines that receive government quality guarantees will be allowed to be sold in boxes. "
[225001490050] |Good for them.
[225001490060] |I'm a hater of corks.
[225001490070] |No other technology in the world would be allowed to fail as often as corks do and be allowed to persist.
[225001490080] |What if gallons of milk went bad at the rate that bottles of wine do?
[225001490090] |The dairy industry would die off in weeks.
[225001490100] |But I must say, what counts as a "box" is being given clever and stylish leeway.
[225001490110] |For me, a prototypical box is most certainly square-ish, with 90 degree angles.
[225001490120] |If a box is to deviate from this prototype, for me it needs a special modifier like "hat box" or "pill box" or (even "Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat" as in this most excellent Dylan song).
[225001490130] |The specialty wine box above seems to be a haute couture variation on Labov's famed 1973 study of how how an object's function affects its naming.
[225001490140] |Prototypical wine boxes might be square-ish, but a variation may take the box name because it is more importantly a wine container fashioned out of a similar material (presumably cardboad of some sort).
[225001490150] |(pssst, the best reference I could find quickly for Labov's 1973 study is this Google books result here.
[225001490160] |If anyone knows of a better one, just let me know.)
[225001500010] |Do Ossetians Speak Osetin?
[225001500020] |(Map from CIA - The World Factbook)
[225001500030] |The Daily Dish had a reader make the following statement: "...It claimed that there are a majority of ethnic Russians in South Ossetia.
[225001500040] |In fact, the majority are Ossetians, a small Iranic-Language speaking group." (original here)
[225001500050] |I have no special knowledge of the linguistic diaspora in this region, so I did a little quick research.
[225001500060] |According to The CIA World Factbook, Georgia's overall population is 4,630,841.
[225001500070] |According to its Wikipedia page, there were about "45,000 ethnic Ossetians and 17,500 ethnic Georgians in South Ossetia in 2007" (let's say about 62,000 altogether).
[225001500080] |According to Ethnologue there is a language called Osetin with about 100,000 speakers in Georgia (figure from 2001).
[225001500090] |Osetin's typological classification is Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Iranian, Eastern, Northeastern.
[225001500100] |It does seem to be the case that a) there are a majority of Ossetians in South Ossetia; and b) Ossetians do speak an Iranian language.
[225001500110] |The answer, then, is yes, Ossetians speak Osetin.
[225001500120] |UPDATE (8/25/2008): Bill Poser over at Language Log has a nice post discussing the "linguistic aspects of the situation in Georgia" here.
[225001510010] |Learning Something Niue Everyday
[225001510020] |(Map of Niue from CIA World Factbook)
[225001510030] |Thanks to Yahoo! news, I learned today that there is a nation of Niue: "Tiny nation of Niue gets laptop for every child".
[225001510040] |Niue is composed of a whopping 1444 persons and occupies 260 sq km, making it "one of world's largest coral islands" (CIA Factbook).
[225001510050] |What language do they speak in Niue?
[225001510060] |Why, they speak Niue, of course (aka Niuean, "Niuefekai").
[225001510070] |Ethnologue Classification: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Central-Eastern, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Central-Eastern Oceanic, Remote Oceanic, Central Pacific, East Fijian-Polynesian, Polynesian, Tongic.
[225001510080] |As for the laptops, I'm a fan of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative.
[225001510090] |I especially like two features of the XO green boxes they've designed.
[225001510100] |Each computer automatically links to any other around it, making a sort of mini-web.
[225001510110] |Plus, you can get a hand crank to manually power the little guy.
[225001510120] |God!
[225001510130] |I wich my laptop had one of those!
[225001520010] |Stope!
[225001520020] |I snapped the above pic at the Canadian border crossing on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, Canada (Saturday, Aug 23) while heading up to Toronto to enjoy the cool Buskerfest (sorry, you missed it, but there's always next year).
[225001520030] |While not obvious at first from this cell phone camera's photo, look closely and you'll notice that the French word 'arrêt' looks slightly off-center.
[225001520040] |That's because it originally read 'arrête', but someone put red tape over the final 'e'.
[225001520050] |I'm assuming that final '-e' was the French imperative morpheme for -er verbs occuring with the (implied) second person singular informal pronoun tu.
[225001520060] |I could be wrong.
[225001520070] |Feel free to correct me.
[225001520080] |But the letter 'e' undeniably was originally there for some reason.
[225001520090] |Was it the informality of tu that someone objected to?
[225001520100] |Any French speakers out there?
[225001520110] |Is there some reason why it would be "wrong" to use this imperative morpheme on a stop sign?
[225001520120] |I found an image of another English-French bilingual stop sign on Wolfgang Meyenberg's cool little site here and indeed, it uses the 'arrêt' form.
[225001520130] |As for the Buskerfest, well, that just rocked.
[225001530010] |Semantic Faces
[225001530020] |(Rafael Nadal pics from his official page rafaelnadal.com)
[225001530030] |In an earlier post here, I boldly claimed that the semantic web movement was a fool's errand.
[225001530040] |Rather than relying on a preconceived ontology, I argued that web searching would be better facilitated by "smart search technologies that can look at new, uncategorized things and figure out what to do with them right now, on the fly."
[225001530050] |Recently, Google's Picasa photo sharing site has added some face recognition software to help users find different pictures of the same person then add name tags.
[225001530060] |The name tags are more reliable right now, but as face recognition software inevitably improves, I predict that they will be able to do away with tags altogether and rely wholly on the recognition of similarity in the pictures themselves.
[225001530070] |This is closer to the way the human cognitive system works.
[225001530080] |There will come a day when an algortihm can accurately match the two pictures of Rafael Nadal above and that algortihm with be the future of search.
[225001530090] |This cognitive model of searching is what I want to see applied to web search as well.
[225001530100] |Find matches based on on-the-fly analysis of content.
[225001530110] |No tags.
[225001530120] |No ontology (at least, not built into the page itself).
[225001530130] |Laten Semantic Analysis is one quasi-linguistic method of doing this and it is already being applied quite profitably to the problem of matching advertisements with relevant web pages.
[225001530140] |LSA, with its somewhat crude bag-o'-words approach, has miles to go before it sleeps, but it's the right basic idea.
[225001530150] |Analyze content based on some salient metrics.
[225001530160] |(Again, I admit I am no expert on the semantic web or search technologies, so my views are naive.
[225001530170] |If I am misunderstanding something, please feel free to educate me.)
[225001540010] |“Listen honey, …”
[225001540020] |(A modified screenshot from Artvoice)
[225001540030] |After contributing a brilliant and witty comment to a conversation at a local pub last night, I was slightly accused of being a misogynist …or at least of employing a misogynistic discourse construction, namely “honey”.
