20120323

we use the old to handle the new

this is how ancient languages (and most all languages are ancient)
handle the new modern world

this is how we all handle new information
in conversations: new, buffered via the old and familiar

this is how a learner handles a new language,
improvising towards the new
with whatever is old to them, familiar to them, easy to them, readily
used by them.

this is how we use the old to handle the new,
the familiar to handle the novel.

[it is your family, your elders, showing you how to go out into the bigger world of the unknown]

Event structure and programming languages

So here's an idea I'm working on: that a programming language based on event structure---more precisely, the linguistic/cognitive representational model thereof---will be intuitive and easy for a wide range of programmers to use.   Now breaking down events into sub-events has long been a fundamental task for much of programming.  To say the least.  The advantage of basing yet another such system on natural language/cognition is that it should align our computational breakdowns of event structures (i.e. chiefly as instructions on sub-events to execute) how we naturally perceive them. This alignment isn't always super-obvious, since languages tend to lump some sub-events together into chunks while parsing others out (see the work of Leonard Talmy for lots on this, and I may revise with examples therefrom).  But these kinds of analyses of the sub-elements of event structure are in my experience quite easy to learn---perhaps since they simply aim to reflect the cognitive structuring what we all already implicitly know. More on this later.

Ghost phonology in Farsi false codas

So the deal with Farsi is that it has false codas. Glottal stops only in the most artificial speech: otherwise it's just the same pre-cluster lengthening, just before no actual cluster. Ghost phonology again, like Irish mutations: the (morpho)phonlogical persistence of the past.

Why we have to pay for language revitalization

It's more than reasonable to ask why there should ever be government (a.k.a. taxpayer) support for revitalization of indigenous languages. After all, language shift is an individual choice, right? And what was done in the past isn't my current responsibility, right?

Well, all that would make more sense if not for two points. First is that more or less by logical definition, the currently threatened indigenous languages of this continent survived the early colonial period fairly well on their own: it's recent, no earlier than 20th-century policies that have helped push most languages over the brink.

Second is that I am pretty sure that for practically all of these languages, we can demonstrate that government power was brought to bear (directly or indirectly) down on and against the free choice of indigenous peoples to maintain their own languages in their own homes and communities. Since that is the case, denying governmental responsibility for a large part of why these languages are currently threatened is the same as, say, denying governmental responsibility for waging a past war which it now admits was wrongly motivated and/or unjustified. It is not fun for taxpayers, but nonetheless, reparations/restitution are a requirement in such cases for any government that wishes to be considered civilized and responsible.

Look at it this way: if the government came and burned down your house, especially the library you'd been building up your whole life, all the while telling you that they knew what was best for you in doing so, you would expect reparations from that government. Say, some credible amount at least towards rebuilding that library. And that government couldn't simply say, "Well, WE in particular didn't burn down your house and library. That was OTHER people who just used the power of this government to pull it off." Governments are responsible for the consequences of the actions of their predecessors. Otherwise we could totally just not worry about the national debt. So when you have a clear case of a government stepping in and actively infringing on the basic individual rights of a group, using their institutional power to coerce them into doing what the government wants and thinks is best for them, then I think you have an argument for more responsibility than just ceasing to carry out that illicit policy. There's a clear debt owed, due to the immoral and unconstitutional imposition on personal (and by extension, minority-group) rights.

Or to put it even more simply: if I burn down your house and library, my responsibilities to you don't end just because I promise not to do it again.

So this is, above all, a question of responsibility and accountability, like it or not.

How a morphosyntactician teaches phonetics

I suppose this is sort of a disingenuous title, since I am a documentary linguist by profession. And that entails a fairly broad range of background training in all the subfields of linguistics, in order to ensure that we can do adequately comprehensive coverage of all the features of the languages we seek to document.

But the reason I choose this title is because even the ostensible morphologist and syntactician (proof, such as it is, of this allegiance: my dissertation is titled "Referential-Access Dependency in Penobscot") that I am is thoroughly distressed at how we tolerate thin to dismal training in practical phonetics for all but those who go on to specialize in that field.

One might argue that this is just the normal course of specialization: we syntacticians can slack on producing and perceiving uvular ejectives and retroflex vs. alveolar contrasts because, well, we can always call in a phonetician when the need arises.

But this is not really true, for at least two reasons. The first is the obvious fact that one cannot collect remotely accurate syntactic data without solid control of any and all phonological contrasts: if tone is how they mark relative clauses, one cannot beg off on the difficulty of hearing tone.

The second and more important is this: the deeper I go into the syntax, the more I see how much of the surface syntactic patterning that we attribute to abstracted and empty features might better be accounted for by attending to prosody.

Rank unawareness of how much the phonological form of morphemes, of phrases, and so on, contributes to the surface orderings and surface wellformedness of language, can lead to some needless formal floundering, positing features that do not really do anything except make the bits show up in the surface form they actually do. In short: any work in syntax that is going to deal with PF had better, well, deeply understand all that "P" can involve.