[225001540040] |I have occasion to employ “honey” in a specialized discourse function and I’m going to defend my usage of this function and its value in conversation.
[225001540050] |The word honey in conversation certainly can be demeaning when it is used to trivialize or marginalize the referent, as in “Hey, honey, get me a sandwich” (see here for relevant article).
[225001540060] |However, the specialized application I utilized last night is different; in my case, I used it to indicate that my contribution was intended to be helpful and somehow more common sensical, more honest, more folksy than my interlocutors previous point.
[225001540070] |The use of “honey”(often co-occurring with “listen”), rather than being demeaning, was meant to convey familiarity and solidarity.
[225001540080] |I use it when my contribution is intended to wise up an interlocutor.
[225001540090] |I use it with both male and female interlocutors.
[225001540100] |And I am far from alone is employing "honey" in this way.
[225001540110] |I assume it was borrowed from African American culture, but this specialized usage is particularly prevalent amongst gay men (just fyi, see Jeff Runner’s excellent powerpoint presentation In Search of Gay Language).
[225001540120] |I have had three gay male housemates over the years and I suspect I picked it up a bit from them; I think I’ve heard Bill Maher use it on his show as well (can’t for the life of me find an example though.
[225001540130] |I need Everyzing to improve dramatically).
[225001540140] |Here’s a first pass attempt at listing the constitutive features of this construction:
[225001540150] |Contribution should1. be formed in low register vocabulary and syntax2. begin with “honey” or “listen honey”3. semantically contrast with another participant’s contribution
[225001540160] |Example 1: blog commenter"I don't get this obsession with men's "bulges" on the gay blogs.
[225001540170] |It really makes gays look juvenile and prurient.
[225001540180] |You really debase yourself with such stories."
[225001540190] |Listen honey, if straight guys can check out boobs, we can check out baskets.
[225001540200] |Of course, I won't be able to drag my partner away from the computer today. [my emphasis]
[225001540210] |Example 2: blog post
[225001540220] |Here in my hometown, the reports and anecdotes are not so good.
[225001540230] |A friend’s daughter heard Obama is a Muslim.
[225001540240] |Another friend’s mother-in-law says that if Obama wins, “the Blacks will take over.”
[225001540250] |(Listen, honey, they can’t screw it up any worse than the Whites have.) [my emphasis]
[225001550010] |Ave Maria
[225001550020] |Having little to do with linguistics other than the pure astonishment of what the human vocal folds can accomplish when properly trained, I offer this amazing tribute to the late, great Luciano Pavarotti:
[225001560010] |Prototypical Podcast
[225001560020] |(image from LearnOutLoud.coReading m)
[225001560030] |Eleanor Rosch seems to have come out of semi-retirement and is teaching a new course at Berkeley on Buddhist psychology, complete with podcasts here.
[225001560040] |Reading Rosch in graduate school was a transformative experience fort me.
[225001560050] |Her empirical work on cognition and prototype theory changed many of my ill-formed preconceived notions about how the mind works.
[225001560060] |She created clever and intelligent methods for studying how humans naturally categorize.
[225001560070] |Her findings were astonishing.
[225001560080] |From The U. Pitt School of Information Science - Hall of Fame: "A basic tenet demonstrated by Rosch's experiments is that people classify an everyday object or experience less on abstract definitions than on what they regard as the best representation of the appropriate category.
[225001560090] |For example, a robin is considered a much better prototype for the concept of a bird than is a chicken or an ostrich.
[225001560100] |Her findings led Rosch to develop a hierarchy of basic, superordinate, and subordinate categories that "provide maximum information with the least congitive ability."
[225001570010] |Hero Acquisition Device
[225001570020] |(screen shot from NBC.com online video)
[225001570030] |Folks, I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them, but there are times that pop culture pseudo-science references try my soul.
[225001570040] |One of these times occurred on Monday night's premier of the superhero show Heroes.
[225001570050] |While slicing into good, sweet, honey, sugar-candied Clair's brain, über villain Sylar marvels at the brain's complexity, then, disappointingly, repeats one of the greatest neuroscience fallacies of all time: the brain only uses 10%-20% of its capacity.
[225001570060] |There is zero factual basis to this ridiculous claim.
[225001570070] |"Though an alluring idea, the "10 percent myth" is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore" (Scientific American).
[225001570080] |The writer's could't spend two minutes Googling around to check up on this tid-bit?
[225001570090] |Hmmm?
[225001570100] |Really?
[225001570110] |Unfortunate.
[225001570120] |Even the Neuroscience For Kids website debunks this idiocy.
[225001570130] |In Feb 2007, blogger Peggy at her Biology in Science Fiction blog ran down a few genetics related plot devices that make her start shaking her fist at the screen.
[225001570140] |An enjoyable read.
[225001570150] |More recently, she took on the new adrenelin plot device here.
[225001570160] |Note: feel free to track down the homage in my italicized description of Clair (wink).
[225001580010] |Frame Semantics in Oz
[225001580020] |(image from HBO's Oz website)
[225001580030] |Continuing my obsession with Netflixing cable TV shows, I've begun watching one of cable TV's first big successful original shows, Oz.
[225001580040] |I just finished the second of six seasons.
[225001580050] |Each episode is book-ended by a narrator and in episode 6 he makes a clever linguistic observation that is essentially a frame-semantics argument:
[225001580060] |Narrator: "You made your bed, now lie in it."
[225001580070] |Anybody wanna tell me what the fuck that means?
[225001580080] |You're gonna go to the trouble of making up your bed, smoothing out the sheets, fluffing up the pillows, just to ruin it all by lying down.
[225001580090] |The phrase should be, "You laid in your bed, now make it."
[225001580100] |Point being, you got to be responsible for your actions.
[225001580110] |Responsible. (season 2, episode 6: strange bedfellows).
[225001580120] |I think he's right.
[225001580130] |The semantic meaning of this saying doesn't quite match the frame it's evoking.
[225001580140] |The meaning should be something like you made certain choices which caused a given situation and now you must accept responsibility for the results of your choices.
[225001580150] |I have to work too hard to imagine how a situation where lying in a bed is a natural consequence of the decision to make it.
[225001580160] |I have to imagine a slightly different sense of making a bed.
[225001580170] |I have to imagine choices being made (like maybe the type of pillows, blankets, how big it is, etc).
[225001580180] |But that is not the normal sense of making a bed in contemporary American English.
[225001580190] |What choices does one make when making a bed?
[225001580200] |None, right?
[225001580210] |Has this meaning changed?
[225001580220] |However, if one chooses to lie in a bed, one chooses to cause it be messed up.
[225001580230] |This seems to be closer to the meaning of the saying.
[225001590010] |"Palin and McCain"
[225001590020] |(image from JohnMcCain.com)
[225001590030] |(image from BarackObama.com)
[225001590040] |Following up on a comment I made over on polyglot conspiracy, I wanted to object to criticism of Sara Palin's recent use of the NP "a Palin and McCain administration".
[225001590050] |She was criticized for putting her name first as if she was framing herself as the presidential candidate rather than the VP candidate.
[225001590060] |My objection is linguistic.
[225001590070] |The linguistic construction used to refer to a presidential ticket is typically two last names with maybe a dash or special character separating them, and often nothing at all (see above examples), but rarely are the two names conjoined by "and".
[225001590080] |When I took a look at what Palin actually said ("a Palin and McCain administration") I felt it was perfectly acceptable for a VP candidate to refer to a hypothetical administration that way.
[225001590090] |I take this to be roughly a NP-noun compound where the NP is made up of two conjoined names.
[225001590100] |There are surely patterns to these kind of NP-noun compounds that probably favor listing the more prominant name first, but patterns are not prescritpive rules.
[225001590110] |On the other hand, I'm sure there are prescriptive rules used by campaing staff and journalists that explicitly spell out which name comes first when referring to a presidential ticket.
[225001590120] |Please note, I am not intending to make any sort of political statement with this post.
[225001590130] |This is intended to be primarily a linguistics blog.
[225001600010] |Palin's Big Finnish...
[225001600020] |Stop beating up on Google's machine translation!
[225001600030] |The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg recently complained about Sara Palin's interview answers by saying "The whole thing reads like something rendered from the Finnish by Google Translate" (HT: Daily Dish).
[225001600040] |Does it?
[225001600050] |Really?
[225001600060] |This is testable folks.
[225001600070] |Let's see...
[225001600080] |Katie Couric asked the following question: "But polls have shown that Sen. Obama has actually gotten a boost as a result of this latest crisis, with more people feeling that he can handle the situation better than John McCain."
[225001600090] |Watch clip here:
[225001600100] |Palin's Original answer:I'm not looking at poll numbers.
[225001600110] |What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who's more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who's actually done it?
[225001600120] |Google's Finish translation:En ole katsot kyselyn numerot.
[225001600130] |Mielestäni amerikkalaiset lopussa on päivässä tulee voida palata taaksepäin ja tarkastella tuloksia ja katsoa, kuka on enemmän omiaan puhuu ratkaisuja ja haluavat ja toivovat ratkaisuja joillekin mahdollisuus muuttua, ja kuka oikeastaan tehnyt se?
[225001600140] |Google's Finnish to English translation:I'm not looking at poll numbers.
[225001600150] |I think the Americans have at the end of a day will be able to go back and look at the results and see who is more likely talking about solutions, and wish and hope for solutions to some of the possibility of change, and who had done it?
[225001600160] |You be the judge...
[225001610010] |I Love This Guy
[225001610020] |The other famous Chris Phipps.
[225001620010] |Txt Parsing
[225001620020] |David Crystal's newest book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, has just recently been released.
[225001620030] |I'm looking forward to reading it (though I'll likely wait until the paperback is available ...
[225001620040] |I'm staunchly anti-hardback).
[225001620050] |From the book's Amazon synopsis:
[225001620060] |"Does texting spell the end of literacy?
[225001620070] |Is there a panic in the media?
[225001620080] |David Crystal looks at the evidence.
[225001620090] |He investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for.
[225001620100] |He shows how to interpret its mix of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay, and how it works in different languages.He explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras and discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing - and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it."
[225001620110] |My colleagues and I were wondering if there was any NLP work being done on parsing text messages?
[225001620120] |I haven't been able to find anything.
[225001620130] |Since there is an growing market for thinks like machine translation of text messages, I gotta believe somebody out there is researching this.
[225001620140] |But, has anything been published?
[225001620150] |The linguistics of texting was, in fact, the topic of my very first post on this blog here.
[225001620160] |My basic point last year was this: "I've noticed that, in the context of email and online slang/abbreviations, the character "8" is the only number or character that gets used to replace a phonological rime (a nucleus plus a coda).
[225001620170] |Most other replacements either replace whole syllables, or just consonant clusters.
[225001620180] |For example (from Wikipedia's "List of Internet slang phrases" [note: this page no longer exists on Wikipedia so I linked to the Simple English page that copied it])
[225001620190] |2L8 -- too late GR8 -- great H8 —Hate L8R —Later (sometimes abbreviated to L8ER) M8 —Mate sk8/sk8r —skate/skater W8 —Wait"
[225001620200] |I hope Crystal discusses the linguistics of text formation.
[225001630010] |Palin's Homeys
[225001630020] |(my cell phone pic from WJ Morrissey's Irish pub roughly 9:30pm)
[225001630030] |During tonight's Vice Presidential debate, Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin used the term "shout out".
[225001630040] |I don't have a transcript (yet), but it was something involving a reference to her hometown (see Daily Dish's live-blogging comment here).
[225001630050] |The Urban Dictionary's top rated definition of "shout out" is this: "A kind mention of a homey."
[225001630060] |Straight up righteous, Sarah P., for giving props to your peeps.
[225001630070] |(Note: thanks to BuffaloPundit for organizing the debate watching get together)
[225001650010] |Semantics: "Bailout" vs. "Rescue"
[225001650020] |(screen grab from CNN)
[225001650030] |In last night's presidential debate, Senator McCain made an interesting semantic distinction between two words used to refer to the Treasury department's infamous financial plan:
[225001650040] |Clark: Well, Senators, through this economic crisis, most of the people that I know have had a difficult time.
[225001650050] |And through this bailout package, I was wondering what it is that's going to actually help those people out.
[225001650060] |McCain: Well, thank you, Oliver, and that's an excellent question, because as you just described it, bailout, when I believe that it's rescue, because -- because of the greed and excess in Washington and Wall Street, Main Street was paying a very heavy price, and we know that [emphasis added].
[225001650070] |What is the difference between a bailout and a rescue?
[225001650080] |There is a nice cognitive semantic point to be made: I think bailout foregrounds the undergoer participants who are being helped and their failure to help themselves, whereas rescue foregrounds the actor participants who are doing the rescuing and their benevolence.
[225001650090] |My own take is that a bailout presupposes the participants being helped caused their own misfortune whereas a rescue presupposes they did not.
[225001650100] |The indispensable political polling blogger Nate Silver posted about this very topic here. nate's big takeaway:
[225001650110] |"...the proposal has been referred to colloquially as the "bailout" or very commonly the "Wall Street bailout" (the latter term brings up more than 7,000 hits in Google News).