There's a case to be made in the opposite direction, i.e. for how phoneticians and phonologists would do well to attend deeper than they already do to morphology and syntax. This is largely because the latter domains set up and drive the environments of combination and interaction in which we identify the most illuminating phonetic and phonological phenomena. But the dependency is really quite asymmetrical: phonetics in particular does not radically depend on syntactic form for all its data---whereas there is no access to syntactic data at all except through the intermediary of phonetic-phonological form.

My suggestion: have every linguistics major master the full set of contrasts (and their phonetic details) in the White Hmong system. With that done, students will have command of a rich tonal system (including breathy and creaky phonation contrasts) and some of the more challenging segmental contrasts: preglottalization, prenasalization, aspiration, extensive coronal (dental, retroflex, palatal) and dorsal (velar, uvular) features, among others. Toss in some training in pharyngeals, ejectives, length contrasts, and some of the more baroque vowel systems of the world (English, Khmer, Scandinavian), and students should be well set to handle most of what the world's phonetic-phonological diversity can throw at them.

This seems an oddly specific choice, but it is grounded in the practical fact that White Hmong is rather well documented, and fairly accessible worldwide, as a major language of the Hmong diaspora, who are substantially represented at least in North America, Europe, Australia, and of course, China and Southeast Asia.

More in the next installment on exactly HOW to teach the (supposedly) "tin-eared" to approach the challenge of non-mother-tongue sound contrasts....

My currently-stewing model of morphology-syntax-discourse (and phonetics and phonology)

This is a very rough sketch, but I thought I'd toss it out as is to see what responses it engenders....

Morphology, syntax, and discourse are all the same thing: structure builders. What qualitative differences exist between them emerge strictly from the scale-derived type of elements they are combining; their fundamental combinatorial principles are the same.

One qualification to this is that morphology is actually two things: a combinatorial component, and a lexical component. These are roughly the morphosyntactic and the morphophonological. The latter in particular covers aspects of morphology that are not directly structure-building, namely, paradigmaticity effects...which are probably attributable to acquisition and retention constraints and strategies.

It's useful in this to see that traditional syntax, as understood through generativist tree diagrams, is quite explicitly the interface between the generic-encyclopedic and the discourses-specific. Functional structure can be of either kind: the former realizes event-argument structure and aspect (both verbal and nominal; nominal aspect is measures, quantification, etc.), and the latter realizes all the features interpretable only relative to the specifics of the discourse, i.e. of the speech act itself. This includes voice, tense, mood and modality, pronominal features, focus, topicality, and clause type.

To understand this clearly: man bite dog is a generic, non-discourse-specific event-argument structure. What we currently call light elements---i.e. stackings of minimal predicates---are enough to constrain the semantics to this realm. Aspectuality doesn't change this: man having bitten dog, man regularly biting dog: all of these are still generic, encyclopedic, non-discourse-specific concepts.

Add in voice, and we begin to have discourse-determined priorities:

man bite dog
dog bitten by man

Add in tense, mood, etc., and we definitely have discourse-determined material, since the semantics added are calculated with respect to NOW, with respect to our REAL WORLD, etc.

man did bite dog
dog would be bitten by man

Definiteness of argments, relativization of arguments, pronominalization of arguments, ellipsis of arguments: all of these refer to pre- or elsewhere-established reference of arguments...which is of course discourse. Same again of course for focus, topicalization, etc.

the man did bite the dog

Clause-type is of course exactly the same thing as the above, even subordination, as subordination indicates NOT being the discourse-Main proposition. Same again for imperatives, which of course are discourse-specific par excellence.

man, bite the dog!
the man that did bite the dog

Phonetics and phonology of course do relate to this: prosody in particular tracks word-level and phrase-level structure quite intensely, and has a rather obviously substantial role at the discourse level. For example, the prosodic weight, and the prosodic specification (clitic, etc.) of morphemes determines their distribution, their position, their availability, their well-formedness in a given configuration. Does the same thing at the phrasal level, acting as the real agent behind the parameterization of word order, among other things. And at the discourse level, it of course manifests quite a bit of discourse morphology, i.e. old/new information and topic/focus and topic/comment contrasts, and very often interrogativity and a thousand other emotional and affective stances.

Phonetics and phonology also share properties with the morphology-syntax-discourse complex in that they too have combinatoriality and configurationality, and often the same modeling tools for the latter work well for the former. Locality, for example. We often think of this as the syntax of phonology, etc., but it's better understood as syntax and phonology both drawing from a common pool of cognitive-computational processes and constraints thereon.