[225001650120] |Where is Frank Luntz when you need him?
[225001650130] |If the proposal had instead been framed as, say, an "economic recovery" plan, it would probably be far less politically toxic."
[225001660010] |Singular 'they' is old, logical, and grammatical
[225001660020] |(pic of Andrew Sullivan from his Wikipedia entry)
[225001660030] |Like most linguists, I roll my eyes at prescriptivism.
[225001660040] |Yet it rears its ugly head again and again, and the now stale and tiresome complaints about singular they have popped up again.
[225001660050] |Andrew Sullivan is currently acting as a conduit and because his blog is so popular, he has the ability to reinforce this issue with a wide audience.
[225001660060] |To his credit, Andrew says "I often use her as a generalizing pronoun.
[225001660070] |But this kind of dispute is better left to experts..."
[225001660080] |It remains to be seen what rules he will follow in the future.
[225001660090] |I'll try to keep my eyes open.
[225001660100] |But the point is that English singular they has been around for a long time.
[225001660110] |It is not new by any stretch.
[225001660120] |English has no gender neutral plural pronoun, so we speakers have long been faced with the challenge of "working around" our deficit.
[225001660130] |I will act as conduit to my little piece of the blogosphere for Geoff Pullum's April 26, 2008 advice:"Avoid singular they if you want to; nobody is making you use it.
[225001660140] |But don't ever think that it is new (it goes back to early English centuries ago), or that it is illogical (there is no logical conflict between being syntactically singular and semantically plural), or that it is ungrammatical (it is used by the finest writers who ever used English, writers who uncontroversially knew what they were doing)."
[225001660150] |FYI: here's a sampling of various Language Log singular they posts going back four years, all of which seem to support Pullum's advice:
[225001660160] |All posts tagged "singular they".
[225001660170] |Facebook phases out singular "they" (Benjamin Zimmer, June 27, 2008)
[225001660180] |Canadian Department of Justice: use "singular they" (Mark Liberman, April 13, 2008)
[225001660190] |Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof (Geoffrey K. Pullum March 02, 2008)
[225001660200] |Singular they on Facebook (Eric Bakovic, April 28, 2007)
[225001660210] |"Singular they" mailbag (Mark Liberman, September 15, 2006)
[225001660220] |"Singular they": God said it, I believe it, that settles it (Mark Liberman, September 13, 2006)
[225001660230] |Is "singular they" verbally and plenarily inspired of God?
[225001660240] |(Mark Liberman, August 21, 2006)
[225001660250] |They are a prophet (Geoffrey K. Pullum, October 21, 2004)
[225001670010] |Definitely A Winner
[225001670020] |(screen shot from SF Chronicle)
[225001670030] |The San Francisco Chronicle delved into linguistics Thursday:
[225001670040] |Arien O'Connell was vindicated Wednesday morning - sort of.
[225001670050] |The fifth-grade teacher from New York City ran the fastest time in Sunday's Nike Women's Marathon, but she was told by race officials that she didn't win because she wasn't among the "elite" runners who were given a 20-minute head start.
[225001670060] |O'Connell was unhappy - and as corporate sports giant Nike quickly learned, she wasn't the only one.
[225001670070] |Faced with a blast of criticism from all over the country, Nike issued a statement Wednesday saying that it "recognizes Arien O'Connell as a winner.
[225001670080] |Did you catch that?
[225001670090] |It says a winner - not the winner.
[225001670100] |Even though she ran 11 minutes faster than the "elite" woman who was given first place, O'Connell's career-best finish will exist in an odd parallel universe where, no matter how fast you run, you can't win the race unless you're among a special few." [my emphases]
[225001670110] |In typical introductory linguistics courses, we would teach students that the English indefinite article "a" is used to introduce a new referent into discourse.
[225001670120] |But of course, it's uses are far more varied, as this case demonstrates.
[225001670130] |In this case, Nike chose to use the indefinite article "a" in a partitive function implying that O'Connell was one member of a set of winners (and causing readers to infer that the set of winners has more than one member, otherwise they would have used "the" ... someday I'll brush up on Grice to be able to explain this reasoning more clearly).
[225001670140] |Now, my take on the events in question is somewhat cynical: almost all individual-based sporting events are rigged in one way or another to favor the top pros.
[225001670150] |The practice of seeding in Grand Slam tennis tournaments is a good example (Agassi once said he thought seeding ought to be abolished, and I agree).
[225001670160] |Arien O'Connell ran a great race and deserves to be recognized for that.
[225001670170] |But what counts as "the winner" is Nike's call, not ours.
[225001670180] |I don't have a problem with Nike's statement.
[225001670190] |One fair question, though, is whether they referred to the other winner as "a winner" too?
[225001680010] |"think" vs. "believe"
[225001680020] |Good ol' Sitemeter never fails to yield its share of fascinating factoids.
[225001680030] |For example, earlier today some brave Canadian Googler found my blog by searching for, and I quote, "think vs believe semantic difference".
[225001680040] |Having nothing but love for my readers, I think it only fair that I might attempt to address the deep and profound "think" vs. "believe" distinction.
[225001680050] |Let us take the following two sentences as our minimal pair:
[225001680060] |1. Willy thinks that the wine is good.
[225001680070] |2. Willy believes that the wine is good.
[225001680080] |In both (1) and (2) above there is a verb of cognition (e.g., FrameNet frames Awareness, Certainty) which takes a clause as its complement.
[225001680090] |The difference lies in the nature of the truth value predicated of the complement clause by the matrix verb (think vs. believe).
[225001680100] |We could couch this truth value predication either in terms of a) epistemic modality or b) evidentiality.
[225001680110] |Either way, the verb "think" denotes lesser confidence in the truth of the complement clause than the verb "believe" (and they both denote less confidence than the verb "know").
[225001680120] |So (1) should be interpreted as meaning Willy has weak confidence in the belief that the wine is good, whereas (2) should be interpreted as meaning that Willy has strong confidence that the wine is good.
[225001680130] |So the difference between "think" and "believe" is one of degree in confidence of the truth of X (where X is a proposition...which is a tad redundant if you take it to be the case that only propositions have truth value...)
[225001680140] |You'll have to try the wine yourself to decide if Willy knows his wine or not.
[225001690010] |Deer Meat & Semantic Narrowing
[225001690020] |Andrew Sullivan!
[225001690030] |PLEASE!
[225001690040] |PLEASE!
[225001690050] |PLEASE!
[225001690060] |Take a frikkin linguistics course!
[225001690070] |Ugh!
[225001690080] |Sullivan (and I love the little blogging devil, really) but damn!
[225001690090] |He promotes some of the most ass-backwards, wrong-headed linguists outside of that dried up old fogy Willy-boy Safire.
[225001690100] |Today, Sullivan posted a passage from another blogger decrying the degradation of language (yawn) which made a plainly wrong and easily falsifiable claim:
[225001690110] |"Words have value in their ability to distinguish and to discriminate.
[225001690120] |And they are only ever damaged in one direction: they become more abstracted, more broad, less specific, less forceful, less memorable, less powerful, more middling, less individual. " [my emphasis]
[225001690130] |Sigh ... after years of teaching Linguistics 101 courses, this is just tiresome.
[225001690140] |And yet, here I shall plunge into the conventional examples (with 21st century hyperlinks, oooh, ahhhh).
[225001690150] |There are many kinds of semantic change.
[225001690160] |Sullivan's reference focuses on one, widening, where a word's meaning changes from subordinate level to superordinate level (i.e., from specific to general).
[225001690170] |But there are many examples of the opposite, or narrowing (or some would use the term sepcialization) involving a change from superordinate level to subordinate level (i.e., from general to specific).
[225001690180] |You don't belive me?
[225001690190] |You want examples?
[225001690200] |Okay.
[225001690210] |Example 1: meat (pdf here)Narrowing: the meaning of the word narrows to have a more specific meaning.
[225001690220] |The word mete (“meat”) in Old English used to mean “food.”
[225001690230] |Its meaning has narrowed to mean “food in the form of animal flesh.”
[225001690240] |Example 2: skyline (original here)Narrowing: Change from superordinate level to subordinate level.
[225001690250] |For example, skyline used to refer to any horizon, but now it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers.
[225001690260] |Example 3: hound (original from Google books here)Old English hund 'dog' narrowed to Modern English hound to refer to 'a particular breed of dog'.
[225001690270] |Example 4: deer (original here)SPECIALIZATION, in which the meaning of a word narrows over the years (deer once meant any four-legged beast and now means only members of the family Cervidae).
[225001690280] |Some fine day, these examples will be general knowledge ... someday ... (sigh) .. someday ...
[225001700010] |The semantics of "call"
[225001700020] |(picture from this Flickr page)
[225001700030] |Breakfasting at a local diner this post-Thanksgiving morning, my niece Ashley pointed to a sign on the door and asked "why do some sings say 'please call again' when they mean 'come back again'?"
[225001700040] |Helluva question Ashley.
[225001700050] |First, WordNet lists a large number of synsets (meanings) for the word call (13 noun synsets and 28 verb synsets).
[225001700060] |It's a highly polysemous word.
[225001700070] |The relevant meaning for this use is "to pay a brief visit".
[225001700080] |Lacking access to the OED (the price I paid for leaving the academic world ... sigh), I used instead the Online Etymology Dictionary (and trust that it is relatively accurate) which lists this entry for call: "From Meaning "to visit" (M.E.) was literally "to stand at the door and call;" sense of "a short formal visit" is from 1862; caller "visitor" is from 1786."
[225001700090] |So, why has this otherwise outdated meaning persisted in the retail customer service frame?
[225001700100] |I suspect it has to do with politeness.
[225001700110] |This older meaning evokes a friendliness, even a neighborliness which encourages customers who have missed the hours of service to not be offended.
[225001700120] |Something like that.
[225001710010] |awesome
[225001710020] |I moved back to California just about 6 weeks ago after spending about 15 years on the East Coast and I've noticed the frequency of the word "awesome" in my daily speech as skyrocketed ... ahhh, it's good to be home.
[225001720010] |My New Favorite Quote
[225001720020] |(pic from NBC)Having missed the entire new season of 30 Rock so far, I finally started catching up on past episodes.
[225001720030] |And it turns out, I now have a new favorite quote:
[225001720040] |I don't like hypotheticals.
[225001720050] |It's like lying to your brain.
[225001720060] |Kenneth the page
[225001720070] |How would Kenneth have assessed the Ramsey Test?
[225001720080] |(psssst, a running a close second is Kenneth's other great quote from the same episode: There's a whole cable channel that just tells you what's on the other channels.)
[225001730010] |Sullivan's Silly Semantics
[225001730020] |The Daily Dish, often a conduit for linguistic prescriptivism (see here), also displays its fair share of awkward and questionable linguistic practices.
[225001730030] |Take the following modal verb coordination as a case in point:
[225001730040] |"Megan believes the government shouldn't and can't successfully refinance people's mortgages."
[225001730050] |I find the coordination of shouldn't and can't syntactically awkward and semantically ill-formed (or is it the other way 'round?).
[225001730060] |The traditional, Linguistics 101 explanation of modal verbs is that they express possibility and necessity.
[225001730070] |Typically, the modal should expresses a level of necessity in that it means one is obligated to some extent to perform the action under question.
[225001730080] |However, the modal can is highly ambiguous between a possibility and necessity reading.
[225001730090] |So, the sentence you can jump is ambiguous between you are allowed to jump and you have the physical ability to jump.
[225001730100] |In the absence of disambiguating information (such as Gricean pragmatics), I have no default or preferred interpretation (perhaps you do).
[225001730110] |My impression is that there is also a register difference between shouldn't (high) and can't (low).
[225001730120] |So my reaction is driven in part by the contrasting functions and registers of shouldn't and can't.
[225001730130] |Am I alone in this interpretation?
[225001730140] |Let's see.
[225001730150] |Being a corpus linguist at heart, I went to the data.
[225001730160] |I performed a Google search to determine the frequency of the relevant collocations (for a nice discussion of why I should NOT use Google for this kind of thing, see Kilgarriff's Googleology is Bad Science, but I'm a blogger, so screw it, haha):
[225001730170] |Base Frequencies4,290,000,000 for can 1,630,000,000 for should 1,410,000,000 for could692,000,000 for can't 617,000,000 for cannot81,000,000 for shouldn't
[225001730180] |'shouldn't and X' 46,400 for shouldn't and can't7,140 for shouldn't and cannot2,630 for shouldn't and couldn't2 for shouldn't and can not1 for shouldn't and could not
[225001730190] |'should not and X'276,000 for should not and cannot53,200 for should not and can not52,600 for should not and could not30 for should not and can'tNo results found for should not and couldn't
[225001730200] |'should and can'703,000 for should and can
[225001730210] |'should and could'365,000 for should and could
[225001730220] |Variations7,160,000 for can and should1,360,000,000 for must340,000,000 for shall107,000 for can't and shouldn't291,000 for should and must36,200 for should and shall
[225001730230] |Results: I included the base modals and their collocations to round out the picture of the overall frequency of these words.