Sapir-Whorf for the umpteenth time

So people keep sending me this article from the New York Times regarding what we conventionally refer to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

And here, slightly edited, is what I wrote to my mother about it:

Man, every time I read these things, I just wanna say: of course no, and of course yes. No in the sense that it doesn't fundamentally limit the range of your cognitive potential. Yes in the sense that a specific hand tool you use every day is going to develop some specific neuromuscular tasks/skills more than others. This question is structurally similar to the nature/nurture debate, and the answer there seems pretty obvious: we are products of both. And as with that issue, the interesting question is not which extreme is correct, but to what extent, and in what specific ways, does each of these factors shape what we experience:. Hence the effects of what Jakobson is quoted here to have observed, about what our languages oblige us to attend to, are well worth thinking about. More on that later.

Overall, I don't see why this kind of perspective is so hard to reach, and why people continue to obsess about the one side or the other.

Also, the line "But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action." is a bit inaccurate: it means they're not obliged to think about time relative to the point of speaking (which is what tense is/can be, among other things); Chinese grammar still requires you to be specific about relative timing, i.e. relative timing of one reported event to another, the relations of before, during, and after, and so forth.

And again, lots of languages do this, or only specify tense when discursively relevant---Penobscot and Passamaquoddy are like the latter---probably because this kind of information is in fact usually eminently recoverable from discourse context anyways.

I remember asking Jay Keyser about WHY we end up with these weird obligatorinesses in language, like tense in English, and so forth (I was specifically asking him about grammatical gender, actually). He told me he thinks it may be that the computational system of language just needs something to grab on to, some way to tag things to make them readily manipulable. I've been taking this to mean something like uniformizing labels for elements, so that the system doesn't have to take every object as wholly unique, wholly on its own terms. Same principle, then, behind the convenience of stereotyping and the efficiency of mass production using interchangeable parts.

But why these particular tags, of tense, of gender, etc.? My conversation with Jay didn't get that far, but I'd venture that it's just because these happen to be some of the more salient categorical features of the things we're manipulating. Which (among others) are, basically, events (= verbs) and entities (= nouns). Relative location in time is a feature that can at least be imputed to all events; as is gender for entities, provided you wander through the universe anthropomorphizing the hell out of everything, which is what humans sure seem to do.

And regarding this: "More recently, psychologists have even shown that "gendered languages" imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory." I think that what this tells us is something more about what kinds of tools we bring to bear to construct and maintain memory. One of them clearly can be narrative---which, generally, involves language. I wonder if they've in fact shown language-specific gender to actively obstruct memory, or simply fail to be available in the relevant contexts as a powerful aid to memory.

And the Guugu Yimithirr matter, well, you know what my native tongue is [Ed: Well, my mom does], and and I don't actually even speak any languages that work like Guugu Yimithirr or Tzeltal. Yet I pretty much always know which way is north, south, east, and west. Even though my language(s) never demand that out of me on a regular basis. I'm not sure why this is, but it's true, and oddly enough, rather recent for me. Somewhere in the last ten/fifteen years or so I just started to always pay attention to cardinal directions, and I still don't know why. Maybe from moving to so many new towns or something...I can remember all of Bandung, Wellington, Ithaca, Beijing, Boston, Indian Island, Sipayik, and Birkat Al Mouz this way, for example. And Portland [Maine, my hometown], of course. And even Manhattan, which I hardly have spent any real time in---though there, as in Beijing, the fact that the whole city is laid out on a cardinal-directions grid makes that pretty simple anyways.

So I think this is actually a pretty simple cognitive skill that is probably more natural to have than not. I'm thinking that there's of course likely a feedback relationship between this skill and the language-specific demand for it in Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal, to be sure---but I think the linguistic phenomenon almost certainly piggybacked on the pre-existing common cognitive phenomenon. Just the same as, say, linguistically formalizing off of our attention to gender, animacy, and other crucial landmarks in our cognitive world. And yes, the orienteering metaphor is intentional.

I'm also suspicious of this example of evidentiality in Matses. In most cases of evidentiality that I know of, it's more of a rhetorical stance than a strict factual requirement. I.e. the guy will tell you that he has four wives, if he's as sure of it as if they were standing there evidently. Perhaps Matses is a language more strict in its evidentiality than those I've studied, but again, most languages use evidential hedges to reflect how the speaker personally views or wishes to portray the proposition's relation to the evidence, and not some purely legalistically objective relation between the two. This flexibility is what, again in my experience at least, makes evidentiality so tricky to research. And I would point out that only in the previous sentence did I realize just how many evidential hedges I've already included in this paragraph. You could attribute it to my working with Penobscot and Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, which both have evidentiality as active components of their grammar, but I don't think any native English speaker would find this paragraph unusually epistemologically sensitive.

So there you go. I think that there is a wonderful wealth of cool and nifty things to study about all of these phenomena, and all of the interesting kinds of normative perspectives that different speech communities have developed around the world. And I'm wicked glad that scholars are making these kinds of respectful, thoughtful, and earnest efforts to share all of this with the general public, and thereby give us all useful material with which happily blow our minds. But I worry that people still over-exoticize this stuff...failing, in particular, to notice just how much of this seemingly exotic behavior they themselves also carry out on a regular basis.