[225001730240] |Many other searches could have been performed to provide an even more complete picture of the frequencies of modals.
[225001730250] |The mini-data here show that should and can is the most frequent collocation.
[225001730260] |Sullivan's shouldn't and can't is the fourth most frequent negated collocation.
[225001730270] |Discussion: Given the low frequency of Sullivan's collocation, plus the high frequency of the non-negated version, plus the high frequency of can't alone, I take this to be evidence that his phrase is generally dispreferred (i.e., I am not alone).
[225001730280] |The large difference in the base-form collocation should and can (703,000) and the negated version shouldn't and can't (46,400) is interesting.
[225001730290] |It is worth noting that most of the negated versions were in roughly the same range as shouldn't and can't (with the high frequency should not and cannot exception).
[225001740010] |Crazy Economics
[225001740020] |(pic from The New Yorker)
[225001740030] |The econo-blogger Daniel Hamermesh recently lamented his "English guilt" (i.e., it's easier for native speakers of English to publish scholarly papers because English is the lingua franca of academics).
[225001740040] |This is a fine point (I'm not sure it's true, but it's worth debating).However, he decided to link to a story about Crazy English to establish the world-wide interest in learning English (see Language Log postings about Crazy English here and here and read Amber R. Woodward's academic thesis on it here (pdf)).
[225001740050] |I have no doubt that Crazy English has a large number of followers in China (20 million by one count), but it's hardly representative of the general, world-wide interest in the English language.
[225001740060] |Why did Hamermesh link to it?
[225001740070] |Just 'cause it crazy and goofy?
[225001740080] |Would he be happy if a linguistic blogger wrote about economics and linked to some crazy, goofy economics trends like ethanol subsidies and protectionist tariffs as if to say that these were somehow representative of world-wide interest in economics?
[225001740090] |I think I'd care less if he had a smaller megaphone, but he's blogging at one of the most frequently read blogs in the world, the NYT's Freakonomics blog (#64 on Technorati's list).
[225001740100] |That's a big megaphone.
[225001740110] |So be careful what you yell through it, Danny.
[225001750010] |What Is a Word?
[225001750020] |(picture definition of the "word" zazen)
[225001750030] |The nature of a word's meaning has been an Achilles Heel, stumbling linguistics for hundreds of years.
[225001750040] |For example, Pāṇini's 4th Century Sanskrit grammar Astadhyayi (Aṣṭādhyāyī - अष ट ध य य ) appears to have accepted that "the authority of the popular usage of words …must supersede the authority of the meaning dependent on derivation.
[225001750050] |The meanings of words (the relations between word and meaning) are also established by popular usage" (more here).
[225001750060] |The Urban Dictionary is a great example of this kind of approach to dictionary making and now The Photographic Dictionary is trying to use pictures to define words (HT: Daily Dish).
[225001750070] |It's an interesting project, linguistically as well as artistically.
[225001750080] |I doubt these pics have been normed for their "meaning" (to be fair, it's more of an art project than linguistic research), but it's a good move towards functional definitions of words.
[225001750090] |I'd prefer to see multiple pictures (and videos??) for each word that have been normed to some extent for the meanings they are supposed to represent.
[225001750100] |For example, when I looked at the picture definition for the "word" zazen (above), a word I had never seen before, I did not feel that one picture helped me understand the meaning of the word.
[225001750110] |If anything, it confused me because I could imagine any number of conflicting meanings associated with that one pitcures.
[225001750120] |No one meaning was salient.
[225001750130] |This is classic function/structuralist linguistics.
[225001750140] |Cognitive semantics grew out of exactly this kind of problem.
[225001750150] |And, for the record, my answer to the question in this post's title is this: I have no idea.
[225001750160] |See Princeton's Construction Site for more on my confusion.
[225001760010] |Pleasant Surprise at LSA
[225001760020] |Being a cynic by nature, I am typically underwhelmed by linguistics conferences (I suspect that I'd be equally underwhelmed by other academic conferences too, but I'm a linguist).
[225001760030] |The Linguistics Society of America's huge annual meeting was held in my backyard this last week in San Fransisco so I attended a few sessions.
[225001760040] |Unfortunately, I largely had the same experience I typically have: squirming in the audience while smart, accomplished professionals drone on about their topic of choice.
[225001760050] |The problem is the format: 20 minute presentations with 10 minutes for Q&A.
[225001760060] |That's a tough set to play.
[225001760070] |Only academics and professional comedians are ever asked to perform under those kinds of conditions, and professional comedians get hundreds if not thousands of times more experience before they get good at it.
[225001760080] |Professional academics get maybe one or two chances a year to perfect the art of presentation.
[225001760090] |Nonetheless, occasionally there is a person who has a talent for presenting complex information in a helpful and productive way, and I was lucky enough to see one presentation at the LSA by just such a linguist: Chris Golston of CSU, Fresno.
[225001760100] |He and co-author Tomas Riad presented an OT account of metrical phenomenon.
[225001760110] |By all rights, I should have been half asleep.
[225001760120] |I am neither a phonologist nor an OT adherent.
[225001760130] |But Chris, who was the primary presenter, was engaging, funny, and damned good and getting me to understand what the issues were and what their solution was.
[225001760140] |He is a natural teacher.
[225001760150] |His students at Frenso probably have no clue how lucky they are to have such a good teacher.
[225001760160] |Their Presentation: Chris Golston (California State University, Fresno), Tomas Riad (Stockholm University): A constraint-based view of English meter.
[225001770010] |Bale's Accent Grammar
[225001770020] |(pic from TheCinemaSource.com)
[225001770030] |Exactly what happened to Christian Bale's accent during his famous rant now buzzing around the interwebs?
[225001770040] |Listen to this 2002 interview with the "Welsh born" actor, then listen to the famous rant here.
[225001770050] |In the 2002 interview, he quite clearly has a UK accent (though it's not clear to me exactly what variety since I'm not good at placing UK accents; also, he spent relatively little time in Wales, so knowing his birthplace is not much help).
[225001770060] |Then, in the rant, he has largely what I would call a American English/California accent, but it breaks occasionally (into what, I'm not sure).
[225001770070] |It might be the case that Bale's famed intensity as an actor engulfed him so much that he was still "in character" when ranting, I don't know.
[225001770080] |I never studied the factors of accent change, but it seems like an interesting topic.
[225001770090] |According to Bale's Wikipedia page, he moved around a lot as a kid, and according to Bale himself in the 2002 interview above, he still moves around a lot as an adult, so he moves between many speech communities.
[225001770100] |I'd be curious to know how phonologists have modeled accents.
[225001770110] |Is a person's accent simply the accumulated total of word pronunciation norms, or do we have a model of a holistic accent in our head that we are trying to approximate when pronouncing sentences (an accent grammar, if you will)?
[225001770120] |This seems like a non-trivial distinction.
[225001780010] |A Working Class Hero Is Something To Be…
[225001780020] |(screen shot from Hulu's State of the Nation feed)
[225001780030] |"And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training.
[225001780040] |This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.
[225001780050] |But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma."
[225001780060] |U.S. President Barack Obama, State of the Nation speech (Feb 24, 2009)
[225001780070] |My first reaction is to agree.
[225001780080] |I think this is a great vision of the future of our country.
[225001780090] |But President Obama was wise to note the problem of increasing costs of tuition.
[225001780100] |When I started state college in California in 1989, I spent $198 on tuition per semester.
[225001780110] |It jacked up to almost $1000 per semester by the time I graduated four years later.
[225001780120] |The same school now charges over $2000 per semester to attend.
[225001780130] |This same school was free when I started elementary school.
[225001780140] |But what does Obama’s vision of increased post-secondary school training really mean?
[225001780150] |Is this feasible?
[225001780160] |The realist in me is forced to think of what this means to actual day-to-day classroom teaching.
[225001780170] |Does this mean overcrowding post-secondary institutions with sub-par students?
[225001780180] |That's not good.
[225001780190] |Are we to expect post-secondary institutions to lower their standards to admit all these new applicants, or are we to "hope" that secondary schools manage to train their students for the post-secondary world?
[225001780200] |I know of what I speak.
[225001780210] |I spent 12 years teaching at colleges and universities.
[225001780220] |I taught at a community college in California, two private colleges in New York state as well as two public universities on the East Coast.
[225001780230] |None of these were elite colleges.
[225001780240] |I had a few "rich" students whose parents were paying their full cost of college but the vast majority of students were working-class or poor students who were in-debt just to get to school every day.
[225001780250] |This experience gave me a very good sense of the skills and needs of the "average" college student in America.
[225001780260] |Most were poorly prepared and that affected my day-to-day lesson plans.
[225001780270] |The sad truth is that there is an emerging class of private colleges whose business model is based on recruiting exactly the kinds of students Obama just reached out to: those unable to obtain "normal" admission to colleges.
[225001780280] |The average private college in America looks nothing like Harvard or Stanford.
[225001780290] |Far from it.
[225001780300] |They look like businesses.
[225001780310] |They charge $10,000 to $20,000 per year for tuition.
[225001780320] |They tend to focus on one or two vocational majors (like occupational therapy or veterinary technician).
[225001780330] |They tend to have 1000-4000 students.
[225001780340] |They tend to employ large numbers of part-time adjunct faculty (cheap labor and my bread and butter for 12 years).
[225001780350] |They tend to skimp on “non-essential” courses.
[225001780360] |I believe President Obama really wants to attain his dream of educational opportunities for all.
[225001780370] |I believe he genuinely wants to reform teacher training and incentives.
[225001780380] |But in order to make those dreams a reality, we’re going to have to look at what happened to college tuition between 1975 and 1995, because those were the dark days.
[225001780390] |In 1975, Obama’s vision would have been feasible.
[225001780400] |After 1995, his vision became a nightmare.
[225001780410] |Can we really expect all Americans to attain post-secondary education under current circumstances?
[225001780420] |I suspect not.
[225001780430] |UPDATE: the AP has published a story addressing this very issue and contains a variety of perspectives here.
[225001780440] |UPDATE 2: the Chronicle of Higher Education has a related story on the increasing costs of college here (HT Daily Dish).
[225001790010] |Taco Bell Grammar
[225001790020] |The grammar of my recent Taco Bell receipt is remarkably interesting.
[225001790030] |Here's my faithful transcription of the actual receipt pictured above:
[225001790040] |THANK'S FOR CHOOSING TACO BELL 3009HAVE YOU WON YOUR $ 1000 YET ?
[225001790050] |IF YOU DON'T PLEASE ASK A CASHIERHOW YOU CAN . . .
[225001790060] |WE APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESSPLEASE LET US KNOW HOW WE DID ITCALL US AT ( 510 ) 844-0764OR CALL THE MANAGER.
[225001790070] |Linguistically, there are some obviously interesting and not so obviously interesting features of this receipt.
[225001790080] |1. They used an apostrophe for "thanks"2.
[225001790090] |An unnecessary space between "$" and "1000"3.
[225001790100] |An unnecessary space between "yet" and the question mark4.
[225001790110] |Incorrect verb choice in the conditional clause ("do" instead of "have")5.
[225001790120] |Extraneous pronoun "it" at the end of a clause6.
[225001790130] |Unnecessary spaces after and before "(" and ")"
[225001790140] |(1) is a common typo/error/misunderstanding.
[225001790150] |(2), (3), and (6) seem to be some spacing convention of the receipt format, but the convention is unpredictable because the "$", "?", "...", "(" and ")" all follow it, but the " ' ", "-", and "." do not (a tokenizer could be built to account for this fairly easily because the only thing that hinges on this is correctly identifying 1000 as a dollar amount and the "510" as an area code).
[225001790160] |(4) and (5) seem to be legitimate grammar errors.
[225001790170] |My guess is that each Taco Bell can personalize the message and the local manager either made the mistake or failed to identify and correct the mistake.
[225001790180] |Finally, and perhaps most compelling of all, at the bottom, they got the Bagging Summary wrong.
[225001790190] |There were three items, not two.
[225001800010] |Family Guy Linguistics
[225001800020] |(screen shot from Family Guy via Hulu)
[225001800030] |The most recent Family Guy episode ("Family Gay": Season 7, Episode 8 ) relied on some interesting linguistics in two separate jokes.
[225001800040] |First, when Peter enters his brain damaged horse, 'Till Death, in a race, it runs amok in the crowd and the announcer on the loud speaker says the following (about the 5:50 mark on Hulu):
[225001800050] |What's this?
[225001800060] |It looks like 'Till Death has taken a right turn and is heading into the stands.
[225001800070] |Dear god!
[225001800080] |I could describe the horror I am witnessing but it is so unfathomably ugly and heart rendering that I cannot bring myself to do so, although I do posess the necessary descriptive powers.
[225001800090] |Haw, well at least the horse raced past the class of visiting deaf second graders...oh no!
[225001800100] |Dear god he's going back oh I know you can't hear any screams but I assure you they are signing frantically just as fast as their little fingers can shape the complicated phonemes necessary to convey dread and terror.
[225001800110] |Having never studied the linguistics of sign language, my first reaction was to ask, are there truly phonemes in sign langauge?
[225001800120] |In spoken language, a phoneme is a conceptual clustering of phonetic segments into a single group.
[225001800130] |For example, in English the segment /p/ can occur with a little extra burst of air called aspiration (typically at the beginning of words), or not, like at the end of words (try saying the words "pat" and "tap" with your hand in front of your lips and, if you're a native speaker if English, you should be able to feel the little burst of air that accompanies the /p/ in "pat" but not in "tap").
[225001800140] |So, there is a difference in how we articulate /p/ depending on where it occurs in a word.
[225001800150] |Nonetheless, we still consider both versions of /p/ to be "the same sound."
[225001800160] |We say there is a single phoneme [p] with two phonetic realizations, aspirated and unaspirated.
[225001800170] |But this use of "phoneme" is based on spoken language.
[225001800180] |How does this relate to signed languages like ASL?
[225001800190] |After a quick bit of Googling, I've discovered that the term "phoneme" is in fact used to refer to segments of signed language by various sign language scholars, though it is used more as a conceptual borrowing than as a term referring to sound.
[225001800200] |The most relevant discussion I found was in an abstract for the paper "Sign language phoneme transcription with PCA-based representation" by Kong, W.W. and Ranganath, S. (from the National University of Singapore).
[225001800210] |They "first apply a semi-automatic segmentation algorithm which detects minimal velocity and maximal change of directional angle to segment the hand motion trajectory of signed sentences.
[225001800220] |We then extract feature descriptors based on principal component analysis (PCA) to represent the segments efficiently.
[225001800230] |These high level features are used with k-means to cluster the segments to form phonemes."
[225001800240] |According to this approach, phonetic segments are roughly approximated to sign language as feature sets composed of "minimal velocity and maximal change of directional angle" and phonemes are approximated as k-means clusters of those feature sets.
[225001800250] |Cool stuff, for sure.
[225001800260] |But it's not clear to me if this computational approach is consistent with the natural way humans actually perceive and analyze sign language segments.
[225001800270] |I'm still looking for more on that topic.
[225001800280] |Nonetheless, there remains the issue of the Family Guy writers getting the nature of phonemes fundamentally wrong.
[225001800290] |Phonemes convey no meaning (excusing for the moment the weak possibility of sound symbolic associations).
[225001800300] |The writers, who were clearly willing to do a little research (even if a very little), could easily have substituted "morphemes" for "phonemes" in the script and would have had the same joke without the error.
[225001800310] |And just how complicated are the signs for dread and terror anyway?
[225001800320] |(pssst, I've clearly spent too much time reading linguistics because when I first read "the horse raced past the class of visiting deaf second graders" I assumed it was a garden path sentence similar to Bever's famed example "The horse raced past the barn fell."
[225001800330] |It took me several reads to realize that, nope, "raced" is not a reduced relative clause, but rather a run-of-the-mill past tense main verb.
[225001800340] |A nice example of construction priming, eh?
[225001800350] |I'm primed to read any "X raced past Y" clause as being a reduced relative).
[225001800360] |Second, the writers went out of their way to construct a joke not only based on conversational pragmatics, but based on EXPLAINING Gricean maxims (about the 9:50 mark on Hulu.com).
[225001800370] |Lois: Peter, what exactly did they inject you with?
[225001800380] |Peter: Oh all sorts of things.
[225001800390] |Hepatitis vaccine, a couple of steroids, the gay gene, calcium, a vitamin B extract...
[225001800400] |Lois: What did you just say?
[225001800410] |Peter: The gay gene.
[225001800420] |I assume that's the one you meant even though it wasn't literally the last thing I said when you said what did you just say, it's just that clearly (it) was most unusual... (note: the pronoun "it" was reduced to near imperceptibility).
[225001800430] |In this exchange, Peter explains that, under normal circumstances, after listing a set of items and someone asks "what did you just say" he would interpret "what" as referring to the most recent item in the list (presumably because of the semantics of "just").
[225001800440] |But in this case, one earlier item was more "unusual" than the others.
[225001800450] |Let's re-explain this using conversational pragmatics and Gricean maxims, okay?
[225001800460] |Peter lists five items.
[225001800470] |He believes that one of the five items is controversial while the other four are not.
[225001800480] |He believes Lois believes this too.
[225001800490] |The controversial item is in the middle of the list.
[225001800500] |Peter believes he articulated each item clearly such that Lois could properly hear all items.
[225001800510] |He believes Lois believes this too.
[225001800520] |So, when Lois asks "what did you just say," Peter believes 1) that she heard the most recent item clearly and 2) that this item has little informational value.
[225001800530] |He believes Lois believes this too.
[225001800540] |Peter believes Lois is not flouting conversational norms.
[225001800550] |He believes Lois believes this too.
[225001800560] |Therefore, Peter believes Lois is trying to make her contribution (her question) informative (maxim of quantity).
[225001800570] |He believes Lois believes this too.
[225001800580] |Peter believes that repeating a well heard, uncontroversial item has no information value.
[225001800590] |He believes Lois believes this too.
[225001800600] |Thus, he infers that "what" must refer to some item other than the last one.
[225001800610] |He believes Lois believes this too.
[225001800620] |Peter believes there is only one item on the list that meets the information value requirement.
[225001800630] |He believes Lois believes this too.
[225001800640] |This is a long-winded way of saying the same thing Peter did, but we linguists have to make things complicated and technical.
[225001800650] |It's our job.
[225001820010] |Frikkin Spelling
[225001820020] |This cartoon is floating round the innerwebs today (HT Daily Dish; couldn't figure out who the original source is).
[225001820030] |After laughing, I noticed what struck me as a completely odd way to spell "fucking" to avoid explicit profanity (see Language Log's series of posts on the use of what they call "avoidance characters" for somewhat related issues here).
[225001820040] |I'm not sure if this counts as an example of "avoidance characters" or euphamism, or some other category of linguistic fun (this Baltimore Sun article referred to it as "faux cursing."
[225001820050] |Not bad.).
[225001820060] |There are several common ways to intentionally misspell "fucking", and some of them are so popular, people actually say them too (see my post on the use of "frik" on Scrubs or any episode of Battlestar Galactica).
[225001820070] |Just for kicks, I googled as many faux fucking spelling variations as I could dream up.
[225001820080] |Listed by frequency, we can see that Pooh's "fucken" variation is middle of the road:
[225001820090] |123,000,000 for fucking24,200,000 for fuckin10,300,000 for freakin2,040,000 for frickin1,880,000 for fucken502,000 for fukkin298,000 for frikkin208,000 for fukken206,000 for freekin45,300 for frakken (highly ambiguous with some Swedish word)